Rodney said quickly, "I mean outside."
"Out there, too, Rodney, they must have had illumination." Martin looked back along the straight, metal street they'd walked on, and past that out over the bleak, furrowed slopes where the ship's lifeboat lay ... and he thought everything outside the city seemed, somehow, from here, a little dim, a little hazy.
He straightened his shoulders. The city was alien, of course, and that explained most of it ... most of it. But he felt the black city was something familiar, yet twisted and distorted.
"Well," Wass said, his nose wrinkling a bit, "now that we're here...."
"Pictures," Martin decided. "We have twelve hours. We'll start here. What's the matter, Wass?"
The blond man grinned ruefully. "I left the camera in the lifeboat." There was a pause. Then Wass, defensively—"It's almost as if the city didn't want to be photographed."
Martin ignored the remark. "Go get it. Rodney and I will be somewhere along this street."
Wass turned away. Martin and Rodney started slowly down the wide metal street, at right angles to their path of entrance.
Again Martin felt a tug of twisted, distorted familiarity. It was almost as if ... they were human up to a certain point, the point being, perhaps, some part of their minds.... Alien things, dark and subtle, things no man could ever comprehend.
Parallel evolution on two inner planets of the same system? Somewhere, sometime, a common ancestor? Martin noted the shoulder-high doors, the heavier gravity, remembered the inhabitants of the city vanished before the thing that was to become man ever emerged from the slime, and he decided to grin at himself, at his own imagination.