"You earthmen," sighed Foster. "For you every new experience is immediately assessed in terms of its merchandising possibilities. Well, I leave that to you." "Okay, okay," I said. "You go on ahead and scout around down that way, if you want--where the technical-looking stuff is. I want to browse around here for a while." "As you wish." "We'll meet at this end of the big hall we passed back there. Okay?" Foster nodded and went on. I turned to a bin filled with what looked like unset emeralds the size of walnuts. I picked up a handful, juggled them lovingly. "Anyone for marbles?" I murmured to myself. Hours later, I came along a corridor that was like a path through a garden that was a forest, crossed a ballroom like a meadow floored in fine-grained rust-red wood and shaded by giant ferns, and went under an arch into the hall where Foster sat at a long table cut from yellow marble. A light the color of sunrise gleamed through tall pseudo-windows. I dumped an armfull of books on the table. "Look at these," I said. "All made from the same stuff as the journal. And the pictures...." I flipped open one of the books, a heavy folio-sized volume, to a double-page spread in color showing a group of bearded Arabs in dingy white djellabas staring toward the camera, a flock of thin goats in the background. It looked like the kind of picture the National Geographic runs, except that the quality of the color and detail was equal to the best color transparencies. "I can't read the print," I said, "but I'm a whiz at looking at pictures. Most of the books showed scenes like I hope I never see in the flesh, but I found a few that were made on earth--God knows how long ago." "Travel books, perhaps," Foster said. "Travel books that you could sell to any university on earth for their next year's budget," I said, shuffling pages. "Take a look at this one." Foster looked across at the panoramic shot of a procession of shaven-headed men in white sarongs, carrying a miniature golden boat on their shoulders, descending a long flight of white stone steps leading from a colonnade of heroic human figures with folded arms and painted faces. In the background, brick-red cliffs loomed up, baked in desert heat. "That's the temple of Hat-Shepsut in its prime," I said. "Which makes this print close to four thousand years old. Here's another I recognize." I turned to a smaller, aerial view, showing a gigantic pyramid, its polished stone facing chipped in places and with a few panels missing from the lower levels, revealing the cruder structure of massive blocks beneath. "That's one of the major pyramids, maybe Khufu's," I said. "It was already a couple thousand years old, and falling into disrepair. And look at this----" I opened another volume, showed Foster a vivid photograph of a great shaggy elephant with a pinkish trunk upraised between wide-curving yellow tusks.