g or film or
record-tape had vanished.

Finally, they entered the private office of Force-General Foxx Travis.
It had not only been used, it was in disorder. Ashtrays full, many of
the forty-year-old cigarette ends lipstick tinted. Chairs shoved
around at random. Three bottles on the desk, with Terran bourbon
labels; two empty and one with about an inch of whisky left in it. But
no glasses.

That bothered Conn. Somehow, he couldn't quite picture the commander
and staff of the Third Fleet-Army Force passing bottles around and
drinking from the neck. Then he noticed that the wall across the room
was strangely scarred and scratched. Dropping his eye to the floor
under it, he caught the twinkle of broken glass. They had gathered
here, and talked for a long time. Then they had risen, for a final
toast, and when it was drunk, they had hurled their glasses against
the wall and smashed them.

Then they had gone out, leaving the broken glass and the empty
bottles; knowing that they would never return.

VIII

Before they returned to the lower level into which the lateral tunnel
entered, Matsui and his gang had the power plant going; the ventilator
fans were humming softly, and whenever they pressed a starting button,
the escalators began to move. They got the pumps going, and the
oxygen-generators, and the sewage disposal system. Until the
communication center could be checked and the relay station found,
they ran a cable out to the _Lester Dawes_, landed in the canyon, and
used her screen-and-radio equipment. Before the Claims Office in
Storisende closed, Rodney Maxwell had transmitted in recorded views of
the interior, and enough of a description for a final claim. They also
received teleprint copies of the Storisende papers. The first story,
in an extra edition of the _Herald-Guardian_, was headlined,
MERLIN FOUND! That would have been the reporter who bolted
off prematurely when they first saw the personnel record machines.
Conn wondered if he still had a job. A later edition corrected this,
but was full of extravagant accounts of what had been discovered.
Merlin or no Merlin, Force Command Duplicate was the biggest
abandoned-property discovery since the Third Force left the
Trisystem.

The camp they had set up on top of the mesa was used, that night, only
by Klem Zareff's guards. Everybody else was inside, eating cold
rations when hungry and, when they could keep awake no longer, bedding
down on piles of bl