ose 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 ha