"Here it is—just a round circle, with three dots at the side."
"Fine, Sister, here's hoping the dots mean eggs and that you get one of them."
"Pig!"
There were no eggs, but the little round cakes, appearing a moment later, proved delicious. A warm liquid in the crystal cups was almost a substitute for coffee. In fact, it proved much more stimulating.
After breakfast, John boldly pressed the visi-screen control. This time, instead of one old man, they faced a group of them around a green table, covered with lexicons, other books, and charts.
They recognized the spokesman who stepped forward into a close up perspective and began the conversation. "I hope you will forgive our seeming—" he paused. "Aloofness," supplied one of the other men, after hastily examining a lexicon. "That's right, our aloofness, but we are products of an artificial world. Your primitive contagion would be dangerous for us.
"I am also sorry," he went on, "that the conversation must be one direction until you learn more of our language, and we can pronounce more finely and hear. We have had difficulty even in assembling visual information about you. There was a collection of Earth photographs which we have magnified so that we could read your street signs. And the first expedition left a few scraps of paper. We had never considered it worth learning your way of speech before."
He paused, as if this part of the address had been memorized. Then he continued slowly, with hesitations and stumbling pronunciation. "We are trying to vocalize your words from those we have heard you speak—but our ears are poor—I mean inadequate." The other old men rustled charts and books and nodded at his correction. The address went on with more pauses and confirmations. Occasionally John had to write "repeat" on the wall chart. The Martians spoke with a strange sibilant hiss, and accents followed a different system, changing even common words enough to make it difficult to understand. In general, this was their explanation....
"Our scientists discovered your world several thousands years ago, but as it was a more primitive one, progressing slowly, they could not see any advantage in making contact. The one danger to us here, a lack of water, could not be remedied by travel to the Blue Planet. Instead, our wise ones devoted themselves to developing an underground civilization, free from the extremes of temperature on our planet. Atomic energy had given us all the heat and power we needed, and in a short time we were able to devote our energies to aesthetics, as soon as the physical necessities were satisfied."
"Each year the flooding polar caps supply us with natural vegetation along the water channels and in the marshes. These plants are harvested and chemically treated for efficiency of use. When the last moisture fails, the remnant of our people must migrate, but that will not be for several of our generations. It may surprise you to know that each of us is over two hundred years old, that is of your years. Our younger men spend fifty years in attaining an education, under very sheltered conditions. We do not wish to disturb them by curiosity about you—at least not for the present. Our women live a very specialized existence, as the birth rate is low, and it takes nearly all of their energy to protect young life and to keep our population from diminishing too rapidly."