with a torch. That's where they are. Eighteen of them,
around a long table--"

Gloria Standish, who had dropped in for lunch, was on the mezzanine,
fairly screaming into a radiophone extension:

" ... Dozen and a half of them! Well, of course they're dead. What a
question! They look like skeletons covered with leather. No, I do not
know what they died of. Well, forget it; I don't care if Bill Chandler's
found a three-headed hippopotamus. Sid, don't you get it? We've found
the _Martians_!"

She slammed the phone back on its hook, rushing away ahead of them.

* * * * *

Martha remembered the closed door; on the first survey, they hadn't
attempted opening it. Now it was burned away at both sides and lay,
still hot along the edges, on the floor of the big office room in front.
A floodlight was on in the room inside, and Lattimer was going around
looking at things while a Space Force officer stood by the door. The
center of the room was filled by a long table; in armchairs around it
sat the eighteen men and women who had occupied the room for the last
fifty millennia. There were bottles and glasses on the table in front of
them, and, had she seen them in a dimmer light, she would have thought
that they were merely dozing over their drinks. One had a knee hooked
over his chair-arm and was curled in foetuslike sleep. Another had
fallen forward onto the table, arms extended, the emerald set of a ring
twinkling dully on one finger. Skeletons covered with leather, Gloria
Standish had called them, and so they were--faces like skulls, arms and
legs like sticks, the flesh shrunken onto the bones under it.

"Isn't this something!" Lattimer was exulting. "Mass suicide, that's
what it was. Notice what's in the corners?"

Braziers, made of perforated two-gallon-odd metal cans, the white walls
smudged with smoke above them. Von Ohlmhorst had noticed them at once,
and was poking into one of them with his flashlight.

"Yes; charcoal. I noticed a quantity of it around a couple of
hand-forges in the shop on the first floor. That's why you had so much
trouble breaking in; they'd sealed the room on the inside." He
straightened and went around the room, until he found a ventilator, and
peered into it. "Stuffed with rags. They must have been all that were
left, here. Their power was gone, and they were old and tired, and all
around them their world was dying. So they just came in here and lit the
charcoal