Omnilingual | Page 5

he continued.
"It had a meaning fifty thousand years ago, when it was written, but it has none at all
now."
She shook her head. "Meaning isn't something that evaporates with time," she argued. "It
has just as much meaning now as it ever had. We just haven't learned how to decipher it."
"That seems like a pretty pointless distinction," Selim von Ohlmhorst joined the
conversation. "There no longer exists a means of deciphering it."

"We'll find one." She was speaking, she realized, more in self-encouragement than in
controversy.
"How? From pictures and captions? We've found captioned pictures, and what have they
given us? A caption is intended to explain the picture, not the picture to explain the
caption. Suppose some alien to our culture found a picture of a man with a white beard
and mustache sawing a billet from a log. He would think the caption meant, 'Man Sawing
Wood.' How would he know that it was really 'Wilhelm II in Exile at Doorn?'"
Sachiko had taken off her loup and was lighting a cigarette.
"I can think of pictures intended to explain their captions," she said. "These picture
language-books, the sort we use in the Service--little line drawings, with a word or phrase
under them."
"Well, of course, if we found something like that," von Ohlmhorst began.
* * * * *
"Michael Ventris found something like that, back in the Fifties," Hubert Penrose's voice
broke in from directly behind her.
She turned her head. The colonel was standing by the archaeologists' table; Captain Field
and the airdyne pilot had gone out.
"He found a lot of Greek inventories of military stores," Penrose continued. "They were
in Cretan Linear B script, and at the head of each list was a little picture, a sword or a
helmet or a cooking tripod or a chariot wheel. That's what gave him the key to the script."
"Colonel's getting to be quite an archaeologist," Fitzgerald commented. "We're all
learning each others' specialties, on this expedition."
"I heard about that long before this expedition was even contemplated." Penrose was
tapping a cigarette on his gold case. "I heard about that back before the Thirty Days' War,
at Intelligence School, when I was a lieutenant. As a feat of cryptanalysis, not an
archaeological discovery."
"Yes, cryptanalysis," von Ohlmhorst pounced. "The reading of a known language in an
unknown form of writing. Ventris' lists were in the known language, Greek. Neither he
nor anybody else ever read a word of the Cretan language until the finding of the
Greek-Cretan bilingual in 1963, because only with a bilingual text, one language already
known, can an unknown ancient language be learned. And what hope, I ask you, have we
of finding anything like that here? Martha, you've been working on these Martian texts
ever since we landed here--for the last six months. Tell me, have you found a single word
to which you can positively assign a meaning?"
"Yes, I think I have one." She was trying hard not to sound too exultant. "Doma. It's the
name of one of the months of the Martian calendar."

"Where did you find that?" von Ohlmhorst asked. "And how did you establish--?"
"Here." She picked up the photostat and handed it along the table to him. "I'd call this the
title page of a magazine."
He was silent for a moment, looking at it. "Yes. I would say so, too. Have you any of the
rest of it?"
"I'm working on the first page of the first article, listed there. Wait till I see; yes, here's all
I found, together, here." She told him where she had gotten it. "I just gathered it up, at the
time, and gave it to Geoffrey and Rosita to photostat; this is the first I've really examined
it."
The old man got to his feet, brushing tobacco ashes from the front of his jacket, and came
to where she was sitting, laying the title page on the table and leafing quickly through the
stack of photostats.
[Illustration]
"Yes, and here is the second article, on page eight, and here's the next one." He finished
the pile of photostats. "A couple of pages missing at the end of the last article. This is
remarkable; surprising that a thing like a magazine would have survived so long."
"Well, this silicone stuff the Martians used for paper is pretty durable," Hubert Penrose
said. "There doesn't seem to have been any water or any other fluid in it originally, so it
wouldn't dry out with time."
"Oh, it's not remarkable that the material would have survived. We've found a good many
books and papers in excellent condition. But only a really vital culture, an organized
culture, will publish magazines, and this civilization had been dying for hundreds of