tched the pair of them with envious
admiration. Then she turned back to her own work, finishing the table of
contents.

The next page was the beginning of the first article listed; many of the
words were unfamiliar. She had the impression that this must be some
kind of scientific or technical journal; that could be because such
publications made up the bulk of her own periodical reading. She doubted
if it were fiction; the paragraphs had a solid, factual look.

At length, Ivan Fitzgerald gave a short, explosive grunt.

"Ha! Got it!"

She looked up. He had detached the page and was cementing another
plastic sheet onto it.

"Any pictures?" she asked.

"None on this side. Wait a moment." He turned the sheet. "None on this
side, either." He sprayed another sheet of plastic to sandwich the page,
then picked up his pipe and relighted it.

"I get fun out of this, and it's good practice for my hands, so don't
think I'm complaining," he said, "but, Martha, do you honestly think
anybody's ever going to get anything out of this?"

Sachiko held up a scrap of the silicone plastic the Martians had used
for paper with her tweezers. It was almost an inch square.

"Look; three whole words on this piece," she crowed. "Ivan, you took the
easy book."

Fitzgerald wasn't being sidetracked. "This stuff's absolutely
meaningless," he continued. "It had a meaning fifty thousand years ago,
when it was written, but it has none at all now."

She shook her head. "Meaning isn't something that evaporates with time,"
she argued. "It has just as much meaning now as it ever had. We just
haven't learned how to decipher it."

"That seems like a pretty pointless distinction," Selim von Ohlmhorst
joined the conversation. "There no longer exists a means of deciphering
it."

"We'll find one." She was speaking, she realized, more in
self-encouragement than in controversy.

"How? From pictures and captions? We've found captioned pictures, and
what have they given us? A caption is intended to explain the picture,
not the picture to explain the caption. Suppose some alien to our
culture found a picture of a man with a white beard and mustache sawing
a billet from a log. He would think the caption meant, 'Man Sawing
Wood.' How would he know that it was really 'Wilhelm II in Exile at
Doorn?'"

Sachiko had taken off her loup and was lighting a cigarette.

"I can think of pictures intended to explain their captions," she said.
"These picture lang