things for every one they saw, until they found an escalator to the
basement. There were three basements, one under another, until at last
they stood at the bottom of the last escalator, on a bare concrete
floor, swinging the portable floodlight over stacks of boxes and barrels
and drums, and heaps of powdery dust. The boxes were plastic--nobody had
ever found anything made of wood in the city--and the barrels and drums
were of metal or glass or some glasslike substance. They were outwardly
intact. The powdery heaps might have been anything organic, or anything
containing fluid. Down here, where wind and dust could not reach,
evaporation had been the only force of destruction after the minute life
that caused putrefaction had vanished.
They found refrigeration rooms, too, and using Martha's ice axe and the
pistollike vibratool Sachiko carried on her belt, they pounded and pried
one open, to find dessicated piles of what had been vegetables, and
leathery chunks of meat. Samples of that stuff, rocketed up to the ship,
would give a reliable estimate, by radio-carbon dating, of how long ago
this building had been occupied. The refrigeration unit, radically
different from anything their own culture had produced, had been
electrically powered. Sachiko and Penrose, poking into it, found the
switches still on; the machine had only ceased to function when the
power-source, whatever that had been, had failed.
The middle basement had also been used, at least toward the end, for
storage; it was cut in half by a partition pierced by but one door. They
took half an hour to force this, and were on the point of sending above
for heavy equipment when it yielded enough for them to squeeze through.
Fitzgerald, in the lead with the light, stopped short, looked around,
and then gave a groan that came through his helmet-speaker like a
foghorn.
"Oh, no! _No!_"
"What's the matter, Ivan?" Sachiko, entering behind him, asked
anxiously.
He stepped aside. "Look at it, Sachi! Are we going to have to do all
that?"
Martha crowded through behind her friend and looked around, then stood
motionless, dizzy with excitement. Books. Case on case of books, half an
acre of cases, fifteen feet to the ceiling. Fitzgerald, and Penrose, who
had pushed in behind her, were talking in rapid excitement; she only
heard the sound of their voices, not their words. This must be the main
stacks of the university library--the entire literature of the vanished
race of Mars. In the center, down an aisle between the cases, she could
see the hollow square of the librarians' desk, and stairs and a
dumb-waiter to the floor above.
She realized that she was walking forward, with the others, toward this.
Sachiko was saying: "I'm the lightest; let me go first." She must be
talking about the spidery metal stairs.
"I'd say they were safe," Penrose answered. "The trouble we've had with
doors around here shows that the metal hasn't deteriorated."
In the end, the Japanese girl led the way, more catlike than ever in her
caution. The stairs were quite sound, in spite of their fragile
appearance, and they all followed her. The floor above was a duplicate
of the room they had entered, and seemed to contain about as many books.
Rather than waste time forcing the door here, they returned to the
middle basement and came up by the escalator down which they had
originally descended.
The upper basement contained kitchens--electric stoves, some with pots
and pans still on them--and a big room that must have been, originally,
the students' dining room, though when last used it had been a workshop.
As they expected, the library reading room was on the street-level
floor, directly above the stacks. It seemed to have been converted into
a sort of common living room for the building's last occupants. An
adjoining auditorium had been made into a chemical works; there were
vats and distillation apparatus, and a metal fractionating tower that
extended through a hole knocked in the ceiling seventy feet above. A
good deal of plastic furniture of the sort they had been finding
everywhere in the city was stacked about, some of it broken up,
apparently for reprocessing. The other rooms on the street floor seemed
also to have been devoted to manufacturing and repair work; a
considerable industry, along a number of lines, must have been carried
on here for a long time after the university had ceased to function as
such.
On the second floor, they found a museum; many of the exhibits remained,
tantalizingly half-visible in grimed glass cases. There had been
administrative offices there, too. The doors of most of them were
closed, and they did not waste time trying to force them, but those that
were open had been turned into living quarters. They made notes, and
rough floor plans, to guide them in future more thorough examination; it
was almost noon before they had worked their way back to the seventh
floor.
Selim von Ohlmhorst was in a room on the north side of the building,
sketching the position of things before examining them and collecting
them for removal. He had the floor checkerboarded with a grid of chalked
lines, each numbered.
"We have everything on this floor photographed," he said. "I have three
gangs--all the floodlights I have--sketching and making measurements. At
the rate we're going, with time out for lunch, we'll be finished by the
middle of the afternoon."
"You've been working fast. Evidently you aren't being high-church about
a 'qualified archaeologist' entering rooms first," Penrose commented.
"Ach, childishness!" the old man exclaimed impatiently. "These officers
of yours aren't fools. All of them have been to Intelligence School and
Criminal Investigation School. Some of the most careful amateur
archaeologists I ever knew were retired soldiers or policemen. But there
isn't much work to be done. Most of the rooms are either empty or like
this one--a few bits of furniture and broken trash and scraps of paper.
Did you find anything down on the lower floors?"
"Well, yes," Penrose said, a hint of mirth in his voice. "What would you
say, Martha?"
She started to tell Selim. The others, unable to restrain their
excitement, broke in with interruptions. Von Ohlmhorst was staring in
incredulous amazement.
"But this floor was looted almost clean, and the buildings we've entered
before were all looted from the street level up," he said, at length.
"The people who looted this one lived here," Penrose replied. "They had
electric power to the last; we found refrigerators full of food, and
stoves with the dinner still on them. They must have used the elevators
to haul things down from the upper floor. The whole first floor was
converted into workshops and laboratories. I think that this place must
have been something like a monastery in the Dark Ages in Europe, or what
such a monastery would have been like if the Dark Ages had followed the
fall of a highly developed scientific civilization. For one thing, we
found 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 a
civilization running after the rest of the planet had gone back to
barbarism; I suppose they'd have to fight off raids by the barbarians
now and then."
"You're not going to insist on making this building into expedition
quarters, 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 better
get this floor cleaned up as soon as you can, though. I'll have the
subsurface part, from the sixth floor down, airsealed. Then we'll put
in oxygen generators and power units, and get a couple of elevators into
service. For the floors above, we can use temporary airsealing floor by
floor, and portable equipment; when we have things atmosphered and
lighted and heated, you and Martha and Tony Lattimer can go to work
systematically and in comfort, and I'll give you all the help I can
spare from the other work. This is one of the biggest things we've found
yet."
Tony Lattimer and his companions came down to the seventh floor a little
later.
"I don't get this, at all," he began, as soon as he joined them. "This
building wasn't stripped the way the others were. Always, the procedure
seems to have been to strip from the bottom up, but they seem to have
stripped the top floors first, here. All but the very top. I found out
what that conical thing is, by the way. It's a wind-rotor, and under it
there'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, of
course, but it looks to be in pretty good shape. Hey, I'll bet that's
it! 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 to
have 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 in
front of Martha, but two floors above--we hit a room--it must have been
the reference library for one of the departments--that had close to five
hundred books in it."
The noise that interrupted him, like the squawking of a Brobdingnagian
parrot, was only Ivan Fitzgerald laughing through his helmet-speaker.
* * * * *
Lunch at the huts was a hasty meal, with a gabble of full-mouthed and
excited talking. Hubert Penrose and his chief subordinates snatched
their food in a huddled consultation at one end of the table; in the
afternoon, work was suspended on everything else and the fifty-odd men
and women of the expedition concentrated their efforts on the
University. By the middle of the afternoon, the seventh floor had been
completely examined, photographed and sketched, and the murals in the
square central hall covered with protective tarpaulins, and Laurent
Gicquel and his airsealing crew had moved in and were at work. It had
been decided to seal the central hall at the entrances. It took the
French-Canadian engineer most of the afternoon to find all the
ventilation-ducts and plug them. An elevator-shaft on the north side was
found reaching clear to the twenty-fifth floor; this would give access
to the top of the building; another shaft, from the center, would take
care of the floors below. Nobody seemed willing to trust the ancient
elevators, themselves; it was the next evening before a couple of cars
and the necessary machinery could be fabricated in the machine shops
aboard the ship and sent down by landing-rocket. By that time, the
airsealing was finished, the nuclear-electric energy-converters were in
place, and the oxygen generators set up.
[Illustration]
Martha was in the lower basement, an hour or so before lunch the day
after, 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, and
that 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--the
first Martian odor she had smelled--but when she lit a cigarette, the
lighter flamed clear and steady and the tobacco caught and burned
evenly.
The archaeologists, many of the other civilian scientists, a few of the
Space Force officers and the two news-correspondents, Sid Chamberlain
and Gloria Standish, moved in that evening, setting up cots in vacant
rooms. They installed electric stoves and a refrigerator in the old
Library Reading Room, and put in a bar and lunch counter. For a few
days, the place was full of noise and activity, then, gradually, the
Space Force people and all but a few of the civilians returned to their
own work. There was still the business of airsealing the more habitable
of the buildings already explored, and fitting them up in readiness for
the arrival, in a year and a half, of the five hundred members of the
main expedition. There was work to be done enlarging the landing field
for the ship's rocket craft, and building new chemical-fuel tanks.
There was the work of getting the city's ancient reservoirs cleared of
silt before the next spring thaw brought more water down the underground
aqueducts everybody called canals in mistranslation of Schiaparelli's
Italian word, though this was proving considerably easier than
anticipated. The ancient Canal-Builders must have anticipated a time
when their descendants would no longer be capable of maintenance work,
and had prepared against it. By the day after the University had been
made completely habitable, the actual work there was being done by
Selim, Tony Lattimer and herself, with half a dozen Space Force
officers, mostly girls, and four or five civilians, helping.
* * * * *
They worked up from the bottom, dividing the floor-surfaces into
numbered squares, measuring and listing and sketching and photographing.
They packaged samples of organic matter and sent them up to the ship for
Carbon-14 dating and analysis; they opened cans and jars and bottles,
and found that everything fluid in them had evaporated, through the
porosity of glass and metal and plastic if there were no other way.
Wherever they looked, they found evidence of activity suddenly suspended
and never resumed. A vise with a bar of metal in it, half cut through
and the hacksaw beside it. Pots and pans with hardened remains of food
in them; a leathery cut of meat on a table, with the knife ready at
hand. Toilet articles on washstands; unmade beds, the bedding ready to
crumble at a touch but still retaining the impress of the sleeper's
body; papers and writing materials on desks, as though the writer had
gotten up, meaning to return and finish in a fifty-thousand-year-ago
moment.
It worried her. Irrationally, she began to feel that the Martians had
never left this place; that they were still around her, watching
disapprovingly every time she picked up something they had laid down.
They haunted her dreams, now, instead of their enigmatic writing. At
first, everybody who had moved into the University had taken a separate
room, 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 without
somebody to talk to before falling asleep. Sachiko Koremitsu joined them
the next evening, and before going to bed, the girl officer cleaned and
oiled her pistol, remarking that she was afraid some rust may have
gotten into it.
The others felt it, too. Selim von Ohlmhorst developed the habit of
turning quickly and looking behind him, as though trying to surprise
somebody or something that was stalking him. Tony Lattimer, having a
drink at the bar that had been improvised from the librarian's desk in
the 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 the
shifts these people used to keep a civilization going here--but what was
the end? What happened to them? Where did they go?"
"You didn't expect them to be waiting out front, with a red carpet and a
big banner, _Welcome Terrans_, did you, Tony?" Gloria Standish asked.
"No, of course not; they've all been dead for fifty thousand years. But
if 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 the
glass, a bubble-thin goblet, found, with hundreds of others like it, in
a closet above, as though debating with himself whether to have another
drink. Then he voted in the affirmative and reached for the cocktail
pitcher. "And every door on the old ground level is either barred or
barricaded from the inside. How did they get out? And why did they
leave?"
* * * * *
The next day, at lunch, Sachiko Koremitsu had the answer to the second
question. Four or five electrical engineers had come down by rocket from
the ship, and she had been spending the morning with them, in oxy-masks,
at the top of the building.
"Tony, I thought you said those generators were in good shape," she
began, catching sight of Lattimer. "They aren't. They're in the most
unholy mess I ever saw. What happened, up there, was that the supports
of the wind-rotor gave way, and weight snapped the main shaft, and
smashed everything under it."
"Well, after fifty thousand years, you can expect something like that,"
Lattimer retorted. "When an archaeologist says something's in good
shape, he doesn't necessarily mean it'll start as soon as you shove a
switch in."
"You didn't notice that it happened when the power was on, did you," one
of the engineers asked, nettled at Lattimer's tone. "Well, it was.
Everything's burned out or shorted or fused together; I saw one busbar
eight inches across melted clean in two. It's a pity we didn't find
things in good shape, even archaeologically speaking. I saw a lot of
interesting things, things in advance of what we're using now. But it'll
take a couple of years to get everything sorted out and figure what it
looked like originally."
"Did it look as though anybody'd made any attempt to fix it?" Martha
asked.
Sachiko shook her head. "They must have taken one look at it and given
up. I don't believe there would have been any possible way to repair
anything."
"Well, that explains why they left. They needed electricity for
lighting, and heating, and all their industrial equipment was
electrical. They had a good life, here, with power; without it, this
place wouldn't have been habitable."
"Then why did they barricade everything from the inside, and how did
they get out?" Lattimer wanted to know.
"To keep other people from breaking in and looting. Last man out
probably barred the last door and slid down a rope from upstairs," von
Ohlmhorst suggested. "This Houdini-trick doesn't worry me too much.
We'll find out eventually."
"Yes, about the time Martha starts reading Martian," Lattimer scoffed.
"That may be just when we'll find out," von Ohlmhorst replied seriously.
"It wouldn't surprise me if they left something in writing when they
evacuated this place."
"Are you really beginning to treat this pipe dream of hers as a serious
possibility, Selim?" Lattimer demanded. "I know, it would be a wonderful
thing, but wonderful things don't happen just because they're wonderful.
Only because they're possible, and this isn't. Let me quote that
distinguished Hittitologist, Johannes Friedrich: 'Nothing can be
translated out of nothing.' Or that later but not less distinguished
Hittitologist, Selim von Ohlmhorst: 'Where are you going to get your
bilingual?'"
"Friedrich lived to see the Hittite language deciphered and read," von
Ohlmhorst reminded him.
"Yes, when they found Hittite-Assyrian bilinguals." Lattimer measured a
spoonful of coffee-powder into his cup and added hot water. "Martha, you
ought to know, better than anybody, how little chance you have. You've
been working for years in the Indus Valley; how many words of Harappa
have you or anybody else ever been able to read?"
"We never found a university, with a half-million-volume library, at
Harappa or Mohenjo-Daro."
"And, the first day we entered this building, we established meanings
for several words," Selim von Ohlmhorst added.
"And you've never found another meaningful word since," Lattimer added.
"And you're only sure of general meaning, not specific meaning of
word-elements, and you have a dozen different interpretations for each
word."
"We made a start," von Ohlmhorst maintained. "We have Grotefend's word
for 'king.' But I'm going to be able to read some of those books, over
there, if it takes me the rest of my life here. It probably will,
anyhow."
"You mean you've changed your mind about going home on the _Cyrano_?"
Martha asked. "You'll stay on here?"
The old man nodded. "I can't leave this. There's too much to discover.
The old dog will have to learn a lot of new tricks, but this is where my
work will be, from now on."
Lattimer was shocked. "You're nuts!" he cried. "You mean you're going
to throw away everything you've accomplished in Hittitology and start
all over again here on Mars? Martha, if you've talked him into this
crazy decision, you're a criminal!"
"Nobody talked me into anything," von Ohlmhorst said roughly. "And as
for throwing away what I've accomplished in Hittitology, I don't know
what the devil you're talking about. Everything I know about the Hittite
Empire is published and available to anybody. Hittitology's like
Egyptology; it's stopped being research and archaeology and become
scholarship and history. And I'm not a scholar or a historian; I'm a
pick-and-shovel field archaeologist--a highly skilled and specialized
grave-robber and junk-picker--and there's more pick-and-shovel work on
this planet than I could do in a hundred lifetimes. This is something
new; I was a fool to think I could turn my back on it and go back to
scribbling footnotes about Hittite kings."
"You could have anything you wanted, in Hittitology. There are a dozen
universities that'd sooner have you than a winning football team. But
no! You have to be the top man in Martiology, too. You can't leave that
for anybody else--" Lattimer shoved his chair back and got to his feet,
leaving the table with an oath that was almost a sob of exasperation.
Maybe his feelings were too much for him. Maybe he realized, as Martha
did, what he had betrayed. She sat, avoiding the eyes of the others,
looking at the ceiling, as embarrassed as though Lattimer had flung
something dirty on the table in front of them. Tony Lattimer had,
desperately, wanted Selim to go home on the _Cyrano_. Martiology was a
new field; if Selim entered it, he would bring with him the reputation
he had already built in Hittitology, automatically stepping into the
leading role that Lattimer had coveted for himself. Ivan Fitzgerald's
words echoed back to her--when you want to be a big shot, you can't bear
the possibility of anybody else being a bigger big shot. His derision of
her own efforts became comprehensible, too. It wasn't that he was
convinced that she would never learn to read the Martian language. He
had been afraid that she would.
* * * * *
Ivan Fitzgerald finally isolated the germ that had caused the Finchley
girl's undiagnosed illness. Shortly afterward, the malady turned into a
mild fever, from which she recovered. Nobody else seemed to have caught
it. Fitzgerald was still trying to find out how the germ had been
transmitted.
They found a globe of Mars, made when the city had been a seaport. They
located the city, and learned that its name had been Kukan--or something
with a similar vowel-consonant ratio. Immediately, Sid Chamberlain and
Gloria Standish began giving their telecasts a Kukan dateline, and
Hubert Penrose used the name in his official reports. They also found a
Martian calendar; the year had been divided into ten more or less equal
months, and one of them had been Doma. Another month was Nor, and that
was a part of the name of the scientific journal Martha had found.
Bill Chandler, the zoologist, had been going deeper and deeper into the
old sea bottom of Syrtis. Four hundred miles from Kukan, and at fifteen
thousand feet lower altitude, he shot a bird. At least, it was a
something with wings and what were almost but not quite feathers, though
it was more reptilian than avian in general characteristics. He and Ivan
Fitzgerald skinned and mounted it, and then dissected the carcass almost
tissue by tissue. About seven-eighths of its body capacity was lungs; it
certainly breathed air containing at least half enough oxygen to support
human life, or five times as much as the air around Kukan.
That took the center of interest away from archaeology, and started a
new burst of activity. All the expedition's aircraft--four jetticopters
and three wingless airdyne reconnaissance fighters--were thrown into
intensified exploration of the lower sea bottoms, and the bio-science
boys and girls were wild with excitement and making new discoveries on
each flight.