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you can hope to succeed."
She shrugged and drank some more of her cocktail, then lit another cigarette. It was
getting tiresome to try to verbalize something she only felt.
"Neither do I, now, but I will. Maybe I'll find something like the picture-books Sachiko
was talking about. A child's primer, maybe; surely they had things like that. And if I don't.
I'll find something else. We've only been here six months. I can wait the rest of my life, if
I have to, but I'll do it sometime."
"I can't wait so long," von Ohlmhorst said. "The rest of my life will only be a few years,
and when the Schiaparelli orbits in, I'll be going back to Terra on the Cyrano."
"I wish you wouldn't. This is a whole new world of archaeology. Literally."
"Yes." He finished the cocktail and looked at his pipe as though wondering whether to
re-light it so soon before dinner, then put it in his pocket. "A whole new world--but I've
grown old, and it isn't for me. I've spent my life studying the Hittites. I can speak the
Hittite language, though maybe King Muwatallis wouldn't be able to understand my
modern Turkish accent. But the things I'd have to learn here--chemistry, physics,
engineering, how to run analytic tests on steel girders and beryllo-silver alloys and
plastics and silicones. I'm more at home with a civilization that rode in chariots and
fought with swords and was just learning how to work iron. Mars is for young people.
This expedition is a cadre of leadership--not only the Space Force people, who'll be the
commanders of the main expedition, but us scientists, too. And I'm just an old cavalry
general who can't learn to command tanks and aircraft. You'll have time to learn about
Mars. I won't."
His reputation as the dean of Hittitologists was solid and secure, too, she added mentally.
Then she felt ashamed of the thought. He wasn't to be classed with Tony Lattimer.
"All I came for was to get the work started," he was continuing. "The Federation
Government felt that an old hand should do that. Well, it's started, now; you and Tony
and whoever come out on the Schiaparelli must carry it on. You said it, yourself; you
have a whole new world. This is only one city, of the last Martian civilization. Behind
this, you have the Late Upland Culture, and the Canal Builders, and all the civilizations
and races and empires before them, clear back to the Martian Stone Age." He hesitated
for a moment. "You have no idea what all you have to learn, Martha. This isn't the time to
start specializing too narrowly."
* * * * *
They all got out of the truck and stretched their legs and looked up the road to the tall
building with the queer conical cap askew on its top. The four little figures that had been
busy against its wall climbed into the jeep and started back slowly, the smallest of them,
Sachiko Koremitsu, paying out an electric cable behind. When it pulled up beside the
truck, they climbed out; Sachiko attached the free end of the cable to a nuclear-electric

battery. At once, dirty gray smoke and orange dust puffed out from the wall of the
building, and, a second later, the multiple explosion banged.
She and Tony Lattimer and Major Lindemann climbed onto the truck, leaving the jeep
stand by the road. When they reached the building, a satisfyingly wide breach had been
blown in the wall. Lattimer had placed his shots between two of the windows; they were
both blown out along with the wall between, and lay unbroken on the ground. Martha
remembered the first building they had entered. A Space Force officer had picked up a
stone and thrown it at one of the windows, thinking that would be all they'd need to do. It
had bounced back. He had drawn his pistol--they'd all carried guns, then, on the principle
that what they didn't know about Mars might easily hurt them--and fired four shots. The
bullets had ricocheted, screaming thinly; there were four coppery smears of jacket-metal
on the window, and a little surface spalling. Somebody tried a rifle; the 4000-f.s. bullet
had cracked the glasslike pane without penetrating. An oxyacetylene torch had taken an
hour to cut the window out; the lab crew, aboard the ship, were still trying to find out just
what the stuff was.
Tony Lattimer had gone forward and was sweeping his flashlight back and forth,
swearing petulantly, his voice harshened and amplified by his helmet-speaker.
"I thought I was blasting into a hallway; this lets us into a room. Careful; there's about a
two-foot drop to the floor, and a lot of rubble from the blast just