"The setup isn't quite finished," Rick said. "Certain breech details aren't hooked together yet. But you can see where they go. Say, Fane must have spent most of his first six months on Mercury here in this vault trying to put what was left to do in order! A lot of these final touches must be his. He thought he could complete everything alone." The evidence was clear. Empty food containers of Earthly origin were scattered about the floor. There were tools from the same source. And boxes of parts, made so long ago on Mars, were fairly free of dust, showing that they had been opened and their contents fastened into place quite recently in the gigantic assembly. And in one corner of this chamber a small Terran tent had been set up. Fane had been working on something here when these three men had first found him. So now they went to see just what it was. They found a spread parchment on a work bench. It was blueprint stuff. Red lines traced the structure of the tube breeches. There were the fuel ducts in which an air blast fed the dust of uranium, and the exciter grids needed for firing. And there was the hookup of cables and bus-bars, needed to bind the whole bank of jets into a unit. On the work bench there was even a book of advanced engineering brought from Earth. It lay open to a page on space ship motors. Rick Mills saw more of the twisted soul of a man in the presence of that volume. "Poor Fane," he growled with bitter sarcasm. "Always making cracks about being bookish. Yet he found that he didn't have quite the knowledge to finish the assembly when he came here with Martell. He had to go home, study, get books." "Given time, we can do what he can do," Finden said. "The still missing parts must be here somewhere." "The Martians were close to completing the job themselves," Lattimer mused. "The Xians might have done it, too. I wonder just how it happened that Mercury was not reclaimed." "Failure was also near," Rick said. "You can see that the Xians broke in through the underground fortifications with their robots. Meanwhile, on the hills outside, the snow of air was falling after the cold which followed the last sunset. There was a fight in these chambers at close quarters. The Xians had wanted to seize the setup intact, so they must have tried hard not to damage the main machinery here. But when they won, they lost. Maybe the news came that X was blown to pieces by Martian atomic science. Panic took hold, I'll bet. They fled Mercury, perhaps hardly believing that home was gone." Rick's voice had become almost a harsh whisper. A savage bitterness smoldered in him. Around him, in the disorder of this chamber, and in the mummies of the two kinds of beings who had died, he saw how violence had blocked a great public work of peaceful constructiveness, and for fifty million years had robbed Mercury of a better destiny. For all of those ages it might have been a living, useful world instead of a half frozen, half sun-blasted tomb.