We clambered over shattered piles of black basalt under the bright green moons. This was more like the kind of thing I thought Bob Hoodward would do. A wind had come up and it was moaning through the tumbled stones. The beginning lines of "An Ode to the Homeless Ghost" began to run through my head. I wasn't watching where I was going.

I FELL STRAIGHT DOWN!

Fifteen feet below I fetched up with a horrible thud!

Shafter's voice out in the night. "Hey, where'd you go?"

"I'm down here!" I yelled.

I could see his head above in the hole, silhouetted against the moon-hazed sky. "You shouldn't go running off that way! You could get hurt!"

"Could get hurt?" I wailed. "I'm smashed! Get me out of here!"

He shined a light down into the place. "Hey!" he said. "Good going! You found a room!"

I stopped feeling for broken bones and looked around. Yes, I was in what might have been a room.

Shafter got out a line but instead of hauling me up, he came down. "What's that you're lying on?" he said.

I looked.

A DOOR!

It was made out of impervious alloy and had been so covered with dust that it had taken my fall to expose it.

We uncovered it. Shafter used a disintegrator drill to remove the hinges and we managed to lay it aside. There was a gaping hole under it and when we shined in the torch, we were looking at a room lying on its side.

It had the collapsed remains of some furniture in it. We dropped down a rope into it. I righted a chair. It was an ornate antique. I thought maybe that we had gotten into some old tomb. I looked around for signs of a coffin or burial artifacts. There were only a lot of shards of glass.

"Let's see if there's any buried treasure back of these walls," said Shafter. "You read the meter. I'll get on some insulator gloves and bang this fuel rod."

Shortly the sparks were flying as he went along the walls. It made the air smell like ozone.

I was passing the meter along one wall. I got a tremendous read. Shafter rushed over to me. "Crashing cogwheels!" he said. "There must be metal back of there by the millions of tons!"

We went down the wall and found, under a cascade of stone, another door. We unburied it, disintegrated the hinges and removed it.

We were in another room.

I shined my torch. Just behind the place where I had gotten my read was the remains of a COMPUTER BANK!

"Oh, blast," said Shafter. "That isn't any treasure. My current was just energizing the electromagnetic coils. We been had!"

"No, we haven't!" I cried. I suddenly knew where we were. That antique throne chair in the other office, this door, the desks tumbled about, all compared with the Gris confession!

WE WERE IN THE TOWER OFFICES Of LOMBAR

HISST!

THAT WAS HIS COMPUTER CONSOLE!

Oh, the very thing I had hoped to find!

"Quick, Shatter!" I said. "Can you get power into that thing?"

He looked at it. When the tower had crashed, the retaining bolts had held. But it was a sorry-looking mess.

"Well, why?" said Shafter.

"To get the information out of it, of course!"

"Well, Monte, I hate to have to tell you this but if there had been anything left on those recordings, it's gone now."

"What do you mean?" I wailed.

"Well, we been sending hellish jolts of electricity around to find things and it would have wiped every cell in it."

I collapsed. What Bob Hoodward must have gone through!

If I got any more help on this project I might as well give up!

At length I climbed back up the lines we had left dangling and got outside. I sat down on a rock in the moonlight.

Prospects of Modon with Corsa and her brother or prospects of drudgery at dull desks were two types of torture it was impossible to choose between. The green haze in the sky was not emblazoned with my name. The mile-deep chasm looked very attractive. Dully, I began to compose "An Ode to a Snuffed-out Life."

Listlessly, all the next day, I loafed around, not even bothering to pick up the bits and pieces the land-reclamation project was turning up.

In the first place, I had had very little sleep. In the second place, I knew down deep that it was a good thing for this herding tribe to have more water and grass and I was sort of ashamed of myself for feeling so harshly about it. The Great Desert had once been a ferule plain, 125,000 years ago or more. It had the remains of primitive canals all through it. But the civilization had been wiped out and it had all gone to dust.

I began to ruminate upon the transient nature of cultures. They could be interrupted. For the first time I wondered about our own. It was, on the surface, quite stable. What if some cataclysmic war destroyed us in a puff of flame?

Before I had gotten very far with "An Ode to Vanished Glory," in a very sad meter that fitted my mood, I suddenly had an errant thought.

Maybe there wasn't any real cover-up. Maybe Voltar had wiped out Blito-P3. Maybe it simply wasn't there anymore. Maybe it had become an awful threat!

I mentioned it at supper. I said, "Say, do you suppose some unconquered planet far from here could have developed weapons that could defeat the Voltar Fleet and wipe out the Confederacy?"

"WHAT?" said Corsa's brother. "Wipe out 110 planets? You must be crazy."

"What planet are you talking about?" said Corsa.

"It is a planet designated on our charts—or used to be—Blito-P3. The name the inhabitants use is Earth."

"Does it have people on it?" said Corsa's brother.

"Yes. I guess you could call them Earthmen."

He let out a snort of laughter. "The Earthmen are coming!" he finally managed with a bucolic guffaw.

Corsa joined in with raucous laughter.

Her brother looked up at the twilight sky. "Get under cover quick! Strange ships are in the air!"

They really laughed.

I wouldn't have felt so bad about it but the staff around joined in.

"Oh, Monte," Corsa said at last, "you'll wreck my belly muscles yet! You are such a clown!"

I was trying to explain to them that what I had meant was that Voltar might have found it expedient to wipe the planet out because it somehow could have threatened us. But they weren't listening. They had the whole staff rushing out to make sure there was no enemy fleet in the sky, and they were pretending to see strange ships and running into each other with fake cries of horror at discovering the other was an Earthman just landed. They were awfully energetic. I guess the fresh night air does that to you. Later her brother amused himself by drawing what an Earthman must look like. He tried feelers and discarded that for horns and threw that away for blobs. Corsa gathered them up and said she couldn't wait to show them to her friends.

I retired early.

It was a good thing I did. About midnight, just when I had composed my tortured wits enough to drop off, Shatter woke me up.

I got some clothes on and followed his beckoning finger. When we were far enough from the camp to be able to talk normally, he said, "You should have told me you were looking for data banks. Is this a secret or something?"

I rued that I had not kept it more secret from that Modon pair.

"Yes, very much so," I said. "I'm trying to find out what happened after a confession I read. He left it all up in the air."

"Well, you just come along," Shafter said.

We were going to the village!

A very shadowy tribesman met us and led us onward. We went into what appeared to be a cave, stepping over bundles of hides. We went to the back.

"I couldn't stand to see you pouting," said Shafter. "So last night I followed the cables from that console. I came out here!"

He was pointing down a tunnel. I followed him. He opened a huge metal side door.

It was a vast room full of tables, benches and cabinets. Pieces of hide and working tools lay all about.