moved beneath the wrinkled folds of the surface suit. Cigar smoke curled in the still air.

Mr. Tucker said, "You must have been aware that it would not have been a great loss to have evacuated Miracastle."

The general shuffled in silence. "Yes, sir, I knew the background. It's part of my job to know things like that. You'll find, sir, that I have a strong sense of responsibility. If it's part of my job, I'll know about it."

General Max Shorter abruptly stood and for a moment was motionless, a man deformed and diminished in stature by the ill-fitting surface suit. Expressionless, he looked down, without psychological advantage, at the seated civilian holding the partially smoked cigar.

Later the same day, Mr. Tucker and two of the three other members of the Committee donned surface suits and, together with Captain Meford, the cartographer assigned to Miracastle, they boarded the surface scout.

They arranged themselves in the uncomfortable bucket seats and strapped in.

"Little early for an easy ride," Mr. Tucker commented.

"I've been out before," Captain Meford said laconically. It was his usual manner.

"How long do you think it will take us to get there?"

"Between fifteen and twenty minutes, if I don't hit too much cross wind."

Mr. Ryan, one of the other two civilians, commented, "A long time between cigars, eh, Jim?"

The question was out of place and was ignored without hostility.

Mr. Ryan twisted uncomfortably. At length he said, apologetically, "Dirty, filthy business. I wish it were over with."

"So do I," Mr. Tucker said.

Captain Meford activated the ramp and eased the scout out. It was immediately buffeted by the winds.

"Sorry," he said. "It'll take a minute. Hold tight." The scout moved in three dimensions, erratically. "Wow! Let's set it at about twenty-six inches. Sorry. This will slow us down, but it will ease the bumps on down draft. There. That's better. We're okay now, I think. I guess we can settle back."

Thirty-five minutes later, they came to what was left of the alien city.

Back in the Richardson dome, General Shorter had coffee, in his quarters, with the remaining man on the Committee, a Mr. Flison. They were going through the ritual of conversation.

"This is the first time you've been Destroyed then, sir," the general said. "My first time was so long ago I've forgotten what it feels like."

"I was uneasy in advance," Mr. Flison said. "You read various descriptions about the physical sensations. Intellectually, of course, you draw a distinction, but emotionally you know that the only word which applies is death—pure and simple. But there's no sensation. It happens too fast. You don't even notice it."

Politely attentive, the general had leaned forward. "I don't think it could be put better," he contributed. "That's very apt. You don't even notice it."

Mr. Flison's eyes narrowed in speculation. They maintained the general's own in unwavering focus. He did not acknowledge the compliment.

The general's eyes broke to one side. He moved nervously as though physically to dismiss the tactical error of underestimating his opponent.

"Since this is your first planet," the general said, "perhaps you'd like to see something of the operation? Basically, we have nine Richardson Domes here on Miracastle. Two are the living quarters—the other similar to this. Right now domes Seven and Nine are the more important. They contain the air-changing equipment. We are holding tightly to our completion date, and these two—Seven and Nine—will be pulled out in fifteen days. That is to say, they will, barring any serious interruptions in our work. On schedule, I should point out."

The general poured coffee for himself. Mr. Flison politely declined.

"When you've been in the Corps as long as I have," the general resumed, "the schedule becomes a part of you. Everything—" he held his hands before him, fingers spread, palms facing, and drew them together—"converges on that. It's that simple. Other planets are waiting. In a society as complex as ours, a million—and I mean this literally, sir—a million decisions must be reviewed if the schedule falls behind. Delay of a critical item of equipment can necessitate an unbelievably vast reassignment of personnel and supply patterns. A small cause reverberates throughout the whole fabric of the space technology."

"General Shorter, I think perhaps you're being carried away a little. I'm sure we have adequate procedures to accommodate minor variations in equipment delivery dates. If we don't, the Lord help us: we'd have been dead long ago."

The general was in the process of forming an immediate reply, but he reconsidered. When he reached for the coffee, which by now was cool and bitter, his hand was trembling.

The general licked his lips. "More coffee? No? Well, I didn't intend to get off on this. I really wanted to ask if you'd like to inspect our operations." He glanced at his time piece. "I could show you the present shift operation in Dome Nine."

Mr. Flison rose. "No, General, I don't want to be of any bother. I wouldn't want to interfere with your—work."

III

"City" is not necessarily descriptive: perhaps less so than the application of Euclidean axioms to advanced geometry. Physically, it was this:

1. Three dozen stone arches whose keystones were inverted bowls.

2. A smooth-walled recess in the sheer face of a cliff.

3. A level lip of rock, as precisely flat as though honed, from which the arches seemed to grow.

"Is this all?" Mr. Tucker asked.

"Yes, sir," Captain Meford said.

Mr. Ryan came to the viewing section. "It looks," he said, "as though the cliff were split down to here and then hewn away to leave the structures there and the apron."

"We found no tools, sir. There were no tools here, nor with them."

"Nothing else at all?"

"They left behind some four hundred chips of stone, apparently numbered. We have them in the dome. And there's a two-line inscription on one of the arches. There's nothing else."

High above the men and the ship, the new wind sang in one of the inverted bowls and fluttered lightly over the inscription. It, like the face of the cliff, was oxidizing. Dust filtered down before the recess, alien symbols falling. Life is the recording angel of time. Without life, all ceases.

"Dust," Mr. Tucker said. "Dust ... dust ... more dust. Soon the dust will be over everything. When the wind is gone, it will be there to hold our footprints."

Inside the air-conditioned scout, the men shivered.

"How did you come to find them?" Mr. Ryan asked.

"I saw the constructions from the photos, sir. This had been missed by the mapping party. It's easy enough to see why when you see the pictures."

"This the only one?"

"Yes, sir."

"How can you be sure of that, Captain Meford? It's a large planet."

"I had one of the machines scan the remaining maps for geometrical patterns, sir."

"Isn't that done routinely?" Mr. Tucker asked rather sharply.

"Yes, sir. But you see, we've always expected that if we were ever going to encounter intelligent life on a planet, it would be rather widespread. Accordingly—and this is the routine procedure, sir, used, as far as I know, by all contact parties—we ran through a statistically significant sample of the terrain. There was nothing on Miracastle out of the ordinary. There was the typical, low-order vegetable matter, about what we always find. It was a very typical planet, sir."

The third man from the Earth Committee, Mr. Wallace, seldom spoke. When he did, his voice was mild, and there was a sense of child-like wonder in his tone. "The natives?" he asked.

"They ... had fled when we discovered the city."

"Where did they flee to?" Mr. Wallace asked.

Captain Meford glanced upward. Other eyes followed to