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.Then the Others came and destroyed everything.The Others turned the sky to fire and brought night.Only the people in the deepest cave survived.This was the deepest cave.Only the people of Ardraka escaped the Others.”We destroyed this world, Lee told himself.An interstellar war, eons ago.We destroyed each other, old man.Only you’ve been destroyed for good, and we climbed back.“One more thing remains,” Ardraka said.He walked into the shadows on the other end of the room and pushed open a door.A door! It was metal, Lee could feel as he went past it.There was another chamber, larger.A storeroom! Shelves lined the walls.Most of them empty, but here and there were boxes, containers, machinery with strange writing on it.“These belonged to Ardraka’s oldest ancestors,” the chief said.“No man today knows why these things were saved here in the deepest cave.They have no purpose.They are dead.As dead as the people who put them here.”It was Lee who was trembling as they made their way up to the dwelling caves.XIt was a week before he dared stroll the beach at night again, a week of torment, even though Ardra never gave him the slightest reason to think that he was still under suspicion.They were just as stunned as he was when he told them about it.“We killed them,” he whispered savagely at them, back in the comfort of the ship.“We destroyed them.Maybe we even made the Pup explode, to wipe them out completely.”“That’s … farfetched,” Rassmussen answered.But his voice sounded lame.“What do we do now?”“I want to see those artifacts.”“Yes, but how?”Lee said, “I can take you down to the cave, if we can put the whole clan to sleep for a few hours.Maybe gas …”“That could work,” Rassmussen agreed.“A soporific gas?” Pascual’s soft tenor rang incredulously in Lee’s ears.“But we haven’t the faintest idea of how it might affect them.”“It’s the only way,” Lee said.“You can’t dig your way into the cave … even if you could, they would hear it, and you’d be discovered.”“But gas … it could kill them all.”“They’re all dead right now,” Lee snapped.“Those artifacts are the only possible clue to their early history.”Rassmussen decided.“We’ll do it.”Lee slept less than ever the next few nights, and when he did he dreamed, but no longer about the buildings on Titan.Now he dreamed of the ships of an ancient Earth, huge round ships that spat fire on the cities and people of Makta.He dreamed of the Pup exploding and showering the planet with fire, blowing off the atmosphere, boiling the oceans, turning mountains into glass slag, killing every living thing on the surface of the world, leaving the planet bathed in a steam cloud, its ground ruptured with angry new volcanoes.It was a rainy dark night when you could hardly see ten meters beyond the cave’s mouth that they came.Lee heard their voices in his head as they drove the skimmer up onto the beach and clambered down from it and headed for the caves.Inside the caves, the people were asleep, sprawled innocently on the damp musty ground.Out of the rain a huge, bulky metal shape materialized, walking with exaggerated caution.“Hello, Sid,” Jerry Grote’s voice said in his head, and the white metal shape raised a hand in greeting.The Others, Lee thought as he watched four more powersuited figures appear in the dark rain.He stepped out of the cave, the rain a cold shock to his body.“Bring the stuff?”Grote hitched a gauntleted thumb at one of the others.“Pascual’s got it.He’s insisting on administering the gas himself.”“Okay, but let’s get it done quickly, before somebody wakes up and spots you.Who else is with you?”“Chien, Tanaka, and Stek.Tanaka can help Carlos with the anesthetic.Chien and Stek can look over the artifacts.”Lee nodded agreement.Pascual and Tanaka spent more than an hour seeping the mildest soporific they knew of through the sleeping cave.Lee fidgeted outside on the beach, in the rain, waiting for them to finish.When Tanaka finally told them it was safe to go through, he hurried past the sprawled bodies, scarcely seeing Pascual —still inside his cumbersome suit—patiently recording medical analyses of each individual.Even with the suit lamps to light the corridors, it was hard to retrace his steps down to the lowest level of the ancient shelter.But when he got to the storeroom, Lee heard Stek break into a long string of Polish exultation at the sight of the artifacts.The three suited figures holographed, X-rayed, took radiation counts, measured, weighed, every piece on the ancient shelves.They touched nothing directly, but lifted each piece with loving tenderness in a portable magnetic grapple.“This one,” Stek told Lee, holding a hand-sized, oddly angular instrument in midair with the grapple, “we must take with us
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