ered it up, at the time, and gave it to
Geoffrey and Rosita to photostat; this is the first I've really examined
it."

The old man got to his feet, brushing tobacco ashes from the front of
his jacket, and came to where she was sitting, laying the title page on
the table and leafing quickly through the stack of photostats.

[Illustration]

"Yes, and here is the second article, on page eight, and here's the next
one." He finished the pile of photostats. "A couple of pages missing at
the end of the last article. This is remarkable; surprising that a thing
like a magazine would have survived so long."

"Well, this silicone stuff the Martians used for paper is pretty
durable," Hubert Penrose said. "There doesn't seem to have been any
water or any other fluid in it originally, so it wouldn't dry out with
time."

"Oh, it's not remarkable that the material would have survived. We've
found a good many books and papers in excellent condition. But only a
really vital culture, an organized culture, will publish magazines, and
this civilization had been dying for hundreds of years before the end.
It might have been a thousand years before the time they died out
completely that such activities as publishing ended."

"Well, look where I found it; in a closet in a cellar. Tossed in there
and forgotten, and then ignored when they were stripping the building.
Things like that happen."

Penrose had picked up the title page and was looking at it.

"I don't think there's any doubt about this being a magazine, at all."
He looked again at the title, his lips moving silently. "_Mastharnorvod
Tadavas Sornhulva_. Wonder what it means. But you're right about the
date--_Doma_ seems to be the name of a month. Yes, you have a word, Dr.
Dane."

Sid Chamberlain, seeing that something unusual was going on, had come
over from the table at which he was working. After examining the title
page and some of the inside pages, he began whispering into the
stenophone he had taken from his belt.

"Don't try to blow this up to anything big, Sid," she cautioned. "All we
have is the name of a month, and Lord only knows how long it'll be till
we even find out which month it was."

"Well, it's a start, isn't it?" Penrose argued. "Grotefend only had the
word for 'king' when he started reading Persian cuneiform."

"But I don't have the word for month; just the name of a month.
Everybody knew the names of the Persian kings, long before Grotefend."

"Tha