"We were thrilled by the sight of this ancient wonder, and speculated about its builders. Had they been giants her size, or had they erected her as a Colossus to celebrate some great deed or personage or ruler? What did she mean to her builders, what did her uplifted torch signify? What aspirations, hopes, dreams? Could we find the answer beneath that dry soil?" "Did you dig?" Ky-Tann said, his eyes shining with excitement. "You weren't equipped for any major excavation work, were you?" "No; the most we could have done was scratch the surface of the planet, perhaps enough to free the entire figure of the Colossus. But that wasn't enough; we burned with curiosity to know what lay under our feet, what buried cities, people, histories.... Totin set up a signal station, and beamed our message to the space station on Briaticus. After a few days, we made contact, and relayed our story. There was skepticism at first, but they finally agreed to dispatch all available manpower and excavation equipment to the planet Earth." "The planet what?" Devia said. "Earth," Deez said, with a wan smile. "That was its name, eons ago, and the builders, who were called Earthmen, lived within natural and artificial boundaries called nations, empires, states, dominions, protectorates, satellites, and commonwealths. That empty globe had once housed as many as three _billion_ of these Earthmen, and their works were prodigious. Their science was advanced, and they had already thrust their ships into the space of their own solar system...." Ky-Tann was plainly startled. "Deez, you're really serious about this? It's not another hoax?" "I've seen the ruins of their cities, I've touched their dry bones, I've turned the pages of their books...." Deez' eyes glowed, pulsating eerily. "We found libraries, Ky, great volumes of writing, in languages astonishingly varied and yet many that were swiftly encodable.... We've seen their machines and their houses, their working tools and their play-things. We found their histories, records of their bodies and voices, their manners and morals and sometimes mad behavior ... Ky!" Deez said, his voice choked. "It'll take a hundred years to understand all we've found!" Devia rose quickly at the sound of his agitated voice, and went to his side. "Try not to overexcite yourself," she said. "I know how you must feel...." "You can't. You can't possibly," Deez muttered. "To know the overwhelming--_greediness_ I felt--turned loose in an archeological treasure house--I began waking up at night, sweating at the thought that I might die before I had seen all there was to see on that planet, read all its books, learned all its secrets--" "And what _did_ you learn?" Ky-Tann said. Deez stood up slowly. He crossed the room to the view-glass, but they knew his eyes looked out at nothing. "I learned," he said bitterly, "that it was a world which deserved to die." * * * * *