Omnilingual | Page 2

Penrose, the Space Force CO, and Captain
Field, the intelligence officer, listening to the report of one of the airdyne pilots, returned
from his afternoon survey flight. A couple of girl lieutenants from Signals, going over the
script of the evening telecast, to be transmitted to the Cyrano, on orbit five thousand
miles off planet and relayed from thence to Terra via Lunar. Sid Chamberlain, the
Trans-Space News Service man, was with them. Like Selim and herself, he was a civilian;
he was advertising the fact with a white shirt and a sleeveless blue sweater. And Major
Lindemann, the engineer officer, and one of his assistants, arguing over some plans on a
drafting board. She hoped, drawing a pint of hot water to wash her hands and sponge off
her face, that they were doing something about the pipeline.
She started to carry the notebooks and sketchbooks over to where Selim von Ohlmhorst
was sitting, and then, as she always did, she turned aside and stopped to watch Sachiko.
The Japanese girl was restoring what had been a book, fifty thousand years ago; her eyes
were masked by a binocular loup, the black headband invisible against her glossy black
hair, and she was picking delicately at the crumbled page with a hair-fine wire set in a
handle of copper tubing. Finally, loosening a particle as tiny as a snowflake, she grasped
it with tweezers, placed it on the sheet of transparent plastic on which she was
reconstructing the page, and set it with a mist of fixative from a little spraygun. It was a
sheer joy to watch her; every movement was as graceful and precise as though done to
music after being rehearsed a hundred times.
"Hello, Martha. It isn't cocktail-time yet, is it?" The girl at the table spoke without raising
her head, almost without moving her lips, as though she were afraid that the slightest
breath would disturb the flaky stuff in front of her.
"No, it's only fifteen-thirty. I finished my work, over there. I didn't find any more books,
if that's good news for you."
Sachiko took off the loup and leaned back in her chair, her palms cupped over her eyes.
"No, I like doing this. I call it micro-jigsaw puzzles. This book, here, really is a mess.
Selim found it lying open, with some heavy stuff on top of it; the pages were simply
crushed." She hesitated briefly. "If only it would mean something, after I did it."
There could be a faintly critical overtone to that. As she replied, Martha realized that she
was being defensive.
"It will, some day. Look how long it took to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, even after they
had the Rosetta Stone."

Sachiko smiled. "Yes. I know. But they did have the Rosetta Stone."
"And we don't. There is no Rosetta Stone, not anywhere on Mars. A whole race, a whole
species, died while the first Crò-Magnon cave-artist was daubing pictures of reindeer and
bison, and across fifty thousand years and fifty million miles there was no bridge of
understanding.
"We'll find one. There must be something, somewhere, that will give us the meaning of a
few words, and we'll use them to pry meaning out of more words, and so on. We may not
live to learn this language, but we'll make a start, and some day somebody will."
Sachiko took her hands from her eyes, being careful not to look toward the unshaded
light, and smiled again. This time Martha was sure that it was not the Japanese smile of
politeness, but the universally human smile of friendship.
"I hope so, Martha: really I do. It would be wonderful for you to be the first to do it, and
it would be wonderful for all of us to be able to read what these people wrote. It would
really bring this dead city to life again." The smile faded slowly. "But it seems so
hopeless."
"You haven't found any more pictures?"
Sachiko shook her head. Not that it would have meant much if she had. They had found
hundreds of pictures with captions; they had never been able to establish a positive
relationship between any pictured object and any printed word. Neither of them said
anything more, and after a moment Sachiko replaced the loup and bent her head forward
over the book.
* * * * *
Selim von Ohlmhorst looked up from his notebook, taking his pipe out of his mouth.
"Everything finished, over there?" he asked, releasing a puff of smoke.
"Such as it was." She laid the notebooks and sketches on the table. "Captain Gicquel's
started airsealing the building from the fifth floor down, with an entrance on the sixth;
he'll start putting in oxygen generators as soon as that's done. I have