Jerry ran their car off the road to a hiding place behind a dune. He and Borden took posts behind the sand dune's tip. Sattell came racing at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, raising a long plume of sand dust behind him.

Borden and Jerry fired together—two thin pencil rods of flame from the golden-metal weapons. Sattell's ground car ran past them, crossing the highway just a foot from the rock. The treads of the car disintegrated. The car sped on, slid, and rolled clumsily, three separate times. Then it stopped.

The oval side window turned and Sattell came crawling out. He had a golden-metal weapon now. He must have searched feverishly in the shambles of one of the two forts to find a weapon that still would operate. He swung it frenziedly in their direction. He ran toward them, screaming hate. He stumbled.

His weapon was firing, but the fire was short. He fell on it. Into its flame.

And the ship's log and the star maps were in the ground car Borden and Jerry had disabled.

It was more than a month later when the Danaë, completely overhauled and refueled, and with the product of Ellen's agriculture stored carefully away, hovered cautiously over what had been the white spot. At last they descended into the central square of the city that once had been the center of a civilization.

The three of them spent a day examining that city. They found things they could not understand, and things at which they smiled, and things that were quite marvelous. Every civilization makes some discoveries that others miss, and misses some that others take for granted. There would be useful items in this civilization, when humans landed here and examined the remains.

"I think," Ellen said, to Borden, "that you mean to come back."

Borden nodded, frowning a little.

"No rational natives," he said, "and eighteen thousand square miles of oasis. It would make a rather wonderful place in which to live—with that city and that civilization to study. Will you mind?"

Ellen laughed. She held out her hand. There were capsules in it.

"I've been planting more seeds," she said, "so there'll be Earth-type vegetation here when we get back."

"And Jerry?"

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