and day, warmth and light, and rain and wind. Pluto was once
a living world, a place we'd have called homelike."

Burl shivered a bit. "Out here? So far from the Sun? How and when?"

Russ shrugged. "We'll find that out. But the evidence is unmistakable."
They walked on.

There was a low, cracked wall on the other side of the hill, and beyond
the wall stood the roofless ruins of a stone house, silent and gray in
the airless scene.

They waited with surprise and uncertainty. Haines drew his compressed
air pistol, but there was no movement. The scene remained dead and
still--the windows of the house were dark.

They advanced on it and flashed a light inside. It was an empty shell.
There was no glass within the unusually wide and low window openings,
and no door.

"They went in and out the windows," commented Burl, ducking through one
of the openings. "And they weren't built like us."

"No," said Russ, "there's no reason to suppose the inhabitants would
have been built like human beings."

Inside there was nothing to see, and they left. Beyond, they found a
straight depression in the ground filled with flat swirls of cosmic
dust. "This looks like a road," said Haines.

They returned to the rocket plane in order to follow the dead roadway
more easily. Passing between the low, dark cliffs of rocky mountains,
they came to a plain marked by thousands of columns of rock, pieces of
crumbling walls, and many straight depressions that must have been
streets. It was the remains of a world that had died.

They found, as they traveled northward and made intermittent landings,
that there had been many cities. Now all lay in ruins. There had been
great roadways, now covered with the debris of outer space. There had
been mighty forests, now miles of petrified black stumps. It was a
gloomy sight.

In their landings, they had found inscriptions on walls and bas-reliefs
carved on mountains. They knew from these what the Plutonians had looked
like, and they had a suspicion of what had happened.

The Plutonians had been vaguely like men and vaguely like spiders. They
had stood upright on four thin, wide-spread legs and had two short arms.
Their bodies were wide and squat, and they seemed to have been mammalian
and probably warm-blooded. They breathed air out of flat, thin nostrils
and their heads joined their bodies without necks. Two oval eyes were
set below a jutting bald brow. They had worn clothes, they had driven
vehicles