that looked like
machine-guns and auto-cannon; long tables, tops littered with a
dust-covered miscellany; machinery; boxes and crates and containers.

* * * * *

They made their way down and walked among the clutter, missing a hundred
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, f