The foundations of some of the buildings had endured, though whittled down to stumps by a million years of sand and wind and rain. But nothing else of this civilization had survived. Mattern, in his scorn, had been right, I admitted ruefully: this planet was as useless to us as it was to them. Weathered foundations could tell us little except that there had once been a civilization here. An imaginative paleontologist can reconstruct a dinosaur from a fragment of a thigh-bone, can sketch out a presentable saurian with only a fossilized ischium to guide him. But could we extrapolate a culture, a code of laws, a technology, a philosophy, from bare weathered building foundations? Not very likely. We moved on and dug somewhere else half a mile away, hoping at least to unearth one tangible remnant of the civilization that had been. But time had done its work; we were lucky to have the building foundations. All else was gone. "_Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away_," I muttered. Gerhardt looked up from his digging. "Eh? What's that?" he demanded. "Shelley," I told him. "Oh. Him." He went back to digging. * * * * * Late in the afternoon we finally decided to call it quits and head back to the base. We had been in the field for seven hours, and had nothing to show for it except a few hundred feet of tridim films of building foundations. The sun was beginning to set; Planet Four had a thirty-five hour day, and it was coming to its end. The sky, always somber, was darkening now. There was no moon to be still as bright. Planet Four had no satellites. It seemed a bit unfair; Three and Five of the system each had four moons, while around the massive gas giant that was Eight a cluster of thirteen moonlets whirled. We wheeled round and headed back, taking an alternate route three miles east of the one we had used on the way out, in case we might spot something. It was a forlorn hope, though. Six miles along our journey, the truck radio came to life. The dry, testy voice of Dr. Leopold reached us: "Calling Trucks Two and Three. Two and Three, do you read me? Come in, Two and Three." Gerhardt was driving. I reached across his knee to key in the response channel and said, "Anderson and Gerhardt in Number Three, sir. We read you." A moment later, somewhat more faintly, came the sound of Number Two keying into the threeway channel, and I heard Marshall saying, "Marshall and Webster in Two, Dr. Leopold. Is something wrong?" "I've found something," Leopold said. From the way Marshall exclaimed "_Really!_" I knew that Truck Number Two had had no better luck than we. I said, "That makes one of us, then." "You've had no luck, Anderson?" "Not a scrap. Not a potsherd." "How about you, Marshall?" "Check. Scattered signs of a city, but nothing of archaeological value, sir."