stepped down through the breach; the others began dragging equipmentout of the trucks--shovels and picks and crowbars and sledges, portablefloodlights, cameras, sketching materials, an extension ladder, evenAlpinists' ropes and crampons and pickaxes. Hubert Penrose wasshouldering something that looked like a surrealist machine gun butwhich was really a nuclear-electric jack-hammer. Martha selected one ofthe spike-shod mountaineer's ice axes, with which she could dig or chopor poke or pry or help herself over rough footing.
The windows, grimed and crusted with fifty millennia of dust, filteredin a dim twilight; even the breach in the wall, in the morning shade,lighted only a small patch of floor. Somebody snapped on a floodlight,aiming it at the ceiling. The big room was empty and bare; dust laythick on the floor and reddened the once-white walls. It could have beena large office, but there was nothing left in it to indicate its use.
"This one's been stripped up to the seventh floor!" Lattimer exclaimed."Street level'll be cleaned out, completely."
"Do for living quarters and shops, then," Lindemann said. "Added to theothers, this'll take care of everybody on the _Schiaparelli_."
"Seem to have been a lot of electric or electronic apparatus over alongthis wall," one of the Space Force officers commented. "Ten or twelveelectric outlets." He brushed the dusty wall with his glove, thenscraped on the floor with his foot. "I can see where things were priedloose."
* * * * *
The door, one of the double sliding things the Martians had used, wasclosed. Selim von Ohlmhorst tried it, but it was stuck fast. The metallatch-parts had frozen together, molecule bonding itself to molecule,since the door had last been closed. Hubert Penrose came over with thejack-hammer, fitting a spear-point chisel into place. He set the chiselin the joint between the doors, braced the hammer against his hip, andsqueezed the trigger-switch. The hammer banged briefly like the weaponit resembled, and the doors popped a few inches apart, then stuck.Enough dust had worked into the recesses into which it was supposed toslide to block it on both sides.
That was old stuff; they ran into that every time they had to force adoor, and they were prepared for it. Somebody went outside and broughtin a power-jack and finally one of the doors inched back to the doorjamb. That was enough to get the lights and equipment through: they allpassed from the room to the hallway beyond. About half the other doorswere open; each had a number and a single word, _Darfhulva_, over it.
One of the civilian volunteers, a woman professor of natural ecologyfrom Penn State University, was looking up and down the hall.
"You know," she said, "I feel at home here. I think this was a collegeof some sort, and these were classrooms. That word, up there; that wasthe subject taught, or the department. And those electronic devices, allwhere the class would face them; audio-visual teaching aids."
"A twenty-five-story university?" Lattimer scoffed. "Why, a buildinglike this would handle thirty thousand students."
"Maybe there were that many. This was a big city, in its prime," Marthasaid, moved chiefly by a desire to oppose Lattimer.
"Yes, but think of the snafu in the halls, every time they changedclasses. It'd take half an hour to get everybody back and forth from onefloor to another." He turned to von Ohlmhorst. "I'm going up above thisfloor. This place has been looted clean up to here, but there's a chancethere may be something above," he said.
"I'll stay on this floor, at present," the Turco-German replied. "Therewill be much coming and going, and dragging things in and out. We shouldget this completely examined and recorded first. Then Major Lindemann'speople can do their worst, here."
"Well, if nobody else wants it, I'll take the downstairs," Martha said.
"I'll go along with you," Hubert Penrose told her. "If the lower floorshave no archaeological value, we'll turn them into living quarters. Ilike this building: it'll give everybody room to keep out from undereverybody else's feet." He looked down the hall. "We ought to findescalators at the middle."
* * * * *
The hallway, too, was thick underfoot with dust. Most of the open roomswere empty, but a few contained furniture, including small seat-desks.The original proponent of the university theory pointed these out asjust what might be found in classrooms. There were escalators, up anddown, on either side of the hall, and more on the intersecting passageto the right.
"That's how they handled the students, between classes," Marthacommented. "And I'll bet there are more ahead, there."
They came to a stop where the hallway ended at a great square centralhall. There were elevators, there, on two of the sides, and fourescalators, still usable as stairways. But it was the walls, and thepaintings on them, that brought them up short and staring.
They were clouded with dirt--she was trying to imagine what they musthave looked like originally, and at the same time estimating the laborthat would be involved in cleaning them--but they were stilldistinguishable, as was the word, _Darfhulva_, in golden letters aboveeach of the four sides. It was a moment before she realized, from themurals, that she had at last found a meaningful Martian word. They werea vast historical panorama, clockwise around the room. A group ofskin-clad savages squatting around a fire. Hunters with bows and spears,carrying a carcass of an animal slightly like a pig. Nomads ridinglong-legged, graceful mounts like hornless deer. Peasants sowing andreaping; mud-walled hut villages, and cities; processions of priests andwarriors; battles with swords and bows, and with cannon and muskets;galleys, and ships with sails, and ships without visible means ofpropulsion, and aircraft. Changing costumes and weapons and machinesand styles of architecture. A richly fertile landscape, graduallymerging into barren deserts and bushlands--the time of the greatplanet-wide drought. The Canal Builders--men with machines recognizableas steam-shovels and derricks, digging and quarrying and driving acrossthe empty plains with aqueducts. More cities--seaports on the shrinkingoceans; dwindling, half-deserted cities; an abandoned city, with fourtiny humanoid figures and a thing like a combat-car in the middle of abrush-grown plaza, they and their vehicle dwarfed by the huge lifelessbuildings around them. She had not the least doubt; _Darfhulva_ wasHistory.
"Wonderful!" von Ohlmhorst was saying. "The entire history of this race.Why, if the painter depicted appropriate costumes and weapons andmachines for each period, and got the architecture right, we can breakthe history of this planet into eras and periods and civilizations."
"You can assume they're authentic. The faculty of this university wouldinsist on authenticity in the _Darfhulva_--History--Department," shesaid.
"Yes! _Darfhulva_--History! And your magazine was a journal of_Sornhulva_!" Penrose exclaimed. "You have a word, Martha!" It took heran instant to realize that he had called her by her first name, and notDr. Dane. She wasn't sure if that weren't a bigger triumph than learninga word of the Martian language. Or a more auspicious start. "Alone, Isuppose that _hulva_ means something like science or knowledge, orstudy; combined, it would be equivalent to our 'ology. And _darf_ wouldmean something like past, or old times, or human events, or chronicles."
"That gives you three words, Martha!" Sachiko jubilated. "You did it."
"Let's don't go too fast," Lattimer said, for once not derisively. "I'lladmit that _darfhulva_ is the Martian word for history as a subject ofstudy; I'll admit that _hulva_ is the general word and _darf_ modifiesit and tells us which subject is meant. But as for assigning specificmeanings, we can't do that because we don't know just how the Martiansthought, scientifically or otherwise."
He stopped short, startled by the blue-white light that blazed as SidChamberlain's Kliegettes went on. When the whirring of the camerastopped, it was Chamberlain who was speaking:
"This is the biggest thing yet; the whole history of Mars, stone age tothe end, all on four walls. I'm taking this with the fast shutter, butwe'll telecast it in slow motion, from the beginning to the end. Tony, Iwant you to do the voice for it--running commentary, interpretation ofeach scene as it's shown. Would you do th
at?"
Would he do that! Martha thought. If he had a tail, he'd be wagging itat the very thought.
"Well, there ought to be more murals on the other floors," she said."Who wants to come downstairs with us?"
Sachiko did; immediately. Ivan Fitzgerald volunteered. Sid decided to goupstairs with Tony Lattimer, and Gloria Standish decided to go upstairs,too. Most of the party would remain on the seventh floor, to help Selimvon Ohlmhorst get it finished. After poking tentatively at the escalatorwith the spike of her ice axe, Martha led the way downward.
* * * *