of food, andstoves with the dinner still on them. They must have used the elevatorsto haul things down from the upper floor. The whole first floor wasconverted into workshops and laboratories. I think that this place musthave been something like a monastery in the Dark Ages in Europe, or whatsuch a monastery would have been like if the Dark Ages had followed thefall of a highly developed scientific civilization. For one thing, wefound a lot of machine guns and light auto-cannon on the street level,and all the doors were barricaded. The people here were trying to keep acivilization running after the rest of the planet had gone back tobarbarism; I suppose they'd have to fight off raids by the barbariansnow and then."
"You're not going to insist on making this building into expeditionquarters, I hope, colonel?" von Ohlmhorst asked anxiously.
"Oh, no! This place is an archaeological treasure-house. More than that;from what I saw, our technicians can learn a lot, here. But you'd betterget this floor cleaned up as soon as you can, though. I'll have thesubsurface part, from the sixth floor down, airsealed. Then we'll putin oxygen generators and power units, and get a couple of elevators intoservice. For the floors above, we can use temporary airsealing floor byfloor, and portable equipment; when we have things atmosphered andlighted and heated, you and Martha and Tony Lattimer can go to worksystematically and in comfort, and I'll give you all the help I canspare from the other work. This is one of the biggest things we've foundyet."
Tony Lattimer and his companions came down to the seventh floor a littlelater.
"I don't get this, at all," he began, as soon as he joined them. "Thisbuilding wasn't stripped the way the others were. Always, the procedureseems to have been to strip from the bottom up, but they seem to havestripped the top floors first, here. All but the very top. I found outwhat that conical thing is, by the way. It's a wind-rotor, and under itthere's an electric generator. This building generated its own power."
"What sort of condition are the generators in?" Penrose asked.
"Well, everything's full of dust that blew in under the rotor, ofcourse, but it looks to be in pretty good shape. Hey, I'll bet that'sit! They had power, so they used the elevators to haul stuff down.That's just what they did. Some of the floors above here don't seem tohave been touched, though." He paused momentarily; back of his oxy-mask,he seemed to be grinning. "I don't know that I ought to mention this infront of Martha, but two floors above--we hit a room--it must have beenthe reference library for one of the departments--that had close to fivehundred books in it."
The noise that interrupted him, like the squawking of a Brobdingnagianparrot, was only Ivan Fitzgerald laughing through his helmet-speaker.
* * * * *
Lunch at the huts was a hasty meal, with a gabble of full-mouthed andexcited talking. Hubert Penrose and his chief subordinates snatchedtheir food in a huddled consultation at one end of the table; in theafternoon, work was suspended on everything else and the fifty-odd menand women of the expedition concentrated their efforts on theUniversity. By the middle of the afternoon, the seventh floor had beencompletely examined, photographed and sketched, and the murals in thesquare central hall covered with protective tarpaulins, and LaurentGicquel and his airsealing crew had moved in and were at work. It hadbeen decided to seal the central hall at the entrances. It took theFrench-Canadian engineer most of the afternoon to find all theventilation-ducts and plug them. An elevator-shaft on the north side wasfound reaching clear to the twenty-fifth floor; this would give accessto the top of the building; another shaft, from the center, would takecare of the floors below. Nobody seemed willing to trust the ancientelevators, themselves; it was the next evening before a couple of carsand the necessary machinery could be fabricated in the machine shopsaboard the ship and sent down by landing-rocket. By that time, theairsealing was finished, the nuclear-electric energy-converters were inplace, and the oxygen generators set up.
Martha was in the lower basement, an hour or so before lunch the dayafter, when a couple of Space Force officers came out of the elevator,bringing extra lights with them. She was still using oxygen-equipment;it was a moment before she realized that the newcomers had no masks, andthat one of them was smoking. She took off her own helmet-speaker,throat-mike and mask and unslung her tank-pack, breathing cautiously.The air was chilly, and musty-acrid with the odor of antiquity--thefirst Martian odor she had smelled--but when she lit a cigarette, thelighter flamed clear and steady and the tobacco caught and burnedevenly.
The archaeologists, many of the other civilian scientists, a few of theSpace Force officers and the two news-correspondents, Sid Chamberlainand Gloria Standish, moved in that evening, setting up cots in vacantrooms. They installed electric stoves and a refrigerator in the oldLibrary Reading Room, and put in a bar and lunch counter. For a fewdays, the place was full of noise and activity, then, gradually, theSpace Force people and all but a few of the civilians returned to theirown work. There was still the business of airsealing the more habitableof the buildings already explored, and fitting them up in readiness forthe arrival, in a year and a half, of the five hundred members of themain expedition. There was work to be done enlarging the landing fieldfor the ship's rocket craft, and building new chemical-fuel tanks.
There was the work of getting the city's ancient reservoirs cleared ofsilt before the next spring thaw brought more water down the undergroundaqueducts everybody called canals in mistranslation of Schiaparelli'sItalian word, though this was proving considerably easier thananticipated. The ancient Canal-Builders must have anticipated a timewhen their descendants would no longer be capable of maintenance work,and had prepared against it. By the day after the University had beenmade completely habitable, the actual work there was being done bySelim, Tony Lattimer and herself, with half a dozen Space Forceofficers, mostly girls, and four or five civilians, helping.
* * * * *
They worked up from the bottom, dividing the floor-surfaces intonumbered squares, measuring and listing and sketching and photographing.They packaged samples of organic matter and sent them up to the ship forCarbon-14 dating and analysis; they opened cans and jars and bottles,and found that everything fluid in them had evaporated, through theporosity of glass and metal and plastic if there were no other way.Wherever they looked, they found evidence of activity suddenly suspendedand never resumed. A vise with a bar of metal in it, half cut throughand the hacksaw beside it. Pots and pans with hardened remains of foodin them; a leathery cut of meat on a table, with the knife ready athand. Toilet articles on washstands; unmade beds, the bedding ready tocrumble at a touch but still retaining the impress of the sleeper'sbody; papers and writing materials on desks, as though the writer hadgotten up, meaning to return and finish in a fifty-thousand-year-agomoment.
It worried her. Irrationally, she began to feel that the Martians hadnever left this place; that they were still around her, watchingdisapprovingly every time she picked up something they had laid down.They haunted her dreams, now, instead of their enigmatic writing. Atfirst, everybody who had moved into the University had taken a separateroom, happy to escape the crowding and lack of privacy of the huts.After a few nights, she was glad when Gloria Standish moved in with her,and accepted the newswoman's excuse that she felt lonely withoutsomebody to talk to before falling asleep. Sachiko Koremitsu joined themthe next evening, and before going to bed, the girl officer cleaned andoiled her pistol, remarking that she was afraid some rust may havegotten into it.
The others felt it, too. Selim von Ohlmhorst developed the habit ofturning quickly and looking behind him, as though trying to surprisesomebody or something that was stalking him. Tony Lattimer, having adrink at the bar that had been improvised from the librarian's desk inthe Reading Room, set down his glass and swore.
"You know what this place is? It's an archaeological _Marie Celeste_!"he declared. "It was occupied right up to the end--we've all seen theshifts these people used to keep a civilization going here--but what wasthe end? What happened to them
? Where did they go?"
"You didn't expect them to be waiting out front, with a red carpet and abig banner, _Welcome Terrans_, did you, Tony?" Gloria Standish asked.
"No, of course not; they've all been dead for fifty thousand years. Butif they were the last of the Martians, why haven't we found their bones,at least? Who buried them, after they were dead?" He looked at theglass, a bubble-thin goblet, found, with hundreds of others like it, ina closet above, as though debating with himself whether to have anotherdrink. Then he voted in the affirmative and reached for the cocktailpitcher. "And every door on the old ground level is either barred orbarricaded from the inside. How did they get out? And why did theyleave?"
* * * * *
The