Answer Came There None
Galaxy, January 1974
(1974)
James White

Chapter One

	Like a green and seemingly virginal carpet, the planetary surface unrolled five miles below the slowing ship. The grasses and small plants showed no signs of vegetable blight—the atmosphere was free of industrial pollutants and there were no cities or surface transport networks of any kind. But to the ship's sensors and the tired, experienced eyes of the crew the greenery was a beautiful lie, a cosmetic skin of apparent youth overlaying a world which for many thousands of years had been drained of all its natural resources, used up and emptied of all life above the insect level.

	"We're wasting our time," said Jan, in a tone that indicated that she was looking for an argument.

	Peter did not like arguing with her, especially during the last few minutes before touchdown, even though a searchship was fully capable of landing itself. He waited until the ship had recovered from a brief attack of the transonic shudders and their landing spot was centered in the forward viewscreen. Then he said, "Probably."

	She gave a short sigh of irritation and tapped for a magnified picture of the landing area on her duplicate display. He could not see the particular section she had blown up for closer examination because her head was in the way.

	Lit in profile by the screen, Jan looked almost young again. In silhouette the graying hair and the fine facial wrinkles did not show. But it took more than a trick of back lighting, he knew, to cancel out the weariness and lack of hope in her body and mind—as well as his own. Like the salt used to preserve meat in ancient times, every cell and thought was soaked in it. If an old-time cannibal had taken a bite out of one of them, hopelessness and frustration would have been the strongest taste.

	Eighty years, he thought, was a long time to be doing the same job.

	The screen darkened as the ship's nose went up, pulling forward-facing cameras off-picture, and they began falling tail-first into the increasingly resistant softness of their antigravity landing cushion. They touched down— the cushion flicked off and the ship rocked gently as the weight forced its landing legs deep into the soft ground. The all-around viewscreens lit up and the images steadied and sharpened as the ship came finally to rest.

	"We are wasting our time," Jan persisted. I'm sure we have been here before."

	"Unlikely," he replied, "but you could be forgiven for thinking so. One of these sites is very much like any other—the same green mounds, the same type and size of ruined buildings even, because they are probably examples of the most advanced and durable structures built by the same architect—"

	He broke off because she was shaking her head. In a less conciliatory tone he went on, "Are you suggesting that I made a mistake and we've doubled back to a site already investigated? An understandable error, you are doubtless thinking, caused by my advancing years? But you are forgetting that our computer, which isn't subject to lapses caused by senile decay—"

	"I could argue that point too," she broke in.

	His first impulse was to tell her that the recent trouble they had had with the computer had been due to operator error and that she had been the operator, but he thought better of it. Instead he said, "Are you coming outside?"

	"Yes," she replied. "I prefer talking to you to sitting here talking to myself."

	"I'm glad," he said drily. "For a moment I wondered if the romance was going out of our relationship."

	But they said very little while they were climbing into their protective suits, probably because he had touched on a subject to which they were both hypersensitive. He would willingly have bet that within the next hour there would be an argument about rejuvenation and that argument, he knew from bitter experience, nobody won.

	Preceded by a general purpose robot which, in addition to the usual sensory and specimen gathering equipment was also programmed for medical and surgical emergencies, they moved down the ramp and onto the springy turf. The sun shone brightly out of a sky whose clouds could not have been more tastefully arranged by a landscape painter. The air was fresh and pure and eminently breathable, but their heavy protective suits were needed to protect them against the insects which crawled and flew and were incredibly vicious. Even though he knew that he would have no use for it, he wore a sidearm because the regulations required him to do so.

	Jan did not wear one because, she was fond of saying, if a native life form more than two inches tall came at them she would be so pleased that she would want to hug the thing instead of shoot it.

	The insects were everywhere.

	Hundreds of the things died with each step the searchers took, while the robot's balloon tires wreaked even greater havoc. But the dark and oozing tracks that stained the grass in their wake were gone before they had traveled ten yards because the insects ate each other and not, for some odd ecological reasons, the short grass that sheltered them. Any insect left defenseless by death or injury disappeared quickly, right down to the last smear of juice or edible tissue.

	There had been a time when Jan and he would have examined the insects' behavior for indications of developing intelligence—some sign, perhaps, that these last inheritors of this and so many other worlds would produce an insect gestalt with which the human race might eventually communicate. Now, however, they walked between and over the all too familiar grassy mounds and ignored the senseless ferocity under their feet.

	Beneath the grass and the layer of warring insects the robot's sensors reported the usual mixture of indestructible plastic debris and metallic oxides. Toward the end this particular civilization had used a lot of plastic because no metal had been available. Nevertheless the. beings had built well and the plastic ruins still stood impressively tall in a few places, even though the builders had long since gone down before the insect enemy.

	"That one looks interesting," Peter said, pointing toward a squat, five-story building that seemed to be structurally complete except for its missing roof. Many of the plastic windows were still in place, but rendered virtually opaque by weathering and the mosslike growth that also covered the walls. The ground-level entrance was large and clear of rubble. He added: "Do you still think that we've been here before?"

	"The familiar can look strange," she said stubbornly, "if you approach it from a different angle."

	"And the wrong angle of view," he replied, "can make the strange look familiar. But let's stop arguing and start looking inside. We are supposed to examine at least one building on every site and more if we should turn up something interesting ..."

	His voice trailed into silence. He was thinking that one indication of approaching senility was the habit of explaining things to someone who already knew the explanation.

	A few minutes later the robot placed sensors against a wall and emitted high-pitched squeaks as it sonically analyzed the building for structural defects. Satisfied that the place was safe for human searchers, it preceded them inside.

	With the robot's main beam trained at full intensity on the ceiling there was more than enough light for them to see around the big entrance hall. The remains of what might have been desks and possibly some clear-walled display cases were spaced at intervals about the floor, while the walls were covered with largo pictures. A heavy dusting of living and long-dead insects over everything made it difficult to pick out details.

	The contents of the display cases, if they once had been display cases, were no longer recognizable. Most of the pictures, for some reason, were less obscured by insects and showed machinery with natives busy around it—Peter deduced a large factory complex and what looked like a supersonic atmospheric flyer of conventional design. A bank of elevators was framed against the wall facing the entrance, the doors collapsed outward under the pressure of the rubble that had collected in the elevator shafts.

	A broad ramp curved upward to the level above. The searchers began to climb.

	From their studies of sites visited earlier they had formed a vague idea of what the natives of this world had looked like and of the way they moved when they were not riding in cars or flyers. Physically they had resembled short, wide-based cones with a number of specialized appendages—manipulators, visual equipment and possibly eating and breathing orifices—sprouting from the top. Presumably their brains were housed somewhere inside the stubby, legless bodies, which had moved snaillike—but not necessarily slowly—on a wide apron of muscle. Stairs or ladders inside the dwellings had been conspicuous by their absence.

	As ho mounted the ramp Peter's eyes were fixed on the robot, which was capable of climbing anything, when Jan gripped his arm tightly and pointed ahead.

	"Look at those sculptures," she said excitedly. "And undraped, too. This will answer a lot of the physiological questions."

	Two enormous figures, five or six times larger than life, dominated the floor space at the top of the ramp. They had been cut from hard rock and the insects had left them alone—Peter saw that every muscle and joint and wrinkle was rendered in perfect detail. No wonder Jan was pleased.

	"I suppose," he said, "the smaller of the two is the female of the species?"

	"It's easy to tell who is the medic in this family," Jan said, shaking her head. "No. I'd say that the small one with its eye glaring aggressively at us is their equivalent of Neanderthal Man, while the tall one with the more specialized appendages, whose eyestalk is pointed skyward, represents the builders of this once-mighty civilization."

	... Which rose to its greatest heights, he added silently, and signaled its presence to the rest of the galaxy and then died, two thousand years ago ...

	"We're lucky," Jan went on. "We've found a cultural center designed for posterity—maybe even us. Look around you. Some of those display cases are still complete and their contents are undamaged—which isn't surprising since most of them contain oddly shaped pieces of rock—"

	She broke off and turned away from him. The robot was busily photographing the alien tableau and concentrating its main beam on the subject it had chosen. Jan switched on her suit light and picked her way along a cluttered aisle to the next ascending ramp. She went up it at a near run. Peter followed more slowly. By the time he and the robot found her crouched over a collapsed display case, she was still trying to catch her breath.

	"You shouldn't run like that," he said. "Overexertion is dangerous at our age."

	She waved his words aside and went on excitedly, "I was pretty sure below, but now there is no doubt in my mind. We've found a museum. The ground floor level is devoted to the race's prehistory—crude stone implements, knives, early attempts at working clay or mud. On this level they have progressed to agriculture and weaving. Most of the specimens were of perishable vegetable matter, so time and the insects have done for them. But the wall pictures are well preserved and clearly show the level of culture of that period. Succeeding levels should bring us to the time when this civilization began to fall apart. We may even find the reasons for its collapse."

	"We know the reason why it, and all the others, collapsed," he said tiredly. "They had too many, smug, self-satisfied, selfish beings eating up too few natural resources. We've pieced together that particular picture too many times—what's begun to impress me is that nearly every culture we've found has left us a lesson of its past; not one a lesson for survival."

	"I know," she replied, some of the enthusiasm fading from her tone. "But finding this building was a piece of rare good luck and there might be another piece just waiting for us. We're due some good luck and I have a feeling—"

	"You always have a feeling," he broke in. "It's called wishful thinking."

	"Are you trying to be nasty or can't you help it?" she said angrily, then went on: "Right here we may be able to piece together a complete picture, instead of searching all over the planet for pieces of the jigsaw—and probably missing most of them. I'm glad you made that mistake and doubled back here because—"

Chapter Two

	"Damn it," he said furiously. "You keep insisting that we landed here before, but we can't have done so. The computer isn't your specialty, so I can't completely convince you that when I program the ship for a search it cannot possibly make that kind of error."

	"It couldn't—but maybe you could," she snapped back. Then, more quietly, she went on, "You are sure that you didn't make a mistake and I am sure you did. So we are having this stupid argument and letting it blunt our powers of observation and reasoning. We've found something I think we missed before and you don't. That doesn't alter the fact that we could be on the point of learning the workings of an extraterrestrial culture that—in all respects save one—might make ours look medieval by comparison.

	"This is all wrong," she went on seriously. "We're losing our sense of proportion. I think we've let ourselves grow too old. We seem to do nothing these days but argue and snap at each other and we could be missing important data simply because we are squabbling instead of looking."

	"I know we're growing old," he said. "But the last time this subject came up we agreed that there would be no more rejuvenation programs unless we found—"

	"You agreed. I had reservations."

	He took a deep breath and tried to hide his anger at having to say something he had already said too many times before.

	"We've already undergone three rejuvenations. There is no problem about getting another. Even though the treatments are restricted because there are too many people, our work insures our being made young again with no quibbling. At the same time—if we go through the process once again we'll be morally obliged to continue our work as searchers. And I, for one, do not think that I could stand another twenty years doing— this. Even as a youthful, vigorous, clear-eyed grave-robber instead of an elderly specimen with hardening of the intellect. We've already known lifetimes of disappointment. To extend it by another twenty years is more than I could take. I'm sorry. But if you want to apply—"

	He could see her head shaking inside her helmet.

	She said, "No. I do as you do."

	"But—" he said drily.

	"But," she said softly, "I miss the fringe benefits."

	For a few seconds they stared silently at each other. Then he grinned and suddenly they both laughed. The problems were still there—nothing had changed so far as their personal difficulties were concerned but, for a short time at least, the senseless arguing was over.

	"Is there anything special I should look for?" he asked when the therapeutic laughter had ceased. "Something to indicate species survival?"

	"I don't know," she replied. "Look for something different, some new idea or facet in the culture that would make it unlike any of the others we've investigated. It could be a scheme for population control or feeding— maybe an idea that came too late to do these creatures any good, but one we might use on Earth before we go the same way. But I would especially like to find some indication that—before their culture fell apart—some of them were able to get away and plant a colony. In the two thousand years since this world stopped signaling a flourishing colony could have come into being in another system. A colonization project like that is important enough to have a place in a museum," she added, "and its position in space would almost certainly be included in the exhibit."

	In short, he thought wearily as they moved toward another ascending ramp, we are still looking for our own image ...

	They had been looking for "people" on the first search mission, Peter remembered, but on that occasion it had not seemed to matter too much when they had not found them. The prospects had been too new, strange and exciting—setting out in one of the first searchships with everyone wishing them well. In many respects it had been like a honeymoon—for Jan and himself it had been their honeymoon—and those tend to be perfect in every way, especially in retrospect.

	Using the newly developed stardrive, they had jumped ten light-years into interstellar space, deployed their vast antennae and listened. More accurately, the ship's sensors had listened while the personnel carried out explorations of a more personal nature. The weeks of waiting had passed pleasantly enough while the antennae scooped up mush from stellar objects that radiated on the bands above and below the visible spectrum. Then, suddenly, a signal had come that could only have had an intelligent source.

	It was simple, repetitious and as individually unique as a signature. As expected, it faded out within a few minutes and returned, again for only a few minutes, just over a day later.

	During their training on Pluto Station they had listened to recordings of many such signals. The theory had been that the "messages" emanated from antennae on worlds that could well lie halfway across the galaxy and that the periods of silence corresponded to the rotational period of the transmitting planet. It was also thought that the transmitting antennae were steerable, so that they painted virtually all of the surrounding space in measured, vertical sweeps. This theory proved true in the majority of cases, the searchers discovered later, but there had been a few worlds where the signals had been sent from a transmitter in orbit.

	Peter had taken a fix on that first signal and he and his bride had jumped one hundred light-years closer. Then they had taken another fix and jumped again. There was no need to make sense of the signal, although they had often tried—it was simply an alien voice saying over and over again that it was there.

	Then, abruptly, it was no longer there.

	They had back-tracked until the signal was coming in again, then made a long jump at right angles to fix the system's position by triangulation. Within a few weeks they had found it—and arrived on a world wiped clean of intelligent life.

	The system had been something like four thousand light-years from Earth and in all probability its signals had been coming long before human technology had reached the level of being able to detect them. Radio-frequency emissions traveled at the speed of light, and their ship had continued to encounter those signals for more than half of its four-thousand-light-year journey, so that the civilization which produced them had lasted for at least two thousand years.

	But even long-lived, stable and technologically advanced cultures come to an end and, when such a civilization fell—it fell hard.

	Peter's and Jan's feelings on finding that first dead world had been of mild disappointment rather than sorrow. They had been unlucky first time out, they told themselves, and next time there would be people—new, alien and perhaps dangerous people—to contact.

	The risks involved were not great because a race that advertised its presence all over space would probably welcome contact. But on that first world there had been only insects and the remains of a great civilization in a remarkably good state of preservation. Jan and Peter had taken back specimens and records that had advanced Earth technology by a half-century. Their debriefing had lasted for nearly three years, during which they had been heaped with academic and other honors, as had, to a lesser extent, the other searchship crews which had brought home smaller pieces of the alien bacon.

	Finally they had been allowed to try again.

	The second world they found had also died long before its radio signals had finished their slow journey to Earth. There were interesting artifacts and useful processes on that world, too, and on the many others they visited. At home everyone benefited from the steady feedback of alien know-how. But the searchship crews grew tired of robbing technological tombs. They wanted to find people ...

	"Next time we'll ask for a trip into the Galactic Center—" Peter began, then stopped. He had made the same suggestion at this stage of the investigation of nearly every planet they had visited.

	"We tried that once and were nearly killed," Jan replied. "If you remember—stars there have young planets and it is easy to have the ship wrecked by an extraterrestrial mammoth or an outbreak of volcanic activity. But you know all this," she went on irritably. "Why bring it up again when you'll end by arguing that it's better to follow a signal—because then we are sure of something having been there—than to launch ourselves into a forest of stars where life as we know it has not had a chance to evolve.

	"We've never delayed our rejuvenation treatments as long as this before," she added, "and I think that we're becoming forgetful as well as bad-tempered, myself included. Or have you a fresh idea about a Center search?"

	He shook his head. "Not really. My idea is that we take rejuvenation again and, young and healthy and with our reflexes speeded up, we make a three-year random search of the Center. The planets we find may be composed of primeval magma, but there is still a chance that we will find intelligent life. Maybe young life—but intelligent. A fresh start. We can't go on forever trying to talk to alien ghosts."

	"Neither can we talk to alien children or mindless alien embryos," she replied. "We must find someone our own age to play with."

	"Yes," he said.

	They had climbed from the third floor of the building and were beginning to explore the fourth. The equivalent of the industrial revolution had been left behind and nuclear energy had been released, although not in time of war. In common with all of the other dead cultures they had studied, this one had had very few major wars in its recorded history. Progress in all of the arts and sciences had been slow and at every stage the culture had remained stable. The beings appeared to have been cooperative, easy-going and seemingly happy. Their world had been a nice place to live.

	The display cases on the fourth floor were relatively undamaged, but their metal contents were irregular masses of corrosion. Plastic components and models, although discolored and encrusted with dead insects, were in good condition. And the searchers were encountering more and more specimens of plastic books—great, thick-paged tomes whose text seemed to float above the pages and whose illustrations gave an illusion of perfect three-D on a flat surface.

	"They'll be interested in that particular effect at home," he said. At least I hope they will, he added silently. The people at home were becoming disinterested in everything -including themselves.

	"Yes," she replied, "and the contents of this building will enable me to finish this mission in two or three months instead of a year. We were lucky finding a museum—"

	"Landing here wasn't a waste of time, then?"

	He did not know what was driving him to restart the argument which, only a few minutes earlier, he had been so glad to end, but he felt angry, frustrated and depressed and suddenly he wanted someone besides himself to suffer.

	"No, it wasn't a waste of time—" she began testily, then stopped. For a few seconds she stared at him as if he were her patient and she a doctor or nurse, her expression sympathetic rather than angry. Then she went on: "Look at that mural over there. One of their interstellar radio transmitters, wouldn't you say?"

	Feeling even more annoyed by her sympathy, he looked in the direction she was pointing and nodded. The murals were large and in a very good state of preservation and. like those in the lower levels, they were displayed in chronological order, beginning at the right of the entrance ramp and running around three walls to end on the left of the ascending ramp to the next level. Two sets of transmitting antennae were pictured on adjacent murals, one built on a snow-streaked headland overlooking an angry sea and another set in desert land.

	The next few murals in line showed advanced agricultural processes on land, sea and under the sea—a lot of wall space had been devoted to the solutions, however temporary, of the problem of feeding a rapidly increasing population. The desert transmitter was shown again, its bright metal dulled by the passage of centuries and the surrounding desert converted to a green and yellow patchwork of field tended by agricultural robots.

	His eyes moved to the next picture and he laughed sardonically.

	"Well, now," he said. "It seems they built their interstellar signaling devices several centuries before they attempted their first space flight. They were a smug, self-opinionated bunch of—"

	"Maybe they had their priorities right," Jan broke in. "After all, they must have realized that there was a strong possibility of life in other star systems as soon as they outgrew the idea that their particular world was unique and the center of the universe. They probably decided that an interstellar drive was beyond their technical capabilities."

	"The stardrive was beyond our technical capabilities, too," he said drily, "until we began looking for unlikely solutions instead of obvious ones. The whole concept is so obviously impossible that it was sheer—"

	"So they chose instead," she continued firmly, "to signal their presence to the rest of the galaxy in the hope that someone with a stardrive would come to them, and they could then do a spot of high class technological horse-trading. They were an intelligent and patient race who obviously believed that everything comes to those who wait."

	"We came," he replied grimly, "two thousand years too late."

Chapter Three

	They did not speak again until they had completed their circuit of the murals and were moving toward the top of the last ramp. The robot's lighting was no longer necessary because the roof of the topmost level had fallen in, wrecking most displays and covering the floor with rubble, which was in turn covered by patches of grass. But here, too, the murals showed clearly through their thin coating of living and dead insects.

	"They must have had a pretty potent insect repellent," he said, "to be able to keep the surface of those pictures clear after all this time."

	"But they weren't able to kill them all," she said softly. "Nobody ever succeeds in killing them all."

	The murals showed space missions to the nearer planets and bases being set up. But there were no indications of the colonization of the worlds concerned, much less the building of generation ships for a sub-lightspeed attempt at planting an interstellar colony. The transmitters were shown again, still patiently sending their signals to the stars, which this race would never reach. There were pictorial examples of high-density living structures and high intensity agriculture which was being troubled by some kind of blight. One of the pictures showed enlarged images of various types of insects with what could have been the chemical symbols representing the insecticide that would kill them.

	There was no sense of urgency or fear in the pictures—the museum had been built by a long-established and stable race which did not frighten easily. But to a searchship's crew which had seen it all before the signs were plain. Another flourishing culture, severely weakened by diminishing food and energy resources, was about to go down before an enemy too small and mindless even to know or care that it had won.

	"Let's go back to the ship," Peter said dully.

	Jan nodded, still looking at him as if he were ill, and said, "Then what?"

	"Then we'll talk about something other than grave-robbing for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow I'll help you begin to evaluate this material until it is time to go home."

	"And then?"

	He had taken her hand to help her over a pile of rubble, and now that they were retracing their steps along a clear section of ramp he continued to hold it, for reasons he could not define. He was still angry. He knew that she had always been argumentative and strong-willed. But there had been times when even the serious arguments had been of no real importance and had been quickly forgotten, instead of dragging on interminably and poisoning their conversation and their work for days on end.

	"Then we'll go home and rejuvenate for one last trip," he said. "You're right about our condition, of course—we spend too much time arguing and not enough searching. And we really should make our last trip in top physical condition. We just might find something."

	"And if we don't?"

	"We resign," he said firmly. "I'm pretty sure there will be no opposition. The number of searchship missions has been reducing steadily over the last ten years and even our top people are beginning to lose hope. There are also signs that our culture, too, is becoming self-satisfied and self-centered and beginning to die on its feet. One of these decades we'll lose our sense of adventure, our insatiable curiosity about the universe and the beings who inhabit it. We'll begin to set up interstellar radio transmitters and settle back to let the Others find us.

	"By that time," he added, "we two will have used up our fourth period of youth and our final old age in sampling the delights of our smug little culture, while trying not to notice the news flashes about insects—or other rivals—adapting to our latest pesticides."

	"That might not be much fun."

	"Of course it won't be fun," he told her. "So maybe we'll make two last trips or even three—the more last trips we make, the greater will be our chances of finding something."

	"This is hopeless," she burst out suddenly. "It always has been hopeless. We're wasting our time."

	"I know," he said.

	But the searchship crews had been chosen very carefully from that large, but rapidly diminishing, number of people who could not give up hope. An unbiased observer, while considering this particular psychological type, might have said that steadfastly refusing to face inevitable failure was utter stupidity. But it had been stupidity of this order that had taken the race so rapidly, if at times violently, to its present cultural and technological eminence. And certainly momentum powered by persistent stupidity had produced both the star-drive and gravity control and—now that humanity had finally renounced war—an even higher order of stubborn, self-aware stupidity was driving them to find a partner before their culture became too ingrown. And before the stupidity that had made them great became lost in a rising tide of intelligence and philosophical acceptance of static realities.

	As they followed the robot to the ground-level entrance Peter remembered the other planet-sized graveyards they had visited. The inhabitants of those worlds had been humanoid in the majority of cases, but some of the others had been visually unpleasant. But in each instance they had built civilizations for themselves that were rich, stable, peaceful and, by Earth standards, extremely long-lived. They had matured early and given up such childish and destructive pursuits as war and racial or religious/sociological discrimination while they were still young. Their cultures had been nice places in which to live—and perhaps a pleasant life was all that any life form could reasonably expect.

	"Sometimes," Peter said suddenly, "I think we'll never grow up."

	"That could be a better way to live," she argued, "than growing up too soon and having nothing to live for but the contemplation of the racial navel."

	Jan's first instinct was to argue, he thought tiredly, and it always had been for as long as he had known her. But nowadays the arguments were lifeless, hopeless and petty instead of being the intellectual challenge they once had been. He relaxed his grip on her hand, but she tightened hers and would not let go.

	She said, "Species with a long period of gestation and preadolescence have a much greater potential for development than—well—alien butterflies. Maybe we aren't really stupid, just too young to know any better. And now we may have passed the post-puberty stage and have left home to look for a mate. An intellectual mate," she added. "I was speaking figuratively."

	"I realize that," he said and laughed in spite of himself.

	"I'm sorry," she continued, in a tone that was both apologetic and defensive. "From the very beginning I warned you that I would always speak my mind and tell you whenever I thought you were wrong. You used to say that my candor was stimulating and — Well, it really doesn't matter. I don't want to win every battle. And we certainly did not waste our time landing here."

	He waited until they were outside the building before speaking. The sun was close to the horizon and the bright green mounds of rubble and the few intact structures were bathed in a dramatic orange light—the area had the sharp clarity of a stage set. From all around came the buzzing of the insect audience.

	"On the very few occasions when you were wrong," Peter said carefully, "you used to apologize and admit it. This time you apologized without actually admitting that you were wrong, which means that you still think

	that you are right and that we came down here through my error."

	"Oh, let's forget the whole thing and stop fighting. Please."

	He shook his head. "I'm not fighting. But if I made a mistake I want to know about it. Show me proof."

	"You'll also be annoyed about it for weeks—" She broke off and began looking around carefully, obviously taking her bearings; then she pointed.

	"It should be about four hundred yards in that direction," she said. "It could be a patch of diseased vegetation or a trick of the light, but only a searchship makes a mark like that and I caught a glimpse of it as we were landing."

	He saw the saucer-shaped depression as they breasted the next high mound. It was about thirty feet across and carpeted with vegetation whose color was a shade lighter than normal because the grass in the area had been flattened both by the landing and takeoff of a searchship and the new growth had had to struggle through the crashed remains of the old. Many such depressions had been left on this and other worlds in their eighty years of searching.

	"Judging by the age of the new growth," he said, "this must have been our first planetfall. But the robot can check it against the known growth rate and give a close approximation of the time of landing. Then I'll know exactly when the mistake was made in the search pattern—if in fact a mistake was made."

	She pulled her hand away from his and said angrily, "Don't be so childish! Rather than admit you made a mistake, you are suggesting that some other searchship wandered into the galactic sector assigned to us and landed here. That is ten times more impossible than the impossibility of your making an error. Maybe I should instruct the robot to run an ID check on the depression to make sure that it was our ship that landed here."

	He had been staring at the ground while she had been speaking, studying the deeper and more well-defined hollows around the circumference of the depression that were the marks left by the stabilizers and landing legs. His pulse was thumping so loudly that subjectively it seemed much louder than his voice.

	"Yes. Do that."

	"No. You do it!"

	"My mental state at the moment," he said quietly, "makes it unlikely that I would be able to frame the instructions in a sufficient;y coherent manner for the robot to understand."

	"You framed that sentence well enough—" she began, then stopped to stare at him. He could see the concern returning and replacing the anger in her face, and he knew that the sunlight reflected on his visor made it difficult for her to see his expression. She gave the necessary instructions to the robot and they stood back to enable it to work freely.

	"You're taking this very badly," she said worriedly. "I'm sorry. You don't make mistakes as a rule and this was such a small one that—"

	"Promise me one thing," he said very seriously, gripping her arm and squeezing it to accentuate his words. "If at any time in the future you feel like expressing an opinion likely to displease me, or you feel the need to criticize something I have said or done, or failed to say or do, or you want to make an observation about anything important or even trivial, go right ahead."

	She opened her mouth to speak, looking completely baffled, but he waved for silence. The robot had completed its investigation of the depression and the markings around it and was making its report.

	SOIL COMPRESSION AND CONTOUR OF DEPRESSION INDICATE LANDING AND SUBSEQUENT TAKEOFF OF A VESSEL OP SEARCHSHIP MASS USING FOCUSED ANTI-GRAVITY THRUSTER OF CONVENTIONAL TYPE, said the precise, mechanical and toneless voice in their suit phones. CONDITION OF VEGETATION SUGGESTS ELAPSED TIME OF TEN WEEKS. RESIDUAL RADIATION AND DEPTH OF MARKINGS LEFT BY STABILIZERS AND LANDING SUPPORT STRUTS CONFIRMS MASS FIGURE FOR SEARCHSHIP. CONFIGURATION OF STABILIZERS AND LANDING-SUPPORT STRUTS DOES NOT CONFORM TO ANY EARTH VESSEL TYPE ON PAST OR CURRENT RECORDS. IDENTIFICATION OF THE VESSEL IS THEREFORE IMPOSSIBLE.

	She turned toward him and said warmly, "I'm glad you didn't make a mistake—" Then she stopped as the implications began to sink in.

	"It also means," he said, "that somebody else is searching for people and finding graveyards. It means that somebody else has discovered the stardrive and is using a conventional antigravity thruster for takeoffs and landings—probably because there is only one way to build the thing.

	"It means," he went on, "that we will have to go on searching for long-dead civilizations, because they were the only kind that signaled their presence over a period long enough to attract the attention of ourselves and the other searchers. It also means that instead of robbing graves we carve our initials and a message on them— more accurately, we will devise weather- and insect-proof radio beacons containing data on Earth and its position in space. We will scatter them over the new worlds we find, as well as the ones we have already covered, because we have no idea how many of them have yet to be visited by the Others.

	"Most of all," he ended jubilantly, "it means that one day a beacon will be discovered and opened by people who, like us, were not content to sit and wait."

	Suddenly they were hugging each other, a ridiculous and senseless thing to do considering the thickness of their protective suits. But it did not matter. Her face was younger than he could remember for a great many years—more animated and vital. She was looking, he realized suddenly, the way he felt—as if he had just undergone rejuvenation.

	Gently he pushed her away from him and said, "Let's go back to the ship, dear. We're wasting time."

The End