d been cleaning with a soft brush.

"Dr. Thwaite? I'm Jim Dalton."

"Glad to meet you, Professor." Thwaite carefully laid down his work,
then rose to grip the visitor's hand. "You didn't lose any time."

"After you called last night I managed to get a seat on the
dawn-rocket out of Chicago. I hope I'm not interrupting?"

"Not at all. I've got some assistants coming in around nine. I was
just going over some stuff I don't like to trust to their
thumb-fingered mercies."

Dalton looked down at the thing the archeologist had been brushing. It
was a reed syrinx, the Pan's pipes of antiquity. "That's not a very
Martian-looking specimen," he commented.

"The Martians, not having any lips, could hardly have had much use for
it," said Thwaite. "This is of Earthly manufacture--one of the
Martians' specimens from Earth, kept intact over all this time by a
preservative I wish we knew how to make. It's a nice find, man's
earliest known musical instrument--hardly as interesting as the record
though."

Dalton's eyes brightened. "Have you listened to the record yet?"

"No. We got the machine working last night and ran off some of the
Martian stuff. Clear as a bell. But I saved the main attraction for
when you got here." Thwaite turned to a side door, fishing a key from
his pocket. "The playback machine's in here."

The apparatus, squatting on a sturdy table in the small room beyond,
had the slightly haywire look of an experimental model. But it was
little short of a miracle to those who knew how it had been built--on
the basis of radioed descriptions of the ruined device the excavators
had dug up on Mars.

Even more intriguing, however, was the row of neatly labeled boxes on
a shelf. There in cushioned nests reposed little cylinders of
age-tarnished metal, on which a close observer could still trace the
faint engraved lines and whorls of Martian script. These were the
best-preserved specimens yet found of Martian record films.

Sound and pictures were on them, impressed there by a triumphant
science so long ago that the code of Hammurabi or the hieroglyphs of
Khufu seemed by comparison like yesterday's newspaper. Men of Earth
were ready now to evoke these ancient voices--but to reproduce the
stereoscopic images was still beyond human technology.

Dalton scrutinized one label intently. "Odd," he said. "I realize how
much the Martian archives may have to offer us when we master their
spoken language--but I still want most