e report of one of the airdyne
pilots, returned from his afternoon survey flight. A couple of girl
lieutenants from Signals, going over the script of the evening telecast,
to be transmitted to the _Cyrano_, on orbit five thousand miles off
planet and relayed from thence to Terra via Lunar. Sid Chamberlain, the
Trans-Space News Service man, was with them. Like Selim and herself, he
was a civilian; he was advertising the fact with a white shirt and a
sleeveless blue sweater. And Major Lindemann, the engineer officer, and
one of his assistants, arguing over some plans on a drafting board. She
hoped, drawing a pint of hot water to wash her hands and sponge off her
face, that they were doing something about the pipeline.

She started to carry the notebooks and sketchbooks over to where Selim
von Ohlmhorst was sitting, and then, as she always did, she turned aside
and stopped to watch Sachiko. The Japanese girl was restoring what had
been a book, fifty thousand years ago; her eyes were masked by a
binocular loup, the black headband invisible against her glossy black
hair, and she was picking delicately at the crumbled page with a
hair-fine wire set in a handle of copper tubing. Finally, loosening a
particle as tiny as a snowflake, she grasped it with tweezers, placed it
on the sheet of transparent plastic on which she was reconstructing the
page, and set it with a mist of fixative from a little spraygun. It was
a sheer joy to watch her; every movement was as graceful and precise as
though done to music after being rehearsed a hundred times.

"Hello, Martha. It isn't cocktail-time yet, is it?" The girl at the
table spoke without raising her head, almost without moving her lips, as
though she were afraid that the slightest breath would disturb the flaky
stuff in front of her.

"No, it's only fifteen-thirty. I finished my work, over there. I didn't
find any more books, if that's good news for you."

Sachiko took off the loup and leaned back in her chair, her palms cupped
over her eyes.

"No, I like doing this. I call it micro-jigsaw puzzles. This book, here,
really is a mess. Selim found it lying open, with some heavy stuff on
top of it; the pages were simply crushed." She hesitated briefly. "If
only it would mean something, after I did it."

There could be a faintly critical overtone to that. As she replied,
Martha realized that she was being defensive.

"It will, some day. Look how long it took to read Egyptian
hierogl