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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 briefly like the weapon it resembled, and the doors popped a few inches apart, then stuck. Enough dust had worked into the recesses into which it was supposed to slide to block it on both sides.

That was old stuff; they ran into that every time they had to force a door, and they were prepared for it. Somebody went outside and brought in a power-jack and finally one of the doors inched back to the door jamb. That was enough to get the lights and equipment through: they all passed from the room to the hallway beyond. About half the other doors were open; each had a number and a single word, Darfhulva, over it.

One of the civilian volunteers, a woman professor of natural ecology from Penn State University, was looking up and down the hall.

“You know,” she said, “I feel at home here. I think this was a college of some sort, and these were classrooms. That word, up there; that was the subject taught, or the department. And those electronic devices, all where the class would face them; audio-visual teaching aids.”

“A twenty-five-story university?” Lattimer scoffed. “Why, a building like this would handle thirty thousand students.”

“Maybe there were that many. This was a big city, in its prime,” Martha said, moved chiefly by a desire to oppose Lattimer.

“Yes, but think of the snafu in the halls, every time they changed classes. It’d take half an hour to get everybody back and forth from one floor to another.” He turned to von Ohlmhorst. “I’m going up above this floor. This place has been looted clean up to here, but there’s a chance there may be something above,” he said.