Frowning, I turned to look at him as I drove. Gerhardt had always been an enigma: a small scrunchy guy with untidy brown hair flapping in his eyes, eyes that were set a little too close together. He had a degree from the University of Kansas and had put in some time on their field staff with distinction, or so his references said. I said, "What the hell do you mean?" "I don't trust Mattern. He hates us." "He doesn't. Mattern's no villain--just a fellow who wants to do his job and go home. But what do you mean, the ship not being there?" "He'll blast off without us. You see the way he sent us all out into the desert, and kept his own men back. I tell you, he'll strand us here!" I snorted. "Don't be a paranoid. Mattern won't do anything of the sort." "He thinks we're dead weight on the expedition," Gerhardt insisted. "What better way to get rid of us?" The halftrack breasted a hump in the desert. I kept wishing a vulture would squeal somewhere, but there was not even that. Life had left this world ages ago. I said, "Mattern doesn't have much use for _us_, sure. But would he blast off and leave three perfectly good halftracks behind? Would he?" It was a good point. Gerhardt grunted agreement after a while. Mattern would _never_ toss equipment away, though he might not have such scruples about five surplus archaeologists. We rode along silently for a while longer. By now we had covered twenty miles through this utterly barren land. As far as I could see, we might just as well have stayed at the ship. At least there we had a surface lie of building foundations. But another ten miles and we came across our city. It seemed to be of linear form, no more than half a mile wide and stretching out as far as we could see--maybe six or seven hundred miles; if we had time, we would check the dimensions from the air. Of course it wasn't much of a city. The sand had pretty well covered everything, but we could see foundations jutting up here and there, weathered lumps of structural concrete and reinforced metal. We got out and unpacked the power-shovel. An hour later, we were sticky with sweat under our thin spacesuits and we had succeeded in transferring a few thousand cubic yards of soil from the ground to an area a dozen yards away. We had dug one devil of a big hole in the ground. And we had nothing. Nothing. Not an artifact, not a skull, not a yellowed tooth. No spoons, no knives, no baby-rattles. Nothing.