THE STARS ARE OURS

They landed on a patch of grassy ground before a huge pile of masonry which had three walls still standing. The ruined farmhouse had pictured for them tragedy, fear and cruelty. But this whole city-it was impersonal, too much,. Such complete wreckage was closer to a dream.

"Atom bomb, H-bomb, Null-bomb," Cully recited the list of the worst Terra had known. "They must have had them here-all of them!"

"And they were certainly men-for they used them!" Kimber added savagely. He climbed out of the sled and faced the building. Its walls reflected the sun as if they were of some metallic substance but softly, with a glow of green-blue-as if the blocks used in building had been quarried of sea water. A flight of twelve steps, as wide as a Terran city block, led up to a mighty portal through which they could see the sun glow bright in the roofless interior.

Around that portal ran a band of colors, blending and contrasting in a queer way which might have had meaning and yet did net-for Terran eyes. As he studied the hues Dard thought he had a half-hint. Perhaps those colors did have a deliberate sequence-perhaps they were more than just decoration.

6: DISASTER

THEIR ATTEMPTS to explore on foot were frustrated by the mounds of debris and danger from falling rubble. Cully jumped to safety from the top of a mound which caved in under his weight, and so escaped a dangerous slide into one of the pits. Those pits were everywhere, dug so deeply into the foundations of the city that the Terrans, huddling on the rims, could look down past several underground levels to a darkness uncut by the sun.

A little shaken by the engineer's narrow escape, they retired to the sled and made an unappetizing meal on concentrates.

"No birds," Dard suddenly realized that fact. Nothing alive."

"Unhuh." Santee dug his heel into the grass and earth.

"No bugs either. And there're enough of them back in the valley!"

"No birds, no insects," Kimber said slowly. "The place is dead. I don't know how the rest of you feel, but I've had just about enough."

They did agree with that. The brooding stillness, broken only when debris crashed or rolled, rasped their nerves.

Dard swallowed his last bite of concentrate and turned to the pilot.

"Do we have any microfilm we can use?"

"For what-a lot of broken buildings?" Cully wanted to know.

"I'd like one of those bands of color around that doorway," Dard answered. His idea that the bands had a meaning was perhaps silly but he could not push it away.

"All right, kid." Kimber unpacked the small recorder and focused it on a place where the sun was strong. "No pattern I can see. But, it just might mean something at that."

That was the only picture they took when on the ground. But once again in the air Cully ran the machine for a bird's-eye view of as much of the ruined area as could be recorded.

They were approaching the outer reaches of the city to the east when Santee gave an exclamation and touched Kimber's arm. They were over a street less cumbered with rubble than any they had yet crossed, and there was a flicker of movement there.

As the sled coasted down they disturbed a pack of grayish, four-footed things that streaked away into the ruins leaving their meal behind them on the blood-smeared pavement.

"Whew!" Cully coughed and Dard gagged at the stench the wind carried in their direction. They left the sled to gather around the tangle of stripped bones and rotting flesh.

"That wasn't killed today," Kimber observed unnecessarily.

Dard rounded the stained area. The dead thing had been large, perhaps the size of a Terran draft horse, and the skeleton-tumbled as the bones now were-suggested that it was four-footed and hooved. But that skull, to which ragged and blood-clotted hair still dung, was what he had moved to see. He had been right-two horns sprouted above the eye sockets. This was the horned horse of the game set!

"A duocorn?" mused the pilot.

"A what?" Santee wanted to know.

"There was a fabled animal mentioned in some of the old books on Terra. Had a single horn in the middle of the forehead, but the rest was all horse. Well, here's a horse with two horns-a duocorn instead of a unicorn. But those things we saw feeding here-they were pretty small to bring down an animal of this size."

"Unless they carry a burper, they didn't!" Dard, in spite of the odor, leaned down to inspect that stretch of spine beyond the loose skull. A section of vertebra had been smashed just as if a giant vise had been applied to the nape of the duocorn's neck!

"Crushed!" Kimber agreed. "But whatever could do that?"

Cully studied the body. "Mighty big for a horse."

"There were breeds on earth which were seventeen to twenty hands high at the shoulder and weighed close to a ton," returned Kimber. "This fellow must have been about that size."

"And what is big enough to crunch through a spine supporting a ton of meat?" Santee wanted to know. He went back to the sled and picked up the rifle.