rom grotesque, angling drifts of
soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and
there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life
was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by incalculable
ages of erosion.

* * * * *

At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a
building. A gigantic, jagged mass of detritus slanted upward from its
crest--red debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult for the
last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was--half a
million years ago. Man was gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war,
decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans
to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that.

"Kaalleee!... Tik, tik, tik!..." The sounds were not human. They were
more like the chatter and wail of small desert animals.

But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too.
The glint of metal, sharp and burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a
flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange
excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear
away rock and soil. Thus the gulch had been cleared of the accumulated
rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the
Earth.

Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands
to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. And he was very happy
now--flushed with a vast and unlooked-for success.

He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The
breeze rumpled his long, brown fur. He wasn't very different in
appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted
there in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred,
his undersides creamy. White whiskers spread around his inquisitive,
pink-tipped snout.

But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes,
betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of
evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of
his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century.

Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around
the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of
junk--scarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky rust. But
imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The