Omnilingual | Page 3

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