I looked around and saw it: right on the wall, to the side of the door, in tiny, neat handwriting there was the word therefore in Alayan. That is, more was written there, maybe six lines, but everything else was math, and what kind of math! I could only figure out the pluses and minuses. Here’s the way it looked; four lines of this math, then the word therefore, underlined twice, and then two more lines of formulas, circled with a thick line, with a break where the pencil point had crumbled. In my poor head, in my empty gas tank, such a crowd of ideas jumped up that I forgot about the door. It seemed that I was not alone, there were other Alayans. Who? Where? Why hadn’t I seen them yet? Why did they write this? Leaving a sign? To whom? Me? But I didn’t know math. Or was the math just a dec
