And all the Stars a Stage 159
“Great Ghost,” Jorn whispered. “But, couldn’t there have been–2′
“A real such race? Yes, we think so. But there are two more things to be
added. While we were in our aborted landing orbit around that planet, we
were photographing continuously, as a matter of course; and the pictures
show that all the cities over which we passed were in a fairly uniform
stage of ruin, Secondly, we passed over the spot which later turned out to
be the place where our attackers wanted us to land; and after this matter
came up, we examined that site closely.
“It evidently had been a landing field, a large spaceport, at one time in
the distant past. Its completely overgrown now, and you can only see its
bare outlines. You can also see two wrecks. One of them is about three
hundred years old, if we have interpreted the vegetation around it
correctly. It looks rather like the lavelin in general design. The other
one is such a ruin that almost nothing can be told about it, except that
it’s of completely different design. I would like to guess that the more
recent of the two might have been a refugee from the Great Nova, but of
course, that’s just my romantic nature speaking.
“Given this much, however, we can put the story together. The black race
obviously was real, and it was probably just as proud and hostile as was
the ghost of it we encountered-after all, the computer involved had to
build its solidigrapb and its social attitudes from stored data, it
couldn’t invent them. Maybe the race was visited by an interstellar