e bottom of the door glowed red.
Presently it began to crumble. Dorle clicked the weapon off. "I think we
can get through. Let's try."

The door came apart easily. In a few minutes they had carried it away in
pieces and stacked the pieces on the first step. Then they went on,
flashing the light ahead of them.

They were in a vault. Dust lay everywhere, on everything, inches thick.
Wood crates lined the walls, huge boxes and crates, packages and
containers. Tance looked around curiously, his eyes bright.

"What exactly are all these?" he murmured. "Something valuable, I would
think." He picked up a round drum and opened it. A spool fell to the
floor, unwinding a black ribbon. He examined it, holding it up to the
light.

"Look at this!"

They came around him. "Pictures," Nasha said. "Tiny pictures."

"Records of some kind." Tance closed the spool up in the drum again.
"Look, hundreds of drums." He flashed the light around. "And those
crates. Let's open one."

Dorle was already prying at the wood. The wood had turned brittle and
dry. He managed to pull a section away.

It was a picture. A boy in a blue garment, smiling pleasantly, staring
ahead, young and handsome. He seemed almost alive, ready to move toward
them in the light of the hand lamp. It was one of them, one of the
ruined race, the race that had perished.

For a long time they stared at the picture. At last Dorle replaced the
board.

"All these other crates," Nasha said. "More pictures. And these drums.
What are in the boxes?"

"This is their treasure," Tance said, almost to himself. "Here are their
pictures, their records. Probably all their literature is here, their
stories, their myths, their ideas about the universe."

"And their history," Nasha said. "We'll be able to trace their
development and find out what it was that made them become what they
were."

Dorle was wandering around the vault. "Odd," he murmured. "Even at the
end, even after they had begun to fight they still knew, someplace down
inside them, that their real treasure was this, their books and
pictures, their myths. Even after their big cities and buildings and
industries were destroyed they probably hoped to come back and find
this. After everything else was gone."

"When we get back home we can agitate for a mission to come here," Tance
said. "All this can be loaded up and taken back. We'll be leaving
about--"

He stopped.

"Yes," Dorle said dryly. "We'll be leaving ab