"Nobody talked me into anything," von Ohlmhorst said roughly. "And as
for throwing away what I've accomplished in Hittitology, I don't know
what the devil you're talking about. Everything I know about the Hittite
Empire is published and available to anybody. Hittitology's like
Egyptology; it's stopped being research and archaeology and become
scholarship and history. And I'm not a scholar or a historian; I'm a
pick-and-shovel field archaeologist--a highly skilled and specialized
grave-robber and junk-picker--and there's more pick-and-shovel work on
this planet than I could do in a hundred lifetimes. This is something
new; I was a fool to think I could turn my back on it and go back to
scribbling footnotes about Hittite kings."
"You could have anything you wanted, in Hittitology. There are a dozen
universities that'd sooner have you than a winning football team. But
no! You have to be the top man in Martiology, too. You can't leave that
for anybody else--" Lattimer shoved his chair back and got to his feet,
leaving the table with an oath that was almost a sob of exasperation.
Maybe his feelings were too much for him. Maybe he realized, as Martha
did, what he had betrayed. She sat, avoiding the eyes of the others,
looking at the ceiling, as embarrassed as though Lattimer had flung
something dirty on the table in front of them. Tony Lattimer had,
desperately, wanted Selim to go home on the _Cyrano_. Martiology was a
new field; if Selim entered it, he would bring with him the reputation
he had already built in Hittitology, automatically stepping into the
leading role that Lattimer had coveted for himself. Ivan Fitzgerald's
words echoed back to her--when you want to be a big shot, you can't bear
the possibility of anybody else being a bigger big shot. His derision of
her own efforts became comprehensible, too. It wasn't that he was
convinced that she would never learn to read the Martian language. He
had been afraid that she would.
* * * * *
Ivan Fitzgerald finally isolated the germ that had caused the Finchley
girl's undiagnosed illness. Shortly afterward, the malady turned into a
mild fever, from which she recovered. Nobody else seemed to have caught
it. Fitzgerald was still trying to find out how the germ had been
transmitted.
They found a globe of Mars, made when the city had been a seaport. They
located the city, and learned that its name had been Kukan--or something
with a similar vowel-consonant ratio. Immediately, Sid Chamberlain and
Gloria Standish began giving their telecasts a Kukan dateline, and
Hubert Penrose used the name in his official reports. They also found a
Martian calendar; the year had been divided into ten more or less equal
months, and one of them had been Doma. Another month was Nor, and that
was a part of the name of the scientific journal Martha had found.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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