“As he watched, the creature tore a page out of Fadeeva’s “Computational Methods of Linear Algebra”, stuffed it in his mouth and chewed. Spat it out.”

“In several of the stories John had read, humans had communicated with alien races through the medium of mathematics, a pure and supposedly universal language. Fortunately, his library sported a blackboard. “Allow me to demonstrate,” he said with a slightly quavering voice as he crossed to the board, “the Theorem of Pythagorus.” The creature’s eyes followed him, blinking. “A logical starting place. Perhaps. As good as any,” he trailed off apologetically. He drew a right triangle on the board, and then drew squares out from the sides that embraced the right angle. He held the chalk out to the alien. The creature made a huffing sound, vaguely affirmative and wayed over to the blackboard. It retracted the claws on one hand and took the chalk from John. It bit off one end of the chalk experimentally, and spit it out. Then it reached over and casually sketched in the box representing the square of the hypotenuse. In the middle of the triangle it drew what was obviously an equals sign: ~. John was ecstatic. He took the chalk from the alien and repeated the curly line. He pointed at the alien and then a himself: equals. The alien nodded enthusiastically and took the chalk. It put a slanted line through John’s equals sign.

Not equals.

It stared at the blackboard, tapping it with the chalk; one universal gesture. Then, squeaking with every line, it rapidly wrote down {a squiggled diagram} John studied the message. Some sort of tree diagram? Perhaps a counting system. Or maybe not mathematical at all.”