ng at the ceiling, as embarrassed as though Lattimer had flung
something dirty on the table in front of them. Tony Lattimer had,
desperately, wanted Selim to go home on the _Cyrano_. Martiology was a
new field; if Selim entered it, he would bring with him the reputation
he had already built in Hittitology, automatically stepping into the
leading role that Lattimer had coveted for himself. Ivan Fitzgerald's
words echoed back to her--when you want to be a big shot, you can't bear
the possibility of anybody else being a bigger big shot. His derision of
her own efforts became comprehensible, too. It wasn't that he was
convinced that she would never learn to read the Martian language. He
had been afraid that she would.

* * * * *

Ivan Fitzgerald finally isolated the germ that had caused the Finchley
girl's undiagnosed illness. Shortly afterward, the malady turned into a
mild fever, from which she recovered. Nobody else seemed to have caught
it. Fitzgerald was still trying to find out how the germ had been
transmitted.

They found a globe of Mars, made when the city had been a seaport. They
located the city, and learned that its name had been Kukan--or something
with a similar vowel-consonant ratio. Immediately, Sid Chamberlain and
Gloria Standish began giving their telecasts a Kukan dateline, and
Hubert Penrose used the name in his official reports. They also found a
Martian calendar; the year had been divided into ten more or less equal
months, and one of them had been Doma. Another month was Nor, and that
was a part of the name of the scientific journal Martha had found.

Bill Chandler, the zoologist, had been going deeper and deeper into the
old sea bottom of Syrtis. Four hundred miles from Kukan, and at fifteen
thousand feet lower altitude, he shot a bird. At least, it was a
something with wings and what were almost but not quite feathers, though
it was more reptilian than avian in general characteristics. He and Ivan
Fitzgerald skinned and mounted it, and then dissected the carcass almost
tissue by tissue. About seven-eighths of its body capacity was lungs; it
certainly breathed air containing at least half enough oxygen to support
human life, or five times as much as the air around Kukan.

That took the center of interest away from archaeology, and started a
new burst of activity. All the expedition's aircraft--four jetticopters
and three wingless airdyne reconnaissance fighters--wer