the eerie glow of black light pencils as we made our way along a row of stone markers. Herb strode purposefully. Dotty stuck close to him, still a little suspicious of me. I trailed half a step behind.

Finally Herb stopped beside one of the markers. "This is it," he said softly. I blinked at the marker, then at Herb. It wasn't the one he had singled out in the afternoon. Was he mixed up?

If he wasn't he was a good actor. He took out one of the dinner knives and squatted down and started to probe the soil, loosening it so that it could be scraped out by hand.

I watched him dig. Part of the time I helped him. We found nothing. After a reasonable amount of this Herb stood up with a resigned sigh. "Guess I was wrong," he said.

"Poor Herby," Dotty said.

"Yeah, poor Herby," Herb said with every appearance of tiredness and defeat. "But—that's that. Sorry to have gotten you all excited about nothing, Joe. Guess it was too much to expect anything." He turned to Dotty. "As long as we're out here, let's take a walk by ourselves. Huh?"

That was as obvious a cue as I had ever been handed. Neat. I was confronted with the alternatives of scramming or calling him a liar.

"Guess I might as well go back to the hotel," I said cheerfully. "See you in the morning."

I headed back the way we had come until I was sure they couldn't hear me or see me with their black light pencils. Then, ducking down next to a marker I waited. After a couple of minutes I heard cautious footsteps.

"It's me, Joe—Steve."

"Good," I grunted. "What are they doing now? They gave me the brush-off."

"I got the play," Steve said. "Slick. Should we close in now, or wait?"

"I think I'll play my part a little further. Don't want C.I. to think we're timid."

"Okay," Steve said. "The next funeral we attend may be our own."

"Yeah," I said. "It might."

I moved into the darkness, not using my black light pencil, but keeping my sensitized glasses on so I could see Herb's if I got close enough.

I reached the spot where we had done the digging. I hesitated, then kept on, toward the spot where Herb and Dotty had been so engrossed that afternoon. In my mind's eye I knew exactly where it was.

My hands explored ahead of me, searching out each stone marker along my path, clinging to it as I passed it, and slipping off as I went on to the next. They were my only contact with reality in this total blackness.

I was thinking, too. I was thinking of what Herb had said about this being a parking area for airsleds back before the earliest known records of man on Earth when this city was alive. He was probably right about it at that. Analysis had shown the presence of copper and aluminum in the top surface of some of the markers that could only be accounted for by some metallic object setting atop each one long ago, and remaining so that molecular and atomic creep could set in, carrying such atoms deep into the surface crystals of the stone.

And I was wondering what it was he hoped to dig up. If it were some sort of weapon it probably wouldn't work after all this time. It couldn't! Or could it? A few things had been pieced together about the ancient Martian civilization. Not much, but enough to be sure that they knew a few things we had never discovered. They had been masters at creating machines with no moving parts. The electronic devices we had found had proven they knew far more about V.H.F. than we did.

I could see what C.I. was aiming at now. We might not even recognize what Herb was searching for. It would be better to let him find it, and get it from him before he could use it. If it was a weapon.

And it probably was a weapon. I was pretty sure his main objective was hidden in the wall in the dome, and that this thing in the cemetery was something that would help him get to that objective.

My thoughts came back to my surroundings. I was less than a dozen feet from where Herb and Dotty should be. I stopped. There was no trace of black