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inside."
He stepped down through the breach; the others began dragging equipment out of the
trucks--shovels and picks and crowbars and sledges, portable floodlights, cameras,
sketching materials, an extension ladder, even Alpinists' ropes and crampons and
pickaxes. Hubert Penrose was shouldering something that looked like a surrealist
machine gun but which was really a nuclear-electric jack-hammer. Martha selected one
of the spike-shod mountaineer's ice axes, with which she could dig or chop or poke or pry
or help herself over rough footing.
The windows, grimed and crusted with fifty millennia of dust, filtered in 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 lay thick on the floor and reddened the once-white walls. It could have been a
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 the others, this'll
take care of everybody on the Schiaparelli."
"Seem to have been a lot of electric or electronic apparatus over along this wall," one of
the Space Force officers commented. "Ten or twelve electric outlets." He brushed the
dusty wall with his glove, then scraped on the floor with his foot. "I can see where things
were pried loose."

* * * * *
The door, one of the double sliding things the Martians had used, was closed. Selim von
Ohlmhorst tried it, but it was stuck fast. The metal latch-parts had frozen together,
molecule bonding itself to molecule, since the door had last been closed. Hubert Penrose
came over with the jack-hammer, fitting a spear-point chisel into place. He set the chisel
in the joint between the doors, braced the hammer against his hip, and squeezed the
trigger-switch. The hammer banged briefly like the weapon it resembled, and the doors
popped a few inches apart, then stuck. Enough dust had worked into the recesses into
which it was supposed to slide to block it on both sides.
That was old stuff; they ran into that every time they had to force a door, and they were
prepared for it. Somebody went outside and brought in a power-jack and finally one of
the doors inched back to the door jamb. That was enough to get the lights and equipment
through: they all passed from the room to the hallway beyond. About half the other doors
were open; each had a number and a single word, Darfhulva, over it.
[Illustration]
One of the civilian volunteers, a woman professor of natural ecology from Penn State
University, was looking up and down the hall.
"You know," she said, "I feel at home here. I think this was a college of some sort, and
these were classrooms. That word, up there; that was the subject taught, or the
department. And those electronic devices, all where the class would face them;
audio-visual teaching aids."
"A twenty-five-story university?" Lattimer scoffed. "Why, a building like this would
handle thirty thousand students."
"Maybe there were that many. This was a big city, in its prime," Martha said, moved
chiefly by a desire to oppose Lattimer.
"Yes, but think of the snafu in the halls, every time they changed classes. It'd take half an
hour to get everybody back and forth from one floor to another." He turned to von
Ohlmhorst. "I'm going up above this floor. This place has been looted clean up to here,
but there's a chance there may be something above," he said.
"I'll stay on this floor, at present," the Turco-German replied. "There will be much
coming and going, and dragging things in and out. We should get this completely
examined and recorded first. Then Major Lindemann's people 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 floors have no
archaeological value, we'll turn them into living quarters. I like this building: it'll give
everybody room to keep out from under everybody else's feet." He looked down the hall.
"We ought to find escalators at the middle."

* * * * *
The hallway, too, was thick underfoot with dust. Most of the open rooms were empty, but
a few contained furniture, including small seat-desks. The original proponent of the
university theory pointed these out as just what might be found in classrooms. There were
escalators, up and down, on either side of the hall, and more on the intersecting passage
to the right.
"That's how they handled the students, between classes," Martha commented. "And I'll