Part 3 (1/2)
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 s.p.a.ce Force officers commented. ”Ten or twelve electric outlets.” He brushed the dusty wall with his glove, then sc.r.a.ped 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 pa.s.sed 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
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 cla.s.srooms. That word, up there; that was the subject taught, or the department. And those electronic devices, all where the cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses. 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.
”I'll stay on this floor, at present,” the Turco-German replied. ”There will be much coming and going, and dragging things in and out. We should get this completely examined and recorded first. Then Major Lindemann's people can do their worst, here.”
”Well, if n.o.body else wants it, I'll take the downstairs,” Martha said.
”I'll go along with you,” Hubert Penrose told her. ”If the lower floors have no archaeological value, we'll turn them into living quarters. I like this building: it'll give everybody room to keep out from under everybody else's feet.” He looked down the hall. ”We ought to find escalators at the middle.”
The hallway, too, was thick underfoot with dust. Most of the open rooms were empty, but a few contained furniture, including small seat-desks.
The original proponent of the university theory pointed these out as just what might be found in cla.s.srooms. There were escalators, up and down, on either side of the hall, and more on the intersecting pa.s.sage to the right.
”That's how they handled the students, between cla.s.ses,” Martha commented. ”And I'll bet there are more ahead, there.”
They came to a stop where the hallway ended at a great square central hall. There were elevators, there, on two of the sides, and four escalators, still usable as stairways. But it was the walls, and the paintings on them, that brought them up short and staring.
They were clouded with dirt--she was trying to imagine what they must have looked like originally, and at the same time estimating the labor that would be involved in cleaning them--but they were still distinguishable, as was the word, _Darfhulva_, in golden letters above each of the four sides. It was a moment before she realized, from the murals, that she had at last found a meaningful Martian word. They were a vast historical panorama, clockwise around the room. A group of skin-clad savages squatting around a fire. Hunters with bows and spears, carrying a carca.s.s of an animal slightly like a pig. Nomads riding long-legged, graceful mounts like hornless deer. Peasants sowing and reaping; mud-walled hut villages, and cities; processions of priests and warriors; battles with swords and bows, and with cannon and muskets; galleys, and s.h.i.+ps with sails, and s.h.i.+ps without visible means of propulsion, and aircraft. Changing costumes and weapons and machines and styles of architecture. A richly fertile landscape, gradually merging into barren deserts and bushlands--the time of the great planet-wide drought. The Ca.n.a.l Builders--men with machines recognizable as steam-shovels and derricks, digging and quarrying and driving across the empty plains with aqueducts. More cities--seaports on the shrinking oceans; dwindling, half-deserted cities; an abandoned city, with four tiny humanoid figures and a thing like a combat-car in the middle of a brush-grown plaza, they and their vehicle dwarfed by the huge lifeless buildings around them. She had not the least doubt; _Darfhulva_ was History.
”Wonderful!” von Ohlmhorst was saying. ”The entire history of this race.