The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Old Martians, by Roger Phillips Graham

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Title: The Old Martians

Author: Roger Phillips Graham

Release Date: May 30, 2010 [EBook #32590]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The OLD MARTIANS

By Rog Phillips

[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from If Worlds of Science
Fiction March 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _They opened the ruins to tourists at a dollar a head but
they reckoned without The OLD MARTIANS_]

The man with the pith helmet had his back toward me. Hunched forward, he
was screaming at the girl in the lens of his camera. "Don't just stand
there, Dotty! Move! Do something! Back up toward that column with
inscriptions on it...."

The girl was tall and longlegged with ideal body proportions, her
features and skin coloring a perfect norm-blend with no throwback
elements. Right now she seemed confused and half-frightened as she tried
to comply with the directions of the man with the movie camera. She
smiled artificially, turned her head to look at the fragment of a wall
behind her, reached out with a finger and started tracing the lines of
an almost obliterated inscription in its stone surface.

The camera stopped whirring. Its owner straightened and grumbled,
"That's all."

Now the girl was allowed to go back to her worrying. Swiftly she
surveyed the crowd, but didn't find the person she was looking for. She
started moving toward one of the arches that led deeper into the ruins.

I followed her slowly.

She passed through the arch, stopped, and turned her head toward the
right, her eyes on something out of sight. She'd found him, but she saw
me at the same time and her worry deepened.

When she moved back into the crowd, I strolled casually through the
archway.

There was a vaguely defined passageway, the roof over it gone for half a
million