already, the bright
metal was thinly coated with red dust. She thought, again, of what
clearing this city would mean, in terms of time and labor, of people and
supplies and equipment brought across fifty million miles of space.
They'd have to use machinery; there was no other way it could be done.
Bulldozers and power shovels and draglines; they were fast, but they
were rough and indiscriminate. She remembered the digs around Harappa
and Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus Valley, and the careful, patient native
laborers--the painstaking foremen, the pickmen and spademen, the long
files of basketmen carrying away the earth. Slow and primitive as the
civilization whose ruins they were uncovering, yes, but she could count
on the fingers of one hand the times one of her pickmen had damaged a
valuable object in the ground. If it hadn't been for the underpaid and
uncomplaining native laborer, archaeology would still be back where
Wincklemann had found it. But on Mars there was no native labor; the
last Martian had died five hundred centuries ago.

Something started banging like a machine gun, four or five hundred yards
to her left. A solenoid jack-hammer; Tony Lattimer must have decided
which building he wanted to break into next. She became conscious, then,
of the awkward weight of her equipment, and began redistributing it,
shifting the straps of her oxy-tank pack, slinging the camera from one
shoulder and the board and drafting tools from the other, gathering the
notebooks and sketchbooks under her left arm. She started walking down
the road, over hillocks of buried rubble, around snags of wall jutting
up out of the loess, past buildings still standing, some of them already
breached and explored, and across the brush-grown flat to the huts.

* * * * *

There were ten people in the main office room of Hut One when she
entered. As soon as she had disposed of her oxygen equipment, she lit a
cigarette, her first since noon, then looked from one to another of
them. Old Selim von Ohlmhorst, the Turco-German, one of her two fellow
archaeologists, sitting at the end of the long table against the farther
wall, smoking his big curved pipe and going through a looseleaf
notebook. The girl ordnance officer, Sachiko Koremitsu, between two
droplights at the other end of the table, her head bent over her work.
Colonel Hubert Penrose, the Space Force CO, and Captain Field, the
intelligence officer, listening to th