"The thing I don't understand," Morey said as they shot toward the city, "is why this planet is here at all. The intense radiation from the sun when it went supernova should have vaporized it!"
Arcot pointed toward a tall, oddly-shaped antenna that rose from the highest building of the city. "There's your answer. That antenna is similar to those we found on the planets of the Black Star; it's a heat screen. They probably had such antennas all over the planet.
"Unfortunately, the screen's efficiency goes up as the fourth power of the temperature. It could keep out the terrific heat of a supernova, but couldn't keep in the heat of the planet after the supernova had died. The planet was too cool to make the screen work efficiently!"
At last they came to the outskirts of the dead city. The vertical walls of the buildings were free of snow, and they could see the blank, staring eyes of the windows, and within, the bleak, empty rooms. They swept on through the frozen streets until they came to one huge building in the center. The doors of bronze had been closed, and through the windows they could see that the room had been piled high with some sort of insulating material, evidently used as a last-ditch attempt to keep out the freezing cold.
"Shall we break in?" asked Arcot.
"We may as well," Morey's voice answered over the radio. "There may be some records we could take back to Earth and have deciphered. In a time like this, I imagine they would leave some records, hoping that some race might come and find them."
They worked with molecular ray pistols for fifteen minutes tearing a way through. It was slow work because they had to use the heat ray pistols to supply the necessary energy for the molecular motion.
When they finally broke through, they found they had entered on the second floor; the deep snow had buried the first. Before them stretched a long, richly decorated hall, painted with great colored murals.
The paintings displayed a people dressed in a suit of some soft, white cloth, with blond hair that reached to their shoulders. They were shorter and more heavily built than Earthmen, perhaps, but there was a grace to them that denied the greater gravity of their planet. The murals portrayed a world of warm sunlight, green plants, and tall trees waving in a breeze—a breeze of air that now lay frozen on the stone floors of their buildings.
Scene after scene they saw—then they came to a great hall. Here they saw hundreds of bodies; people wrapped in heavy cloth blankets. And over the floor of the room lay little crystals of green.