Short Fiction, Stanley G. Weinbaum [chromebook ebook reader .TXT] 📗

back the ones his people needed, or perhaps he let me take the ones he thought we’d understand most easily. I don’t know; the books are outside there in the rocket.

“Then he held that dim torch of his toward the walls, and they were pictured. Lord, what pictures! They stretched up and up into the blackness of the roof, mysterious and gigantic. I couldn’t make much of the first wall; it seemed to be a portrayal of a great assembly of Tweel’s people. Perhaps it was meant to symbolize Society or Government. But the next wall was more obvious; it showed creatures at work on a colossal machine of some sort, and that would be Industry or Science. The back wall had corroded away in part, from what we could see, I suspected the scene was meant to portray Art, but it was on the fourth wall that we got a shock that nearly dazed us.

“I think the symbol was Exploration or Discovery. This wall was a little plainer, because the moving beam of daylight from that crack lit up the higher surface and Tweel’s torch illuminated the lower. We made out a giant seated figure, one of the beaked Martians like Tweel, but with every limb suggesting heaviness, weariness. The arms dropped inertly on the chair, the thin neck bent and the beak rested on the body, as if the creature could scarcely bear its own weight. And before it was a queer kneeling figure, and at sight of it, Leroy and I almost reeled against each other. It was, apparently, a man!”

“A man!” bellowed Harrison. “A man you say?”

“I said apparently,” retorted Jarvis. “The artist had exaggerated the nose almost to the length of Tweel’s beak, but the figure had black shoulder-length hair, and instead of the Martian four, there were five fingers on its outstretched hand! It was kneeling as if in worship of the Martian, and on the ground was what looked like a pottery bowl full of some food as an offering. Well! Leroy and I thought we’d gone screwy!”

“And Putz and I think so, too!” roared the captain.

“Maybe we all have,” replied Jarvis, with a faint grin at the pale face of the little Frenchman, who returned it in silence. “Anyway,” he continued, “Tweel was squeaking and pointing at the figure, and saying ‘Tick! Tick!’ so he recognized the resemblance⁠—and never mind any cracks about my nose!” he warned the captain. “It was Leroy who made the important comment; he looked at the Martian and said ‘Thoth! The god Thoth!’ ”

“Oui!” confirmed the biologist. “Comme l’Egypte!”

“Yeah,” said Jarvis. “Like the Egyptian ibis-headed god⁠—the one with the beak. Well, no sooner did Tweel hear the name Thoth than he set up a clamor of twittering and squeaking. He pointed at himself and said ‘Thoth! Thoth!’ and then waved his arm all around and repeated it. Of course he often did queer things, but we both thought we understood what he meant. He was trying to tell us that his race called themselves Thoth. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

“I see, all right,” said Harrison. “You think the Martians paid a visit to the earth, and the Egyptians remembered it in their mythology. Well, you’re off, then; there wasn’t any Egyptian civilization fifteen thousand years ago.”

“Wrong!” grinned Jarvis. “It’s too bad we haven’t an archeologist with us, but Leroy tells me that there was a stone-age culture in Egypt then, the pre-dynastic civilization.”

“Well, even so, what of it?”

“Plenty! Everything in that picture proves my point. The attitude of the Martian, heavy and weary⁠—that’s the unnatural strain of terrestrial gravitation. The name Thoth; Leroy tells me Thoth was the Egyptian god of philosophy and the inventor of writing! Get that? They must have picked up the idea from watching the Martian take notes. It’s too much for coincidence that Thoth should be beaked and ibis-headed, and that the beaked Martians call themselves Thoth.”

“Well, I’ll be hanged! But what about the nose on the Egyptian? Do you mean to tell me that stone-age Egyptians had longer noses than ordinary men?”

“Of course not! It’s just that the Martians very naturally cast their paintings in Martianized form. Don’t human beings tend to relate everything to themselves? That’s why dugongs and manatees started the mermaid myths⁠—sailors thought they saw human features on the beasts. So the Martian artist, drawing either from descriptions or imperfect photographs, naturally exaggerated the size of the human nose to a degree that looked normal to him. Or anyway, that’s my theory.”

“Well, it’ll do as a theory,” grunted Harrison. “What I want to hear is why you two got back here looking like a couple of year-before-last bird’s nests.”

Jarvis shuddered again, and cast another glance at Leroy. The little biologist was recovering some of his accustomed poise, but he returned the glance with an echo of the chemist’s shudder.

“We’ll get to that,” resumed the latter. “Meanwhile I’ll stick to Tweel and his people. We spent the better part of three days with them, as you know. I can’t give every detail, but I’ll summarize the important facts and give our conclusions, which may not be worth an inflated franc. It’s hard to judge this dried-up world by earthly standards.

“We took pictures of everything possible; I even tried to photograph that gigantic mural in the library, but unless Tweel’s lamp was unusually rich in actinic rays, I don’t suppose it’ll show. And that’s a pity, since it’s undoubtedly the most interesting object we’ve found on Mars, at least from a human viewpoint.

“Tweel was a very courteous host. He took us to all the points of interest⁠—even the new waterworks.”

Putz’s eyes brightened at the word. “Vater-vorks?” he echoed. “For vot?”

“For the canal, naturally. They have to build up a head of water to drive it through; that’s obvious.” He looked at the captain. “You told me yourself that to drive water from the polar caps of Mars to the equator was equivalent to forcing it