“Well, grant that. And grant that it’s going to be impressive to rattle off the names of Martian notables whose statues we find, and that if we’re ever able to attribute any placenames, they’ll sound a lot better than this horse- doctors’ Latin the old astronomers splashed all over the map of Mars,” Lattimer said. “What I object to is her wasting time on this stuff, of which nobody will ever be able to read a word if she fiddles around with those lists till there’s another hundred feet of loess on this city, when there’s so much real work to be done and we’re as shorthanded as we are.”
That was the first time that had come out in just so many words. She was glad Lattimer had said it and not Selim von Ohlmhorst.
“What you mean,” she retorted, “is that it doesn’t have the publicity value that digging up statues has.”
For an instant, she could see that the shot had scored. Then Lattimer, with a side glance at Chamberlain, answered:
“What I mean is that you’re trying to find something that any archaeologist, yourself included, should know doesn’t exist. I don’t object to your gambling your professional reputation and making a laughing stock of yourself; what I object to is that the blunders of one archaeologist discredit the whole subject in the eyes of the public.”
That seemed to be what worried Lattimer most. She was framing a reply when the communication-outlet whistled shrilly, and then squawked: “Cocktail time! One hour to dinner; cocktails in the library, Hut Four!”
The library, which was also lounge, recreation room, and general gathering-place, was already crowded; most of the crowd was at the long table topped with sheets of glasslike plastic that had been wall panels out of one of the ruined buildings. She poured herself what passed, here, for a martini, and carried it over to where Selim von Ohlmhorst was sitting alone.
For a while, they talked about the building they had just finished exploring, then drifted into reminiscences of their work on Terra—von Ohlmhorst’s in Asia Minor, with the Hittite Empire, and hers in Pakistan, excavating the cities of the Harappa Civilization. They finished their drinks—the ingredients were plentiful; alcohol and flavoring extracts synthesized from Martian vegetation—and von Ohlmhorst took the two glasses to the table for refills.
“You know, Martha,” he said, when he returned, “Tony was right about one thing. You are gambling your professional standing and reputation. It’s against all archaeological experience that a language so completely dead as this one could be deciphered. There was a continuity between all the other ancient languages—by knowing Greek, Champollion learned to read Egyptian; by knowing Egyptian, Hittite was learned. That’s why you and your colleagues have never been able to translate the Harappa hieroglyphics; no such continuity exists there. If you insist that this utterly dead language can be read, your reputation will suffer for it.”
“I heard Colonel Penrose say, once, that an officer who’s afraid to risk his military reputation seldom makes much of a reputation. It’s the same with us. If we really want to find things out, we have to risk making mistakes. And I’m a lot more interested in finding things out than I am in my reputation.”
She glanced across the room, to where Tony Lattimer was sitting with Gloria Standish, talking earnestly, while Gloria sipped one of the counterfeit martinis and listened. Gloria was the leading contender for the title of Miss Mars, 1996, if you liked big bosomy blondes, but Tony would have been just as attentive to her if she’d looked like the Wicked Witch in “The Wizard of Oz.” because Gloria was the Pan-Federation Telecast System commentator with the expedition.
“I know you are,” the old Turco-German was saying. “That’s why, when they asked me to name another archaeologist for this expedition, I named you.”
He hadn’t named Tony Lattimer; Lattimer had been pushed onto the expedition by his university. There’d been a lot of high-level string-pulling to that; she wished she knew the whole story. She’d managed to keep clear of universities and university politics; all her digs had been sponsored by non-academic foundations or art museums.
“You have an excellent standing: much better than my own, at your age. That’s why it disturbs me to see you jeopardizing it by this insistence that the Martian language can be translated. I can’t, really, see how you can hope to succeed.”
She shrugged and drank some more of her cocktail, then lit another cigarette. It was getting tiresome to try to verbalize something she only felt.
“Neither do I, now, but I will. Maybe I’ll find something like the picture-books Sachiko was talking about. A child’s primer, maybe; surely they had things like that. And if I don’t. I’ll find something else. We’ve only been here six months. I can wait the rest of my life, if I have to, but I’ll do it sometime.”
“I can’t wait so long,” von Ohlmhorst said. “The rest of my life will only be a few years, and when the Schiaparelli orbits in, I’ll be going back to Terra on the Cyrano.”
“I wish you wouldn’t. This is a whole new world of archaeology. Literally.”
“Yes.” He finished the cocktail and looked at his pipe as though wondering whether to re-light it so soon before dinner, then put it in his pocket. “A whole new world—but I’ve grown old, and it isn’t for me. I’ve spent my life studying the Hittites. I can speak the Hittite language, though maybe King Muwatallis wouldn’t be able to understand my modern Turkish accent. But the things I’d have to learn here—chemistry, physics, engineering, how to run analytic tests on steel girders and beryllo-silver alloys and plastics and silicones. I’m more at home with a civilization that rode in chariots and fought with swords and was just learning how to work iron. Mars is for young people. This expedition is a cadre of leadership—not only the Space Force people, who’ll be the commanders of the main expedition, but us scientists, too. And I’m just an old cavalry general who can’t learn to command tanks and aircraft. You’ll have time to learn about Mars. I won’t.”
His reputation as the dean of Hittitologists was solid and secure, too, she added mentally. Then she felt ashamed of the thought. He wasn’t to be classed with Tony Lattimer.
“All I came for was to get the work started,” he was continuing. “The Federation Government felt that an old hand should do that. Well, it’s started, now; you and Tony and whoever come out on the Schiaparelli must carry it on. You said it, yourself; you have a whole new world. This is only one city, of the last Martian civilization. Behind this, you have the Late Upland Culture, and the Canal Builders, and all the civilizations and races and empires before them, clear back to the Martian Stone Age.” He hesitated for a moment. “You have no idea what all you have to learn, Martha. This isn’t the time to start specializing too narrowly.”
They all got out of the truck and stretched their legs and looked up the road to the tall building with the queer conical cap askew on its top. The four little figures that had been busy against its wall climbed into the jeep and started back slowly, the smallest of them, Sachiko Koremitsu, paying out an electric cable behind. When it pulled up beside the truck, they climbed out; Sachiko attached the free end of the cable to a nuclear-electric battery. At once, dirty gray smoke and orange dust puffed out from the wall of the building, and, a second later, the multiple explosion banged.
She and Tony Lattimer and Major Lindemann climbed onto the truck, leaving the jeep stand by the road. When they reached the building, a satisfyingly wide breach had been blown in the wall. Lattimer had placed his shots between two of the windows; they were both blown out along with the wall between, and lay unbroken on the ground. Martha remembered the first building they had entered. A Space Force officer had picked up a stone and thrown it at one of the windows, thinking that would be all they’d need to do. It had bounced back. He had drawn his pistol—they’d all carried guns, then, on the principle that what they didn’t know about Mars might easily hurt them—and fired four shots. The bullets had ricocheted, screaming thinly; there were four coppery smears of jacket-metal on the window, and a little surface spalling. Somebody tried a rifle; the 4000-f.s. bullet had cracked the glasslike pane without penetrating. An oxyacetylene torch had taken an hour to cut the window out; the lab crew, aboard the ship, were still trying to find out just what the stuff was.
Tony Lattimer had gone forward and was sweeping his flashlight back and forth, swearing petulantly, his voice harshened and amplified by his helmet-speaker.
“I thought I was blasting into a hallway; this lets us into a room. Careful; there’s about a two-foot drop to the floor, and a lot of rubble from the blast just inside.”
He stepped down through the breach; the others began dragging equipment out of the trucks—shovels and picks and crowbars and sledges, portable floodlights, cameras, sketching materials, an extension ladder, even Alpinists’ ropes and crampons and pickaxes. Hubert Penrose was shouldering something that looked like a surrealist machine gun but which was really a nuclear-electric jack-hammer. Martha selected one of the spike-shod mountaineer’s ice axes, with which she could dig or chop or poke or pry or help herself over rough footing.
