"The white spot? It looks as if they had been fighting something that came from there."
"They were," said Borden. "And I don't want Sattell to encounter the thing they were fighting. He knows too much."
She studied his expression. She knew that they were making the top possible speed toward that same white spot from which a heat-ray had been thrown at them. He hadn't explained. Jerry was too diffident to ask. Ellen was not, but something occurred to her suddenly.
"You said, the 'thing'!" she said, startled. "Not creatures or people or anything like that! You said the thing!"
He grimaced, but did not answer her. Instead, he said. "I'll take the tiller, Jerry. We've still got the talkie that Sattell sabotaged, haven't we?"
Jerry nodded and shifted the tiller to him. They'd discovered that the steering gear could be shifted from side to side of the front of the vehicle, so that it could be driven from either the right or left side. On a planet without cities but with highways running thousands of miles to the polar ice-caps, long-distance driving would be the norm. Conveniences for that purpose would be logical. Drivers could relieve each other without difficulty.
"Look it over," commanded Borden. "The logical way to sabotage a talkie would be to throw its capacitances out of balance. No visible sign of damage, but I couldn't find a band it wasn't tuned to. See if that was the trick."
Jerry busied himself as Borden drove on. Here the highway wound through great hills, the color of iron rust and carved by wind and sand into incredibly grotesque shapes. A long trail of swirling dust arose behind the racing cruiser.
Borden said abruptly, "I've been thinking. Check me, will you two? First, I think the people who made this vehicle were much like us. The skeletons proved that. They had families and pets and they made cars like this to travel long distances on highways they'd built from pole to pole. This car uses normal electric power, and its power source is good! So they should have had radio frequency apparatus as well as power. But no radio frequency is being used on this planet. The race that built this car, then, has either changed its culture entirely, or been wiped out."
Jerry said blankly, "You mean, the people in the white spot—"