pyramid exactly as it had been before they had come.

"Say!" Morey commented, "how did you open and close that door, anyway?"

Arcot grinned. "Didn't you notice the jewel at the corner? It was the
lens of a photoelectric cell. My flashlight opened the door. I didn't
figure it out; it just worked accidentally."

Morey raised an eyebrow. "But if the darned thing is so simple, any
creature, intelligent or not, might be able to get in and destroy the
records!"

Arcot looked at him. "And where are your savages going to come from?
There are none on this planet, and anyone intelligent enough to build a
spaceship isn't going to destroy the contents of the tower."

"Oh." Morey looked a little sheepish.

They went into the airlock and took off their suits. Then they began
packing the precious books in specimen cases that had been brought for
the purpose of preserving such things.

When the last of them was carefully stowed, they returned to the
control room. They looked silently out across this strange, dead world,
thinking how much it must have been like Earth. It was dead now, and
frozen forever. The low hills that stretched out beneath them were dimly
lighted by the weak rays of a shrunken sun. Three hundred million miles
away, it glowed so weakly that this world received only a little more
heat than it might have received from a small coal fire a mile away.

So weakly it flared that in this thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium,
its little corona glowed about it plainly, and even the stars around it
shone brilliantly. The men could see one constellation that grouped
itself in the outlines of a dragon, with the sun of this system as its
cold, baleful eye.

Gradually, Arcot lifted the ship, and, as they headed out into space,
they could see the dim frozen plains fall behind. It was as if a load of
oppressing loneliness parted from them as they flew out into the vast
spaces of the eternal stars.

X

Arcot looked speculatively at the star field in the great broad window
before him. "We'll want to find another G-0 sun, naturally, but I don't
think we ought to go directly from here. If we did, we'd have to do a
lot of backtracking to get back to this dead star. I suggest we go back
to the edge of this galaxy, taking pictures on the way out, so that any
future investigators can come in directly. It'll only take a few hours."

"I think you're right," agreed Morey. "Besides, that will give us a
wider choice of s