Inside cabinets and broad tables bore a wilderness of strange artifacts, many still crusted with red Martian sand. Alone in the room a trim-mustached man in a rough open-throated shirt looked up from an object he had been cleaning with a soft brush.
“Dr. Thwaite? I’m Jim Dalton.”
“Glad to meet you, Professor.” Thwaite carefully laid down his work, then rose to grip the visitor’s hand. “You didn’t lose any time.”
“After you called last night I managed to get a seat on the dawn-rocket out of Chicago. I hope I’m not interrupting?”
“Not at all. I’ve got some assistants coming in around nine. I was just going over some stuff I don’t like to trust to their thumb-fingered mercies.”
Dalton looked down at the thing the archeologist had been brushing. It was a reed syrinx, the Pan’s pipes of antiquity. “That’s not a very Martian-looking specimen,” he commented.
“The Martians, not having any lips, could hardly have had much use for it,” said Thwaite. “This is of Earthly manufacture—one of the Martians’ specimens from Earth, kept intact over all this time by a preservative I wish we knew how to make. It’s a nice find, man’s earliest known musical instrument—hardly as interesting as the record though.”
Dalton’s eyes brightened. “Have you listened to the record yet?”
“No. We got the machine working last night and ran off some of the Martian stuff. Clear as a bell. But I saved the main attraction for when you got here.” Thwaite turned to a side door, fishing a key from his pocket. “The playback machine’s in here.”
The apparatus, squatting on a sturdy table in the small room beyond, had the slightly haywire look of an experimental model. But it was little short of a miracle to those who knew how it had been built—on the basis of radioed descriptions of the ruined device the excavators had dug up on Mars.