He pulled up, startled. In the moonlight, a blackened devastation stretched around him, a few ruined walls still standing, the rest a shapeless mass of blackened debris. Wales, after a moment, got over his first shock. "Lightning could easily start a fire," he thought. "And with nobody to put it out--" It seemed logical enough. Yet he still felt shocked as he drove hastily on out of the blackened ruins. As the moon rose, he drove faster. Castletown was very near. He would soon know if he had come all this way for nothing. In this old town, Wales had grown up with Lee and Martha Kendrick. In Westpenn College here, they'd been classmates. Lee, making astronomy his career, had stayed here at the small but famous Westpenn Observatory, to make finally the astronomical discovery of approaching Doomsday. And, Wales knew, Martha had stayed with him, keeping the old Kendrick house for him. He knew too that the Kendricks had stayed on here, even after the whole region was evacuated. And then they'd disappeared. Fairlie had said that his men had searched here and hadn't found them. But Wales clung to the conviction that his quest of them must begin here. CASTLETOWN A Good Place to Live * * * * * The sign at the edge of town, unintentionally ironic now, went past him. It had been a long way from here, Wales thought, to the Rocket Service school out west, a long way farther to Mars, and yet here he was, after all these years, back again. His own boyhood home was here but there was no reason at all to visit it. He was glad there was no reason, he was glad now that his parents had died before Doomsday came. He turned off the highway. The campus of Westpenn College was on the hills east of Castletown. The buildings were dark and silent. On the loftiest eminence, the dome of the Observatory shouldered the stars. There was no light there, either. Wales drove past the campus to the big, square, old-fashioned Kendrick house. It was dark and quiet as everything else. He stopped his car, made sure of the pistol in his jacket pocket, and ascended the steps. He felt, after all these years, like a ghost coming back to a dead town, to a dead world. Impatient of fancies, he pushed at the front door and it swung quietly inward. Wales flashed his light around the hall inside. Then he began going through the rooms. Over an hour later he was back in the front hall, disappointed and baffled. He had found no one in the house, and no evidence that either Lee or Martha had been here recently. As he stood, anxious and frustrated, Wales suddenly noticed a smear of red on the inner side of the white-painted front door. He flashed his light on it. Two words were written in lipstick on the door, in a feminine hand. "The Castle." Nothing more.