We didn’t need to know any more.

Back at the house, I broke open a bottle of Scotch I’d been saving, while Lewis sat down at the kitchen table and drew a sketch of the gadget.

We had a drink, then went into the den and put the drawing on the desk. The drawing disappeared and we waited. In a few minutes, another one of the gadgets appeared. We waited for a while and nothing happened.

“We’ve got to let him know we want a lot of them,” I said.

“There’s no way we can,” said Lewis. “We don’t know his mathematical symbols, he doesn’t know ours, and there’s no sure-fire way to teach him. He doesn’t know a single word of our language and we don’t know a word of his.”

We went back to the kitchen and had another drink.

Lewis sat down and drew a row the gadgets across a sheet of paper, then sketched in representations of others behind them so that, when you looked at it, you could see that there were hundreds of them.

We sent that through.

Fourteen gadgets came back—the exact number Lewis had sketched in the first row.

Apparently the Trader had no idea of perspective. The lines that Lewis had drawn to represent the other gadgets behind the first row didn’t mean a thing to him.

We went back to the kitchen and had a few more drinks.

“We’ll need thousands of the things,” said Lewis, holding his head in his hands. “I can’t sit here day and night, drawing them.”

“You may have to do that,” I said, enjoying myself.

“There must be another way.”

“Why not draw a bunch of them, then mimeograph the drawing?” I suggested. “We could send the mimeographer sheets through to him in bundles.”

I hated to say it, because I was still enamoured of the idea o: sticking Lewis somewhere off in a corner, sentenced to a lifetime of drawing the same thing over and over.