Science Fiction - Daily Short Stories

As Long as You Wish - John O'Keefe

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Duration:: 11m
Broadcast on:: 09 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping king supers for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouth-watering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices, plus extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points. So you can get big flavors and big savings, king supers, fresh for everyone, fuel restrictions apply. Every day, we rise, challenging ourselves to work for what we believe in. At U.S. Border Patrol, protecting our borders is more than a job. It's a calling. Agents answer the call, working together to keep our country and community safe. If you are ready for a new mission, join U.S. Border Patrol and go beyond. Learn more at cbp.gov/careers. As long as you wish, by John O'Keefe began reading. The patient sat stiffly in the leather chair on the other side of the desk. Nervously, he pressed a coin into the palm of one hand. Just start anywhere, I said, and tell me about it. As before, without waiting for an answer, he continued. The coin clutched tightly in one hand. I'm Charles J. Fisher, professor of philosophy at Reiser College. He looked at me quickly, or at least I was until recently. For a second, his face was boyish. Professor of philosophy, that is. I smiled and found that I was staring at the coin in his hand. He gave it to me. On one side, I read the words. The statement on the other side of this coin is false. The patient watched me with an expressionless face. I turned over the coin. It was engraved with the words. The statement on the other side of this coin is false. That's not the problem, he said. Not my problem. I had the coin made when I was an undergraduate. I enjoyed reading one side, turning it over, reading the other side, and so on. And a fiendish enjoyment, like voice planning where to put the tip over out house. I looked at the patient. He was 38, single, medium-build, and had an MA and PhD from an Eastern university. I knew this and more from the folder on my desk. Eight months ago, he continued, I read about the sphere found on Piney Island. He stopped, looking at me questioningly. "Yes, I know," I said. I opened my desk drawer, took out a clipping from the newspaper, and handed it to him. That's it. I read the clipping before putting it back into the drawer. Manila, September 24th, I and Us. Archaeologists from the University of California have discovered an earth fault of recent quake, a sphere of two feet in diameter of an unidentifiable material. Dr. Carl Schwartz, head of the group, said the sphere was returned to the university for study. He declined to answer questions on cultural origin of the sphere. "There wasn't any more in the newspaper about it," he said. "I have a friend in California who got me the photographs." He looked at me intently. "You won't believe any of this." He pressed a coin in the palm of his hand. "You won't be able to." The photographs, he continued, as a flucturing, were of characters projected by the sphere when placed before focused light. The sphere was transparent, you see, embedded with dark microscopic specs. By moving the sphere a certain distance each time, there was a total projection of 360 different characters and 18 different orderings, or 19 different orderings, if you count one that was the list of all the characters. I made a mental note of the numbers. I felt they were significant. As I said, he continued, "I obtained photographs of characters, "very strange shapes, totally unlike the characters "for random languages, but yet that was the closest way "to describe them." He jerked forward in his chair, except, of course, ostensibly. "Later," I said, "I wanted to get through the preliminaries first. "There would be time later to see the photographs. "The characters projected by the sphere," he said, "weren't like the characters of any known language." He paused dramatically. There was reason to believe they had origin in an unknown culture, a culture more scientifically advanced than our own. And the reason for the supposition I asked? The material, the material of the sphere. It could only be roughly classified as spheroplastic, totally unknown, amazing imperviousness, a synthetic material, hardly the product of a former culture. "For Mars," I said, smiling. There were all kinds of conjectures, but, of course, the important thing was to see if the projections of characters was a message. The message, if any, would mean more than any conjecture. "You translated it?" He polished coin on his jacket. "You won't dare believe it," he said sharply. He cleared his throat and stiffened to an more rigid posture. "It wasn't exactly translation. You see, to us none of the characters had decimation. They were just characters." So it was a problem of decoding, I asked. As it turned out, no. Decoding is dependent on knowledge of language characteristics, characteristics of known languages. Decoding was tried, but with that success. Now, what we had to find was a key to the language. You mean like the roomstones. More or less, in principle, we needed a picture of a cow and a sign of meaning indicating one of the characters. For me, there is no possibility of finding similarities between the characters and characters of other languages that would require tremendous linguistic knowledge and library facilities. Nor could I use a decoding approach. That would require special knowledge of techniques and access to electronic computers and other mechanical aids. Now, I had to work on the assumption that key to the sphere was implicit in the sphere. You hoped to find a key to the language in the language itself? Exactly. You know, of course, some languages do have an implicit key. For example, hieroglyphics are picture language. The word for cow is a picture of a cow. You looked at the toes of a shoe. You won't be able to believe it. It's impossible to believe. I used the word impossible in its logical sense. In most languages, he continued looking up from the shoes, the sound of some words themselves indicate the meaning of the word, automatic, p-it words, like bao wao, buzz, and the key to the unknown language, I asked. How did you find it? I watched him push the coin against the back of his arm, then lift it and read backwards letter pressed into his skin. He looked up, it means smiled. I built models of the characters, big material ones, exactly proportionate to the ones projected. Then, quite by accident, I viewed one of them through glass globe size of the original sphere. What do you think I saw? What? I noticed he had a boyish look again. A distortion of the model. But that's not what's important. The distortions on study gave specific visual entities. Like when looking at one of those trick pictures and suddenly seeing the line in the grass, the lines outlining the line are there all the time. Only the observer has to view them as the outline of a line. It was the same with the models of the characters, except the shapes that appeared were not lines and other recognizable things, but they did suggest. He pressed a coin against his forehead, closed his eyes, and appeared to be thinking deeply. Yes, impossible to believe. No one can believe it. In addition to the visual response, did distortions gave me definite feelings? Not mixtures of feelings, but one definite emotional experience. How do you mean? One character when viewed through the globe gave me a visual image and, at the same time, a strong feeling of light hilarity. I take it then that these distortions seem to connote meanings rather than denote them. You might say that their meaning was conveyed through a gestalt experience on the part of the observer. Yes, each character gave a definite gestalt, but the gestalt was the same for each observer, or at least for 35 observers, there's an 80% correlation. I whistled softly. And the translation? Doctor, what would you say if I told you the translation was unbelievable, that it couldn't be seriously entertained by any man? What if I said that it would take the sanity of any man who believed it? I would say it might well be incorrect. He took some papers from his pocket and laughed excitedly, slumping down into the chair. This is the complete translation in idiomatic English. I'm going to let you read it. But first I want you to consider a few things. He hid the papers behind the back of his chair. His face became even more boyish, almost as if he were deciding where to put the tip over outhouse. Consider first Doctor that there were a total projection of 360 different characters, the same number as a number of degrees in a circle. Consider also that there were 18 different orderings of the characters, or 19 counting the alphabetical west. The square root of 360 would lie between 18 and 19. Yes, I said. I remember there was something significant about the numbers, but I wasn't sure that it was this. Consider also, he continued, that the communication was through the medium of a sphere. Moreover, keep in mind that physics accepts the path of a beam of light as its definition of a straight line, yet the path is a curve. If extended sufficiently, it would be a circle, the section of a sphere. All right, I said. By now the patient was pounding the coin against the soul of one shoe. And, he said, keep in mind, in some sense, time can be thought of as another dimension. He suddenly thrust the papers at me and sat back in the chair. I picked up the translation and began reading. The patient sat stiffly in the leather chair on the other side of the desk. Nervously he pressed a coin into the palm of one hand. Just start anywhere, I said, and tell me about it. As before, without waiting for an answer, he continued. The coin clutched tightly in one hand. I'm Charles J. Fisher, Professor of Philosophy at Riser College. He looked at me quickly, or at least I was until recently. For a second, his face was boyish. Professor of Philosophy, that is. I smiled and found that I was staring at the coin in his hand. He gave it to me. On one side, I read the words, the statement on the other side of this coin is false. The patient watched me with an expressional space. End of As Long As You Wish by John O'Keefe. - When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping king supers, for thousands of advertising ingredients that inspire countless mouth-watering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices. Plus, extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week, and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points. 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