by Various
"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 sa
id. "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
* * *
Contents
DANGER
by Fletcher Pratt and Irvin Lester
The wind rose in the night and by dawn the sky was streaming with torn and ragged masses of cloud moving from south to north like an army in flight. There was a shiver of cold in the air and the seas ran so high that effective work was impossible, so we gathered in Professor Hartford's cabin to help the old man brave out his discomfort by getting him to talk. The way in which he kept up his spirit, if not his body, through all the miseries of seasickness on that trip, was one of the finest exhibitions of courage I have seen anywhere.
As the senior member of the Museum's staff he was, in a sense, in charge of the expedition, though like the rest of us, he was inclined to let things run themselves while he pursued his specialty. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that the protozoa can be studied as well on a constantly moving steamer as on dry land; for the work kept his mind off his troubles. At all events, every day that was calm enough for him to be out of bed, found him poring over his microscope in search of hitherto undescribed forms in this remote corner of the Pacific.
On days such as this he lay in his bunk, and between uneasy heavings of the mal-de-mer that plagued him, lectured our crowd of assorted scientific experts on the importance of unicellular life. Very interesting lectures they must have been to the other chaps; even I was sometimes caught by the spell of the professor's keen and philosophical observation, and as a mere artist I always felt more or less a misfit among all those -ologies and -isms.
I remember this day in particular, partly because the evening brought us to our first view of Easter Island and partly because the conversation turned to those scientific generalizations; which are both easier to understand and more interesting to the non-scientific hearer. But even then, I probably would have recalled it only as one of a number of similar talks, had not after events given it a peculiar, almost a sinister significance.
Burgess, our entomologist, had been trying to draw the professor out by descanting on the rising tide of insect life. "Sooner or later," he declared, "we will have to fight for our lives with them. Science always plods along behind their attacks. They have taken the chestnut, the boll-weevil and corn-borer are taking two more of our economically important plants. Who knows but that nature is working in its slow way to send us after the dinosaurs?"
Slap, slap, went the waves against the cabin wall.
"Perhaps, perhaps," mused Professor Hertford, "though I incline to think that the insects will never drive man from the planet. Evolution allows a group only one opportunity--the insects had their chance to rule the world in the Carboniferous, and failed.
"... No," he went on, "there are many lines of evolution untried, but none of them lead through existing forms. When a more capable type than man appears, it will be in a wholly new form of animal life--perhaps even a direct evolution from the protozoa. So far as we know, evolution along that line has never taken place to any great extent. The division between the one-celled and many-celled animals is sharper than that between an insect and an elephant. Think of a one-celled animal, practically immortal as they are and possessed of intelligence. No matter what work we do, no matter what records we leave, the greater portion of human knowledge perishes with the minds that give it birth. Think what it would mean if one person could go on gathering knowledge through the centuries."
"But," objected Burgess, "a parmoecium hasn't any brain tissue. You can't have that without some nervous organization."
"But, my dear Burgess," said the professor, urbanely, "is brain tissue necessary to thought? You might as well say fins are necessary to swimming. Neither the polar bear nor the octopus have them, yet both can swim very well. Nature has a queer way of accomplishing similar results by all sorts of different means. Suppose thought is what Osborn hints it is--a matter of chemical reaction, and interaction--is there any need for brain tissue in which the thought must take place?"
"All true enough," said Burgess, "but you must admit that without proprioceptors there can be no sensation, and with a cortex--"
The conversation became so technical that I was perforce eliminated from it, and wandered down the iron stairway to watch the engines. For a time I sat there, vainly trying to put on paper the flicker of those bright moving parts--so beautifully ordered, so Roman in their efficient performance of their task, whatever else was happening. But it was no use; a job for a Nevinson, and I clambered back to the deck.
There I found the weather had moderated. The whole southwest was streaked with the orange presage of a fairer day and, right in the center of the illumination, grey and ominous, a huge cone rose steeply from the water.
"That's Puakatina," said Bronson the mate, pausing beside me. "There's an anchorage right beneath it, but we'll have to work round to the west of Cook's Bay to get shelter from the wind. I was here on a guano ship ten years ago. Damndest place you ever saw--no water, no fish, no nothing."
Morning found us at anchor in the bay and already scattering to our several pursuits. For me, Easter Island was a fairyland. Never, among primitive work, have I seen such sculpture. It far surpassed the best Egyptian work, for every one of those cyclopean heads was a portrait, and almost a perfect one. I cannot better express my feeling for them than by saying that now, as I am writing this account with the memory sharp in my mind, of she strange and terrible events that took place later, I must still turn aside to pay tribute to those statues.
After all they are not so far from my story. Indeed, it was the statues that gave me what should have been a clue--a queer idea that all was not quite as it should be on this island--an idea that I would dismiss as an afterview, were it not that I find on the margin of one of my sketches, made at the time, a note to the effect that something very curious must have happened on the island. Those stones were carved by nothing less than a race of conquerors, with stern high faces, utterly different from the easy-going Polynesians of today. What became of them?
The same impression, of some weird catastrophe, was confirmed by other members of the expedition. There were almost no fish, very little life for the botanists to chew on, and Hertford announced at one of our cabin conferences that the waters, as Agassiz had reported, were quite devoid of plankton. He pooh-poohed the idea of the subsidence of a large land put forth by De Salza, our geologist. "Subsidence," he said, "would leave the plankton and fish untouched. It is more as though some destructive organism had swept every trace of life from the locality. All the birds and the few fish are obviously recent immigrants, like the people."
Despite my entreaties for more time to make sketches, the scientists had done about all they could with this barren land in a week or so, and we hauled up anchor for Sala-y-Gomez, three hundred miles further east, taking a couple of the islanders with us. In spite of its atmosphere of ruin and gloom I was sorry to leave Easter Island, but there was the possibility that Sala-y-Gomez might contain some traces of the Easter script or carvings, and I felt it necessary to refuse Hertford's offer to leave me and stop on the way back.
Upon Sala-y-Gomez too, we came just at evening, marking it by the white line of foam along its low-lying shores as we felt our way slowly among the reefs, and here occurred another of those trivial incidents which are straws pointing in the direction of hidden things.
I was standing by the rail with Howard, the icthyological man, idly watching the wires of the dredge where they interrupted the slow curls of water turned back by our bow when there was a heavy muffled clang, and we saw the lines of the dredge tighten to tensity. Howard signalled for it to be drawn in, and together we watche
d the big scoop, eager to see what it had encountered. To our surprise it held only a little sea-weed.
"Now that's odd," said Howard, searching the sea-weed, with a small hand glass. "I could have sworn that dredge caught something heavy."
"It did," I answered, pointing. There was a long scratch of bright metal along one side.
"Corals possibly," he remarked. "Hey, Bronson, any reefs charted here?"
The mate strolled up. "Not on the charts," he said, "but you never can tell. These Chilean charts aren't very good, you know."
"M-m-m" murmured Howard, continuing his examination. "There ought to be fragments of coralline formation here, but there aren't. Wonder what is could have been? Almost as though we'd caught something and it got away."
The thought of Hertford's comment about a destructive organism slipped into my mind, to be dismissed as not worth mentioning. Rock, shark, almost anything would have made that mark on the dredge.
There were no specimens ready to be sketched in the morning, and I went ashore with the first boat to wander about the island with my drawing materials. It must have been nearly noon when I rounded a jutting outcrop of rock to see before me a little sandy cove, placid and unresponsive in the heat, without a sign of life. Far ahead, a dark blob of rock was the only mark on the perfect line of the beach. It was so suavé a scene that I sat down to make a sketch. After I had pencilled it in and was mixing the brown color for the cliffs, I noted that the rock seemed to have moved, but I attributed it to imagination and went on with my coloring. It must have been quite ten minutes when I looked up again. This time there could be no doubt--neither the outline nor the position of the rock were at all as I had recorded them.
In some excitement, I started to climb down the cliff toward this singular rock that changed place and form, but the distance was considerable, and while I was still a quarter of a mile away, it moved again, visibly this time, sliding down to the water's edge, where it disappeared beneath the gentle surge. The most peculiar thing about it was that there seemed to be no sensible method of progress; it flowed, like a huge, irregular drop of liquid.