PAGE 17
Omnilingual
by
“You didn’t expect them to be waiting out front, with a red carpet and a big banner, Welcome Terrans, did you, Tony?” Gloria Standish asked.
“No, of course not; they’ve all been dead for fifty thousand years. But if they were the last of the Martians, why haven’t we found their bones, at least? Who buried them, after they were dead?” He looked at the glass, a bubble-thin goblet, found, with hundreds of others like it, in a closet above, as though debating with himself whether to have another drink. Then he voted in the affirmative and reached for the cocktail pitcher. “And every door on the old ground level is either barred or barricaded from the inside. How did they get out? And why did they leave?”
* * * * *
The next day, at lunch, Sachiko Koremitsu had the answer to the second question. Four or five electrical engineers had come down by rocket from the ship, and she had been spending the morning with them, in oxy-masks, at the top of the building.
“Tony, I thought you said those generators were in good shape,” she began, catching sight of Lattimer. “They aren’t. They’re in the most unholy mess I ever saw. What happened, up there, was that the supports of the wind-rotor gave way, and weight snapped the main shaft, and smashed everything under it.”
“Well, after fifty thousand years, you can expect something like that,” Lattimer retorted. “When an archaeologist says something’s in good shape, he doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll start as soon as you shove a switch in.”
“You didn’t notice that it happened when the power was on, did you,” one of the engineers asked, nettled at Lattimer’s tone. “Well, it was. Everything’s burned out or shorted or fused together; I saw one busbar eight inches across melted clean in two. It’s a pity we didn’t find things in good shape, even archaeologically speaking. I saw a lot of interesting things, things in advance of what we’re using now. But it’ll take a couple of years to get everything sorted out and figure what it looked like originally.”
“Did it look as though anybody’d made any attempt to fix it?” Martha asked.
Sachiko shook her head. “They must have taken one look at it and given up. I don’t believe there would have been any possible way to repair anything.”
“Well, that explains why they left. They needed electricity for lighting, and heating, and all their industrial equipment was electrical. They had a good life, here, with power; without it, this place wouldn’t have been habitable.”
“Then why did they barricade everything from the inside, and how did they get out?” Lattimer wanted to know.
“To keep other people from breaking in and looting. Last man out probably barred the last door and slid down a rope from upstairs,” von Ohlmhorst suggested. “This Houdini-trick doesn’t worry me too much. We’ll find out eventually.”
“Yes, about the time Martha starts reading Martian,” Lattimer scoffed.
“That may be just when we’ll find out,” von Ohlmhorst replied seriously. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they left something in writing when they evacuated this place.”
“Are you really beginning to treat this pipe dream of hers as a serious possibility, Selim?” Lattimer demanded. “I know, it would be a wonderful thing, but wonderful things don’t happen just because they’re wonderful. Only because they’re possible, and this isn’t. Let me quote that distinguished Hittitologist, Johannes Friedrich: ‘Nothing can be translated out of nothing.’ Or that later but not less distinguished Hittitologist, Selim von Ohlmhorst: ‘Where are you going to get your bilingual?'”
“Friedrich lived to see the Hittite language deciphered and read,” von Ohlmhorst reminded him.
“Yes, when they found Hittite-Assyrian bilinguals.” Lattimer measured a spoonful of coffee-powder into his cup and added hot water. “Martha, you ought to know, better than anybody, how little chance you have. You’ve been working for years in the Indus Valley; how many words of Harappa have you or anybody else ever been able to read?”