"Out there, too, Rodney, they must have had illumination." Martin
looked back along the straight, metal street they'd walked on, and past
that out over the bleak, furrowed slopes where the ship's lifeboat
lay ... and he thought everything outside the city seemed, somehow,
from here, a little dim, a little hazy.
He straightened his shoulders. The city was alien, of course, and that
explained most of it ... most of it. But he felt the black city was
something familiar, yet twisted and distorted.
"Well," Wass said, his nose wrinkling a bit, "now that we're here...."
"Pictures," Martin decided. "We have twelve hours. We'll start here.
What's the matter, Wass?"
The blond man grinned ruefully. "I left the camera in the lifeboat."
There was a pause. Then Wass, defensively--"It's almost as if the city
didn't want to be photographed."
Martin ignored the remark. "Go get it. Rodney and I will be somewhere
along this street."
Wass turned away. Martin and Rodney started slowly down the wide metal
street, at right angles to their path of entrance.
Again Martin felt a tug of twisted, distorted familiarity. It was
almost as if ... they were human up to a certain point, the point
being, perhaps, some part of their minds.... Alien things, dark and
subtle, things no man could ever comprehend.
Parallel evolution on two inner planets of the same system? Somewhere,
sometime, a common ancestor? Martin noted the shoulder-high doors, the
heavier gravity, remembered the inhabitants of the city vanished before
the thing that was to become man ever emerged from the slime, and he
decided to grin at himself, at his own imagination.
Rodney jerked his scarecrow length about quickly, and a chill sped up
Martin's spine. "What's the matter?"
The bony face was white, the gray eyes were wide. "I saw--I thought I
saw--something--moving--"
Anger rose in Martin. "You didn't," he said flatly, gripping the
other's shoulder cruelly. "You couldn't have. Get hold of yourself,
man!"