Ross said wearily, “Yes, mighty funny! Look, Doc, why don’t you sort of wander around by yourself for a while? That big thing up ahead is the museum you were talking about, isn’t it?” The doctor squinted. His eyes were unnaturally bright, and his breathing was fast, but he was making an attempt to seem casual in the presence of these manifold obscenities of design. He licked his lips. “_Round pillars_,” he marveled. “Why, yes, I think that’s the museum. You go on up there, like you say. I’ll, uh, sort of see what there is to see. Jones, yes!” He staggered off, staring from ribald curbing to scatological wall in an orgy of prurience. Ross sighed and walked through the deserted, weed-grown streets to the stone building that bore on its cracked lintel the one surviving word, “Earth.” This was all wrong, he was almost certain; Earth _had_ to be a planet, not a city. But still.... The museum had to have the answers. On its moldering double doors was a large lead seal. He read: “Surplus Information Repository. Access denied to unauthorized personnel.” But the seal had been forced by somebody; one of the doors swung free, creaking. Ross invoked the forcer of the door. If _he_ could do it.... He went in and stumbled over a skeleton, presumably that of the last entrant. The skull had been crushed by a falling beam. There was some sort of mechanism involved—a trigger, a spring, a release hook. All had rusted badly, and the spring had lost its tension over the years. A century? Two? Five? Ross prayed that any similar mantraps had likewise rusted solid, and cautiously inched through the dismal hall of the place, ready for a backward leap at the first whisper of a concealed mechanism in action. It was unnecessary. The place was—dead. Exploring room after room, he realized slowly that he was stripping off history in successive layers. The first had been the booby-trapped road, lackadaisically planned to ensure that mere inquisitiveness would be discouraged. There had been no real denial of access, for there was almost no possibility that anybody would care to visit the place. Next, the seal and the mantraps. An earlier period. Somebody had once said: “This episode is closed. This history is determined. We have all reached agreement. Only a dangerous or frivolous meddler would seek to rake over these dead ashes.” And then, prying into the museum, Ross found the era during which agreement had been reached, during which it still was necessary to insist and demonstrate and cajole.