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 said. “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.”
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.”
