Newton asked, “The ruins near Yellow Lake, wasn’t it?”
“Yes”, answered the Brain’s metallic voice. “It was where the ship left Carlin and where it was to pick him up.”
The Futuremen had been here inside Vulcan once before. Yet they felt again the wonder of this strangest world in the System as the Comet flew low over its inner surface.
Beneath their flying ship stretched a weird landscape of fern jungles. It extended into a shrouding haze ahead, the horizon fading away in an upward curve. Over their heads now was the hazy “sky” of the planetoid’s central hollow, cut across by the tremendous, glittering sword of the giant beam of sunlight that gave light to this world.
As their ship slanted down over the fern jungle toward their destination a feeling of gray futility came upon Curt Newton. Months had passed since Philip Carlin had disappeared here. Could the scientist have survived alone so long in his wild world?
A city wrecked by time lay beneath them, almost swallowed by the giant ferns. Only scattered crumbling stones of massive dimensions had survived the ravages of unthinkable ages. It was like the flotsam of a lost ship, floating up out of the past.
The Comet came to rest upon cracked paving surrounded by towering shattered monoliths. The Futuremen went out into the steamy air.
“It was here that Carlin was to meet the ship when it came”, said Captain Future. “And he wasn’t here.” He spoke in a lowered voice. The brooding silence of this memorial of lost greatness laid a cold spell upon them all.
These broken mighty stones were all that remained of a city of the Old Empire, that mighty galactic civilization mankind had attained to long ago. On worlds of every star its cities and monuments had risen, then had passed — had passed so completely that men had had no memory of it until the Futuremen probed back into cosmic history.
Long ago the mighty ships of the star— conquering Empire had come to colonize even hollow Vulcan. Men and women with the powers of a brilliant science and with proud legends of victorious cosmic conquest had lived and loved and died here. But the Empire had fallen and its cities had died and the descendants of its people here were barbarians now.