"All right, then; let's have the lights back up again."

The lights came on and once more there was a murmur of talking around
the room. Rynason shifted his position on the seat and tried to catch
the thought that had slipped through his mind just before the screen had
faded. There was another similarity.... Well, he'd seen a lot of the
Outsider buildings in the past few years; it wasn't necessary to trace
all the evidences right now.

"What I want to know is, why didn't any of the rest of you see this?"
said Manning angrily. "Have you all got plastic for brains? Over a dozen
men spend weeks researching these damn horsefaces, and only one of you
has the sense to see the evidence of his own eyes!"

"Maybe we should turn in our spades," said Stoworth.

Manning glared at him. "Maybe you should, if you think this isn't
serious. Let's get this clear: these old horsefaces that so many of you
think are just as quaint as can be have been building in exactly the
same style as the Outsiders. Quaint, are they? Harmless too, I suppose!"

He stood with his hands on his hips, dropped his head and took a long,
deep breath. When he looked up again his forehead was furrowed into an
intense frown. "Gentlemen ... as I call you from force of habit ...
we've been finding dead cities of the Outsiders for centuries. They were
all over God knows how many galaxies before your ancestors or mine had
stopped playing with their tails; as far as we can tell they had a
civilization as tightly-knit as our own, and probably stronger. And
sometime about forty thousand years ago they started pulling out. They
left absolutely nothing behind but empty buildings and a few crumbling