latter keeping to himself while she and the old Turco-German worked
together. The civilian specialists in other fields, and the Space Force
people who had been holding tape lines and making sketches and snapping
cameras, were all flying to lower Syrtis to find out how much oxygen
there was and what kind of life it supported.
Sometimes Sachiko dropped in; most of the time she was busy helping Ivan
Fitzgerald dissect specimens. They had four or five species of what
might loosely be called birds, and something that could easily be
classed as a reptile, and a carnivorous mammal the size of a cat with
birdlike claws, and a herbivore almost identical with the piglike thing
in the big _Darfhulva_ mural, and another like a gazelle with a single
horn in the middle of its forehead.
The high point came when one party, at thirty thousand feet below the
level of Kukan, found breathable air. One of them had a mild attack of
_sorroche_ and had to be flown back for treatment in a hurry, but the
others showed no ill effects.
The daily newscasts from Terra showed a corresponding shift in interest
at home. The discovery of the University had focused attention on the
dead past of Mars; now the public was interested in Mars as a possible
home for humanity. It was Tony Lattimer who brought archaeology back
into the activities of the expedition and the news at home.
Martha and Selim were working in the museum on the second floor,
scrubbing the grime from the glass cases, noting contents, and
grease-penciling numbers; Lattimer and a couple of Space Force officers
were going through what had been the administrative offices on the other
side. It was one of these, a young second lieutenant, who came hurrying
in from the mezzanine, almost bursting with excitement.
"Hey, Martha! Dr. von Ohlmhorst!" he was shouting. "Where are you?
Tony's found the Martians!"
Selim dropped his rag back in the bucket; she laid her clipboard on top
of the case beside her.
"Where?" they asked together.
"Over on the north side." The lieutenant took hold of himself and spoke
more deliberately. "Little room, back of one of the old faculty
offices--conference room. It was locked from the inside, and we had to
burn it down with a torch. That's where they are. Eighteen of them,
around a long table--"
Gloria Standish, who had dropped in for lunch, was on the mezzanine,
fairly screaming into a radiophone extension:
" ... Dozen and a half of them! Well, of course they're dead. What a
question! They look like skeletons covered with leather. No, I do not
know what they died of. Well, forget it; I don't care if Bill Chandler's
found a three-headed hippopotamus. Sid, don't you get it? We've found
the _Martians_!"
She slammed the phone back on its hook, rushing away ahead of them.
* * * * *
Martha remembered the closed door; on the first survey, they hadn't
attempted opening it. Now it was burned away at both sides and lay,
still hot along the edges, on the floor of the big office room in front.
A floodlight was on in the room inside, and Lattimer was going around
looking at things while a Space Force officer stood by the door. The
center of the room was filled by a long table; in armchairs around it
sat the eighteen men and women who had occupied the room for the last
fifty millennia. There were bottles and glasses on the table in front of
them, and, had she seen them in a dimmer light, she would have thought
that they were merely dozing over their drinks. One had a knee hooked
over his chair-arm and was curled in foetuslike sleep. Another had
fallen forward onto the table, arms extended, the emerald set of a ring
twinkling dully on one finger. Skeletons covered with leather, Gloria
Standish had called them, and so they were--faces like skulls, arms and
legs like sticks, the flesh shrunken onto the bones under it.
"Isn't this something!" Lattimer was exulting. "Mass suicide, that's
what it was. Notice what's in the corners?"
Braziers, made of perforated two-gallon-odd metal cans, the white walls
smudged with smoke above them. Von Ohlmhorst had noticed them at once,
and was poking into one of them with his flashlight.
"Yes; charcoal. I noticed a quantity of it around a couple of
hand-forges in the shop on the first floor. That's why you had so much
trouble breaking in; they'd sealed the room on the inside." He
straightened and went around the room, until he found a ventilator, and
peered into it. "Stuffed with rags. They must have been all that were
left, here. Their power was gone, and they were old and tired, and all
around them their world was dying. So they just came in here and lit the
charcoal, and sat drinking together till they all fell asleep. Well, we
know what became of them, now, anyhow."
Sid and Gloria made the most of it. The Terran public wanted to hear
about Martians, and if live Martians couldn't be found, a room full of
dead ones was the next best thing. Maybe an even better thing; it had
been only sixty-odd years since the Orson Welles invasion-scare. Tony
Lattimer, the discoverer, was beginning to cash in on his attentions to
Gloria and his ingratiation with Sid; he was always either making
voice-and-image talks for telecast or listening to the news from the
home planet. Without question, he had become, overnight, the most widely
known archaeologist in history.
"Not that I'm interested in all this, for myself," he disclaimed, after
listening to the telecast from Terra two days after his discovery. "But
this is going to be a big thing for Martian archaeology. Bring it to the
public attention; dramatize it. Selim, can you remember when Lord
Carnarvon and Howard Carter found the tomb of Tutankhamen?"
"In 1923? I was two years old, then," von Ohlmhorst chuckled. "I really
don't know how much that publicity ever did for Egyptology. Oh, the
museums did devote more space to Egyptian exhibits, and after a museum
department head gets a few extra showcases, you know how hard it is to
make him give them up. And, for a while, it was easier to get financial
support for new excavations. But I don't know how much good all this
public excitement really does, in the long run."
"Well, I think one of us should go back on the _Cyrano_, when the
_Schiaparelli_ orbits in," Lattimer said. "I'd hoped it would be you;
your voice would carry the most weight. But I think it's important that
one of us go back, to present the story of our work, and what we have
accomplished and what we hope to accomplish, to the public and to the
universities and the learned societies, and to the Federation
Government. There will be a great deal of work that will have to be
done. We must not allow the other scientific fields and the so-called
practical interests to monopolize public and academic support. So, I
believe I shall go back at least for a while, and see what I can do--"
Lectures. The organization of a Society of Martian Archaeology, with
Anthony Lattimer, Ph.D., the logical candidate for the chair. Degrees,
honors; the deference of the learned, and the adulation of the lay
public. Positions, with impressive titles and salaries. Sweet are the
uses of publicity.
She crushed out her cigarette and got to her feet. "Well, I still have
the final lists of what we found in _Halvhulva_--Biology--department to
check over. I'm starting on Sornhulva tomorrow, and I want that stuff in
shape for expert evaluation."
That was the sort of thing Tony Lattimer wanted to get away from, the
detail-work and the drudgery. Let the infantry do the slogging through
the mud; the brass-hats got the medals.
* * * * *
She was halfway through the fifth floor, a week later, and was having
midday lunch in the reading room on the first floor when Hubert Penrose
came over and sat down beside her, asking her what she was doing. She
told him.
"I wonder if you could find me a couple of men, for an hour or so," she
added. "I'm stopped by a couple of jammed doors at the central hall.
Lecture room and library, if the layout of that floor's anything like
the ones below it."
"Yes. I'm a pretty fair door-buster, myself." He looked around the room.
"There's Jeff Miles; he isn't doing much of anything. And we'll put Sid
Chamberlain to work, for a change, too. The four of us ought to get your
doors open." He called to Chamberlain, who was carrying his tray over to
the dish washer. "Oh, Sid; you doing anything for the next hour or so?"
"I was going up to the fourth floor, to see what Tony's doing."
"Forget it. Tony's bagged his season limit of Martians. I'm going to
help Martha bust in a couple of doors; we'll probably find a whole
cemetery full of Martians."
Chamberlain shrugged. "Why not. A jammed door can have anything back of
it, and I know what Tony's doing--just routine stuff."
Jeff Miles, the Space Force captain, came over, accompanied by one of
the lab-crew from the ship who had come down on the rocket the day
before.
"This ought to be up your alley, Mort," he was saying to his companion.
"Chemistry and physics department. Want to come along?"
The lab man, Mort Tranter, was willing. Seeing the sights was what he'd
come down from the ship for. She finished her coffee and cigarette, and
they went out into the hall together, gathered equipment and rode the
elevator to the fifth floor.
The lecture hall door was the nearest; they attacked it first. With
proper equipment and help, it was no problem and in ten minutes they had
it open wide enough to squeeze through with the floodlights. The room
inside was quite empty, and, like most of the rooms behind closed doors,
comparatively free from dust. The students, it appeared, had sat with
their backs to the door, facing a low platform, but their seats and the
lecturer's table and equipment had been removed. The two side walls bore
inscriptions: on the right, a pattern of concentric circles which she
recognized as a diagram of atomic structure, and on the left a
complicated table of numbers and words, in two columns. Tranter was
pointing at the diagram on the right.
[Illustration]
"They got as far as the Bohr atom, anyhow," he said. "Well, not quite.
They knew about electron shells, but they have the nucleus pictured as a
solid mass. No indication of proton-and-neutron structure. I'll bet,
when you come to translate their scientific books, you'll find that they
taught that the atom was the ultimate and indivisible particle. That
explains why you people never found any evidence that the Martians used
nuclear energy."
"That's a uranium atom," Captain Miles mentioned.
"It is?" Sid Chamberlain asked, excitedly. "Then they did know about
atomic energy. Just because we haven't found any pictures of A-bomb
mushrooms doesn't mean--"
She turned to look at the other wall. Sid's signal reactions were
getting away from him again; uranium meant nuclear power to him, and the
two words were interchangeable. As she studied the arrangement of the
numbers and words, she could hear Tranter saying:
"Nuts, Sid. We knew about uranium a long time before anybody found out
what could be done with it. Uranium was discovered on Terra in 1789, by
Klaproth."
There was something familiar about the table on the left wall. She tried
to remember what she had been taught in school about physics, and what
she had picked up by accident afterward. The second column was a
continuation of the first: there were forty-six items in each, each item
numbered consecutively--
"Probably used uranium because it's the largest of the natural atoms,"
Penrose was saying. "The fact that there's nothing beyond it there shows
that they hadn't created any of the transuranics. A student could go to
that thing and point out the outer electron of any of the ninety-two
elements."
* * * * *
Ninety-two! That was it; there were ninety-two items in the table on the
left wall! Hydrogen was Number One, she knew; One, _Sarfaldsorn_. Helium
was Two; that was _Tirfaldsorn_. She couldn't remember which element
came next, but in Martian it was _Sarfalddavas_. _Sorn_ must mean
matter, or substance, then. And _davas_; she was trying to think of what
it could be. She turned quickly to the others, catching hold of Hubert
Penrose's arm with one hand and waving her clipboard with the other.
"Look at this thing, over here," she was clamoring excitedly. "Tell me
what you think it is. Could it be a table of the elements?"
They all turned to look. Mort Tranter stared at it for a moment.
"Could be. If I only knew what those squiggles meant--"
That was right; he'd spent his time aboard the ship.
"If you could read the numbers, would that help?" she asked, beginning
to set down the Arabic digits and their Martian equivalents. "It's
decimal system, the same as we use."
"Sure. If that's a table of elements, all I'd need would be the numbers.
Thanks," he added as she tore off the sheet and gave it to him.
Penrose knew the numbers, and was ahead of him. "Ninety-two items,
numbered consecutively. The first number would be the atomic number.
Then a single word, the name of the element. Then the atomic weight--"
She began reading off the names of the elements. "I know hydrogen and
helium; what's _tirfalddavas_, the third one?"
"Lithium," Tranter said. "The atomic weights aren't run out past the
decimal point. Hydrogen's one plus, if that double-hook dingus is a plus
sign; Helium's four-plus, that's right. And lithium's given as seven,
that isn't right. It's six-point nine-four-oh. Or is that thing a
Martian minus sign?"
"Of course! Look! A plus sign is a hook, to hang things together; a
minus sign is a knife, to cut something off from something--see, the
little loop is the handle and the long pointed loop is the blade.
Stylized, of course, but that's what it is. And the fourth element,
kiradavas; what's that?"
"Beryllium. Atomic weight given as nine-and-a-hook; actually it's
nine-point-oh-two."
Sid Chamberlain had been disgruntled because he couldn't get a story
about the Martians having developed atomic energy. It took him a few
minutes to understand the newest development, but finally it dawned on
him.
"Hey! You're reading that!" he cried. "You're reading Martian!"
"That's right," Penrose told him. "Just reading it right off. I don't
get the two items after the atomic weight, though. They look like months
of the Martian calendar. What ought they to be, Mort?"
* * * * *
Tranter hesitated. "Well, the next information after the atomic weight
ought to be the period and group numbers. But those are words."
"What would the numbers be for the first one, hydrogen?"
"Period One, Group One. One electron shell, one electron in the outer
shell," Tranter told her. "Helium's period one, too, but it has the
outer--only--electron shell full, so it's in the group of inert
elements."
"_Trav, Trav._ _Trav's_ the first month of the year. And helium's _Trav,
Yenth_; _Yenth_ is the eighth month."
"The inert elements could be called Group Eight, yes. And the third
element, lithium, is Period Two, Group One. That check?"
"It certainly does. _Sanv, Trav_; _Sanv's_ the second month. What's the
first element in Period Three?"
"Sodium. Number Eleven."
That's right; it's _Krav, Trav_. Why, the names of the months are simply
numbers, one to ten, spelled out.
"_Doma_'s the fifth month. That was your first Martian word, Martha,"
Penrose told her. "The word for five. And if _davas_ is the word for
metal, and _sornhulva_ is chemistry and / or physics, I'll bet Tadavas
Sornhulva is literally translated as: Of-Metal Matter-Knowledge.
Metallurgy, in other words. I wonder what Mastharnorvod means." It
surprised her that, after so long and with so much happening in the
meantime, he could remember that. "Something like 'Journal,' or
'Review,' or maybe 'Quarterly.'"
"We'll work that out, too," she said confidently. After this, nothing
seemed impossible. "Maybe we can find--" Then she stopped short. "You
said 'Quarterly.' I think it was 'Monthly,' instead. It was dated for a
specific month, the fifth one. And if _nor_ is ten, Mastharnorvod could
be 'Year-Tenth.' And I'll bet we'll find that _masthar_ is the word for
year." She looked at the table on the wall again. "Well, let's get all
these words down, with translations for as many as we can."
"Let's take a break for a minute," Penrose suggested, getting out his
cigarettes. "And then, let's do this in comfort. Jeff, suppose you and
Sid go across the hall and see what you find in the other room in the
way of a desk or something like that, and a few chairs. There'll be a
lot of work to do on this."
Sid Chamberlain had been squirming as though he were afflicted with
ants, trying to contain himself. Now he let go with an excited jabber.
"This is really it! _The_ it, not just it-of-the-week, like finding the
reservoirs or those statues or this building, or even the animals and
the dead Martians! Wait till Selim and Tony see this! Wait till Tony
sees it; I want to see his face! And when I get this on telecast, all
Terra's going to go nuts about it!" He turned to Captain Miles. "Jeff,
suppose you take a look at that other door, while I find somebody to
send to tell Selim and Tony. And Gloria; wait till she sees this--"
"Take it easy, Sid," Martha cautioned. "You'd better let me have a look
at your script, before you go too far overboard on the telecast. This is
just a beginning; it'll take years and years before we're able to read
any of those books downstairs."
"It'll go faster than you think, Martha," Hubert Penrose told her.
"We'll all work on it, and we'll teleprint material to Terra, and people
there will work on it. We'll send them everything we can ... everything
we work out, and copies of books, and copies of your word-lists--"
And there would be other tables--astronomical tables, tables in physics
and mechanics, for instance--in which words and numbers were equivalent.
The library stacks, below, would be full of them. Transliterate them
into Roman alphabet spellings and Arabic numerals, and somewhere,
somebody would spot each numerical significance, as Hubert Penrose and
Mort Tranter and she had done with the table of elements. And pick out
all the chemistry textbooks in the Library; new words would take on
meaning from contexts in which the names of elements appeared. She'd
have to start studying chemistry and physics, herself--
* * * * *
Sachiko Koremitsu peeped in through the door, then stepped inside.
"Is there anything I can do--?" she began. "What's happened? Something
important?"
"Important?" Sid Chamberlain exploded. "Look at that, Sachi! We're
reading it! Martha's found out how to read Martian!" He grabbed Captain
Miles by the arm. "Come on, Jeff; let's go. I want to call the others--"
He was still babbling as he hurried from the room.
Sachi looked at the inscription. "Is it true?" she asked, and then,
before Martha could more than begin to explain, flung her arms around
her. "Oh, it really is! You are reading it! I'm so happy!"
She had to start explaining again when Selim von Ohlmhorst entered. This
time, she was able to finish.
"But, Martha, can you be really sure? You know, by now, that learning to
read this language is as important to me as it is to you, but how can
you be so sure that those words really mean things like hydrogen and
helium and boron and oxygen? How do you know that their table of
elements was anything like ours?"
Tranter and Penrose and Sachiko all looked at him in amazement.
"That isn't just the Martian table of elements; that's _the_ table of
elements. It's the only one there is." Mort Tranter almost exploded.
"Look, hydrogen has one proton and one electron. If it had more of
either, it wouldn't be hydrogen, it'd be something else. And the same
with all the rest of the elements. And hydrogen on Mars is the same as
hydrogen on Terra, or on Alpha Centauri, or in the next galaxy--"
"You just set up those numbers, in that order, and any first-year
chemistry student could tell you what elements they represented."
Penrose said. "Could if he expected to make a passing grade, that is."
The old man shook his head slowly, smiling. "I'm afraid I wouldn't make
a passing grade. I didn't know, or at least didn't realize, that. One of
the things I'm going to place an order for, to be brought on the
_Schiaparelli_, will be a set of primers in chemistry and physics, of
the sort intended for a bright child of ten or twelve. It seems that a
Martiologist has to learn a lot of things the Hittites and the Assyrians
never heard about."
Tony Lattimer, coming in, caught the last part of the explanation. He
looked quickly at the walls and, having found out just what had
happened, advanced and caught Martha by the hand.
"You really did it, Martha! You found your bilingual! I never believed
that it would be possible; let me congratulate you!"
He probably expected that to erase all the jibes and sneers of the past.
If he did, he could have it that way. His friendship would mean as
little to her as his derision--except that his friends had to watch
their backs and his knife. But he was going home on the _Cyrano_, to be
a big shot. Or had this changed his mind for him again?
"This is something we can show the world, to justify any expenditure of
time and money on Martian archaeological work. When I get back to Terra,
I'll see that you're given full credit for this achievement--"
On Terra, her back and his knife would be out of her watchfulness.
"We won't need to wait that long," Hubert Penrose told him dryly. "I'm
sending off an official report, tomorrow; you can be sure Dr. Dane will
be given full credit, not only for this but for her previous work,
which made it possible to exploit this discovery."
"And you might add, work done in spite of the doubts and discouragements
of her colleagues," Selim von Ohlmhorst said. "To which I am ashamed to
have to confess my own share."
"You said we had to find a bilingual," she said. "You were right, too."
"This is better than a bilingual, Martha," Hubert Penrose said.
"Physical science expresses universal facts; necessarily it is a
universal language. Heretofore archaeologists have dealt only with
pre-scientific cultures."
THE END
[Transcriber's Note: The following errors in the original have been
corrected in this version.
Page 11: fixitive to fixative
crushed. to crushed."
Page 13: photostated to photostatted
Page 21: jeapordizing to jeopardizing
Page 22: ricochetted to ricocheted
Page 26: aquaducts to aqueducts
Page 27: testtube to test tube
Page 28: evaportation to evaporation
Page 33: aquaducts to aqueducts
Page 35: And you've never to "And you've never
Page 36: Finchly to Finchley
Page 37: eights to eighths
Page 39: Egyptiology to Egyptology
Page 42: There's an uncorrected error here: the third element is
"Sarfalddavas" above but "tirfalddavas" below. This wasn't changed in
later versions of the text, so it's not clear which is correct. The
capitalized one would be consistent with the other names, and the "Sar-"
implies a relationship with the first element, which _is_ in the same
group. Or maybe the character misspoke, in her excitement?
Page 45: big-shot to big shot
Page 46: archeologists to archaeologists
]