The Project Gutenberg EBook of Omnilingual, by H. Beam Piper

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Title: Omnilingual

Author: H. Beam Piper

Illustrator: Freas

Release Date: October 2, 2006 [EBook #19445]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OMNILINGUAL ***

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from "Astounding Science Fiction," February,
1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.

[Illustration]

OMNILINGUAL

_To translate writings, you need a key to the code--and
if the last writer of Martian died forty thousand years
before the first writer of Earth was born ... how could
the Martian be translated...?_

BY H. BEAM PIPER

Illustrated by Freas

* * * * *

[Illustration]

Martha Dane paused, looking up at the purple-tinged copper sky. The wind
had shifted since noon, while she had been inside, and the dust storm
that was sweeping the high deserts to the east was now blowing out over
Syrtis. The sun, magnified by the haze, was a gorgeous magenta ball, as
large as the sun of Terra, at which she could look directly. Tonight,
some of that dust would come sifting down from the upper atmosphere to
add another film to what had been burying the city for the last fifty
thousand years.

The red loess lay over everything, covering the streets and the open
spaces of park and plaza, hiding the small houses that had been crushed
and pressed flat under it and the rubble that had come down from the
tall buildings when roofs had caved in and walls had toppled outward.
Here, where she stood, the ancient streets were a hundred to a hundred
and fifty feet below the surface; the breach they had made in the wall
of the building behind her had opened into the sixth story. She could
look down on the cluster of prefabricated huts and sheds, on the
brush-grown flat that had been the waterfront when this place had been a
seaport on the ocean that was now Syrtis Depression;