Kingsley strode across the room and picked up the pad. He stood for long minutes, staring at it, the pucker of amazement and bafflement growing on his face.
He looked questioningly at the girl.
"Do you understand this?" he rasped.
She nodded blithely.
He flung down the pad. "There's only one other person in the system who could," he said. "Only one person who even remotely could come anywhere near knowing what it's all about. That's Dr. Konrad Fairbanks, and he's in a mental institution back on Earth.”
"Sure," yelled Herb, "he's the guy that invented three-way chess. I took a picture of him once.”
They disregarded Herb. All of them were looking at Caroline.
"I understand it well enough to start," she said. "I probably will have to talk with them from time to time to get certain things straightened in my mind. But we can always do that when the time comes.”
"Those equations," said Kingsley, "represent advanced mathematics of the fourth dimension. They take into consideration conditions of stress and strain and angular conditions which no one yet has been able to fathom.”
"Probably," Caroline suggested, "the Engineers live on a large and massive world, so large that space would be distorted, where stresses such as are shown in the equations would be the normal circumstance. Beings living on such a world would soon solve the intricacies of dimensional space. On a world that large, gravity would distort space. Plane geometry probably couldn't be developed because there'd be no such a thing as a plane surface.”