Produced by Susan Skinner, Greg Weeks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from "Astounding Science Fiction," February,
1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.
[Illustration]
OMNILINGUAL
_To translate writings, you need a key to the code--and
if the last writer of Martian died forty thousand years
before the first writer of Earth was born ... how could
the Martian be translated...?_
BY H. BEAM PIPER
Illustrated by Freas
* * * * *
[Illustration]
Martha Dane paused, looking up at the purple-tinged copper sky. The wind
had shifted since noon, while she had been inside, and the dust storm
that was sweeping the high deserts to the east was now blowing out over
Syrtis. The sun, magnified by the haze, was a gorgeous magenta ball, as
large as the sun of Terra, at which she could look directly. Tonight,
some of that dust would come sifting down from the upper atmosphere to
add another film to what had been burying the city for the last fifty
thousand years.
The red loess lay over everything, covering the streets and the open
spaces of park and plaza, hiding the small houses that had been crushed
and pressed flat under it and the rubble that had come down from the
tall buildings when roofs had caved in and walls had toppled outward.
Here, where she stood, the ancient streets were a hundred to a hundred
and fifty feet below the surface; the breach they had made in the wall
of the building behind her had opened into the sixth story. She could
look down on the cluster of prefabricated huts and sheds, on the
brush-grown flat that had been the waterfront when this place had been a
seaport on the ocean that was now Syrtis Depression; already, the bright
metal was thinly coated with red dust. She thought, again, of what
clearing this city would mean, in terms of time and labor, of people and
supplies and equipment brought across fifty million miles of space.
They'd have to use machinery; there was no other way it could be done.
Bulldozers and power shovels and draglines; they were fast, but they
were rough and indiscriminate. She remembered the digs around Harappa
and Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus Valley, and the careful, patient native
laborers--the painstaking foremen, the pickmen and spademen, the long
files of basketmen carrying away the earth. Slow and primitive as the
civilization whose ruins they were uncovering, yes, but she could count
on the fingers of one hand the times one of her pickmen had damaged a
valuable object in the ground. If it hadn't been for the underpaid and
uncomplaining native laborer, archaeology would still be back where
Wincklemann had found it. But on Mars there was no native labor; the
last Martian had died five hundred centuries ago.
Something started banging like a machine gun, four or five hundred yards
to her left. A solenoid jack-hammer; Tony Lattimer must have decided
which building he wanted to break into next. She became conscious, then,
of the awkward weight of her equipment, and began redistributing it,
shifting the straps of her oxy-tank pack, slinging the camera from one
shoulder and the board and drafting tools from the other, gathering the
notebooks and sketchbooks under her left arm. She started walking down
the road, over hillocks of buried rubble, around snags of wall jutting
up out of the loess, past buildings still standing, some of them already
breached and explored, and across the brush-grown flat to the huts.
* * * * *
There were ten people in the main office room of Hut One when she
entered. As soon as she had disposed of her oxygen equipment, she lit a
cigarette, her first since noon, then looked from one to another of
them. Old Selim von Ohlmhorst, the Turco-German, one of her two fellow
archaeologists, sitting at the end of the long table against the farther
wall, smoking his big curved pipe and going through a looseleaf
notebook. The girl ordnance officer, Sachiko Koremitsu, between two
droplights at the other end of the table, her head bent over her work.
Colonel Hubert Penrose, the Space Force CO, and Captain Field, the
intelligence officer, listening to the report of one of the airdyne
pilots, returned from his afternoon survey flight. A couple of girl
lieutenants from Signals, going over the script of the evening telecast,
to be transmitted to the _Cyrano_, on orbit five thousand miles off
planet and relayed from thence to Terra via Lunar. Sid Chamberlain, the
Trans-Space News Service man, was with them. Like Selim and herself, he
was a civilian; he was advertising the fact with a white shirt and a
sleeveless blue sweater. And Major Lindemann, the engineer officer, and
one of his assistants, arguing over some plans on a drafting board. She
hoped, drawing a pint of hot water to wash her hands and sponge off her
face, that they were doing something about the pipeline.
She started to carry the notebooks and sketchbooks over to where Selim
von Ohlmhorst was sitting, and then, as she always did, she turned aside
and stopped to watch Sachiko. The Japanese girl was restoring what had
been a book, fifty thousand years ago; her eyes were masked by a
binocular loup, the black headband invisible against her glossy black
hair, and she was picking delicately at the crumbled page with a
hair-fine wire set in a handle of copper tubing. Finally, loosening a
particle as tiny as a snowflake, she grasped it with tweezers, placed it
on the sheet of transparent plastic on which she was reconstructing the
page, and set it with a mist of fixative from a little spraygun. It was
a sheer joy to watch her; every movement was as graceful and precise as
though done to music after being rehearsed a hundred times.
"Hello, Martha. It isn't cocktail-time yet, is it?" The girl at the
table spoke without raising her head, almost without moving her lips, as
though she were afraid that the slightest breath would disturb the flaky
stuff in front of her.
"No, it's only fifteen-thirty. I finished my work, over there. I didn't
find any more books, if that's good news for you."
Sachiko took off the loup and leaned back in her chair, her palms cupped
over her eyes.
"No, I like doing this. I call it micro-jigsaw puzzles. This book, here,
really is a mess. Selim found it lying open, with some heavy stuff on
top of it; the pages were simply crushed." She hesitated briefly. "If
only it would mean something, after I did it."
There could be a faintly critical overtone to that. As she replied,
Martha realized that she was being defensive.
"It will, some day. Look how long it took to read Egyptian
hieroglyphics, even after they had the Rosetta Stone."
Sachiko smiled. "Yes. I know. But they did have the Rosetta Stone."
"And we don't. There is no Rosetta Stone, not anywhere on Mars. A whole
race, a whole species, died while the first Cro-Magnon cave-artist was
daubing pictures of reindeer and bison, and across fifty thousand years
and fifty million miles there was no bridge of understanding.
"We'll find one. There must be something, somewhere, that will give us
the meaning of a few words, and we'll use them to pry meaning out of
more words, and so on. We may not live to learn this language, but we'll
make a start, and some day somebody will."
Sachiko took her hands from her eyes, being careful not to look toward
the unshaded light, and smiled again. This time Martha was sure that it
was not the Japanese smile of politeness, but the universally human
smile of friendship.
"I hope so, Martha: really I do. It would be wonderful for you to be the
first to do it, and it would be wonderful for all of us to be able to
read what these people wrote. It would really bring this dead city to
life again." The smile faded slowly. "But it seems so hopeless."
"You haven't found any more pictures?"
Sachiko shook her head. Not that it would have meant much if she had.
They had found hundreds of pictures with captions; they had never been
able to establish a positive relationship between any pictured object
and any printed word. Neither of them said anything more, and after a
moment Sachiko replaced the loup and bent her head forward over the
book.
* * * * *
Selim von Ohlmhorst looked up from his notebook, taking his pipe out of
his mouth.
"Everything finished, over there?" he asked, releasing a puff of smoke.
"Such as it was." She laid the notebooks and sketches on the table.
"Captain Gicquel's started airsealing the building from the fifth floor
down, with an entrance on the sixth; he'll start putting in oxygen
generators as soon as that's done. I have everything cleared up where
he'll be working."
Colonel Penrose looked up quickly, as though making a mental note to
attend to something later. Then he returned his attention to the pilot,
who was pointing something out on a map.
Von Ohlmhorst nodded. "There wasn't much to it, at that," he agreed. "Do
you know which building Tony has decided to enter next?"
"The tall one with the conical thing like a candle extinguisher on top,
I think. I heard him drilling for the blasting shots over that way."
"Well, I hope it turns out to be one that was occupied up to the end."
The last one hadn't. It had been stripped of its contents and fittings,
a piece of this and a bit of that, haphazardly, apparently over a long
period of time, until it had been almost gutted. For centuries, as it
had died, this city had been consuming itself by a process of
auto-cannibalism. She said something to that effect.
"Yes. We always find that--except, of course, at places like Pompeii.
Have you seen any of the other Roman cities in Italy?" he asked.
"Minturnae, for instance? First the inhabitants tore down this to repair
that, and then, after they had vacated the city, other people came along
and tore down what was left, and burned the stones for lime, or crushed
them to mend roads, till there was nothing left but the foundation
traces. That's where we are fortunate; this is one of the places where
the Martian race perished, and there were no barbarians to come later
and destroy what they had left." He puffed slowly at his pipe. "Some of
these days, Martha, we are going to break into one of these buildings
and find that it was one in which the last of these people died. Then we
will learn the story of the end of this civilization."
And if we learn to read their language, we'll learn the whole story, not
just the obituary. She hesitated, not putting the thought into words.
"We'll find that, sometime, Selim," she said, then looked at her watch.
"I'm going to get some more work done on my lists, before dinner."
For an instant, the old man's face stiffened in disapproval; he started
to say something, thought better of it, and put his pipe back into his
mouth. The brief wrinkling around his mouth and the twitch of his white
mustache had been enough, however; she knew what he was thinking. She
was wasting time and effort, he believed; time and effort belonging not
to herself but to the expedition. He could be right, too, she realized.
But he had to be wrong; there had to be a way to do it. She turned from
him silently and went to her own packing-case seat, at the middle of the
table.
* * * * *
Photographs, and photostats of restored pages of books, and transcripts
of inscriptions, were piled in front of her, and the notebooks in which
she was compiling her lists. She sat down, lighting a fresh cigarette,
and reached over to a stack of unexamined material, taking off the top
sheet. It was a photostat of what looked like the title page and
contents of some sort of a periodical. She remembered it; she had found
it herself, two days before, in a closet in the basement of the building
she had just finished examining.
She sat for a moment, looking at it. It was readable, in the sense that
she had set up a purely arbitrary but consistently pronounceable system
of phonetic values for the letters. The long vertical symbols were
vowels. There were only ten of them; not too many, allowing separate
characters for long and short sounds. There were twenty of the short
horizontal letters, which meant that sounds like -ng or -ch or -sh were
single letters. The odds were millions to one against her system being
anything like the original sound of the language, but she had listed
several thousand Martian words, and she could pronounce all of them.
And that was as far as it went. She could pronounce between three and
four thousand Martian words, and she couldn't assign a meaning to one of
them. Selim von Ohlmhorst believed that she never would. So did Tony
Lattimer, and he was a great deal less reticent about saying so. So, she
was sure, did Sachiko Koremitsu. There were times, now and then, when
she began to be afraid that they were right.
The letters on the page in front of her began squirming and dancing,
slender vowels with fat little consonants. They did that, now, every
night in her dreams. And there were other dreams, in which she read them
as easily as English; waking, she would try desperately and vainly to
remember. She blinked, and looked away from the photostatted page; when
she looked back, the letters were behaving themselves again. There were
three words at the top of the page, over-and-underlined, which seemed to
be the Martian method of capitalization. _Mastharnorvod Tadavas
Sornhulva_. She pronounced them mentally, leafing through her notebooks
to see if she had encountered them before, and in what contexts. All
three were listed. In addition, _masthar_ was a fairly common word, and
so was _norvod_, and so was _nor_, but _-vod_ was a suffix and nothing
but a suffix. _Davas_, was a word, too, and _ta-_ was a common prefix;
_sorn_ and _hulva_ were both common words. This language, she had long
ago decided, must be something like German; when the Martians had needed
a new word, they had just pasted a couple of existing words together. It
would probably turn out to be a grammatical horror. Well, they had
published magazines, and one of them had been called _Mastharnorvod
Tadavas Sornhulva_. She wondered if it had been something like the
_Quarterly Archaeological Review_, or something more on the order of
_Sexy Stories_.
A smaller line, under the title, was plainly the issue number and date;
enough things had been found numbered in series to enable her to
identify the numerals and determine that a decimal system of numeration
had been used. This was the one thousand and seven hundred and
fifty-fourth issue, for Doma, 14837; then Doma must be the name of one
of the Martian months. The word had turned up several times before. She
found herself puffing furiously on her cigarette as she leafed through
notebooks and piles of already examined material.
* * * * *
Sachiko was speaking to somebody, and a chair scraped at the end of the
table. She raised her head, to see a big man with red hair and a red
face, in Space Force green, with the single star of a major on his
shoulder, sitting down. Ivan Fitzgerald, the medic. He was lifting
weights from a book similar to the one the girl ordnance officer was
restoring.
"Haven't had time, lately," he was saying, in reply to Sachiko's
question. "The Finchley girl's still down with whatever it is she has,
and it's something I haven't been able to diagnose yet. And I've been
checking on bacteria cultures, and in what spare time I have, I've been
dissecting specimens for Bill Chandler. Bill's finally found a mammal.
Looks like a lizard, and it's only four inches long, but it's a real
warm-blooded, gamogenetic, placental, viviparous mammal. Burrows, and
seems to live on what pass for insects here."
"Is there enough oxygen for anything like that?" Sachiko was asking.
"Seems to be, close to the ground." Fitzgerald got the headband of his
loup adjusted, and pulled it down over his eyes. "He found this thing in
a ravine down on the sea bottom--Ha, this page seems to be intact; now,
if I can get it out all in one piece--"
He went on talking inaudibly to himself, lifting the page a little at a
time and sliding one of the transparent plastic sheets under it, working
with minute delicacy. Not the delicacy of the Japanese girl's small
hands, moving like the paws of a cat washing her face, but like a
steam-hammer cracking a peanut. Field archaeology requires a certain
delicacy of touch, too, but Martha watched the pair of them with envious
admiration. Then she turned back to her own work, finishing the table of
contents.
The next page was the beginning of the first article listed; many of the
words were unfamiliar. She had the impression that this must be some
kind of scientific or technical journal; that could be because such
publications made up the bulk of her own periodical reading. She doubted
if it were fiction; the paragraphs had a solid, factual look.
At length, Ivan Fitzgerald gave a short, explosive grunt.
"Ha! Got it!"
She looked up. He had detached the page and was cementing another
plastic sheet onto it.
"Any pictures?" she asked.
"None on this side. Wait a moment." He turned the sheet. "None on this
side, either." He sprayed another sheet of plastic to sandwich the page,
then picked up his pipe and relighted it.
"I get fun out of this, and it's good practice for my hands, so don't
think I'm complaining," he said, "but, Martha, do you honestly think
anybody's ever going to get anything out of this?"
Sachiko held up a scrap of the silicone plastic the Martians had used
for paper with her tweezers. It was almost an inch square.
"Look; three whole words on this piece," she crowed. "Ivan, you took the
easy book."
Fitzgerald wasn't being sidetracked. "This stuff's absolutely
meaningless," he continued. "It had a meaning fifty thousand years ago,
when it was written, but it has none at all now."
She shook her head. "Meaning isn't something that evaporates with time,"
she argued. "It has just as much meaning now as it ever had. We just
haven't learned how to decipher it."
"That seems like a pretty pointless distinction," Selim von Ohlmhorst
joined the conversation. "There no longer exists a means of deciphering
it."
"We'll find one." She was speaking, she realized, more in
self-encouragement than in controversy.
"How? From pictures and captions? We've found captioned pictures, and
what have they given us? A caption is intended to explain the picture,
not the picture to explain the caption. Suppose some alien to our
culture found a picture of a man with a white beard and mustache sawing
a billet from a log. He would think the caption meant, 'Man Sawing
Wood.' How would he know that it was really 'Wilhelm II in Exile at
Doorn?'"
Sachiko had taken off her loup and was lighting a cigarette.
"I can think of pictures intended to explain their captions," she said.
"These picture language-books, the sort we use in the Service--little
line drawings, with a word or phrase under them."
"Well, of course, if we found something like that," von Ohlmhorst began.
* * * * *
"Michael Ventris found something like that, back in the Fifties," Hubert
Penrose's voice broke in from directly behind her.
She turned her head. The colonel was standing by the archaeologists'
table; Captain Field and the airdyne pilot had gone out.
"He found a lot of Greek inventories of military stores," Penrose
continued. "They were in Cretan Linear B script, and at the head of each
list was a little picture, a sword or a helmet or a cooking tripod or a
chariot wheel. That's what gave him the key to the script."
"Colonel's getting to be quite an archaeologist," Fitzgerald commented.
"We're all learning each others' specialties, on this expedition."
"I heard about that long before this expedition was even contemplated."
Penrose was tapping a cigarette on his gold case. "I heard about that
back before the Thirty Days' War, at Intelligence School, when I was a
lieutenant. As a feat of cryptanalysis, not an archaeological
discovery."
"Yes, cryptanalysis," von Ohlmhorst pounced. "The reading of a known
language in an unknown form of writing. Ventris' lists were in the known
language, Greek. Neither he nor anybody else ever read a word of the
Cretan language until the finding of the Greek-Cretan bilingual in 1963,
because only with a bilingual text, one language already known, can an
unknown ancient language be learned. And what hope, I ask you, have we
of finding anything like that here? Martha, you've been working on these
Martian texts ever since we landed here--for the last six months. Tell
me, have you found a single word to which you can positively assign a
meaning?"
"Yes, I think I have one." She was trying hard not to sound too
exultant. "_Doma._ It's the name of one of the months of the Martian
calendar."
"Where did you find that?" von Ohlmhorst asked. "And how did you
establish--?"
"Here." She picked up the photostat and handed it along the table to
him. "I'd call this the title page of a magazine."
He was silent for a moment, looking at it. "Yes. I would say so, too.
Have you any of the rest of it?"
"I'm working on the first page of the first article, listed there. Wait
till I see; yes, here's all I found, together, here." She told him where
she had gotten it. "I just gathered it up, at the time, and gave it to
Geoffrey and Rosita to photostat; this is the first I've really examined
it."
The old man got to his feet, brushing tobacco ashes from the front of
his jacket, and came to where she was sitting, laying the title page on
the table and leafing quickly through the stack of photostats.
[Illustration]
"Yes, and here is the second article, on page eight, and here's the next
one." He finished the pile of photostats. "A couple of pages missing at
the end of the last article. This is remarkable; surprising that a thing
like a magazine would have survived so long."
"Well, this silicone stuff the Martians used for paper is pretty
durable," Hubert Penrose said. "There doesn't seem to have been any
water or any other fluid in it originally, so it wouldn't dry out with
time."
"Oh, it's not remarkable that the material would have survived. We've
found a good many books and papers in excellent condition. But only a
really vital culture, an organized culture, will publish magazines, and
this civilization had been dying for hundreds of years before the end.
It might have been a thousand years before the time they died out
completely that such activities as publishing ended."
"Well, look where I found it; in a closet in a cellar. Tossed in there
and forgotten, and then ignored when they were stripping the building.
Things like that happen."
Penrose had picked up the title page and was looking at it.
"I don't think there's any doubt about this being a magazine, at all."
He looked again at the title, his lips moving silently. "_Mastharnorvod
Tadavas Sornhulva_. Wonder what it means. But you're right about the
date--_Doma_ seems to be the name of a month. Yes, you have a word, Dr.
Dane."
Sid Chamberlain, seeing that something unusual was going on, had come
over from the table at which he was working. After examining the title
page and some of the inside pages, he began whispering into the
stenophone he had taken from his belt.
"Don't try to blow this up to anything big, Sid," she cautioned. "All we
have is the name of a month, and Lord only knows how long it'll be till
we even find out which month it was."
"Well, it's a start, isn't it?" Penrose argued. "Grotefend only had the
word for 'king' when he started reading Persian cuneiform."
"But I don't have the word for month; just the name of a month.
Everybody knew the names of the Persian kings, long before Grotefend."
"That's not the story," Chamberlain said. "What the public back on Terra
will be interested in is finding out that the Martians published
magazines, just like we do. Something familiar; make the Martians seem
more real. More human."
* * * * *
Three men had come in, and were removing their masks and helmets and
oxy-tanks, and peeling out of their quilted coveralls. Two were Space
Force lieutenants; the third was a youngish civilian with close-cropped
blond hair, in a checked woolen shirt. Tony Lattimer and his helpers.
"Don't tell me Martha finally got something out of that stuff?" he
asked, approaching the table. He might have been commenting on the
antics of the village half-wit, from his tone.
"Yes; the name of one of the Martian months." Hubert Penrose went on to
explain, showing the photostat.
Tony Lattimer took it, glanced at it, and dropped it on the table.
"Sounds plausible, of course, but just an assumption. That word may not
be the name of a month, at all--could mean 'published' or 'authorized'
or 'copyrighted' or anything like that. Fact is, I don't think it's more
than a wild guess that that thing's anything like a periodical." He
dismissed the subject and turned to Penrose. "I picked out the next
building to enter; that tall one with the conical thing on top. It ought
to be in pretty good shape inside; the conical top wouldn't allow dust
to accumulate, and from the outside nothing seems to be caved in or
crushed. Ground level's higher than the other one, about the seventh
floor. I found a good place and drilled for the shots; tomorrow I'll
blast a hole in it, and if you can spare some people to help, we can
start exploring it right away."
"Yes, of course, Dr. Lattimer. I can spare about a dozen, and I suppose
you can find a few civilian volunteers," Penrose told him. "What will
you need in the way of equipment?"
"Oh, about six demolition-packets; they can all be shot together. And
the usual thing in the way of lights, and breaking and digging tools,
and climbing equipment in case we run into broken or doubtful stairways.
We'll divide into two parties. Nothing ought to be entered for the first
time without a qualified archaeologist along. Three parties, if Martha
can tear herself away from this catalogue of systematized
incomprehensibilities she's making long enough to do some real work."
She felt her chest tighten and her face become stiff. She was pressing
her lips together to lock in a furious retort when Hubert Penrose
answered for her.
"Dr. Dane's been doing as much work, and as important work, as you
have," he said brusquely. "More important work, I'd be inclined to say."
Von Ohlmhorst was visibly distressed; he glanced once toward Sid
Chamberlain, then looked hastily away from him. Afraid of a story of
dissension among archaeologists getting out.
"Working out a system of pronunciation by which the Martian language
could be transliterated was a most important contribution," he said.
"And Martha did that almost unassisted."
"Unassisted by Dr. Lattimer, anyway," Penrose added. "Captain Field and
Lieutenant Koremitsu did some work, and I helped out a little, but
nine-tenths of it she did herself."
"Purely arbitrary," Lattimer disdained. "Why, we don't even know that
the Martians could make the same kind of vocal sounds we do."
"Oh, yes, we do," Ivan Fitzgerald contradicted, safe on his own ground.
"I haven't seen any actual Martian skulls--these people seem to have
been very tidy about disposing of their dead--but from statues and busts
and pictures I've seen. I'd say that their vocal organs were identical
with our own."
"Well, grant that. And grant that it's going to be impressive to rattle
off the names of Martian notables whose statues we find, and that if
we're ever able to attribute any placenames, they'll sound a lot better
than this horse-doctors' Latin the old astronomers splashed all over the
map of Mars," Lattimer said. "What I object to is her wasting time on
this stuff, of which nobody will ever be able to read a word if she
fiddles around with those lists till there's another hundred feet of
loess on this city, when there's so much real work to be done and we're
as shorthanded as we are."
That was the first time that had come out in just so many words. She was
glad Lattimer had said it and not Selim von Ohlmhorst.
"What you mean," she retorted, "is that it doesn't have the publicity
value that digging up statues has."
For an instant, she could see that the shot had scored. Then Lattimer,
with a side glance at Chamberlain, answered:
"What I mean is that you're trying to find something that any
archaeologist, yourself included, should know doesn't exist. I don't
object to your gambling your professional reputation and making a
laughing stock of yourself; what I object to is that the blunders of one
archaeologist discredit the whole subject in the eyes of the public."
That seemed to be what worried Lattimer most. She was framing a reply
when the communication-outlet whistled shrilly, and then squawked:
"Cocktail time! One hour to dinner; cocktails in the library, Hut Four!"
* * * * *
The library, which was also lounge, recreation room, and general
gathering-place, was already crowded; most of the crowd was at the long
table topped with sheets of glasslike plastic that had been wall panels
out of one of the ruined buildings. She poured herself what passed,
here, for a martini, and carried it over to where Selim von Ohlmhorst
was sitting alone.
For a while, they talked about the building they had just finished
exploring, then drifted into reminiscences of their work on Terra--von
Ohlmhorst's in Asia Minor, with the Hittite Empire, and hers in
Pakistan, excavating the cities of the Harappa Civilization. They
finished their drinks--the ingredients were plentiful; alcohol and
flavoring extracts synthesized from Martian vegetation--and von
Ohlmhorst took the two glasses to the table for refills.
"You know, Martha," he said, when he returned, "Tony was right about one
thing. You are gambling your professional standing and reputation. It's
against all archaeological experience that a language so completely dead
as this one could be deciphered. There was a continuity between all the
other ancient languages--by knowing Greek, Champollion learned to read
Egyptian; by knowing Egyptian, Hittite was learned. That's why you and
your colleagues have never been able to translate the Harappa
hieroglyphics; no such continuity exists there. If you insist that this
utterly dead language can be read, your reputation will suffer for it."
"I heard Colonel Penrose say, once, that an officer who's afraid to risk
his military reputation seldom makes much of a reputation. It's the same
with us. If we really want to find things out, we have to risk making
mistakes. And I'm a lot more interested in finding things out than I am
in my reputation."
She glanced across the room, to where Tony Lattimer was sitting with
Gloria Standish, talking earnestly, while Gloria sipped one of the
counterfeit martinis and listened. Gloria was the leading contender for
the title of Miss Mars, 1996, if you liked big bosomy blondes, but Tony
would have been just as attentive to her if she'd looked like the Wicked
Witch in "The Wizard of Oz." because Gloria was the Pan-Federation
Telecast System commentator with the expedition.
"I know you are," the old Turco-German was saying. "That's why, when
they asked me to name another archaeologist for this expedition, I named
you."
He hadn't named Tony Lattimer; Lattimer had been pushed onto the
expedition by his university. There'd been a lot of high-level
string-pulling to that; she wished she knew the whole story. She'd
managed to keep clear of universities and university politics; all her
digs had been sponsored by non-academic foundations or art museums.
"You have an excellent standing: much better than my own, at your age.
That's why it disturbs me to see you jeopardizing it by this insistence
that the Martian language can be translated. I can't, really, see how
you can hope to succeed."
She shrugged and drank some more of her cocktail, then lit another
cigarette. It was getting tiresome to try to verbalize something she
only felt.
"Neither do I, now, but I will. Maybe I'll find something like the
picture-books Sachiko was talking about. A child's primer, maybe; surely
they had things like that. And if I don't. I'll find something else.
We've only been here six months. I can wait the rest of my life, if I
have to, but I'll do it sometime."
"I can't wait so long," von Ohlmhorst said. "The rest of my life will
only be a few years, and when the _Schiaparelli_ orbits in, I'll be
going back to Terra on the _Cyrano_."
"I wish you wouldn't. This is a whole new world of archaeology.
Literally."
"Yes." He finished the cocktail and looked at his pipe as though
wondering whether to re-light it so soon before dinner, then put it in
his pocket. "A whole new world--but I've grown old, and it isn't for me.
I've spent my life studying the Hittites. I can speak the Hittite
language, though maybe King Muwatallis wouldn't be able to understand my
modern Turkish accent. But the things I'd have to learn here--chemistry,
physics, engineering, how to run analytic tests on steel girders and
beryllo-silver alloys and plastics and silicones. I'm more at home with
a civilization that rode in chariots and fought with swords and was just
learning how to work iron. Mars is for young people. This expedition is
a cadre of leadership--not only the Space Force people, who'll be the
commanders of the main expedition, but us scientists, too. And I'm just
an old cavalry general who can't learn to command tanks and aircraft.
You'll have time to learn about Mars. I won't."
His reputation as the dean of Hittitologists was solid and secure, too,
she added mentally. Then she felt ashamed of the thought. He wasn't to
be classed with Tony Lattimer.
"All I came for was to get the work started," he was continuing. "The
Federation Government felt that an old hand should do that. Well, it's
started, now; you and Tony and whoever come out on the _Schiaparelli_
must carry it on. You said it, yourself; you have a whole new world.
This is only one city, of the last Martian civilization. Behind this,
you have the Late Upland Culture, and the Canal Builders, and all the
civilizations and races and empires before them, clear back to the
Martian Stone Age." He hesitated for a moment. "You have no idea what
all you have to learn, Martha. This isn't the time to start specializing
too narrowly."
* * * * *
They all got out of the truck and stretched their legs and looked up the
road to the tall building with the queer conical cap askew on its top.
The four little figures that had been busy against its wall climbed into
the jeep and started back slowly, the smallest of them, Sachiko
Koremitsu, paying out an electric cable behind. When it pulled up beside
the truck, they climbed out; Sachiko attached the free end of the cable
to a nuclear-electric battery. At once, dirty gray smoke and orange dust
puffed out from the wall of the building, and, a second later, the
multiple explosion banged.
She and Tony Lattimer and Major Lindemann climbed onto the truck,
leaving the jeep stand by the road. When they reached the building, a
satisfyingly wide breach had been blown in the wall. Lattimer had placed
his shots between two of the windows; they were both blown out along
with the wall between, and lay unbroken on the ground. Martha remembered
the first building they had entered. A Space Force officer had picked up
a stone and thrown it at one of the windows, thinking that would be all
they'd need to do. It had bounced back. He had drawn his pistol--they'd
all carried guns, then, on the principle that what they didn't know
about Mars might easily hurt them--and fired four shots. The bullets had
ricocheted, screaming thinly; there were four coppery smears of
jacket-metal on the window, and a little surface spalling. Somebody
tried a rifle; the 4000-f.s. bullet had cracked the glasslike pane
without penetrating. An oxyacetylene torch had taken an hour to cut the
window out; the lab crew, aboard the ship, were still trying to find out
just what the stuff was.
Tony Lattimer had gone forward and was sweeping his flashlight back and
forth, swearing petulantly, his voice harshened and amplified by his
helmet-speaker.
"I thought I was blasting into a hallway; this lets us into a room.
Careful; there's about a two-foot drop to the floor, and a lot of rubble
from the blast just inside."
He stepped down through the breach; the others began dragging equipment
out of the trucks--shovels and picks and crowbars and sledges, portable
floodlights, cameras, sketching materials, an extension ladder, even
Alpinists' ropes and crampons and pickaxes. Hubert Penrose was
shouldering something that looked like a surrealist machine gun but
which was really a nuclear-electric jack-hammer. Martha selected one of
the spike-shod mountaineer's ice axes, with which she could dig or chop
or poke or pry or help herself over rough footing.
The windows, grimed and crusted with fifty millennia of dust, filtered
in a dim twilight; even the breach in the wall, in the morning shade,
lighted only a small patch of floor. Somebody snapped on a floodlight,
aiming it at the ceiling. The big room was empty and bare; dust lay
thick on the floor and reddened the once-white walls. It could have been
a large office, but there was nothing left in it to indicate its use.
"This one's been stripped up to the seventh floor!" Lattimer exclaimed.
"Street level'll be cleaned out, completely."
"Do for living quarters and shops, then," Lindemann said. "Added to the
others, this'll take care of everybody on the _Schiaparelli_."
"Seem to have been a lot of electric or electronic apparatus over along
this wall," one of the Space Force officers commented. "Ten or twelve
electric outlets." He brushed the dusty wall with his glove, then
scraped on the floor with his foot. "I can see where things were pried
loose."
* * * * *
The door, one of the double sliding things the Martians had used, was
closed. Selim von Ohlmhorst tried it, but it was stuck fast. The metal
latch-parts had frozen together, molecule bonding itself to molecule,
since the door had last been closed. Hubert Penrose came over with the
jack-hammer, fitting a spear-point chisel into place. He set the chisel
in the joint between the doors, braced the hammer against his hip, and
squeezed the trigger-switch. The hammer banged briefly like the weapon
it resembled, and the doors popped a few inches apart, then stuck.
Enough dust had worked into the recesses into which it was supposed to
slide to block it on both sides.
That was old stuff; they ran into that every time they had to force a
door, and they were prepared for it. Somebody went outside and brought
in a power-jack and finally one of the doors inched back to the door
jamb. That was enough to get the lights and equipment through: they all
passed from the room to the hallway beyond. About half the other doors
were open; each had a number and a single word, _Darfhulva_, over it.
[Illustration]
One of the civilian volunteers, a woman professor of natural ecology
from Penn State University, was looking up and down the hall.
"You know," she said, "I feel at home here. I think this was a college
of some sort, and these were classrooms. That word, up there; that was
the subject taught, or the department. And those electronic devices, all
where the class would face them; audio-visual teaching aids."
"A twenty-five-story university?" Lattimer scoffed. "Why, a building
like this would handle thirty thousand students."
"Maybe there were that many. This was a big city, in its prime," Martha
said, moved chiefly by a desire to oppose Lattimer.
"Yes, but think of the snafu in the halls, every time they changed
classes. It'd take half an hour to get everybody back and forth from one
floor to another." He turned to von Ohlmhorst. "I'm going up above this
floor. This place has been looted clean up to here, but there's a chance
there may be something above," he said.
"I'll stay on this floor, at present," the Turco-German replied. "There
will be much coming and going, and dragging things in and out. We should
get this completely examined and recorded first. Then Major Lindemann's
people can do their worst, here."
"Well, if nobody else wants it, I'll take the downstairs," Martha said.
"I'll go along with you," Hubert Penrose told her. "If the lower floors
have no archaeological value, we'll turn them into living quarters. I
like this building: it'll give everybody room to keep out from under
everybody else's feet." He looked down the hall. "We ought to find
escalators at the middle."
* * * * *
The hallway, too, was thick underfoot with dust. Most of the open rooms
were empty, but a few contained furniture, including small seat-desks.
The original proponent of the university theory pointed these out as
just what might be found in classrooms. There were escalators, up and
down, on either side of the hall, and more on the intersecting passage
to the right.
"That's how they handled the students, between classes," Martha
commented. "And I'll bet there are more ahead, there."
They came to a stop where the hallway ended at a great square central
hall. There were elevators, there, on two of the sides, and four
escalators, still usable as stairways. But it was the walls, and the
paintings on them, that brought them up short and staring.
They were clouded with dirt--she was trying to imagine what they must
have looked like originally, and at the same time estimating the labor
that would be involved in cleaning them--but they were still
distinguishable, as was the word, _Darfhulva_, in golden letters above
each of the four sides. It was a moment before she realized, from the
murals, that she had at last found a meaningful Martian word. They were
a vast historical panorama, clockwise around the room. A group of
skin-clad savages squatting around a fire. Hunters with bows and spears,
carrying a carcass of an animal slightly like a pig. Nomads riding
long-legged, graceful mounts like hornless deer. Peasants sowing and
reaping; mud-walled hut villages, and cities; processions of priests and
warriors; battles with swords and bows, and with cannon and muskets;
galleys, and ships with sails, and ships without visible means of
propulsion, and aircraft. Changing costumes and weapons and machines
and styles of architecture. A richly fertile landscape, gradually
merging into barren deserts and bushlands--the time of the great
planet-wide drought. The Canal Builders--men with machines recognizable
as steam-shovels and derricks, digging and quarrying and driving across
the empty plains with aqueducts. More cities--seaports on the shrinking
oceans; dwindling, half-deserted cities; an abandoned city, with four
tiny humanoid figures and a thing like a combat-car in the middle of a
brush-grown plaza, they and their vehicle dwarfed by the huge lifeless
buildings around them. She had not the least doubt; _Darfhulva_ was
History.
"Wonderful!" von Ohlmhorst was saying. "The entire history of this race.
Why, if the painter depicted appropriate costumes and weapons and
machines for each period, and got the architecture right, we can break
the history of this planet into eras and periods and civilizations."
"You can assume they're authentic. The faculty of this university would
insist on authenticity in the _Darfhulva_--History--Department," she
said.
"Yes! _Darfhulva_--History! And your magazine was a journal of
_Sornhulva_!" Penrose exclaimed. "You have a word, Martha!" It took her
an instant to realize that he had called her by her first name, and not
Dr. Dane. She wasn't sure if that weren't a bigger triumph than learning
a word of the Martian language. Or a more auspicious start. "Alone, I
suppose that _hulva_ means something like science or knowledge, or
study; combined, it would be equivalent to our 'ology. And _darf_ would
mean something like past, or old times, or human events, or chronicles."
"That gives you three words, Martha!" Sachiko jubilated. "You did it."
"Let's don't go too fast," Lattimer said, for once not derisively. "I'll
admit that _darfhulva_ is the Martian word for history as a subject of
study; I'll admit that _hulva_ is the general word and _darf_ modifies
it and tells us which subject is meant. But as for assigning specific
meanings, we can't do that because we don't know just how the Martians
thought, scientifically or otherwise."
He stopped short, startled by the blue-white light that blazed as Sid
Chamberlain's Kliegettes went on. When the whirring of the camera
stopped, it was Chamberlain who was speaking:
"This is the biggest thing yet; the whole history of Mars, stone age to
the end, all on four walls. I'm taking this with the fast shutter, but
we'll telecast it in slow motion, from the beginning to the end. Tony, I
want you to do the voice for it--running commentary, interpretation of
each scene as it's shown. Would you do that?"
Would he do that! Martha thought. If he had a tail, he'd be wagging it
at the very thought.
"Well, there ought to be more murals on the other floors," she said.
"Who wants to come downstairs with us?"
Sachiko did; immediately. Ivan Fitzgerald volunteered. Sid decided to go
upstairs with Tony Lattimer, and Gloria Standish decided to go upstairs,
too. Most of the party would remain on the seventh floor, to help Selim
von Ohlmhorst get it finished. After poking tentatively at the escalator
with the spike of her ice axe, Martha led the way downward.
* * * * *
The sixth floor was _Darfhulva_, too; military and technological
history, from the character of the murals. They looked around the
central hall, and went down to the fifth; it was like the floors above
except that the big quadrangle was stacked with dusty furniture and
boxes. Ivan Fitzgerald, who was carrying the floodlight, swung it slowly
around. Here the murals were of heroic-sized Martians, so human in
appearance as to seem members of her own race, each holding some
object--a book, or a test tube, or some bit of scientific apparatus, and
behind them were scenes of laboratories and factories, flame and smoke,
lightning-flashes. The word at the top of each of the four walls was one
with which she was already familiar--_Sornhulva_.
"Hey, Martha; there's that word," Ivan Fitzgerald exclaimed. "The one in
the title of your magazine." He looked at the paintings. "Chemistry, or
physics."
"Both." Hubert Penrose considered. "I don't think the Martians made any
sharp distinction between them. See, the old fellow with the scraggly
whiskers must be the inventor of the spectroscope; he has one in his
hands, and he has a rainbow behind him. And the woman in the blue smock,
beside him, worked in organic chemistry; see the diagrams of long-chain
molecules behind her. What word would convey the idea of chemistry and
physics taken as one subject?"
"_Sornhulva_," Sachiko suggested. "If _hulva's_ something like science,
"_sorn_" must mean matter, or substance, or physical object. You were
right, all along, Martha. A civilization like this would certainly leave
something like this, that would be self-explanatory."
"This'll wipe a little more of that superior grin off Tony Lattimer's
face," Fitzgerald was saying, as they went down the motionless escalator
to the floor below. "Tony wants to be a big shot. When you want to be a
big shot, you can't bear the possibility of anybody else being a bigger
big shot, and whoever makes a start on reading this language will be the
biggest big shot archaeology ever saw."
That was true. She hadn't thought of it, in that way, before, and now
she tried not to think about it. She didn't want to be a big shot. She
wanted to be able to read the Martian language, and find things out
about the Martians.
Two escalators down, they came out on a mezzanine around a wide central
hall on the street level, the floor forty feet below them and the
ceiling thirty feet above. Their lights picked out object after object
below--a huge group of sculptured figures in the middle; some kind of a
motor vehicle jacked up on trestles for repairs; things that looked like
machine-guns and auto-cannon; long tables, tops littered with a
dust-covered miscellany; machinery; boxes and crates and containers.
* * * * *