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"Wishing will make it so," Yaeger said, as he typed a command at his keyboard and the image of the interior walls of the chamber materialized again.
"To decipher an unknown alphabetic writing, the first trick is to separate the consonants from the vowels. Since I see no indication that they represent ideas or objects, I'm assuming that the symbols are alphabetic and they record sounds of words."
"What is the origin of the first alphabet?" asked Yaeger.
"Hard evidence is scarce, but most epigraphists believe it was invented in ancient Canaan and Phoenicia somewhere between 1700 and 1500 B.C., and is labeled as North Semitic. Leading scholars disagree, of course. But they do tend to agree that early Mediterranean cultures developed the awakenings of an alphabet from prehistoric geometric symbols. Much later, the Greeks adapted and refined the alphabet, so the letters we write today are related to theirs. Further developments came from the Etruscans, followed by the Romans, who borrowed heavily to form the written language of Latin and whose later classic characters eventually formed the twenty-six-letter alphabet you and I use today."
"Where do we begin?"
"We'll be starting from scratch," said Pat, referring to her notes. "I'm unaware of any other ancient writing systems whose symbols match those inscribed in the chamber. There seems to be no influence either way, which is most unusual. The only remote similarity is to the Celtic Ogham alphabet, but there any resemblance ends."
"I almost forgot." Yaeger handed her a small batonlike shaft with a miniature camera at one end. "Max has already coded the symbols. If you want me to help you from my end with any calculations, just aim the camera at the symbol and its sequen
ce in the inscriptions you wish to study, and I'll work at developing a decipher program."
"Sounds good," said Pat, happy to be back in the harness again. "First, let's list the different symbols and get a count on how many times each is represented. Then we can try working them into words."
"Like the and and."
"Most of the ancient script did not include words we take for granted today. I also want to see if we can detect the vowels before tackling the consonants."
They worked through the day without a break. At noon, Yaeger sent word down to the NUMA cafeteria to send up sandwiches and soft drinks. Pat was becoming increasingly frustrated. The symbols looked maddeningly simple to decipher, and yet by five o'clock she had had little or no success in untangling their definitions.
"Why is it the numbering system was so easy to break, but the alphabet so impossible?" she muttered irritably.
"Why don't we knock off until tomorrow," Yaeger suggested.
"I'm not tired."
"Neither am I," he concurred. "But we'll have a fresh outlook. I don't know about you, but my best solutions always come to me in the middle of the night. Besides, Max doesn't require sleep. I'll put her on the inscriptions during the night. By morning, she should have some ideas on the translation."
"I have no sensible argument."
"Before we knock off, I'll call up Max and see if she's made any progress with the stars."
Yaeger's fingers didn't have to play over the keyboard. He simply pressed a transmit button and said,
"Max, are you there?"
Her scowling face came over the monitor. "What took you and Dr. O'Connell so long to get back to me? I've been waiting for nearly two hours."
"Sorry, Max," said Yaeger, without a deep sense of regret. "We were busy."
"You didn't spend but a few hours on the project," said Pat naively. "Did you strike out?"
"Strike out, hell," Max snapped. "I can tell you exactly what you want to know."
"Start with how you came to your conclusions," Yaeger commanded.
"You didn't think I was going to calculate movement of the stars myself, did you?"
"It was your project."
"Why should I strain my chips when I can get another computer to do it?"
"Please, Max, tell us what you discovered."
"Well, first of all, finding the coordinates of celestial objects in the sky takes a complicated geometric process. I won't get into boring detail on how to determine the altitude, azimuth, right ascension, and declination. My problem was to determine the sites where the coordinates engraved in the rock of the chamber were measured. I managed to calculate the original sites where the observers took their sightings within a few miles. Also the stars they used to measure deviations over many, many years. The three stars in the belt of the constellation of Orion, the hunter, all move. Sirius, the dog star, who sits near the heel of Orion, is fixed. With these numbers in hand, I tapped into the astrometry computer over at the National Science Center."
