in the middle of its forehead.
The high point came when one party, at thirty thousand feet below thelevel of Kukan, found breathable air. One of them had a mild attack of_sorroche_ and had to be flown back for treatment in a hurry, but theothers showed no ill effects.
The daily newscasts from Terra showed a corresponding shift in interestat home. The discovery of the University had focused attention on thedead past of Mars; now the public was interested in Mars as a possiblehome for humanity. It was Tony Lattimer who brought archaeology backinto the activities of the expedition and the news at home.
Martha and Selim were working in the museum on the second floor,scrubbing the grime from the glass cases, noting contents, andgrease-penciling numbers; Lattimer and a couple of Space Force officerswere going through what had been the administrative offices on the otherside. It was one of these, a young second lieutenant, who came hurryingin from the mezzanine, almost bursting with excitement.
"Hey, Martha! Dr. von Ohlmhorst!" he was shouting. "Where are you?Tony's found the Martians!"
Selim dropped his rag back in the bucket; she laid her clipboard on topof the case beside her.
"Where?" they asked together.
"Over on the north side." The lieutenant took hold of himself and spokemore deliberately. "Little room, back of one of the old facultyoffices--conference room. It was locked from the inside, and we had toburn it down with a torch. That's where they are. Eighteen of them,around a long table--"
Gloria Standish, who had dropped in for lunch, was on the mezzanine,fairly screaming into a radiophone extension:
" ... Dozen and a half of them! Well, of course they're dead. What aquestion! They look like skeletons covered with leather. No, I do notknow what they died of. Well, forget it; I don't care if Bill Chandler'sfound a three-headed hippopotamus. Sid, don't you get it? We've foundthe _Martians_!"
She slammed the phone back on its hook, rushing away ahead of them.
* * * * *
Martha remembered the closed door; on the first survey, they hadn'tattempted opening it. Now it was burned away at both sides and lay,still hot along the edges, on the floor of the big office room in front.A floodlight was on in the room inside, and Lattimer was going aroundlooking at things while a Space Force officer stood by the door. Thecenter of the room was filled by a long table; in armchairs around itsat the eighteen men and women who had occupied the room for the lastfifty millennia. There were bottles and glasses on the table in front ofthem, and, had she seen them in a dimmer light, she would have thoughtthat they were merely dozing over their drinks. One had a knee hookedover his chair-arm and was curled in foetuslike sleep. Another hadfallen forward onto the table, arms extended, the emerald set of a ringtwinkling dully on one finger. Skeletons covered with leather, GloriaStandish had called them, and so they were--faces like skulls, arms andlegs like sticks, the flesh shrunken onto the bones under it.
"Isn't this something!" Lattimer was exulting. "Mass suicide, that'swhat it was. Notice what's in the corners?"
Braziers, made of perforated two-gallon-odd metal cans, the white wallssmudged with smoke above them. Von Ohlmhorst had noticed them at once,and was poking into one of them with his flashlight.
"Yes; charcoal. I noticed a quantity of it around a couple ofhand-forges in the shop on the first floor. That's why you had so muchtrouble breaking in; they'd sealed the room on the inside." Hestraightened and went around the room, until he found a ventilator, andpeered into it. "Stuffed with rags. They must have been all that wereleft, here. Their power was gone, and they were old and tired, and allaround them their world was dying. So they just came in here and lit thecharcoal, and sat drinking together till they all fell asleep. Well, weknow what became of them, now, anyhow."
Sid and Gloria made the most of it. The Terran public wanted to hearabout Martians, and if live Martians couldn't be found, a room full ofdead ones was the next best thing. Maybe an even better thing; it hadbeen only sixty-odd years since the Orson Welles invasion-scare. TonyLattimer, the discoverer, was beginning to cash in on his attentions toGloria and his ingratiation with Sid; he was always either makingvoice-and-image talks for telecast or listening to the news from thehome planet. Without question, he had become, overnight, the most widelyknown archaeologist in history.
"Not that I'm interested in all this, for myself," he disclaimed, afterlistening to the telecast from Terra two days after his discovery. "Butthis is going to be a big thing for Martian archaeology. Bring it to thepublic attention; dramatize it. Selim, can you remember when LordCarnarvon and Howard Carter found the tomb of Tutankhamen?"
"In 1923? I was two years old, then," von Ohlmhorst chuckled. "I reallydon't know how much that publicity ever did for Egyptology. Oh, themuseums did devote more space to Egyptian exhibits, and after a museumdepartment head gets a few extra showcases, you know how hard it is tomake him give them up. And, for a while, it was easier to get financialsupport for new excavations. But I don't know how much good all thispublic excitement really does, in the long run."
"Well, I think one of us should go back on the _Cyrano_, when the_Schiaparelli_ orbits in," Lattimer said. "I'd hoped it would be you;your voice would carry the most weight. But I think it's important thatone of us go back, to present the story of our work, and what we haveaccomplished and what we hope to accomplish, to the public and to theuniversities and the learned societies, and to the FederationGovernment. There will be a great deal of work that will have to bedone. We must not allow the other scientific fields and the so-calledpractical interests to monopolize public and academic support. So, Ibelieve I shall go back at least for a while, and see what I can do--"
Lectures. The organization of a Society of Martian Archaeology, withAnthony Lattimer, Ph.D., the logical candidate for the chair. Degrees,honors; the deference of the learned, and the adulation of the laypublic. Positions, with impressive titles and salaries. Sweet are theuses of publicity.
She crushed out her cigarette and got to her feet. "Well, I still havethe final lists of what we found in _Halvhulva_--Biology--department tocheck over. I'm starting on Sornhulva tomorrow, and I want that stuff inshape for expert evaluation."
That was the sort of thing Tony Lattimer wanted to get away from, thedetail-work and the drudgery. Let the infantry do the slogging throughthe mud; the brass-hats got the medals.
* * * * *
She was halfway through the fifth floor, a week later, and was havingmidday lunch in the reading room on the first floor when Hubert Penrosecame over and sat down beside her, asking her what she was doing. Shetold him.
"I wonder if you could find me a couple of men, for an hour or so," sheadded. "I'm stopped by a couple of jammed doors at the central hall.Lecture room and library, if the layout of that floor's anything likethe ones below it."
"Yes. I'm a pretty fair door-buster, myself." He looked around the room."There's Jeff Miles; he isn't doing much of anything. And we'll put SidChamberlain to work, for a change, too. The four of us ought to get yourdoors open." He called to Chamberlain, who was carrying his tray over tothe dish washer. "Oh, Sid; you doing anything for the next hour or so?"
"I was going up to the fourth floor, to see what Tony's doing."
"Forget it. Tony's bagged his season limit of Martians. I'm going tohelp Martha bust in a couple of doors; we'll probably find a wholecemetery full of Martians."
Chamberlain shrugged. "Why not. A jammed door can have anything back ofit, and I know what Tony's doing--just routine stuff."
Jeff Miles, the Space Force captain, came over, accompanied by one ofthe lab-crew from the ship who had come down on the rocket the daybefore.
"This ought to be up your alley, Mort," he was saying to his companion."Chemistry and physics department. Want to come along?"
The lab man, Mort Tranter, was willing. Seeing the sights was what he'dcome down from the ship for. She finished her coffee and cigarette, andthey went out into the hall together, gath
ered equipment and rode theelevator to the fifth floor.
The lecture hall door was the nearest; they attacked it first. Withproper equipment and help, it was no problem and in ten minutes they hadit open wide enough to squeeze through with the floodlights. The roominside was quite empty, and, like most of the rooms behind closed doors,comparatively free from dust. The students, it appeared, had sat withtheir backs to the door, facing a low platform, but their seats and thelecturer's table and equipment had been removed. The two side walls boreinscriptions: on the right, a pattern of concentric circles which sherecognized as a diagram of atomic structure, and on the left acomplicated table of numbers and words, in two columns. Tranter