They entered the thirty-foot circular room and snapped on their torches. There was a bench that ran almost around the entire room. It was empty save for a few scraps of metal and a Martian book of several hundred metal pages.
"Nuts," said Barney, "we would have to find a thing like this but empty. That's our luck. What's the book, Jim?"
"Some sort of text, I'd say. Full of diagrams and what seems to be mathematics. Hard to tell, of course, but we've established the fact that mathematics is universal, though the characters can not possibly be."
"Any chance of deciphering it?" asked Barney.
"Let's get back in the flier and try. I'm in no particular hurry."
"Nor am I. I don't care whether we get to Lincoln Head tonight or the middle of next week."
"Now let's see that volume of diagrams," he said as soon as they were established in the flier.
Jim passed the book over, and Barney opened the book to the first page. "If we never find anything else," he said, "this will make us famous. I am now holding the first complete volume of Martian literature that anyone has ever seen. The darned thing is absolutely complete, from cover to cover!"
"That's a find," agreed Jim. "Now go ahead and transliterate it—you're the expert on Martian pictographs."