stretching before her on the screen. Rynason could see the pass through
which she had been flying, but there was no movement there; it took him
several seconds to see the low ruins off to the right, and the figures
moving through them.

The screen banked and turned toward them; she was lowering her altitude.

"I see them," he said into the mike. "Can't make out what they're doing,
on the screen. Can you see them any more clearly?"

"They're entering one of the buildings down there," she said after a
moment. "I've counted almost twenty of them so far; they must all be
here."

"Can you go down and see what they're doing? The sooner we find out, the
better: Manning's got a pretty ugly bunch of so-called vigilantes on the
way out there."

She didn't reply, but on the screen he saw the crumbling buildings grow
larger and nearer. He could make out individual structures now: a wall
had fallen and was half-buried in the dust and sand; an entire roof had
caved in on another building, leaving only rubble in the interior. It
was difficult to tell sometimes when the original lines of the buildings
had fallen: they had all been smoothed by the wind-blown sand, so that
broken pillars looked almost as though they had been built that way,
smooth and upright, solitary.

At last, he saw the Hirlaji. They were slowly mounting the steps of one
of the largest of the buildings and passing into the shadows of the
interior. This building was not as deteriorated as most of the others;