It had been a sizable city, I could see now that we were in it. Wide avenues lined for several kilometers with buildings that must have risen quite high before they were blasted into rubble. How old? And what destroyed them?
“Radioactive background is nominal,” Frede murmured as we picked our way through the debris littering one of the major avenues. She had unpacked the scanner from her equipment web and was holding it out stiffly in front of her almost the way a blind man pokes his cane ahead of him.
“This city wasn’t nuked,” I said to her.
The troop had automatically fanned out into two columns, one on either side of the shattered street, the troopers spaced out widely enough so the first shots of an ambush would not take out more than one or two of us. Manfred had taken the van, with four picked men and women; Quint had assigned himself to the rear. I was starting to worry about Quint; it was normal for a man to be afraid, but he was letting his fears get in the way of his duties.
“If it wasn’t nuked,” Frede asked, walking beside me, “how did it get blasted so badly?”
I thought I knew. “They fought a battle here. A long, bloody battle that went from street to street, building to building. Hand-to-hand killing, for weeks. Maybe months.”
Frede shook her head, uncomprehending. “But that would mean the whole population was in the fight: civilians, children, everybody.”
Memories were stirring in me. Troy. Stalingrad. The Crusaders’ siege of Jerusalem and the bloodbath that followed.
“Civilians, children, everybody,” I echoed. “In the siege of Leningrad most of the city’s population died of starvation. They ate rats and all the animals in the zoo.”
“Hell’s fire,” Frede murmured.
“Can you get a fix on how old these ruins are?” I asked her.
“Doubtful. Have to know the ambient ratios of radioactives for this planet, and that data isn’t in our computer background data.”
“You’re sure?”
“I already checked,” she said, tapping the side of her helmet where the earphones were. “I got curious about this city the first time we saw it, when we were still in the mountains.”
So these “tools” can exhibit curiosity. They are more than mindless killing machines, despite the purposes of their creators.
We made camp in the littered basement of one of the crumbling buildings, with a thick concrete roof over our heads and solid walls around us. I let the troops risk a small cook fire, and while they were preparing the last of the food we had hunted in the mountains, I left them to wander through the buildings, seeking some clue to their age and origin.
I could find no pictures to help me. No paintings were left unburned, no statues unsmashed, no friezes or murals or mosaics were recognizable on the shattered remains of the walls that still stood. I found patterns of tiles here and there, tantalizing suggestions of what might have been decorations or even maps. But nowhere was there enough of a wall left intact for a whole picture to be seen.
As I picked my way through the debris-filled buildings, I discovered something else. There were no animals scurrying about. No rats or even insects that I could detect. The destruction of this city must have happened so long ago that even the bones of its inhabitants had long since crumbled to dust and blown away on the winds of the nearby sea.
I stood in the middle of one ruin, in what might have been the lobby or entrance hall to a great building. With my booted foot I scraped aside some of the debris on the floor and saw that it was tiled in colors that once had probably been quite bold. Now they were faded with time, gray with clinging dust. I hunkered down on my knees and swept more of the debris away, seeking a pattern, a picture, any kind of a clue as to who built this city and when.
Nothing but a checkerboard of many-colored tiles. Perhaps, like the ancient Moslems, the creatures who built this city refused to draw representations of themselves.