"We go back, I guess," Martin said.
Rodney turned swiftly to face him. Martin thought the tall man was
holding his gun. "To the switchboard, Martin?"
"Unless someone has a better idea," Martin conceded. He waited. But
Rodney was holding the gun ... and Wass was.... Then--"I can't think of
anything else."
They began to retrace their steps along the metal street, back past
the same dancing shapes of metal, the partitions, the odd windows, all
looking different now in the new angles of illumination.
Martin was in the lead. Wass followed him silently. Rodney, tall,
matchstick thin, even in his cumbersome suit, swayed with jaunty
triumph in the rear.
Martin looked at the metal street lined with its metal objects and he
sighed. He remembered how the dark buildings of the city looked at
surface level, how the city itself looked when they were landing, and
then when they were walking toward it. The dream was gone again for
now. Idealism died in him, again and again, yet it was always reborn.
But--The only city, so far as anyone knew, on the first planet they'd
ever explored. And it had to be like this. Nightmares, Wass said, and
Martin thought perhaps the city was built by a race of beings who at
some point twisted away from their evolutionary spiral, plagued by a
sort of racial insanity.
No, Martin thought, shaking his head. No, that couldn't be.
Viewpoint ... his viewpoint. It was the haunting sense of familiarity,
a faint strain through all this broad jumble, the junkpile of alien
metal, which was making him theorize so wildly.