"Something off there! Something lying on the rocks—come look!"
We ran to join him. About a quarter mile distant there was a broad gully. A dark blob was visible lying at the bottom of it—a sizable blob, something forty or fifty feet long. We picked our way there; climbed down into the ragged, thirty-foot ravine. It was a spaceship lying here—with its sleek alumite hull resting on its side with one of its rocket-stream fins bent and smashed under it.
"The Roberts-King ship," Torrence exclaimed. "So they got here. Cracked up in the landing."
There seemed no doubt of it. This was unquestionably the Roberts-King vehicle—an older version of our own vessel. We stood staring at it blankly—at its little bow pressure port which was wide open, a narrow rectangle with the interior blackness behind it.
Then I saw that here on the rocks near the doorway, a litter of tools and mechanisms were strewn; and a section of one of the gravity plates which had been disconnected and brought out here.
"Trying to repair it," I said to the silently staring, awed Torrence. "Five years ago. Now what do you suppose—"
A startled cry from Jan interrupted me.
The body was lying on the rocks, just beyond the bow of the ship. It was Jonathan Roberts—stocky, middle-aged leader of the expedition. Clad in a strange costume of thin brown material, seemingly animal skin, he lay crumpled. I had never met him, but from his published portraits I could recognize him at once. In the starlight here his dead face with staring eyes goggled up at us.
"Why—why—" Torrence gasped. "Five years—"
There was no great look of decay about the body. Roberts had died here, certainly not five years ago. I was bending down over the body; I shoved at one of the shoulders and turned it over. Stricken Jan, Torrence and I stared numbed. A thin bronze sliver of metal—fin-tipped like a metal arrow—was buried in Roberts' back!