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knew exactly when, for records were incomplete, but certainly many thousands of years ago. And this strange rocket buried in the polar ice was of a different pattern from those of the abortive rocket era in the age of women. It was straight and slender and functional. There were no little devices or artistic shaping of the hull fittings so characteristic of the feminine designer. A psychologist might have described its shape as phallic in origin, but there were no psychologists in the party, and, anyway, the word had been meaningless for some five thousand years.

The rocket was intact and sealed. It had been necessary to cut through the hull with arc-burners in order to gain access to the interior. Inside a tiny control cabin they had found the body, frozen solid, encased in a metal and plastic pressure suit.

The expedition had made no attempt to strip the body, partly because it was obviously dead, and partly because it was thought that the examination ought to be left to those whose job it was to deal with such matters. In due course the body and certain items of equipment from the rocket were flown back to civilization, where they were passed to the appropriate scientific departments concerned. Not a single woman in the expedition had even suspected that the body might be that of a man, despite the implication of the unfamiliar rocket design. Men were the last thing any woman would think of in this day and age.

The body had been removed from the pressure suit at the Aeronautical Research Center. The suit, it seemed, was of major interest, but the body, clothed in quaint attire which bore no parallel to any kind of wearing apparel in current use, was quickly disposed of by sending it intact to the Department of Biophysics. And so it reached the brusque efficient hands of Gallardia, who soon discovered that she had come into possession of a man, albeit a dead one.

The body was in a remarkably fine state of preservation,