uage-books, the sort we use in the Service--little
line drawings, with a word or phrase under them."

"Well, of course, if we found something like that," von Ohlmhorst began.

* * * * *

"Michael Ventris found something like that, back in the Fifties," Hubert
Penrose's voice broke in from directly behind her.

She turned her head. The colonel was standing by the archaeologists'
table; Captain Field and the airdyne pilot had gone out.

"He found a lot of Greek inventories of military stores," Penrose
continued. "They were in Cretan Linear B script, and at the head of each
list was a little picture, a sword or a helmet or a cooking tripod or a
chariot wheel. That's what gave him the key to the script."

"Colonel's getting to be quite an archaeologist," Fitzgerald commented.
"We're all learning each others' specialties, on this expedition."

"I heard about that long before this expedition was even contemplated."
Penrose was tapping a cigarette on his gold case. "I heard about that
back before the Thirty Days' War, at Intelligence School, when I was a
lieutenant. As a feat of cryptanalysis, not an archaeological
discovery."

"Yes, cryptanalysis," von Ohlmhorst pounced. "The reading of a known
language in an unknown form of writing. Ventris' lists were in the known
language, Greek. Neither he nor anybody else ever read a word of the
Cretan language until the finding of the Greek-Cretan bilingual in 1963,
because only with a bilingual text, one language already known, can an
unknown ancient language be learned. And what hope, I ask you, have we
of finding anything like that here? Martha, you've been working on these
Martian texts ever since we landed here--for the last six months. Tell
me, have you found a single word to which you can positively assign a
meaning?"

"Yes, I think I have one." She was trying hard not to sound too
exultant. "_Doma._ It's the name of one of the months of the Martian
calendar."

"Where did you find that?" von Ohlmhorst asked. "And how did you
establish--?"

"Here." She picked up the photostat and handed it along the table to
him. "I'd call this the title page of a magazine."

He was silent for a moment, looking at it. "Yes. I would say so, too.
Have you any of the rest of it?"

"I'm working on the first page of the first article, listed there. Wait
till I see; yes, here's all I found, together, here." She told him where
she had gotten it. "I just gath