toward the door in the rear of the room.

Rynason went on back and found the live set. The screen, monitored from
a camera on the flyer, showed the foothills of the southern mountains
over which Mara was flying. They were bare and blunt; the rock
outcroppings which thrust up from the Flat had been weathered smooth in
the passage of years. Mara was passing over a low range and on to the
desert beyond.

Rynason picked up the mike. "Mara, this is Lee; we just got here. Have
you found them yet?"

Her voice came thinly over the speaker. "Not yet. I thought I saw some
movement in one of the passes, but the light wasn't too good. I'm
looking for that pass again."

"All right. We'll be going up ourselves in a few minutes; if you find
them, be careful. Wait for us."

He refitted the mike in its stand and rose. But as he turned to the door
her voice came again: "There they are!"

He looked at the screen, but for the moment he couldn't see anything.
Mara's flyer was coming down out of the rocky hills now, the Flat
stretching before her on the screen. Rynason could see the pass through
which she had been flying, but there was no movement there; it took him
several seconds to see the low ruins off to the right, and the figures
moving through them.

The screen banked and turned toward them; she was lowering her altitude.

"I see them," he said into the mike. "Can't make out what they're doing,
on the screen. Can you see them any more clearly?"

"They're entering one of the buildings down there," she said after a
moment. "I've counted almost twenty of them so far; they must all be
here."

"Can you go down and see what they're doing? The sooner we find out, the
better: Manning's got a pretty ugly bunch of so-called vigilantes on the
way out there."

She didn't reply, but on the screen he saw the crumbling buildings grow
larger and nearer. He could make out individual structures now: a wall
had fallen and was half-buried in the dust and sand; an entire roof had
caved in on another building, leaving only rubble in the interior. It
was difficult to tell sometimes when the original lines of the buildings
had fallen: they had all been smoothed by the wind-blown sand, so that
broken pillars looked almost as though they had been built that way,
smooth and upright, solitary.

At last, he saw the Hirlaji. They were slowly mounting the steps of one
of the largest of the buildings and passing into the shadows of the
interior. This