FullReads

“That gives you three words, Martha!” Sachiko jubilated. “You did it.”

“Let’s don’t go too fast,” Lattimer said, for once not derisively. “I’ll admit that darfhulva is the Martian word for history as a subject of study; I’ll admit that hulva is the general word and darf modifies it and tells us which subject is meant. But as for assigning specific meanings, we can’t do that because we don’t know just how the Martians thought, scientifically or otherwise.”

He stopped short, startled by the blue-white light that blazed as Sid Chamberlain’s Kliegettes went on. When the whirring of the camera stopped, it was Chamberlain who was speaking:

“This is the biggest thing yet; the whole history of Mars, stone age to the end, all on four walls. I’m taking this with the fast shutter, but we’ll telecast it in slow motion, from the beginning to the end. Tony, I want you to do the voice for it–running commentary, interpretation of each scene as it’s shown. Would you do that?”

Would he do that! Martha thought. If he had a tail, he’d be wagging it at the very thought.

“Well, there ought to be more murals on the other floors,” she said. “Who wants to come downstairs with us?”

Sachiko did; immediately. Ivan Fitzgerald volunteered. Sid decided to go upstairs with Tony Lattimer, and Gloria Standish decided to go upstairs, too. Most of the party would remain on the seventh floor, to help Selim von Ohlmhorst get it finished. After poking tentatively at the escalator with the spike of her ice axe, Martha led the way downward.

* * * * *

The sixth floor was Darfhulva, too; military and technological history, from the character of the murals. They looked around the central hall, and went down to the fifth; it was like the floors above except that the big quadrangle was stacked with dusty furniture and boxes. Ivan Fitzgerald, who was carrying the floodlight, swung it slowly around. Here the murals were of heroic-sized Martians, so human in appearance as to seem members of her own race, each holding some object–a book, or a test tube, or some bit of scientific apparatus, and behind them were scenes of laboratories and factories, flame and smoke, lightning-flashes. The word at the top of each of the four walls was one with which she was already familiar–Sornhulva.

“Hey, Martha; there’s that word,” Ivan Fitzgerald exclaimed. “The one in the title of your magazine.” He looked at the paintings. “Chemistry, or physics.”

“Both.” Hubert Penrose considered. “I don’t think the Martians made any sharp distinction between them. See, the old fellow with the scraggly whiskers must be the inventor of the spectroscope; he has one in his hands, and he has a rainbow behind him. And the woman in the blue smock, beside him, worked in organic chemistry; see the diagrams of long-chain molecules behind her. What word would convey the idea of chemistry and physics taken as one subject?”

“Sornhulva,” Sachiko suggested. “If hulva’s something like science, “sorn” must mean matter, or substance, or physical object. You were right, all along, Martha. A civilization like this would certainly leave something like this, that would be self-explanatory.”

“This’ll wipe a little more of that superior grin off Tony Lattimer’s face,” Fitzgerald was saying, as they went down the motionless escalator to the floor below. “Tony wants to be a big shot. When you want to be a big shot, you can’t bear the possibility of anybody else being a bigger big shot, and whoever makes a start on reading this language will be the biggest big shot archaeology ever saw.”

That was true. She hadn’t thought of it, in that way, before, and now she tried not to think about it. She didn’t want to be a big shot. She wanted to be able to read the Martian language, and find things out about the Martians.