ndish moved in with her,
and accepted the newswoman's excuse that she felt lonely without
somebody to talk to before falling asleep. Sachiko Koremitsu joined them
the next evening, and before going to bed, the girl officer cleaned and
oiled her pistol, remarking that she was afraid some rust may have
gotten into it.

The others felt it, too. Selim von Ohlmhorst developed the habit of
turning quickly and looking behind him, as though trying to surprise
somebody or something that was stalking him. Tony Lattimer, having a
drink at the bar that had been improvised from the librarian's desk in
the Reading Room, set down his glass and swore.

"You know what this place is? It's an archaeological _Marie Celeste_!"
he declared. "It was occupied right up to the end--we've all seen the
shifts these people used to keep a civilization going here--but what was
the end? What happened to them? Where did they go?"

"You didn't expect them to be waiting out front, with a red carpet and a
big banner, _Welcome Terrans_, did you, Tony?" Gloria Standish asked.

"No, of course not; they've all been dead for fifty thousand years. But
if they were the last of the Martians, why haven't we found their bones,
at least? Who buried them, after they were dead?" He looked at the
glass, a bubble-thin goblet, found, with hundreds of others like it, in
a closet above, as though debating with himself whether to have another
drink. Then he voted in the affirmative and reached for the cocktail
pitcher. "And every door on the old ground level is either barred or
barricaded from the inside. How did they get out? And why did they
leave?"

* * * * *

The next day, at lunch, Sachiko Koremitsu had the answer to the second
question. Four or five electrical engineers had come down by rocket from
the ship, and she had been spending the morning with them, in oxy-masks,
at the top of the building.

"Tony, I thought you said those generators were in good shape," she
began, catching sight of Lattimer. "They aren't. They're in the most
unholy mess I ever saw. What happened, up there, was that the supports
of the wind-rotor gave way, and weight snapped the main shaft, and
smashed everything under it."

"Well, after fifty thousand years, you can expect something like that,"
Lattimer retorted. "When an archaeologist says something's in good
shape, he doesn't necessarily mean it'll start as soon as you shove a
switch in."

"You didn