rmed their complex societies--there are none among them with any
larger brains than the rest, and they do not talk. But somehow ants and
bees communicate and somehow they act as a mass. Figure it on a
world-wide scale, driven by the threat of their world drying up, and
these creatures built up a mechanical civilization to meet it. But it
also accounts for why they have never flown, not through the air and not
through space, why they haven't attempted radio communication with
Earth, and why they don't understand what the Sun-tap station is doing
to them. Their world is being killed, and they literally haven't the
brains to understand it."

They reached the city. All about was a silent hustle and bustle of
enigmatic, shining, shelled creatures. Superficially, it looked like an
intelligent civilization. There were wheeled carts driven by some sort
of steam generator. Steam-driven engines ran factories.

The Martians made way for the jeep with unconcern. Never had they seen
creatures as large as themselves that were not of their own kind on hive
business. Hence, none such could exist. This was a world totally without
individualism, a civilization without a spoken language, without names,
without banners. Wherever or however the mass knowledge was located or
transmitted, no individual of another species could ever hope to know.
It would be forever as remote from human explorers as the farthest star
on the farthest galaxy.

They drove to where the Sun-tap masts rose from the ground. The men
parked the jeep out of the way of the silent traffic, climbed out and
walked into the rounded door of a building. Its architecture was not
like that of the other buildings. Inside the chambers were dark.

"These creatures have no lights," remarked Boulton. "They must use their
feelers indoors."

"Ah, but look," said Burl, reaching out a hand to a little globe set on
a pole in the floor. He touched it and the globe lighted up. "The
Sun-tap builders needed light and put in their own fixtures here. I
recognize their style."

The five men followed a hallway that sloped down into the ground, and
came out into a large underground cellar--several hundred feet wide. It
was the Sun-tap station. There were the now-familiar globes and rods,
the force fields, the controls, the pedestals and the ends of the
rotating masts.

They made their recordings, and Burl got ready to turn off the station.
Ferrati and Haines uncrated a small, tactical atom