Orphans of the Void By MICHAEL SHAARA Illustrated by EMSH [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Finding a cause worth dying for is no great trick--the Universe is full of them. Finding one worth living for is the genuine problem! In the region of the Coal Sack Nebula, on the dead fourth planet of a star called Tyban, Captain Steffens of the Mapping Command stood counting buildings. Eleven. No, twelve. He wondered if there was any significance in the number. He had no idea. "What do you make of it?" he asked. Lieutenant Ball, the executive officer of the ship, almost tried to scratch his head before he remembered that he was wearing a spacesuit. "Looks like a temporary camp," Ball said. "Very few buildings, and all built out of native materials, the only stuff available. Castaways, maybe?" Steffens was silent as he walked up onto the rise. The flat weathered stone jutted out of the sand before him. "No inscriptions," he pointed out. "They would have been worn away. See the wind grooves? Anyway, there's not another building on the whole damn planet. You wouldn't call it much of a civilization." "You don't think these are native?" Ball said he didn't. Steffens nodded. Standing there and gazing at the stone, Steffens felt the awe of great age. He had a hunch, deep and intuitive, that this was old--_too_ old. He reached out a gloved hand, ran it gently over the smooth stone ridges of the wall. Although the atmosphere was very thin, he noticed that the buildings had no airlocks. Ball's voice sounded in his helmet: "Want to set up shop, Skipper?" Steffens paused. "All right, if you think it will do any good." "You never can tell. Excavation probably won't be much use. These things are on a raised rock foundation, swept clean by the wind. And you can see that the rock itself is native--" he indicated the ledge beneath their feet--"and was cut out a long while back." "How long?" Ball toed the sand uncomfortably. "I wouldn't like to say off-hand." "Make a rough estimate." Ball looked at the captain, knowing what was in his mind. He smiled wryly and said: "Five thousand years? Ten thousand? I don't know." Steffens whistled. Ball pointed again at the wall. "Look at the striations. You can tell from that alone. It would take even a brisk Earth wind _at least_ several thousand years to cut that deep, and the wind here has only a fraction of that force." The two men stood for a long moment in silence. Man had been in interstellar space for three hundred years and this was the first uncovered evidence of an advanced, space-crossing, alien race. It was an historic moment, but neither of them was thinking about history.