n't you look over the other way? There's the
house--and maybe the barn and the sheds and the old garden!"

Bubs turned around. His eyes got very big. "Oh! O-ooh-h-h!" he gasped in
wonder. "Pop! Mom! Look! Don't you see?..."

"Yeah, we see, Bubs," John Endlich answered.

For a long moment he'd been staring at those blocklike structures.
One--maybe the house--was of grey stone. It had odd, triangular windows,
which may once have been glazed. Some of the others were of a blackened
material--perhaps cellulose. Wood, that is. All of the buildings were
pushed askew, and partly crumpled from top to bottom, like great
cardboard cartons that had been half crushed.

Endlich's imagination seemed forced to follow a groove, trying to
picture that last terrible moment, fifty-million years ago. Had the
blast been caused by natural atomic forces at the heart of the planet,
as one theory claimed? Or had a great bomb, as large as an oversized
meteor, come self-propelled from space, to bury itself deep in that
ancient world? A world as big as Mars, its possible enemy--whose weird
inhabitants had been wiped out, in a less spectacular way, perhaps in
the same conflict?

Endlich's mind grabbed at that brief instant of explosion. The awful
jolt, which must have ended all consciousness, and all capacity for eyes
to see what followed. Perhaps there was a short and terrible passing of
flame. But in swift seconds, great chunks of the planet's crust must
have been hurled outward. In a moment the flame must have died,
dissipated with the suddenly vanishing atmosphere, into the cold vacuum
of the void. Almost instantly, the sky, which had been deep blue before,
must have turned to its present black, with the voidal stars blazing.
There had been no air left to sustain combustion, so buildings and trees
had not continued to burn, if there had been time at all to ignite them.
And, with the same swiftness, all remaining artifacts and surface
features of this chip of a world's crust that was Vesta, had been
plunged into the dual preservatives of the interplanetary
regions--deep-freeze and all but absolute dryness. Yes--the motion of
the few scattered molecules in space was very fast--indicating a high
temperature. But without substance to be hot, there can be no heat. And
so few molecules were there in the void, that while the concept of a
"hot" space remained true, it became tangled at once with the fact that
a _practically_ complete vacuum can hav