e
window out; the lab crew, aboard the ship, were still trying to find out
just what the stuff was.

Tony Lattimer had gone forward and was sweeping his flashlight back and
forth, swearing petulantly, his voice harshened and amplified by his
helmet-speaker.

"I thought I was blasting into a hallway; this lets us into a room.
Careful; there's about a two-foot drop to the floor, and a lot of rubble
from the blast just inside."

He stepped down through the breach; the others began dragging equipment
out of the trucks--shovels and picks and crowbars and sledges, portable
floodlights, cameras, sketching materials, an extension ladder, even
Alpinists' ropes and crampons and pickaxes. Hubert Penrose was
shouldering something that looked like a surrealist machine gun but
which was really a nuclear-electric jack-hammer. Martha selected one of
the spike-shod mountaineer's ice axes, with which she could dig or chop
or poke or pry or help herself over rough footing.

The windows, grimed and crusted with fifty millennia of dust, filtered
in a dim twilight; even the breach in the wall, in the morning shade,
lighted only a small patch of floor. Somebody snapped on a floodlight,
aiming it at the ceiling. The big room was empty and bare; dust lay
thick on the floor and reddened the once-white walls. It could have been
a large office, but there was nothing left in it to indicate its use.

"This one's been stripped up to the seventh floor!" Lattimer exclaimed.
"Street level'll be cleaned out, completely."

"Do for living quarters and shops, then," Lindemann said. "Added to the
others, this'll take care of everybody on the _Schiaparelli_."

"Seem to have been a lot of electric or electronic apparatus over along
this wall," one of the Space Force officers commented. "Ten or twelve
electric outlets." He brushed the dusty wall with his glove, then
scraped on the floor with his foot. "I can see where things were pried
loose."

* * * * *

The door, one of the double sliding things the Martians had used, was
closed. Selim von Ohlmhorst tried it, but it was stuck fast. The metal
latch-parts had frozen together, molecule bonding itself to molecule,
since the door had last been closed. Hubert Penrose came over with the
jack-hammer, fitting a spear-point chisel into place. He set the chisel
in the joint between the doors, braced the hammer against his hip, and
squeezed the trigger-switch. The hammer banged b