d not waste time trying to force them, but those that
were open had been turned into living quarters. They made notes, and
rough floor plans, to guide them in future more thorough examination; it
was almost noon before they had worked their way back to the seventh
floor.

Selim von Ohlmhorst was in a room on the north side of the building,
sketching the position of things before examining them and collecting
them for removal. He had the floor checkerboarded with a grid of chalked
lines, each numbered.

"We have everything on this floor photographed," he said. "I have three
gangs--all the floodlights I have--sketching and making measurements. At
the rate we're going, with time out for lunch, we'll be finished by the
middle of the afternoon."

"You've been working fast. Evidently you aren't being high-church about
a 'qualified archaeologist' entering rooms first," Penrose commented.

"Ach, childishness!" the old man exclaimed impatiently. "These officers
of yours aren't fools. All of them have been to Intelligence School and
Criminal Investigation School. Some of the most careful amateur
archaeologists I ever knew were retired soldiers or policemen. But there
isn't much work to be done. Most of the rooms are either empty or like
this one--a few bits of furniture and broken trash and scraps of paper.
Did you find anything down on the lower floors?"

"Well, yes," Penrose said, a hint of mirth in his voice. "What would you
say, Martha?"

She started to tell Selim. The others, unable to restrain their
excitement, broke in with interruptions. Von Ohlmhorst was staring in
incredulous amazement.

"But this floor was looted almost clean, and the buildings we've entered
before were all looted from the street level up," he said, at length.

"The people who looted this one lived here," Penrose replied. "They had
electric power to the last; we found refrigerators full of food, and
stoves with the dinner still on them. They must have used the elevators
to haul things down from the upper floor. The whole first floor was
converted into workshops and laboratories. I think that this place must
have been something like a monastery in the Dark Ages in Europe, or what
such a monastery would have been like if the Dark Ages had followed the
fall of a highly developed scientific civilization. For one thing, we
found a lot of machine guns and light auto-cannon on the street level,
and all the doors were barricaded. The people here were