Calhoun's mind skirted the notion warily. It was not plausible. The man had been able to feed himself and had done so. Anything which came upon him and made him unable to feed himself—
"He was a city man," growled Calhoun. "And this is a long way from the city. What was he doing away out here, anyhow?"
He hesitated and tramped on again. A city man found starved in a remote place might have become lost, somehow. But if this man was lost, he was assuredly not without food.
"If there was a ground-car," Calhoun considered, "it wouldn't mean anything. If he dared go back to the city he might have used it, but he wouldn't have been where I found him if he hadn't wanted or needed to leave the city. Hm-m-m—He walked out into the middle of the field. He was hungry—why didn't he have food?—and he ate. He stayed there for days, judging by the amount of food he ate and digested. Why did he do that? Then he stopped eating and died. Again why?"
He crossed over the top of a rounded hillock some three miles from the shallow grave he'd made. He began to accept the idea that the dead man had stopped eating, for some reason, as the only possible explanation. But that didn't make it plausible. He saw another ridge of higher hills ahead.
In another hour he came to the crest of that farther range. It was the worn-down remnant of a very ancient mountain-range, now eroded to a mere fifteen hundred or two thousand feet. He stopped at the very top. Here was a time and place to look and take note of what he saw. The ground stretched away in gently rolling fashion for very many miles, and there was the blue blink of sea at the horizon. A little to the left he saw shining white. He grunted.
That was the city of Maris III, which had been built to receive colonists from Dettra and relieve the population-pressure there. It had been planned as the nucleus of a splendid, spacious, civilized world-nation to be added to the number of human-occupied worlds. From its beginning it should hold a population in the hundreds of thousands. It was surrounded by cultivated fields, and the air above it should be a-shimmer with flying things belonging to its inhabitants.
Calhoun stared at it through his binoculars. They could not make an image, even so near, to compare to that the electron telescope had made from space, but he could see much. The city was perfect. It was intact. It was new. But there was no sign of occupancy anywhere in it. It did not look dead, so much as frozen. There were no fliers above it. There was no motion on the highways. He saw one straight road which ran directly away along his line of sight. Had there been vehicles on it, he would have seen at least shifting patches of color as clots of traffic moved together. There were none.
He pressed his lips together. He began to inspect the nearer terrain. He saw foreshortened areas where square miles of ground had been cleared and planted to Earth vegetation. The ground would have been bulldozed clean, and then great sterilizers would have lumbered back and forth, killing every native seed and root and even the native soil-bacteria. Then there would have been spraying with cultures of the nitrogen-fixing and phosphorous-releasing microscopic organisms which normally lived in symbiosis with Earth-plants. They would have been tested beforehand for their ability to compete with indigenous bacterial life. And then Earth-plants would have been seeded.