He took the three weapons and went toward the instrument-room. On the way, his mind went automatically back to the coming destruction. It was completely arbitrary. The Enemy had no reason to destroy the human race in this solar system. Men, here, had lost all recollection of their origin and assuredly all memory of enmities known before memory began. If any tradition remained of the fortress, even, it would be hidden in tales of a Golden Age before Pandora was, or of an Age of Innocence when all things came without effort. Those stories were changed out of all semblance to their foundations, of course, as ever-more-ignorant and ever-more-unsophisticated generations retold them. Perhaps the Golden Age was a garbled memory of a time when machines performed tasks for men--before the machines wore out and could not be replaced without other machines to make them. Perhaps the slow development of tools, with which men did things that machines formerly did for them, blurred the accounts of times when men did not need to use tools. Even the everywhere-present traditions of a long, long journey in a boat--the flood legends--might be the last trace of grand-sires' yarns about a journey to Earth. It would have been modified by successive generations who could not imagine a journey through emptiness, and therefore devised a flood as a more scientific and reasonable explanation for myths plainly overlaid with fantasy and superstition. Burke went into the instrument-room as Sandy was asking, "But how did they? We haven't found any ship-lock except the one we came in by! And if a ship can't travel faster than light without wrapping artificial mass about itself ..." Holmes had taken off his helmet He said doggedly, "There's nothing about ships in the cubes. Anyhow, the nearest other sun is four light-years away. Nobody'd try to carry all the food a whole colony would need from as far away as that! If they'd used ships for supply, there'd have been hydroponic gardens all over the place to ease the load the ships had to carry! There was some other way to get stuff here!" "Whatever it was, it didn't bring meat from Earth. That was hauled out, fastened to the outside of service-boats." "Another thing," Holmes said. "There were thousands of people in the garrison, here. How did the air get renewed? Nobody's found any mention of air-purifying apparatus in the cubes. There's been no sign of any! An emergency air-supply, yes. It was let loose when we came into the ship-lock. But there's no regular provision for purifying the air and putting oxygen into it and breaking down the CO_{2}!" "Won't anyone believe I smelled fresh air yesterday?" Pam asked plaintively. No one commented. It could not be believed. Burke handed Sandy one of the weapons. He gave Pam a second.