With Clive at my heels, I went inside. It was light, since the roof had rotted away. It was a temple with a hollow square sacrificial altar in the center of a large hall. And it was better than a bank.
Scattered everywhere were gold coins, such as we had already found. In addition there were bars of blackened silver, glass jugs filled with precious stones, solid gold candlesticks, ornaments and jewelry.
"You will be well paid, my subject," said Clive. "People of every planet in the universe will envy the people of this planet."
"What's the name of our planet, by the way?" I asked.
The answer came in a different voice: "Up to now it's been Lonesome."
I had my hands full of coins, but as I heard the voice they slipped out of my fingers and fell to the stone floor with a clanking sound. I wheeled around and in the red sunlight that streamed through the broken roof, I saw a human figure. A woman.
At first I thought she was smiling, and then I saw that her lips were grim and tense. What made her look more formidable than anything was what she held in her hand. A large-size, old fashioned thirty-eight on a forty-five frame.
She wasn't the ghost of a vanished race. She was real, from the top of her wavy, black hair, to the crude hand-made sandals on her feet. Her eyes were soft and brown, but they glinted like the flash of polished steel. Her figure was well proportioned and graceful in its curves, but there was no mistaking hardened muscles. Her clothing, which included shorts and a sack-like blouse, seemed to have been woven from grass fibers, and animal skins.