voice came thinly over the speaker. “Not yet. I thought I saw some movement in one of the passes, but the light wasn’t too good. I’m looking for that pass again.”

“All right. We’ll be going up ourselves in a few minutes; if you find them, be careful. Wait for us.”

He refitted the mike in its stand and rose. But as he turned to the door her voice came again: “There they are!”

He looked at the screen, but for the moment he couldn’t see anything. Mara’s flyer was coming down out of the rocky hills now, the Flat stretching before her on the screen. Rynason could see the pass through which she had been flying, but there was no movement there; it took him several seconds to see the low ruins off to the right, and the figures moving through them.

The screen banked and turned toward them; she was lowering her altitude.

“I see them,” he said into the mike. “Can’t make out what they’re doing, on the screen. Can you see them any more clearly?”

“They’re entering one of the buildings down there,” she said after a moment. “I’ve counted almost twenty of them so far; they must all be here.”

“Can you go down and see what they’re doing? The sooner we find out, the better: Manning’s got a pretty ugly bunch of so-called vigilantes on the way out there.”

She didn’t reply, but on the screen he saw the crumbling buildings grow larger and nearer. He could make out individual structures now: a wall had fallen and was half-buried in the dust and sand; an entire roof had caved in on another building, leaving only rubble in the interior. It was difficult to tell sometimes when the original lines of the buildings had fallen: they had all been smoothed by the wind-blown sand, so that broken pillars looked almost as though they had been built that way, smooth and upright, solitary.

At last, he saw the Hirlaji. They were slowly mounting the steps of one of the largest of the buildings and passing into the shadows of the interior. This building was not as deteriorated as most of the others; as Mara’s flyer dipped low over it Rynason could see its characteristic lines unbroken and clear.

With a start, he sat up and said hurriedly, “Mara, take another close pass over that building, the one they’re entering.”

In a moment she came in again over the smooth stone structure, and Rynason looked 

 Prev. P 53/80 next