They waited with surprise and uncertainty. Haines drew his compressed air pistol, but there was no movement. The scene remained dead and still—the windows of the house were dark.
They advanced on it and flashed a light inside. It was an empty shell. There was no glass within the unusually wide and low window openings, and no door.
"They went in and out the windows," commented Burl, ducking through one of the openings. "And they weren't built like us."
"No," said Russ, "there's no reason to suppose the inhabitants would have been built like human beings."
Inside there was nothing to see, and they left. Beyond, they found a straight depression in the ground filled with flat swirls of cosmic dust. "This looks like a road," said Haines.
They returned to the rocket plane in order to follow the dead roadway more easily. Passing between the low, dark cliffs of rocky mountains, they came to a plain marked by thousands of columns of rock, pieces of crumbling walls, and many straight depressions that must have been streets. It was the remains of a world that had died.
They found, as they traveled northward and made intermittent landings, that there had been many cities. Now all lay in ruins. There had been great roadways, now covered with the debris of outer space. There had been mighty forests, now miles of petrified black stumps. It was a gloomy sight.
In their landings, they had found inscriptions on walls and bas-reliefs carved on mountains. They knew from these what the Plutonians had looked like, and they had a suspicion of what had happened.
The Plutonians had been vaguely like men and vaguely like spiders. They had stood upright on four thin, wide-spread legs and had two short arms. Their bodies were wide and squat, and they seemed to have been mammalian and probably warm-blooded. They breathed air out of flat, thin nostrils and their heads joined their bodies without necks. Two oval eyes were set below a jutting bald brow. They had worn clothes, they had driven vehicles, they had flown planes.
Their vehicles had globe-shaped power plants. Their airplanes had globes where wings should have been. Their cities and their engines—which existed now only on wall pictures that were probably once advertisements—were built along globe-and-rod principles.