*
The sixth floor was _Darfhulva_, too; military and technologicalhistory, from the character of the murals. They looked around thecentral hall, and went down to the fifth; it was like the floors aboveexcept that the big quadrangle was stacked with dusty furniture andboxes. Ivan Fitzgerald, who was carrying the floodlight, swung it slowlyaround. Here the murals were of heroic-sized Martians, so human inappearance as to seem members of her own race, each holding someobject--a book, or a test tube, or some bit of scientific apparatus, andbehind them were scenes of laboratories and factories, flame and smoke,lightning-flashes. The word at the top of each of the four walls was onewith which she was already familiar--_Sornhulva_.
"Hey, Martha; there's that word," Ivan Fitzgerald exclaimed. "The one inthe title of your magazine." He looked at the paintings. "Chemistry, orphysics."
"Both." Hubert Penrose considered. "I don't think the Martians made anysharp distinction between them. See, the old fellow with the scragglywhiskers must be the inventor of the spectroscope; he has one in hishands, and he has a rainbow behind him. And the woman in the blue smock,beside him, worked in organic chemistry; see the diagrams of long-chainmolecules behind her. What word would convey the idea of chemistry andphysics taken as one subject?"
"_Sornhulva_," Sachiko suggested. "If _hulva's_ something like science,"_sorn_" must mean matter, or substance, or physical object. You wereright, all along, Martha. A civilization like this would certainly leavesomething like this, that would be self-explanatory."
"This'll wipe a little more of that superior grin off Tony Lattimer'sface," Fitzgerald was saying, as they went down the motionless escalatorto the floor below. "Tony wants to be a big shot. When you want to be abig shot, you can't bear the possibility of anybody else being a biggerbig shot, and whoever makes a start on reading this language will be thebiggest big shot archaeology ever saw."
That was true. She hadn't thought of it, in that way, before, and nowshe tried not to think about it. She didn't want to be a big shot. Shewanted to be able to read the Martian language, and find things outabout the Martians.
Two escalators down, they came out on a mezzanine around a wide centralhall on the street level, the floor forty feet below them and theceiling thirty feet above. Their lights picked out object after objectbelow--a huge group of sculptured figures in the middle; some kind of amotor vehicle jacked up on trestles for repairs; things that looked likemachine-guns and auto-cannon; long tables, tops littered with adust-covered miscellany; machinery; boxes and crates and containers.
* * * * *
They made their way down and walked among the clutter, missing a hundredthings for every one they saw, until they found an escalator to thebasement. There were three basements, one under another, until at lastthey stood at the bottom of the last escalator, on a bare concretefloor, swinging the portable floodlight over stacks of boxes and barrelsand drums, and heaps of powdery dust. The boxes were plastic--nobody hadever found anything made of wood in the city--and the barrels and drumswere of metal or glass or some glasslike substance. They were outwardlyintact. The powdery heaps might have been anything organic, or anythingcontaining fluid. Down here, where wind and dust could not reach,evaporation had been the only force of destruction after the minute lifethat caused putrefaction had vanished.
They found refrigeration rooms, too, and using Martha's ice axe and thepistollike vibratool Sachiko carried on her belt, they pounded and priedone open, to find dessicated piles of what had been vegetables, andleathery chunks of meat. Samples of that stuff, rocketed up to the ship,would give a reliable estimate, by radio-carbon dating, of how long agothis building had been occupied. The refrigeration unit, radicallydifferent from anything their own culture had produced, had beenelectrically powered. Sachiko and Penrose, poking into it, found theswitches still on; the machine had only ceased to function when thepower-source, whatever that had been, had failed.
The middle basement had also been used, at least toward the end, forstorage; it was cut in half by a partition pierced by but one door. Theytook half an hour to force this, and were on the point of sending abovefor heavy equipment when it yielded enough for them to squeeze through.Fitzgerald, in the lead with the light, stopped short, looked around,and then gave a groan that came through his helmet-speaker like afoghorn.
"Oh, no! _No!_"
"What's the matter, Ivan?" Sachiko, entering behind him, askedanxiously.
He stepped aside. "Look at it, Sachi! Are we going to have to do allthat?"
Martha crowded through behind her friend and looked around, then stoodmotionless, dizzy with excitement. Books. Case on case of books, half anacre of cases, fifteen feet to the ceiling. Fitzgerald, and Penrose, whohad pushed in behind her, were talking in rapid excitement; she onlyheard the sound of their voices, not their words. This must be the mainstacks of the university library--the entire literature of the vanishedrace of Mars. In the center, down an aisle between the cases, she couldsee the hollow square of the librarians' desk, and stairs and adumb-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 betalking about the spidery metal stairs.
"I'd say they were safe," Penrose answered. "The trouble we've had withdoors around here shows that the metal hasn't deteriorated."
In the end, the Japanese girl led the way, more catlike than ever in hercaution. The stairs were quite sound, in spite of their fragileappearance, and they all followed her. The floor above was a duplicateof the room they had entered, and seemed to contain about as many books.Rather than waste time forcing the door here, they returned to themiddle basement and came up by the escalator down which they hadoriginally descended.
The upper basement contained kitchens--electric stoves, some with potsand 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-levelfloor, directly above the stacks. It seemed to have been converted intoa sort of common living room for the building's last occupants. Anadjoining auditorium had been made into a chemical works; there werevats and distillation apparatus, and a metal fractionating tower thatextended through a hole knocked in the ceiling seventy feet above. Agood deal of plastic furniture of the sort they had been findingeverywhere in the city was stacked about, some of it broken up,apparently for reprocessing. The other rooms on the street floor seemedalso to have been devoted to manufacturing and repair work; aconsiderable industry, along a number of lines, must have been carriedon here for a long time after the university had ceased to function assuch.
On the second floor, they found a museum; many of the exhibits remained,tantalizingly half-visible in grimed glass cases. There had beenadministrative offices there, too. The doors of most of them wereclosed, and they did not waste time trying to force them, but those thatwere open had been turned into living quarters. They made notes, andrough floor plans, to guide them in future more thorough examination; itwas almost noon before they had worked their way back to the seventhfloor.
Selim von Ohlmhorst was in a room on the north side of the building,sketching the position of things before examining them and collectingthem for removal. He had the floor checkerboarded with a grid of chalkedlines, each numbered.
"We have everything on this floor photographed," he said. "I have threegangs--all the floodlights I have--sketching and making measurements. Atthe rate we're going, with time out for lunch, we'll be finished by themiddle of the afternoon."
"You've been working fast. Evidently you aren't being high-church abouta 'qualified archaeologist' entering rooms first," Penrose commented.
"Ach, childishness!" the old man exclaimed impatiently. "These officersof yours aren't fools. All of them have been to Intelligence School andCriminal Investigation School. Some of the most careful amateurarchaeologists I ever knew were retired soldiers or policemen. Bu
t thereisn't much work to be done. Most of the rooms are either empty or likethis 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 yousay, Martha?"
She started to tell Selim. The others, unable to restrain theirexcitement, broke in with interruptions. Von Ohlmhorst was staring inincredulous amazement.
"But this floor was looted almost clean, and the buildings we've enteredbefore were all looted from the street level up," he said, at length.
"The people who looted this one lived here," Penrose replied. "They hadelectric power to the last; we found refrigerators full