"The meeting will please come to order," interrupted the doctor. "Leo, lay off Arthur. If it will make you any happier, Art, I'll tell you that if neither of you boys had spilled the beans in a day or two, I should have done so myself--carefully, of course. It was better for it to happen naturally. Now sit around, and wear a disgusted expression for the benefit of the guards if you like, and listen. This will take some time.
"In the first place, I suppose you've realized by now that we were captured simply for observation purposes; the pentapods hoped to learn about our weapons and science from our efforts to escape. They have, we must admit, been rather successful. Our activities have probably been evident to them from the first, but they waited until the communicator was completed before taking it, naturally. That habit of theirs struck me when the Vegans first described the way in which their plans were never interfered with until nearly mature.
"There was also the question of the surprising ease with which they were able to divine our feeling and intentions. It took me longer to discover the reason for that; but information supplied by the Vegans again provided the key.
"Their language is not verbal. None of us has yet heard them utter a vocal sound. We couldn't understand how they communicated, but to the Vegans it was so evident as to be unworthy of comment--their captor's language was of the same type as their own, visual rather than audible, a sign language in which the thousands of mobile spines with which their bodies are covered replaced the two antennae of a Vegan. It was so complex that the Vegans couldn't begin to learn it, but the method was obvious to them.
"That, to me, gave a nearly complete picture not only of their language, but of their thought; not only of the way they exchanged ideas, but of the very nature of those ideas.
"You have heard, no doubt, that thoughts may be considered as unuttered words. Of course, we do think in visual images, too, but _logical reasoning_, in human minds at least, takes the form of an unuttered conversation with oneself. Think through the proof of a theorem in grade-school geometry, if you don't believe it. With creatures like the Vegans, an analogous process takes place; they think in terms of the visible symbols of their language. The language, as you know, is slow--takes much longer to get ideas across. Also, it takes longer for a Vegan to comprehend something, though they certainly can't be called stupid.