Norm ignored him, and took a card from his desk. It seemed to be an extra, not with the pack. He put it in the machine. The curve-tracer began to draw a rather abrupt curve, which meandered half across the sheet before Norm realized what it was. Suddenly, an image leaped to his mind's eye and he watched with fascination while the pen traced this mathematical impossibility to the far end of the paper, and in obedience to several successive negative factors in the problem retraced in the opposite direction a little lower down. A head, a slightly lifted elbow, full rounded breast, a knee luxuriously drawn up, a dangling arm, all in one continuous line. There was nothing obvious about it; it was formalized, but with the individual style that is the artist's signature. Once seen, the image persisted. "Hey, Charley, look at this!" "Yeah. What about it?" "What about it! You ever see anything like it?" "Sure. It's a closed loop, like a hysteresis curve." "_An_ hysteresis curve. But this isn't one. Look closely." "Of course, it has harmonics and variables in it. Might be one of those gas-discharge curves, if the gas tube happened to be defective. I've seen some funny...." "Look! It's a reclining figure, with the head turned toward you--see?--and the forearm over the head--_here_. Breast, knee here, foot with the toe pointed, calf, thigh, and the near arm hanging. Remarkable, once you see it...." "You're crazy. All I can see is a closed loop with some wrinkles in it." "Why, it's nearly as plain as a photograph! I can't understand...." "Plain, my eye! If that's the arm hanging down, and this the hand, where are the fingers? That 'hand' is just an oval. You got some imagination if you can get a reclining figure out of that." "Not a nude of the beer-garden type, I grant you. This is real art. Know what this means? Have you any idea how complex a formula must be to trace a curve like this? Just a plain hyperbola is bad enough. This is a test of the machine. Those Mugu boys have worked out this formula to see if she could break it down and draw the equivalent curve, though I don't see how they did it. Even the larger digitals would find this a tough nut to crack, but our baby is a whiz at curves, see? I wonder how they justified the machine-time on it. Of course it is barely possible that they derived the equation themselves, but it must have taken weeks if they did." "Maybe it took us long as you say, but I still can't see any reclining figure in that curve. It's just a closed curve with some wiggles and bumps on it." "In any case, I'm going to send this to Mugu right away. They'll want to know how long it took." "I wouldn't, if I were you." "Why not?" "Maybe trouble developed in the machine. Better run some more cards through it first. But right now I'm going home. We're having a roast tonight. Say, why don't you come to supper with us? Alice would be delighted--she was just wondering what happened to you. I'll phone her...."