In Space Quadrant 964, eight days away from Colony Beta Six, the Enterprise is trapped in orbit around an uncharted planet. There, Kirk and company are confronted by Trelane, an illogical but extremely powerful alien. Although he appears as an adult humanoid, Trelane is eventually revealed to be a ``child'' belonging to an unknown, alien race. Trelane's parents rescue Kirk and the Enterprise from their playful son.
The story is a collection of sentences, which serve to present the ideas which an author was trying to convey. Before any reasoning about the concepts in the Squire story can occur, they must ``enter'' the reasoner from the outside world through various means of perceptions. So, these sentences must be processed in order to make the concepts internal to the reasoner. The supertask which accomplishes this is sentence processing. Much of the functionality of this supertask is provided through the use of the COMPERE system ([#!sentence:kavi1!#]). The exact elements which I have added in order to interface this sentence understanding system to the ISAAC project will be discussed in Chapter 7.