Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

BLIND MAN’S BUFF deserted him, claiming that since they had not yet actually reached Earth they were still part of his expedition. So now he has scores of more parties out. Umps says he has taken in hundreds of square miles of territory on the other side of ours. They’re even talking of sending for more gangs to start clearing a landing field.” “That’s bad,” growled Travis. He wouldn’t have grudged it to any other man, but with Driscoll it was different. Calling in extra help was hitting below the belt. “Did he mention finding any cities?” “Nope, but he said that Driscoll looked pretty cocky. He’s probably playing it cagey like we are.” “Uh, huh,” grunted Travis. It wasn’t good news. There were plenty of smart men on Driscoll’s payroll, and there was no copy- right on unraveling antique mysteries. The summer solstice occurred two days later, but it took several days more to make sure, for the sun declined too imperceptibly to mike certain of it with his crude tools. Travis spent the time poring over the docu- ments unearthed in the sacerdotal library and ihe photostats of those dug up in Persia. The hieroglyphics were quite beyond him except for the numerals. They stopped him for awhile until he angrily noticed that he had persistently overlooked the fact that there were twelve characters employed and not the usual ten. “Of course,” he declared sourly,“ people with six fingers and toes would have a duodecimal based numerical system. I should have guessed it from their orna- ment, the shape of the pyramids, and all.” After that it did not take long to un- ravel the simpler computations left by the ancients, but in the absence of explanatory texts they remained incomprehensible operations in arithmetic. Hartley broke open another scroll and unwound it on their makeshift desk. “Say—” he shouted. “A map!” exclaimed Travis, jumping to him. Then his hopes sank. It was a map, but of what? There was no shorelines or rivers Or mountain ranges, nor was it another star map. It partook of the qualities of both. Sprinkled over it was a myriad of little black sunbursts, some smaller, some larger, and they were connected by a net- work of lines jagged as conventional light- ning streaks. Each of the tiny symbols bore a pair of hieroglyphic characters, evidently the name of the place or thing, but he 5 could not read them. Over all there was a light rectangular grid with numerals in fine script at their ends. Four of the horizontal lines were heavier than the others, and be- tween the middle pair and in the center of the map were two double sunbursts done in gold leaf—one just beneath the upper line, one just above the lower. They puzzled over the map for hours. Travis got out his code table of numerical values and ran in the translation of the figures. The vertical lines were marked with figures running up to three digits, the values being from zero to 999 on the duodecimal scale—just one short of the cube of the base. The horizontal lines had no number higher than 499 on the same scale. But all the values were consecutive, the horizontal series running from the top down, the verti- cal ones from right to left. The extreme upper and lower parts of the map were otherwise blank. “It is a dead ringer for a Mercator pro- jection,” insisted Hartley. “I know ... wait!” Travis came sud- denly out of his gloom into life, then laughed. “This shows what a fixed idea can do to you. We keep thinking in terms of three-hundred and sixty degrees to the circle. These people had a simpler system. They had one thousand seven hundred twenty-eight degrees to the full circle—the cube of twelve! Now it makes sense.” He snatched open a drawer and yanked out the photos they had taken inside the pyramid temple. One was the picture of the giant pylon above the main lower altar. He grabbed a pair of reading glasses and gave one to Hartley. “See if we can match those characters anywhere. They may stand for the temple or the town. My hunch is that it will be in the middle latitudes, so you take the upper half and I'll take the lower.” In a little while Hartley let out a yelp. He found a matching pair. And a relentless search for the next half hour showed there was not another..spot on the map with the same markings. ‘That indicated that each of the small sunbursts stood for a pyramid, and the ragged lines between were probably the connecting highways. What they had was an ecclesiastical map of Venus. There was much more to do before Travis was satisfied. He ran and dug out the measurements of the upper sacrificial chamber. He had all along suspected that comiclooks.c©