"I was just making some coffee when you showed up," Martin Devere said, turning away. "Have some? I'm afraid it's instant. I've given up trying to get the Institute to send me a can of real coffee in the rocket. They think I need canned TV shows more." "He's harmless," the bald man said. "You can see he's just an old senile nut. Leave him be, we've work to do." The tall man lowered his weapon, then let it fall into the holster at his hip. "No big hurry. I think I'd like some of that coffee first. Say, Pop, how about cooking us a meal in a couple of hours?" Martin Devere was spooning brown powder into three cups. "Sure thing. What would you like--beans and franks, or franks and beans?" * * * * * "I suppose you wonder what we're doing, Pop?" The tall man held the disassembled pieces of his gun in his lap. He was carefully polishing each part with a chemically treated cloth. It was three days since they had landed, and the tall metal skeleton was beginning to take shape out in the desert. At the moment, the bald man was out alone, testing circuits. Usually the two went out together--they had apparently decided it was safe to leave Martin Devere unguarded, though they had smashed his radio transmitter just in case. The two men worked steadily during the daylight hours, came back at sunset to eat and sleep, then went out again at dawn. The towering lacework of steel was growing like an ugly flower. The tall man held the trigger assembly of his gun up to the light. He turned it slowly between his thumb and forefinger. It cast an odd crescent-shaped shadow over the muscles of his jaw. "No, I don't wonder what you're doing," Martin Devere answered. He was sitting at his workbench, crouched over an ancient metal plate as thin as paper. The tall man began to put his weapon back together again. He snapped the trigger assembly into the receiver. He pulled the hammer back and then released it; it made a sharp, hard click. "Not even curious, Pop? Okay, then tell me what _you're_ doing. What's that piece of tinfoil you've been staring at the past two hours?" Martin Devere straightened and turned to look at the other. "It's an ancient Martian scroll. It's nearly a million years old. I found it in a new pit I've been digging, five hundred meters down. It's the longest and perhaps most important bit of Martian writing I've found so far." "Yeah? What's it have to say?" Martin Devere shook his head. "Their language, their whole frame of reference, was fundamentally different from ours. It's something like higher mathematics, you'd have to learn the language to understand it. But I suppose you might say that this is a poem.... Yes, an epic poem." The tall man laughed. He shoved an ammunition clip into his weapon, pumped a round into the chamber, slipped the gun back into its holster. He got up and began pacing the floor of the igloo. The floor was cluttered with dozens of artifacts.