ven the animals and
the dead Martians! Wait till Selim and Tony see this! Wait till Tony
sees it; I want to see his face! And when I get this on telecast, all
Terra's going to go nuts about it!" He turned to Captain Miles. "Jeff,
suppose you take a look at that other door, while I find somebody to
send to tell Selim and Tony. And Gloria; wait till she sees this--"

"Take it easy, Sid," Martha cautioned. "You'd better let me have a look
at your script, before you go too far overboard on the telecast. This is
just a beginning; it'll take years and years before we're able to read
any of those books downstairs."

"It'll go faster than you think, Martha," Hubert Penrose told her.
"We'll all work on it, and we'll teleprint material to Terra, and people
there will work on it. We'll send them everything we can ... everything
we work out, and copies of books, and copies of your word-lists--"

And there would be other tables--astronomical tables, tables in physics
and mechanics, for instance--in which words and numbers were equivalent.
The library stacks, below, would be full of them. Transliterate them
into Roman alphabet spellings and Arabic numerals, and somewhere,
somebody would spot each numerical significance, as Hubert Penrose and
Mort Tranter and she had done with the table of elements. And pick out
all the chemistry textbooks in the Library; new words would take on
meaning from contexts in which the names of elements appeared. She'd
have to start studying chemistry and physics, herself--

* * * * *

Sachiko Koremitsu peeped in through the door, then stepped inside.

"Is there anything I can do--?" she began. "What's happened? Something
important?"

"Important?" Sid Chamberlain exploded. "Look at that, Sachi! We're
reading it! Martha's found out how to read Martian!" He grabbed Captain
Miles by the arm. "Come on, Jeff; let's go. I want to call the others--"
He was still babbling as he hurried from the room.

Sachi looked at the inscription. "Is it true?" she asked, and then,
before Martha could more than begin to explain, flung her arms around
her. "Oh, it really is! You are reading it! I'm so happy!"

She had to start explaining again when Selim von Ohlmhorst entered. This
time, she was able to finish.

"But, Martha, can you be really sure? You know, by now, that learning to
read this language is as important to me as it is to you, but how can
you be so sure that those words real