ifteen feet to the ceiling. Fitzgerald, and Penrose, who
had pushed in behind her, were talking in rapid excitement; she only
heard the sound of their voices, not their words. This must be the main
stacks of the university library--the entire literature of the vanished
race of Mars. In the center, down an aisle between the cases, she could
see the hollow square of the librarians' desk, and stairs and a
dumb-waiter to the floor above.

She realized that she was walking forward, with the others, toward this.
Sachiko was saying: "I'm the lightest; let me go first." She must be
talking about the spidery metal stairs.

"I'd say they were safe," Penrose answered. "The trouble we've had with
doors around here shows that the metal hasn't deteriorated."

In the end, the Japanese girl led the way, more catlike than ever in her
caution. The stairs were quite sound, in spite of their fragile
appearance, and they all followed her. The floor above was a duplicate
of the room they had entered, and seemed to contain about as many books.
Rather than waste time forcing the door here, they returned to the
middle basement and came up by the escalator down which they had
originally descended.

The upper basement contained kitchens--electric stoves, some with pots
and pans still on them--and a big room that must have been, originally,
the students' dining room, though when last used it had been a workshop.
As they expected, the library reading room was on the street-level
floor, directly above the stacks. It seemed to have been converted into
a sort of common living room for the building's last occupants. An
adjoining auditorium had been made into a chemical works; there were
vats and distillation apparatus, and a metal fractionating tower that
extended through a hole knocked in the ceiling seventy feet above. A
good deal of plastic furniture of the sort they had been finding
everywhere in the city was stacked about, some of it broken up,
apparently for reprocessing. The other rooms on the street floor seemed
also to have been devoted to manufacturing and repair work; a
considerable industry, along a number of lines, must have been carried
on here for a long time after the university had ceased to function as
such.

On the second floor, they found a museum; many of the exhibits remained,
tantalizingly half-visible in grimed glass cases. There had been
administrative offices there, too. The doors of most of them were
closed, and they di