bitable
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 Sta