Ross stared unbelievingly. “This is Earth?” he asked.
The doctor fanned himself and blew. “That’s it,” he said, looking around curiously. “Heard a lot about it, but I’ve never been here before,” he explained. “Funny-looking, isn’t it?” He nudged Ross, indicating a shattered concrete structure beside them on the road. “Notice that toll booth?” he whispered slyly. “Eight sides!”
Ross said wearily, “Yes, mighty funny! Look, Doc, why don’t you sort of wander around by yourself for a while? That big thing up ahead is the museum you were talking about, isn’t it?”
The doctor squinted. His eyes were unnaturally bright, and his breathing was fast, but he was making an attempt to seem casual in the presence of these manifold obscenities of design. He licked his lips. “Round pillars,” he marveled. “Why, yes, I think that’s the museum. You go on up there, like you say. I’ll, uh, sort of see what there is to see. Jones, yes!” He staggered off, staring from ribald curbing to scatological wall in an orgy of prurience.
Ross sighed and walked through the deserted, weed-grown streets to the stone building that bore on its cracked lintel the one surviving word, “Earth.” This was all wrong, he was almost certain; Earth had to be a planet, not a city. But still....
The museum had to have the answers.
On its moldering double doors was a large lead seal. He read: “Surplus Information Repository. Access denied to unauthorized personnel.” But the seal had been forced by somebody; one of the doors swung free, creaking.
Ross invoked the forcer of the door. If he could do it....
He went in and stumbled over a skeleton, presumably that of the last entrant. The skull had been crushed by a falling beam. There was some sort of mechanism involved—a trigger, a spring, a release hook. All had rusted badly, and the spring had lost its tension over the years. A century? Two? Five? Ross prayed that any similar mantraps had likewise rusted solid, and cautiously inched through the dismal hall of the place, ready for a backward leap at the first whisper of a concealed mechanism in action.
It was unnecessary. The place was—dead.