protect,” the puppeteer speculated. “That seems ominous, does it not? If they think less of their own lives, they will think less of ours.”
“You’re borrowing trouble.”
“We will know soon enough. Speaker, do you see that last building, the tall, cream-colored one with the broken windows—”
They had passed over it while the puppeteer spoke. Louis, who was taking his turn at flying the ’cycles, circled for another look.
“I was right. You see, Speaker? Smoke.”
The building was an artistically twisted and sculpted pillar some twenty stories tall. Its windows were rows of black ovals. Most of the windows of the ground floor were covered. The few that were open poured thin gray smoke into the wind.
The tower stood ankle-deep among one- and two-story homes. A row of those houses had been smashed flat by a rolling cylinder which must have fallen from the sky. But the rolling wreckage had disintegrated into concrete rubble before it reached that single tower.
The back of the tower was the edge of the city. Beyond were only rectangles of cultivation. Humanoid figures were running in from the fields even as the flycycles settled.
Buildings which had looked whole from high up were obvious wrecks at rooftop level. Nothing was untouched. The power failure and its accompanying disasters must have occurred generations ago. Then had come vandalism, rain, all the various corrosions caused by small life-forms, oxidation of metals, and something more. Something that in Earth’s prehistoric past had left village mounds for later archeologists to browse through.
The city-dwellers had not restored their city after the power failure. Neither had they moved away. They had lived on in the ruins.
And the garbage of their living had accumulated about them.
Garbage. Empty boxes. Wind-borne dust. Inedible parts of food, bones, and things comparable to carrot leaves and corn cobs. Broken tools. It built up, when people were too lazy or too hard-worked to haul the rubbish away. It built up, and the parts softened and merged, and the pile settled under its own weight, and was compressed further by heavy feet, year by year, generation by generation.
The original entrance to the tower was already buried. Ground level had risen that far. As the flycycles settled on hard-packed dirt, ten feet above what had once been a parking area for large ground-bound vehicles, five humanoid natives strode in solemn dignity through a second-story window.
The window was a double bay window, easily large enough to accommodate such a procession. Its sill and lintel were decorated with thirty or forty human-looking skulls. Louis could see no obvious pattern to their arrangement.
The five walked toward the ’cycles. As they came near they hesitated, in visible doubt as to who was in charge. They, too, looked human, but not very. Clearly they belonged to no known race of man.
The five were all shorter than Louis Wu by six inches or more. Where it showed, their skin was very light, almost ghost-white in contrast to Teela’s merely Nordic pink or Louis’s darker yellow-brown. They tended to short torsos and long legs. They walked with their arms identically folded; and their fingers were extraordinarily long and tapering, so that any of the five would have been a born surgeon in the days when men still performed surgery.
Their hair was more extraordinary than their hands. On all five dignitaries, it was the same shade of ash blond. They wore their hair and beards combed but uncut; and their beards covered their faces entirely, except for the eyes.
Needless to say, they all looked alike.
“They’re so hairy!” Teela whispered.
“Stay on your vehicles,” Speaker ordered in a low voice. “Wait until they reach us. Then dismount. I assume we are all wearing our communicator discs?”
Louis wore his inside his left wrist. The discs were linked to the autopilot aboard the Liar. They should work over such a distance, and the Liar’s autopilot should be able to translate any new language.
But there was no way to test the tanj things except in action. And there were all those skulls…
Other natives were pouring into the former parking lot. Most of them halted at the sight of the confrontation-in-progress, so that the crowd formed a wide rough circle well outside the region of action. A normal crowd would have grumbled to itself in speculation and wagers and arguments. This crowd was unnaturally silent.
Perhaps the presence of an audience forced the dignitaries to decide. They chose to approach Louis Wu.
The five…they didn’t really look alike. They differed in height. All were thin, but one was almost