een a city once. If you counted buildings and streets,
tall structures where people might work quietly and effectively, broad
avenues leading out to trim homes where they might rest in peace after
their labors of the day, if you counted these things as being important,
it was still a city. But if you thought that the important element in
the make-up of a city was its inhabitants then this place no longer
deserved the name.

It had no inhabitants.

"I don't know what killed it," Thompson said. Before landing they had
circled this world. From the air they had seen more than a dozen cities
such as this one. All of them dead, all of them deserted, all of them
with streets overgrown by shrubbery, the pavements buckling from the
simple pressure of roots pushing upward, the buildings falling away into
ruin for the same reason. But they had seen no inhabitants. They had
seen the roads the inhabitants had built to connect their cities,
deserted now. They had seen the fields where these people had once
worked, fields that now were turning back into forests. They had seen no
evidence of landing fields for air craft or space ships. The race that
had built the cities had not yet learned the secret of wings.

From the roof of the building where they stood, the only living
creatures to be seen were visible through the plastic viewport of the
ship below them--Grant, the communication specialist, and Buster, the
ship's cat.

Grant had been left to guard the vessel. Buster had been required to
remain within the ship, obviously against his will. He had wanted to
come with Thompson. A trace of a grin came to Thompson's face at the
sight of the cat. He and Buster were firm mutual friends.

"I don't like this place," Kurkil spoke suddenly. "We shouldn't have
landed here."

Kurkil paused, then his voice came again, stronger now, and with
overtones of fear in it. "There's death here." He slapped at his arm,
stared around him.

"What happened?"

"Something bit me." He showed the back of his hand. A tiny puncture was
visible.

"Some insect," Thompson said. The matter of an insect bite was of no
concern. Kurkil, and every other member of this expedition, were
disease-proof. Back in Sol Cluster vaccines and immunizing agents had
been developed against every known or conceivable form of germ or virus.
Each member of the crew had been carefully immunized. In addition, they
had been proofed against stress, against mounting neural pressure