Wass watched him, and then shoved aside more sand, several feet away. "It's here, too." Martin stood up. "Let's try farther on. Rodney, radio the ship, tell them we're going in." Rodney nodded. After a time, Wass said, "Here, too. How far do you think it goes?" Martin shrugged. "Clear around the city? I'd like to know what it is--was--for." "Defense," Rodney, several yards behind, suggested. "Could be," Martin said. "Let's go in." The three crossed the metal band and walked abreast down a street, their broad soft soled boots making no sound on the dull metal. They passed doors and arches and windows and separate buildings. They moved cautiously across five intersections. And they stood in a square surrounded by the tallest buildings in the city. Rodney broke the silence, hesitantly. "Not--not very big. Is it?" Wass looked at him shrewdly. "Neither were the--well, shall we call them, people? Have you noticed how low everything is?" Rodney's laughter rose, too. Then, sobering--"Maybe they crawled." A nebulous image, product of childhood's vivid imagination, moved slowly across Martin's mind. "All right!" he rapped out--and the image faded. "Sorry," Rodney murmured, his throat working beneath his lantern jaw. Then--"I wonder what it's like here in the winter when there's no light at all?" "I imagine they had illumination of some sort," Martin answered, dryly. "If we don't hurry up and get through this place and back to the ship, we're very likely to find out." Rodney said quickly, "I mean outside." "Out there, too, Rodney, they must have had illumination." Martin looked back along the straight, metal street they'd walked on, and past that out over the bleak, furrowed slopes where the ship's lifeboat lay ... and he thought everything outside the city seemed, somehow, from here, a little dim, a little hazy. He straightened his shoulders. The city was alien, of course, and that explained most of it ... most of it. But he felt the black city was something familiar, yet twisted and distorted. "Well," Wass said, his nose wrinkling a bit, "now that we're here...." "Pictures," Martin decided. "We have twelve hours. We'll start here. What's the matter, Wass?" The blond man grinned ruefully. "I left the camera in the lifeboat." There was a pause. Then Wass, defensively--"It's almost as if the city didn't want to be photographed." Martin ignored the remark. "Go get it. Rodney and I will be somewhere along this street." Wass turned away. Martin and Rodney started slowly down the wide metal street, at right angles to their path of entrance. Again Martin felt a tug of twisted, distorted familiarity. It was almost as if ... they were human up to a certain point, the point being, perhaps, some part of their minds.... Alien things, dark and subtle, things no man could ever comprehend.