, the process was
too slow.

"And we need to use heat-coils to thaw the ground, Johnny," Rose said.
"And to keep the place warm. And to bring nitrogen gas up out of the
soil. The few cylinders of the compressed stuff that we've got won't be
enough to make a start. And the carbon dioxide...."

So John Endlich had to try to repair that main battery. He thought,
after a while, that he might succeed--in time. But then Rose opened the
airlock, and the kids came in to bother him. With all the triumph of a
favorite puppy dragging an over-ripe bone into the house, Bubs bore a
crooked piece of a black substance, hard as wood and more gruesome than
a dried and moldy monkey-pelt.

"A tentacle!" Evelyn shrilled. "We were up to those old buildings! We
found the people! What's left of them! And lots of stuff. We saw one of
their cars! And there was lots more. Dad--you gotta come and see!..."

Harassed as he was, John Endlich yielded--because he had a hunch, an
idea of a possibility. So he went with his children. He passed through a
garden, where a pool had been, and where the blackened remains of plants
still projected from beds of dried soil set in odd stone-work. He passed
into chambers far too low for comfortable human habitation. And what did
he know of the uses of most of what he saw there? The niches in the
stone walls? The slanting, ramplike object of blackened wood, beside
which three weird corpses lay? The glazed plaque on the wall, which
could have been a religious emblem, a calendar of some kind, a
decoration, or something beyond human imagining? Yeah--leave such stuff
for Cousin Ernest, the school teacher--if he ever got here.

In the cylindrical stone shed nearby, John Endlich had a look at the
car--low slung, three-wheeled, a tiller, no seats. Just a flat platform.
All he could figure out about the motor was that steam seemed the link
between atomic energy and mechanical motion.

Beyond the car was what might be a small tractor. And a lot of odd
tools. But the thing which interested him most was the pattern of copper
ribbons, insulated with a heavy glaze, similar to that which he had seen
traversing walls and ceiling in the first building he had entered. Here,
as before, they connected with queer apparatus which might be stoves and
non-rotary motors, for all he knew. And also with the globes overhead.

The suggestiveness of all this was plain. And now, at the far end of
that cylindrical shed, John Endlich found t