Part 6 (1/2)

She was halfway through the fifth floor, a week later, and was having midday lunch in the reading room on the first floor when Hubert Penrose came over and sat down beside her, asking her what she was doing. She told him.

”I wonder if you could find me a couple of men, for an hour or so,” she added. ”I'm stopped by a couple of jammed doors at the central hall.

Lecture room and library, if the layout of that floor's anything like the ones below it.”

”Yes. I'm a pretty fair door-buster, myself.” He looked around the room.

”There's Jeff Miles; he isn't doing much of anything. And we'll put Sid Chamberlain to work, for a change, too. The four of us ought to get your doors open.” He called to Chamberlain, who was carrying his tray over to the dish washer. ”Oh, Sid; you doing anything for the next hour or so?”

”I was going up to the fourth floor, to see what Tony's doing.”

”Forget it. Tony's bagged his season limit of Martians. I'm going to help Martha bust in a couple of doors; we'll probably find a whole cemetery full of Martians.”

Chamberlain shrugged. ”Why not. A jammed door can have anything back of it, and I know what Tony's doing--just routine stuff.”

Jeff Miles, the s.p.a.ce Force captain, came over, accompanied by one of the lab-crew from the s.h.i.+p who had come down on the rocket the day before.

”This ought to be up your alley, Mort,” he was saying to his companion.

”Chemistry and physics department. Want to come along?”

The lab man, Mort Tranter, was willing. Seeing the sights was what he'd come down from the s.h.i.+p for. She finished her coffee and cigarette, and they went out into the hall together, gathered equipment and rode the elevator to the fifth floor.

The lecture hall door was the nearest; they attacked it first. With proper equipment and help, it was no problem and in ten minutes they had it open wide enough to squeeze through with the floodlights. The room inside was quite empty, and, like most of the rooms behind closed doors, comparatively free from dust. The students, it appeared, had sat with their backs to the door, facing a low platform, but their seats and the lecturer's table and equipment had been removed. The two side walls bore inscriptions: on the right, a pattern of concentric circles which she recognized as a diagram of atomic structure, and on the left a complicated table of numbers and words, in two columns. Tranter was pointing at the diagram on the right.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

”They got as far as the Bohr atom, anyhow,” he said. ”Well, not quite.

They knew about electron sh.e.l.ls, but they have the nucleus pictured as a solid ma.s.s. No indication of proton-and-neutron structure. I'll bet, when you come to translate their scientific books, you'll find that they taught that the atom was the ultimate and indivisible particle. That explains why you people never found any evidence that the Martians used nuclear energy.”

”That's a uranium atom,” Captain Miles mentioned.

”It is?” Sid Chamberlain asked, excitedly. ”Then they did know about atomic energy. Just because we haven't found any pictures of A-bomb mushrooms doesn't mean--”

She turned to look at the other wall. Sid's signal reactions were setting away from him again; uranium meant nuclear power to him, and the two words were interchangeable. As she studied the arrangement of the numbers and words, she could hear Tranter saying:

”Nuts, Sid. We knew about uranium a long time before anybody found out what could be done with it. Uranium was discovered on Terra in 1789, by Klaproth.”

There was something familiar about the table on the left wall. She tried to remember what she had been taught in school about physics, and what she had picked up by accident afterward. The second column was a continuation of the first: there were forty-six items in each, each item numbered consecutively--

”Probably used uranium because it's the largest of the natural atoms,”

Penrose was saying. ”The fact that there's nothing beyond it there shows that they hadn't created any of the transuranics. A student could go to that thing and point out the outer electron of any of the ninety-two elements.”

Ninety-two! That was it; there were ninety-two items in the table on the left wall! Hydrogen was Number One, she knew; One, _Sarfaldsorn_. Helium was Two; that was _Tirfaldsorn_. She couldn't remember which element came next, but in Martian it was _Sarfalddavas_. _Sorn_ must mean matter, or substance, then. And _davas_; she was trying to think of what it could be. She turned quickly to the others, catching hold of Hubert Penrose's arm with one hand and waving her clipboard with the other.

”Look at this thing, over here,” she was clamoring excitedly. ”Tell me what you think it is. Could it be a table of the elements?”

They all turned to look. Mort Tranter stared at it for a moment.

”Could be. If I only knew what those squiggles meant--”