For the record, it was a Russian, Nicolai Belov, who found it and brought it back to the ship. He found it in the course of a routine geological survey he was making some six miles from the ship the day after they landed. For what it might be worth, he was driving a caterpillar jeep at the time, a caterpillar jeep that had been made in Detroit, U.S.A.

He radioed the ship almost immediately. Preston O’Brien, the navigator, was in the control room at the time, as usual, checking his electronic computers against a dummy return course he had set up. He took the call. Belov, of course, spoke in English; O’Brien in Russian.

“O’Brien,” Belov said excitedly, once identification had been established. “Guess what I’ve found? Martians! A whole city!”

O’Brien snapped the computer relays shut, leaned back in the bucket seat, and ran his fingers through his crewcut red hair. They’d had no right to, of course but somehow they’d all taken it for granted that they were alone on the chilly, dusty, waterless planet. Finding it wasn’t so gave him a sudden acute attack of claustrophobia. It was like looking up from his thesis work in an airy, silent college library to find it had filled with talkative freshmen just released from a class in English composition. Or that disagreeable moment at the beginning of the expedition, back in Benares, when he’d come out of a nightmare in which he’d been drifting helplessly by himself in a starless black vacuum to find Kolevitch’s powerful right arm hanging down from the bunk above him and the air filled with sounds of thick Slavic snores. It wasn’t just that he was jumpy, he’d assured himself; after all, everyone was jumpy . . . these days.

He’d never liked being crowded. Or being taken by surprise. He rubbed his hands together irritably over the equations he’d scribbled a moment before. Of course, come to think of it, if anyone was being crowded, it was the Martians. There was that.