The Brain hovered, his lens-eyes surveying the dusky hillside. “Yes, the outline. Definitely unnatural.”
Otho and Grag were staring now, too. “I don’t see anything unnatural about it”, boomed the metal giant.
“It covers a building that stood on that hillside”, Newton informed him. “Look at the symmetry of it, even masked by soil — the central cupola, the two wings.”
Otho’s bright eyes flashed. “The citadel Carlin mentioned?”
“Perhaps. Let’s have a look.”
They moved on. In a brief time they were climbing the slope to that great lumpy scar of new soil.
Newton looked back down at the jungle. No one had followed them out of it onto the bare slope. The giant ferns stretched far away and he could catch the tawny gleam of Yellow Lake in the distant dusk.
Through the twilight jungle, the Belt stretched like a stygian river of deepest black. He could see no building or ruin of any kind on his side of the ebon strip.
“This must be the citadel Carlin meant”, he said. “Apparently a landslide has covered it since he was here. We’ll have to dig a way in.”
They found flat stones in the loose soil of the slide. Using them as hand-spades Newton and the android and robot began pushing aside the ocher soil above the cupola of the buried building.