no sign of anything but space.
He whistled softly. Even the slightest presence of gases would be registered on the dials and so far the needles hadn't even flickered.
Earth must be old! Her atmosphere was swiftly being stripped from her to leave her bare bones naked to the cold of space. Space, cold and malignant, was creeping in on mankind's cradle.
He struck the first sign of atmosphere at slightly under two hundred miles.
The surface of the planet was lighted by a Sun which must have lost much of its energy, for the light seemed feeble compared to the way Gary remembered it. The Sun, behind them, was shielded from their vision.
Swiftly they dropped, closer and closer to the surface. Eagerly they scanned the land beneath them for some sign of cities, but they saw only one and that, the telescope revealed, was in utter ruins. Drifting sands were closing over its shattered columns and once mighty walls.
'It must have been a great city in its day,' said Caroline softly. 'I wonder what has happened to the people.”
'Died off,' said Gary, 'or left for some other planet, maybe for some other sun.”
The telescopic screen mirrored scene after scene of desolation. Vast deserts with shifting dunes and mile after mile of nothing but shimmering sand, without a trace of vegetation. Worn-down hills with boulder-strewn slopes and wind-twisted trees and shrubs making their last stand against the encroachment of a hostile environment.
Gary turned the ship toward the night side of the planet, and it was then they saw the Moon. Vast, filling almost a twelfth of the sky, it loomed over the horizon, a monstrous orange ball in full phase.
'How pretty!' gasped Caroline.
'Pretty and dangerous,' said Gary.
It must be approaching Roche's limit, he thought. Falling out of the sky, year after year it had drawn closer to the Earth. When it reached a certain limit, it would be disrupted, torn to bits by the stresses of gravitation hauling and tugging at it. It would shatter into tiny fragments and those fragments would take up independent orbits around old Earth, giving her in miniature the rings of Saturn. But the same forces which would tear the Moon to bits would shake up the Earth, giving rise to volcanic action, world-shattering earthquakes, monstrous tidal waves. Mountains would be leveled, new continents raised. Earth's face would be changed once again, as it probably had been changed many times before. As it had been changed since early Man had known it, for search as he might, Gary could find no single recognizable feature, not a single sea or continent that seemed familiar.
He reflected on the changes that must have come to pass. The Earth must have slowed down. Probably a night now was almost a month long, and a day equally as long. Long scorching days and endless frigid nights. Century after century, with the moon tides braking the Earth's motion, with the addition of mass due to falling meteors, Earth had lost her energy.
Increase of mass and loss of energy had slowed her spin, had shoved her farther and farther away from the Sun, pushing her out and into the frigidness of space. And now she was losing her atmosphere. Her gravity was weakening and the precious gases were slowly being stripped from her. Rock weathering also would have absorbed some of the oxygen.
'Look!' cried Caroline.
Aroused from his daydreaming, Gary saw a city straight ahead, looming on the horizon, a great city a-gleam with shining metal.
'The Engineer said we would find people here,' Caroline whispered. 'That must be where we'll find them.”
The city was falling into ruin. Much of it, undoubtedly, already had been covered by the creeping desert that crawled toward it from every direction.
Some of the buildings were falling apart, with great gaping holes staring like empty, hopeless eyes. But part of it, at least, was standing, and that part gave a breath-taking hint to the sort of city it had been when it soared in full pride of strength at its very prime.
Smoothly Gary brought the ship down toward the city, down toward a level patch of desert in front of the largest building yet standing. And the building, he saw, was a beauteous thing that almost defied description, a poem in grace and rhythm, seemingly too fragile for this weird and bitter world.
The ship plowed along the sand and stopped. Gary rose from the pilot's seat and reached for his helmet. 'We're here,' he announced.
'I didn't think we'd make it,' Caroline confessed. 'We took such an awful chance.”
'But we did,' he said gruffly. 'And we have a job to do.”
He set his helmet on his head and clamped it down. 'I have a hunch we'll need these things,' he said.
She put on her helmet and together they went out of the air lock.
Wind keened thinly over the empty deserts and the ruins, kicked up little puffs of sand that raced and danced weird rigadoons across the dunes and past the ship, up to the very doors of the shiny building that confronted them.
A slinking shape slunk across a dune and streaked swiftly for the shelter of a pile of fallen masonry — a little furtive shape that might have been a skulking dog or something else, almost anything at all.
A sense of desolation smote Gary and he felt an alien fear gripping at his soul.
He shivered. This wasn't the way a man should feel on his own home planet.
This wasn't the way a man should feel on coming home from the very edge of everything.
But it wasn't the edge of everything, he reminded himself. It was just the edge of the universe. For the universe wasn't everything. Beyond it, stretching for uncountable, mind-shattering distances, were other universes. The universe was just a tiny unit of the whole, perhaps as tiny a unit of the whole as the Earth was a tiny unit of its universe. A grain of sand upon the beach, he thought — less than a grain of sand upon the beach.
And this might not be Earth, of course. It might be just the shadow of the Earth — a probability that gained strength and substance and a semblance of being because it missed being an actuality by a mere hair's- breadth.
His mind whirled at the thought of it, at the astounding vista of possibilities that the thought brought up, the infinite number of possibilities that existed as shadows, each with a queer shadow existence of its very own, things that just missed being realities. Disappointed ghosts, he thought, wailing their way through the eternity of nonexistence.
Caroline was close beside him. Her voice came to him through the helmet phones, a tiny voice. 'Gary, everything is so strange.”
'Yes,' he said. 'Strange.”
Cautiously they walked forward, toward the gaping door of the great metal building from whose turrets and spires and froth of superstructure the moonbeams splintered in a cold glitter of faery beauty.
Sand crunched and grated underfoot. The wind made shrill, keening noises and they could see the frozen frost crystals in the sand, moisture locked in the grip of deadly cold.
They reached the doorway and peered inside. The interior was dark and Gary unhooked the radium lamp from his belt. The lamp cut a broad beam of light down the mighty, high-arched hallway that led straight from the door toward the center of the building.
Gary caught his breath, seized with a nameless fear, the fear of the dark and the unfamiliar, of the ghostly and the ancient.
'We might as well go in,' he said, fighting down the fear.
Their footsteps echoed and re-echoed in the darkness as the metal of their boots rang against the cold paving blocks.
Gary felt the weight of centuries pressing down upon him — the eyes of many nations and of many people watching furtively, jealous to guard old tradition from the invasion of an alien mind. For he and Caroline, he sensed, were aliens here, aliens in time if not in blood. He sensed it in the very architecture of the place, in the atmosphere of the long and silent hall, in the quiet that brooded on this dead or dying planet.
Suddenly they left the hallway and were striding into what seemed a vast chamber. Gary snapped the lamp to full power and explored the place. It was filled with furniture. Solid blocks of seat faced a rostrum, and all about the wall ran ornate benches.
At one time, now long gone, it might have been a council hall, a meeting place of the people to decide great
