time, presently!"

Esther hesitated, and said desperately, "But—who are they? What are they? Why do they want to kill us?"

"They're the local citizens," said Stan. "I was wrong, there are inhabitants. I've no more idea what they may be like than you have. But I suspect they want to kill us simply because we're strangers."

"But how could an intelligent race develop on a planet like this?" demanded Esther unbelievingly. "How'd they stay alive while they were developing?"

Stan shrugged his shoulders.

"Once you admit that a thing is so," he said dryly, "you can figure out how it happened. This sun is a dwarf white star. That means that once upon a time it exploded. It flared out into a nova. Maybe there were other planets nearer to it than this, and they volatilized when their sun blew up. Everything on this planet, certainly, was killed, and for a long, long time after it was surely uninhabitable by any standard. There's a dwarf star in the Crab Nebula which will melt iron four light-hours away—land that was a nova twelve hundred years ago. It must have been bad on this planet for a long time indeed.

"I'm guessing that when the first explosion came the inner planets turned to gas and this one had all its seas and forests and all its atmosphere simply blasted away to nothingness. Everything living on its surface was killed. Even bacteria in the soil turned to steam and went off into space. That would account for the absolute absence of life here now."

"But—" said Esther.

"But," said Stan, "the people—call them people—who lived here were civilized even then. They knew what was coming. If they hadn't interstellar drive, flight would do them no good. They'd have nowhere to go. So maybe they stayed. Underground. Maybe they dug themselves caves and galleries five—ten—twenty miles down. Maybe some of those galleries collapsed when the blow-up came, but some of the people survived. They'd stayed underground for centuries. They'd have to! It might be fifty thousand years they stayed underground, while Khor Alpha blazed less and less fiercely, and they waited until they could come up again.

"There was no air for a while up here. They had to fight to keep alive, down in the planet's vitals. They made a new civilization, surrounded by rock, with no more thought of stars. They'd be hard put to it for power, too. They couldn't well use combustion, with a limited air supply. 

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