amined material, taking off the top
sheet. It was a photostat of what looked like the title page and
contents of some sort of a periodical. She remembered it; she had found
it herself, two days before, in a closet in the basement of the building
she had just finished examining.

She sat for a moment, looking at it. It was readable, in the sense that
she had set up a purely arbitrary but consistently pronounceable system
of phonetic values for the letters. The long vertical symbols were
vowels. There were only ten of them; not too many, allowing separate
characters for long and short sounds. There were twenty of the short
horizontal letters, which meant that sounds like -ng or -ch or -sh were
single letters. The odds were millions to one against her system being
anything like the original sound of the language, but she had listed
several thousand Martian words, and she could pronounce all of them.

And that was as far as it went. She could pronounce between three and
four thousand Martian words, and she couldn't assign a meaning to one of
them. Selim von Ohlmhorst believed that she never would. So did Tony
Lattimer, and he was a great deal less reticent about saying so. So, she
was sure, did Sachiko Koremitsu. There were times, now and then, when
she began to be afraid that they were right.

The letters on the page in front of her began squirming and dancing,
slender vowels with fat little consonants. They did that, now, every
night in her dreams. And there were other dreams, in which she read them
as easily as English; waking, she would try desperately and vainly to
remember. She blinked, and looked away from the photostatted page; when
she looked back, the letters were behaving themselves again. There were
three words at the top of the page, over-and-underlined, which seemed to
be the Martian method of capitalization. _Mastharnorvod Tadavas
Sornhulva_. She pronounced them mentally, leafing through her notebooks
to see if she had encountered them before, and in what contexts. All
three were listed. In addition, _masthar_ was a fairly common word, and
so was _norvod_, and so was _nor_, but _-vod_ was a suffix and nothing
but a suffix. _Davas_, was a word, too, and _ta-_ was a common prefix;
_sorn_ and _hulva_ were both common words. This language, she had long
ago decided, must be something like German; when the Martians had needed
a new word, they had just pasted a couple of existing words together. It
would probably