All that the Martian language held in common with Earthian language was that both represented thought symbols. That was all; there was very little similarity in the way they went about doing that same thing.
Monk reached out and lifted the heavy metal cylinder from the desk before him. Carefully, almost reverentially, he flipped open the lock that released one end of the cylinder, drew out the heavy, lengthy scroll that had provided the key to the thoughts, the works, the ways of the ancient race of Mars.
He unrolled it slowly, gently, squinting at the faded characters, faint with a million years or more of being buried in the sands of Mars.
A dictionary once—a dictionary again, but in a different way.
Monk wondered what sort of a long-dead personality had penned that dictionary. Scholar, seeking no more than the ways of truth? Businessman, seeking to facilitate a better lingual understanding, therefore a better commercial understanding, between the race of Mars and the now decadent races of the Jovian moons? Statesmen, trying to bring about a good-neighbor policy?
The Martian, however, whoever he might have been, had not understood that Jovian language too well, for some of the words and idioms didn’t check with the Jovian language as Earthmen knew it. Or it might have been that the language itself had changed. Perhaps in that long-gone day when the scroll was written the moon men of Jupiter had not been decadent.
On that point, Monk knew, the Jovians themselves could throw little light. There were ruins, of course, and legends, but the legends were utterly crazy and the ruins held no traditional sentiment for the tribes of Europa or Ganymede. Unlike most peoples, they held no racial memories of a more glorious past, of a forgotten golden age.
It was a roundabout way, a long way, an awkward way to read the language of Mars, Monk reflected. Martian to Jovian to Earthian. But it was better than no way at all.
The clock on the manuscript cabinet chimed briefly, apologetically. Monk glanced at it and started in surprise. Midnight. He had not realized it was that late. Suddenly he knew that he was tired and hungry, needed a drink and smoke.
He rose and walked to a table, found a bottle and glass, poured himself a drink. From somewhere, far in another part of the vast building, came the ghostly sound of a watchman’s tread, making his rounds. The sand talked and hissed against the window.
Back at his desk, Monk sipped at his drink, staring at the metallic tube, thinking of the faint scrawlings on the scroll inside.
A Rosetta stone—the Rosetta stone of Mars. Brought in off the desert by a man who might just as easily have passed it by. Uncovered by shifting sand that in the next hour might just as well have covered it again for all eternity.
Monk lifted his glass to the weathered cylinder.
“To destiny,” he said, and drank before he realized how silly it sounded.
Or was it silly? Might there not really be such a thing as destiny? An actual force moving to offset the haphazard course of a vagrant universe? Sometimes it seemed so. Sometimes—
Monk emptied the glass, set it on the desk, dug into his pocket for cigarettes. His fingers closed on a small package and he drew it out wonderingly, brow wrinkled. Then, quickly, he remembered. It had been in his mail box that morning. He had meant to open it later, had forgotten it until now.
He examined it curiously. It bore no return address and his own was laboriously printed by hand. He ripped the fastening tapes with his fingernails, unwrapped the paper.
A jewel box! Monk snapped up the lid and stiffened in surprise.
In its bed of rich velvet lay the gleaming roundness of an Asteroid jewel. It glowed softly under the desk lamp, colors flowing and changing within its heart, almost as if the jewel itself might be in motion.
There was no card. Nothing to indicate who had sent the jewel or, more important, why it had been sent. Asteroid jewels, Monk knew, weren’t something to be just sent around to anyone for no reason at all. The stone before him, he realized, had a value that ran close to five figures.
Almost fearfully, he lifted the gem between thumb and forefinger, held it to the light and caught his breath in wonder as it blazed with soul-stirring beauty.
With a feeling that approached awe, he replaced it, sat quietly in his chair watching it.
Queer things, the Asteroid jewels, queer in more ways than one.
No one knew just what they were. No Asteroid jewel had ever been analyzed. Spectrographically, they were like nothing science had ever known. They could be broken down chemically, of course, but even then they were impossible of analysis. Something there to analyze, naturally, but with certain baffling characteristics no chemist had yet been able to tie down and catalogue.
Found nowhere else in the Solar System, they were the magic that drove men to lives of bitter privation in the Belt, searching among the debris of a dead planet for that tiny gleam in the jumbled rocks that would spell riches. Most of them, as could be expected, died without ever finding a single jewel; died in one of a vast variety of horrible, lonely ways a man can die among the Asteroids.
Monk found a cigarette and lighted it, listening to the pelting of the sand against the window. But there was a strange sound, too. Something that was not sand tapping on the panes, nor yet the shrill keening of the savage wind that moaned against the building. A faint whining that bore a pattern of melody, the sobbing of music—music that sneaked in and out of the wind blasts until one wondered if it was really there or was just imagination.
Monk sat stiffly, poised, cigarette drooping, ears straining.
It came again, the cry of strings, the breath of lilting cadence, until it was a thing apart from the wind and the patter of the sand.
A violin! Someone playing a violin inside the museum!
Monk leaped to his feet and suddenly the violin screamed in singing agony.
And even as that melodic scream ran full-voiced through the hall outside, a sharp bell of warning clanged inside Monk’s brain.
Acting on impulse, his hand shot down and snatched up the Asteroid jewel. Clutching it savagely, he hurled it viciously against the metallic side of the manuscript cabinet.
It flashed for a moment in the light as it exploded into tiny bits of glowing dust. And even as it splashed to shards, it changed—or tried to change. For just a moment it was not a jewel, but something else, a fairylike thing—but a crippled fairy. A fairy with humped back and crooked spine and other curious deformities.
Then there was no twisted fairy, but only jewel dust twinkling on the floor and the sound of running feet far down the corridor.
Monk did not try to give chase to the man outside. Instead, he stood as if frozen, listening to the wind and the sand dance on the window, staring at the sparkle on the floor.
He slowly closed and opened his right hand, trying to remember just how the jewel had felt at the instant he had clutched it. Almost as if it might have been alive, were struggling to get out of his clutches, fighting to attain some end, to carry out some destiny.
His eyes still were upon the floor.
“Now,” he said aloud, amazement in his words, “I wonder why I did that?”
Standing in front of Spencer Chambers’ desk, Harrison Kemp was assailed by doubt, found that in this moment he could not reconcile himself to the belief he had done the right thing. If he were wrong, he had deserted a post he should have kept. Even if he were right, what good could his action do?