Kelley wouldn't look at the sunset this second night. He went into the camp and turned on music. Crawford watched for a little while only. There were clouds. There were breezes. One knew that here and there rain fell in gentle showers which should have nourished grasses and flowers and filled the air with fragrance. But instead it fell upon impalpable dust and turned it to mud which flowed slowly into gullies and into rivers which were also mud and moved onward, until perhaps after years the soil would become part of a mud-bank in the ocean.
Nolan came into the foam-walled house and said shortly, "We'll finish up tomorrow and leave."
Kelley said abruptly. "Nobody's made any guess about why everything died, here. But we all know!"
Crawford said reflectively, "It must've taken a lot of intelligence to murder this planet. When d'you suppose it happened?"
"Ten thousand—twenty thousand years ago," said Nolan. "The whole place must have been radioactive, air and all. But if they used cobalt the background count could be down to 3.9 in ten or twenty thousand years."
"We haven't," said Kelley, "seen any craters. Even the pictures from out in space didn't show bomb-craters."
"When everything died and turned to dust," said Nolan, "there'd be dust storms. There still must be. They'd cover anything! There was a terrific civilization in part of what's now the Sahara, back on Earth. By pure accident they've found a patch of highway and a post-house. Everything else is covered up. Cities, highways, dams, canals.... And that's heavy sand instead of fine dust! The Lotus found some shadows on a photo. They want us to look and see what cast them. We'll look at it tomorrow and then leave."
Crawford said deliberately:
"We three have had a preview of what Earth will be like before too long! I wonder if it would do any good on Earth to show them what we've found?"
"It's being argued on the ship," said Nolan. "Some say we'd better suppress the whole business."