No one-one-two
No One-One-Two
I could not for the life of me remember the science fiction short story which contained this line. I knew it had to do with Mars… Anyways a few weeks back, two was the extent of my daughter’s counting. She knew there were more numbers, but two was about all she cared about, so that’s all she counted to.
But in the story, a human meets an alien and tries to communicate with him/it. He learns to count and uses numbers to convey his meaning. The story is called A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum. A story I read in high school… a long, long time ago.
“I tried questioning him. I pointed at a pyramid and asked ‘People?’ and indicated the two of us. He set up a negative sort of clucking and said, ‘No, no, no. No one-one-two. No two-two-four,’ meanwhile rubbing his stomach. I just stared at him and he went through the business again. ‘No one-one-two. No two-two-four.’ I just gaped at him.”
“That proves it!” exclaimed Harrison. “Nuts!”
“You think so?” queried Jarvis sardonically. “Well, I figured it out different! ‘No one-one-two!’ You don’t get it, of course, do you?”
“Nope—nor do you!”
“I think I do! Tweel was using the few English words he knew to put over a very complex idea. What, let me ask, does mathematics make you think of?”
“Why—of astronomy. Or—or logic!”
“That’s it! ‘No one-one-two!’ Tweel was telling me that the builders of the pyramids weren’t people—or that they weren’t intelligent, that they weren’t reasoning creatures! Get it?”
Anyways, when my daughter counts up to two… she may mean more than she lets on ;)
Here is more background information on Weinbaum and Martian Odyssey.
Or check out the collection of stories in the: Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
