It

Single file they had threaded among the collapsed dome-structures and overthrown cylindricals, a segmented worm of men probing within a vast and withered corpse. First the Captain, then Grimes, then Ives, Kwatahiri, Spencer with his hog-snouted prisma-reflex camera, finally Hogan, the worm's rear end. Six of them. The Captain had left Templar to "guard" the spheroid.

In the last city, where as in the preceding five they had found no sign of life except a scum of dried protoplasm thirty feet up on the sides of the buildings, Templar had begun to see "them". The Captain winced every time he saw Templar's dark blue eyes superimposed on the wreckage ahead, eyes widening with unspeakable horror at something no one else could see. Templar had been too good a soldier to scream, but the Captain was an old hand at spotting "symptoms", so Templar sat this one out. And the Captain had made the long-awaited decision: after this city they were going home.

Orders are orders, but a good captain will not interpret them so narrowly as to expend his men for no purpose. There is room for judgment. He had been sent to ascertain if there were life on this seared planet. After reasonable search he had found none. They were going home.

Overhead the sky was empty, roofless, blinding white. It sucked the sweat before it could form and made their eyeballs stick. It shimmered on the prostrate girders and made them scorching hot. That the girders were silicon instead of steel did not excite them anymore. Nor did they exclaim over the generators of malleable glass with inner windings clearly visible like demonstration models or the strange doorways, all of them exactly three feet in diameter, all of them exactly thirty feet above the cracked mud streets as though the intervening space had been filled with water. It was too damn hot.

As they wormed toward the core of the city, Hogan, who followed Spencer, began to hum softly about a red-haired baby with two great big hums. He kicked up the dust and chattered to himself. He blinked at the white sky and tripped. Touching a girder involuntarily, he staggered back cursing, leaving the skin of his hand and wrist smoking on the silicon.

"Damn that Templar," he shrilled, "drinking beer in the cool of the spheroid!"

"In the cool of the spheroid," cried the echoes.

"The spheroid," replied echoes of the echoes.

Hogan dropped his rifle with a clatter and sucked his wrist.

"Shake it up," shouted the Captain from the head of the worm.

"Hogan's hurt," Spencer called from the tail. But Hogan lurched forward hissing: "Tend your own jet hole."

The Captain was back there, tall and concerned, grabbing Hogan's arm, making him show the burn. Deftly he bandaged it. "You can go back to the ship if you want to."

"Hell no and let you guys find something worth something," Hogan retorted and spat near Spencer's foot.

The Captain watched the gob of saliva sizzle and vanish. He looked across into Hogan's red-veined eyes, then down into Spencer's wide gray ones. Spencer's cheeks were puffed, flaming red. His lips were puffed, cracked and quivering slightly as though he was getting ready to laugh or cry. He shivered when the Captain squeezed his shoulder.

Too young, the Captain thought. I shouldn't have brought him out here. But he didn't say anything, just squeezed Spencer's shoulder again and trotted back to the head of the worm.

The monster had a million legs and it was shiny blue. A smooth hemisphere, it squatted on the hub cap of the city, holding the dead lifelines, the puppet strings of the city, python-thick electrical conduits that radiated out in all directions to tie the city together, to integrate the myriad mechanisms of the ultra-technical city, to bleed the streams of electrons that were the life blood to the city. There was life in the old boy yet.

When the Captain stepped too near a conduit, lightning knocked him down. When Spencer started to help the Captain up, a four-inch spark bit his finger. Hogan hee-hawed. But when the Captain jumped up and, grinning, poked his finger an inch from Hogan's dished-in nose Hogan yelped with pain.

"Yes, Hogan," the Captain laughed, "if you had gone back you'd of missed this. Here is the brain of the city, perhaps of the planet. If there is life on this planet we should find it here."

"Check this!" Spencer shouted. He had backed away to include the entire monster in camera focus. Now he was running toward them waving a print.

While the Captain examined it, Spencer turned the pointer-knob on the back of the camera, watched the needle creep across the dial, then opened the back and removed a second print. But the Captain was still staring at the first one. He turned it upside down, held it to the light, looked at the back. Hogan elbowed between the two men and poked a black-rimmed fingernail at the top of the print.

"When did you climb on top, Spencer? I never saw you."

"I didn't."

Hogan hee-hawed. "Then how'd this picture show you standing up there? You were up there and the Captain took the picture. Come on, quit kidding, my eyes don't fool."

Very carefully, trying to keep his hands steady, the Captain lit a cigarette and inhaled. He watched the smoke rise. "It could be a trick reflection."

"Or a mirage," Spencer filled in. "It's hot enough for a mirage." Then he handed over the second print. "But in this one I'm opening a trapdoor."

"Ho!" Hogan shouted. "This one wasn't taken from the ground. Look at the angle. This was taken from a copter."

The Captain exhaled very slowly. Due to the curve of the hemisphere, this trapdoor could not be seen from their location on the ground. But from thirty feet up, the level of the scum line, it would have been visible, if the trapdoor was really there. He was afraid it was. Somewhere. Was it on Pluto? He had heard tales of people, or were they machines? who had been able to rearrange molecular patterns, when initial cohesion was not great, by remote control. But there was no life here. The flare-up of this planet's sun had surely extinguished all life, even far below the surface.