The shack he had been watching for, loomed dark and dismal in the black of the Martian night. Lawrence cut his rear jets and throttled down, aiding the ineffectual gliding surfaces of the rocket with occasional blasts from the hull. He landed with a very slight jar and cut the engines.
The racket of the engines in a rocket is so violent that it is always something of a shock to a rocket man when he cuts them off. The effect is as though something very vital had died.
Lawrence stood there trying to accustom his ears to the silence that claimed the ship, saving only the weep of the wind outside. And the wind became, in that moment, as all-pervading, as much a part of things as the rockets had been. The difference was that the rocket noise existed for only a brief while, and the wind had moaned out on those somber plains for—how many millions of years had it been?
He shook off the mood, drew on a light, electrically-heated suit with an oxygen container on the back. It completely covered every part of his body, and was especially designed for Mars, having two metaglass openings for his eyes and a voice amplifier just below it.
After that, he stepped out into the air-lock, the sound detectors catching the whoosh of exhausted air, and the faint crunch of his weighted boots in the Martian sand.
The shack was of metal, neat and compact. One side of it bulged like a tin can in which a firecracker has exploded. He stumbled over something in the sand—but he did not look down. The ground was covered in spots with strange relics of a Martian civilization here in this desert.
In the early twenty-first century, during the rush of excitement over interplanetary travel, there had been many expeditions to this part of the planet. In fact, the shack in front of him was probably one of the Smithsonian's archaeological stations. It had been supposedly long-deserted, though he had evidence that it wasn't now.
The expeditions had accumulated enough evidence from the desert to prove conclusively that the Martians had been a highly civilized and advanced people; more advanced, probably, than Earth. There were ruins of great cities in the south of the planet that must have been there for over two million years. The Martians had built well. As to what had happened to them—that was a mystery that remained unsolved. There had been no evidence of warfare of any sort, and a few rare translations of even rarer books, indicated that the Martians had eliminated diseases and had, in their time, colonized the entire solar system with their people. But now there was only the weeping wind and the barren sand—nothing more.
He reached the door, twisted the handle on it. Having suspected that someone was inside, Lawrence was not surprised when it came open easily with a sharp creaking sound. It had been recently used, of course, since otherwise the years would have rusted it to the extent that the first man to open it again would have had to exert a great deal of strength. It was monometal, but everything except lead and a few beryllium alloys rusted in the Martian air.
He took a torch from his utility bag, and the soft but brilliant green of the portable Howard-Brazier fluorescent stabbed into the darkness and tore away the shadows. There was nothing in the path of the beam that he could see. Only the red dust on the wings of the restless wind.