"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 language-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."