[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1943.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Sargon of Akkad was holding court in all of his splendor in the
Mesopotamia area, which he thought to be the center of the Universe.
The stars to him were but holes in a black bowl which he called the
sky. They were beautiful then, as they are now, but he thought that
they were put there for his edification only; for was he not the ruler
of Akkadia?
After Sargon of Akkad, there would come sixty centuries of climbing
before men reached the stars and found not only that there had been men
upon them, but that a civilization on Mars had reached its peak four
thousand years before Christ and was now but a memory and a wealth of
pictographs that adorned the semipreserved Temples of Canalopsis.
And sixty centuries after, the men of Terra wondered about the
ideographs and solved them sufficiently to piece together the wonders
of the long-dead Martian Civilization.
Sargon of Akkad did not know that the stars that he beheld carried on
them wonders his mind would not, could not, accept.
Altas, the Martian, smiled tolerantly at his son. The young man boasted
on until Altas said: "So you have memorized the contents of my manual?
Good, Than, for I am growing old and I would be pleased to have my
son fill my shoes. Come into the workshop that I may pass upon your
proficiency."
Altas led Than to the laboratory that stood at the foot of the great
tower of steel; Altas removed from a cabinet a replacement element from
the great beam above their heads, and said: "Than, show me how to hook
this up!"
Than's eyes glowed. From other cabinets he took small auxiliary parts.
From hooks upon the wall, Than took lengths of wire. Working with a
brilliant deftness that was his heritage as a Martian, Than spent an
hour attaching the complicated circuits. After he was finished, Than
stepped back and said: "There--and believe it or not, this is the first
time you have permitted me to work with one of the beam elements."
"You have done well," said Altas with that same cryptic smile. "But now
we shall see. The main question is: Does it work?"
"Naturally," said Than in youthful pride. "Is it not hooked up exactly
as your manual says? It will work."
"We shall see," repeated Altas. "We shall see."
* * * * *
Barney Carroll and James Baler cut through the thin air of Mars in a
driver-wing flier at a terrific rate of speed. It was the only kind
of flier that would work on Mars with any degree of safety since it
depended upon the support of its drivers rather than the wing surface.
They were hitting it up at almost a thousand miles per hour on their
way from Canalopsis to Lincoln Head; their trip would take an hour and
a half.
As they passed over the red sand of Mars, endlessly it seemed, a glint
of metal caught Barney's eye, and he shouted.
"What's the matter, Barney?" asked Jim.
"Roll her over and run back a mile or so," said Barney. "I saw
something down there that didn't belong in this desert."
Jim snapped the plane around in a sharp loop that nearly took their
heads off, and they ran back along their course.
"Yop," called Barney, "there she is!"
"What?"
"See that glint of shiny metal? That doesn't belong in this mess of
erosion. Might be a crash."
"Hold tight," laughed Jim. "We're going down."
They did. Jim's piloting had all of the aspects of a daredevil racing
pilot's, and Barney was used to it. Jim snapped the nose of the little
flier down and they power-dived to within a few yards of the sand
before he set the plane on its tail and skidded flatwise to kill speed.
He leveled off, and the flier came screaming in for a perfect landing
not many feet from the glinting object.
"This is no crash," said Baler. "This looks like the remains of an
air-lane beacon of some sort."
"Does it? Not like any I've ever seen. It reminds me more of some of
the gadgets they find here and there--the remnants of the Ancients.
They used to build junk like this."
"Hook up the sand-blower," suggested Jim Baler. "We'll clear some of
this rubble away and see what she really looks like. Can't see much
more than what looks like a high-powered searchlight."
Barney hauled equipment out of the flier and hitched it to a small
motor in the plane. The blower created a small storm for an hour or so,
its blast directed by suit-clad Barney Carroll. Working with experience
gained in uncovering the remains of a dozen dead and buried cities,
Barney cleared the shifting sand from the remains of the tower.
The head was there, preserved by the dry sand. Thirty feet below the
platform, the slender tower was broken off. No delving could find the
lower portion.
"This is quite a find," said Jim. "Looks like some of the carvings
on the Temple of Science at Canalopsis--that little house on the top
of the spire with the three-foot runway around it; then this dingbat
perched on top of the roof. Never did figure out what it was for."
"We don't know whether the Martians' eyes responded as ours do,"
suggested Barney. "This might be a searchlight that puts out with
Martian visible spectrum. If they saw with infrared, they wouldn't
be using Terran fluorescent lighting. If they saw with long heat
frequencies, they wouldn't waste power with even a tungsten filament
light, but would have invented something that cooked its most energy
in the visible spectrum, just as we have in the last couple of hundred
years."
"That's just a guess, of course."
"Naturally," said Barney. "Here, I've got the door cracked. Let's be
the first people in this place for six thousand years Terran. Take it
easy, this floor is at an angle of thirty degrees."
"I won't slide. G'wan in. I'm your shadow."
* * * * *
They entered the thirty-foot circular room and snapped on their
torches. There was a bench that ran almost around the entire room. It
was empty save for a few scraps of metal and a Martian book of several
hundred metal pages.
"Nuts," said Barney, "we would have to find a thing like this but
empty. That's our luck. What's the book, Jim?"
"Some sort of text, I'd say. Full of diagrams and what seems to be
mathematics. Hard to tell, of course, but we've established the fact
that mathematics is universal, though the characters can not possibly
be."
"Any chance of deciphering it?" asked Barney.
"Let's get back in the flier and try. I'm in no particular hurry."
"Nor am I. I don't care whether we get to Lincoln Head tonight or the
middle of next week."
"Now let's see that volume of diagrams," he said as soon as they were
established in the flier.
Jim passed the book over, and Barney opened the book to the first page.
"If we never find anything else," he said, "this will make us famous.
I am now holding the first complete volume of Martian literature that
anyone has ever seen. The darned thing is absolutely complete, from
cover to cover!"
"That's a find," agreed Jim. "Now go ahead and transliterate it--you're
the expert on Martian pictographs."
For an hour, Barney scanned the pages of the volume. He made copious
notes on sheets of paper which he inserted between the metal leaves
of the book. At the end of that time, during which Jim Baler had been
inspecting the searchlight-thing on the top of the little house, he
called to his friend, and Jim entered the flier lugging the thing on
his shoulders.
"What'cha got?" he grinned. "I brought this along. Nothing else in that
shack, so we're complete except for the remnants of some very badly
corroded cable that ran from this thing to a flapping end down where
the tower was broken."
Barney smiled and blinked. It was strange to see this big man working
studiously over a book; Barney Carroll should have been leading a horde
of Venusian engineers through the Palanortis country instead of delving
into the artifacts of a dead civilization.
"I think that this thing is a sort of engineer's handbook," he said.
"In the front there is a section devoted to mathematical tables. You
know, a table of logs to the base twelve which is because the Martians
had six fingers on each hand. There is what seems to be a table of
definite integrals--at least if I were writing a handbook I'd place the
table of integrals at the last part of the math section. The geometry
and trig is absolutely recognizable because of the designs. So is the
solid geom and the analyt for the same reason. The next section seems
to be devoted to chemistry; the Martians used a hexagonal figure for
a benzene ring, too, and so that's established. From that we find the
key to the Periodic Chart of the Atoms which is run vertically instead
of horizontally, but still unique. These guys were sharp, though; they
seem to have hit upon the fact that isotopes are separate elements
though so close in grouping to one another that they exhibit the same
properties. Finding this will uncover a lot of mystery."
"Yeah," agreed Baler, "from a book of this kind we can decipher most
anything. The keying on a volume of physical constants is perfect and
almost infinite in number. What do they use for Pi?"
"Circle with a double dot inside."
"And Planck's Constant?"
"Haven't hit that one yet. But we will. But to get back to the meat of
this thing, the third section deals with something strange. It seems to
have a bearing on this gadget from the top of the tower. I'd say that
the volume was a technical volume on the construction, maintenance, and
repair of the tower and its functions--whatever they are."
Barney spread the volume out for Jim to see. "That dingbat is some sort
of electronic device. Or, perhaps subelectronic. Peel away that rusted
side and we'll look inside."
Jim peeled a six-inch section from the side of the big metal tube, and
they inspected the insides. Barney looked thoughtful for a minute and
then flipped the pages of the book until he came to a diagram.
"Sure," he said exultantly, "this is she. Look, Jim, they draw a
cathode like this, and the grids are made with a series of fine
parallel lines. Different, but more like the real grid than our symbol
of a zig-zag line. The plate is a round circle instead of a square, but
that's so clearly defined that it comes out automatically. Here's your
annular electrodes, and the ... call 'em deflection plates. I think we
can hook this do-boodle up as soon as we get to our place in Lincoln
Head."
"Let's go then. Not only would I like to see this thing work, but I'd
give anything to know what it's for!"
"You run the crate," said Barney, "and I'll try to decipher this mess
into voltages for the electrode-supply and so on. Then we'll be in
shape to go ahead and hook her up."
* * * * *
The trip to Lincoln Head took almost an hour. Barney and Jim landed in
their landing yards and took the book and the searchlight-thing inside.
They went to their laboratory, and called for sandwiches and tea. Jim's
sister brought in the food a little later and found them tinkering with
the big beam tube.
"What have you got this time?" she groaned.
"Name it and it's yours," laughed Barney.
"A sort of gadget that we found on the Red Desert."
"What does it do?" asked Christine Baler.
"Well," said Jim, "it's a sort of a kind of a dingbat that does things."
"Uh-huh," said Christine. "A dololly that plings the inghams."
"Right!"
"You're well met, you two. Have your fun. But for Pete's sake don't
forget to eat. Not that you will, I know you, but a girl has got
to make some sort of attempt at admonishment. I'm going to the
moom-picher. I'll see you when I return."
"I'd say stick around," said Barney. "But I don't think we'll have
anything to show you for hours and hours. We'll have something by the
time you return."
Christine left, and the men applied themselves to their problem. Barney
had done wonders in unraveling the unknown. Inductances, he found,
were spirals; resistance were dotted lines; capacitances were parallel
squares.
"What kind of stuff do we use for voltages?" asked Jim.
"That's a long, hard trail," laughed Barney. "Basing my calculations
on the fact that their standard voltage cell was the same as ours, we
apply the voltages as listed on my schematic here."
"Can you assume that their standard is the same as ours?"
"Better," said Barney. "The Terran Standard Cell--the well-known Weston
Cell--dishes out what we call 1.0183 volts at twenty degrees C. Since
the Martian description of their Standard Cell is essentially the same
as the Terran, they are using the same thing. Only they use sense and
say that a volt is the unit of a standard cell, period. Calculating
their figures on the numerical base of twelve is tricky, but I've done
it."
"You're doing fine. How do you assume their standard is the same?"
"Simple," said Barney in a cheerful tone. "Thank God for their habit of
drawing pictures. Here we have the well-known H tube. The electrodes
are signified by the symbols for the elements used. The Periodic Chart
in the first section came in handy here. But look, master mind, this
dinky should be evacuated, don't you think?"
"If it's electronic or subelectronic, it should be. We can solder up
this breach here and apply the hyvac pump. Rig us up a power supply
whilst I repair the blowout."
"Where's the BFO?"
"What do you want with that?" asked Jim.
"The second anode takes about two hundred volts worth of eighty-four
cycles," explained Barney. "Has a sign that seems to signify 'In
Phase,' but I'll be darned if I know with what. Y'know, Jim, this
dingbat looks an awful lot like one of the drivers we use in our
spaceships and driver-wing fliers."
"Yeah," drawled Jim. "About the same recognition as the difference
between Edison's first electric light and a twelve-element, electron
multiplier, power output tube. Similarity: They both have cathodes."
"Edison didn't have a cathode--"
"Sure he did. Just because he didn't hang a plate inside of the bottle
doesn't stop the filament from being a cathode."