Omnilingual | Page 4

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,"