Street level against the crater’s east wall was about nine meters below the top of the sand drift, and so we worked at the bottom of a craterling of our own making. Elsewhere teams had dug other holes, and as I walked about the sand surface in the evenings, stopping here or there to scuff an exposed solar panel’s edge, or inspect a patch of lichen, it seemed that I strolled across an old battlefield, a no-man’s land pocked with bomb craters and giant foxholes. Looking into the trenches gave me an odd feeling, as if I stared into graves — archaeology regressing to graverobbing — and might see the dead carrying on with their daily lives. Tall dredges stood insectlike over the rim of each craterling, and tubes extended from them across the crater floor, up and over the rim. It was an eerie place, this dead city. Frost crunched under my boots, my nose and lungs were cold. I hiked back to our own little graben (grave) and looked down at the sand- filled apartments we had recently exposed. They had built eaves on the roofs, here where no rain would ever have fallen. Where were we? What city of the mind?

Down on the shadowy streets figures emerged from a building, carrying the long vacuum tubes that led back to the dredge. Ghost firemen. Bill Strickland looked up and saw me; he shouted something I couldn’t hear. He pointed back into the building, waved me down. My heart gave a skip and I hurried to the ramp, descended. Xhosa, the chief of my staff, ran by, “What have they found?” I said.

“I don’t know, they just said hurry.”

“It’s not likely to run away,” I said, but Xhosa was already down the street. I kept my pace steady to show them I was not excitable. I rounded a bluff in our new sand cliff and found five or six of them in the entrance of a newly exposed building; it appeared to be a hotel with a tavern in the ground floor. I walked past them and entered. Rooms free of sand gaped like caves, and it smelled of clay and paint. I heard voices in an inner room and continued in.

“Has anyone checked this building for its structural integrity?” I said loudly.

Strickland and a few others were in a large room. “Sort of,” he said.

“Fine. The whole building could come down on us.”

Strickland moved aside, so I could see through a door into an adjoining room.

Four bodies lay on the floor, dressed in old spacesuits. Two held light rifles in their gloved hands. One was curled around the leg of a big empty desk. The dead: how still they are, how other. “Get out of here before the place falls down,” I said harshly, shocked at the sight. “Xhosa, give this place a structural check and get holo crews in here. Holos of every room. Look at the tracks you’ve made. Who vacuumed this building?” Strickland and Heidi Mueller stepped forward. “How often did you check the filters?”

“After every room,” Heidi said. Bill looked sullen.

“Find anything?”

“It’s all in the boxes in the front room,” Bill said.

I grimaced. Here McNeil’s maddening slowness might have done some good. Hana Ingtal entered the room, stopped when she saw the bodies through the doorway. Frost plumed from her nostrils and drifted to the floor.

“Hana, go find Petrini and bring him here,” I said. “Tell him I want his help.”

She looked at me as if I had gone mad at last.

“I want him to see it,” I said.

She nodded and left.

“Leave everything alone,” I said. “When Petrini gets here we’ll start work again.” I herded them out of the building. I didn’t want to stay in there with those bodies; they made me uneasy and disoriented, and something more I could not name. Out in the street my students walked down the excavated sand canyon to our little working tent: pale blue and brown figures in a residential street, at the bottom of two steep walls of red sand. I looked out of the shadows to the dark crater rim, and the plum-colored sky. No stars. But once they had been thick — and that pungent smell, of wet dust and street surface fixative-

My father had sewn a flag, stripes and a star, the lone star state, he had said, with a red star that made him laugh.

Dizzily I took a step in the street, looked up at a black second-story window in the apartment across the way — gasped-

My father came home late to find a group of us kids gathered before the big maps in the window of the Leaky Tap. The generals! he cried cheerily. He took my arm to lead me in and — and-

I was at the plant to get the day’s water ration when the dome fell. The dome fell. Great crashing outside and the roar of air rushing up. I ran to struggle into a daysuit, clamped on helmet and turned on oxygen as I had been taught. Excited at my chance to fight I rushed into the street and couldn’t see a thing in the smoke. The ground was vibrating, the smoke cleared and plates of the dome rained down, tumbling in the turbulence. Flashes on the crater rim made my sight swim with red spurts, and through the spurts dorm-sized boulders rolled down the wall onto us. Fear stunned me like a blow to the head, it smashed me into a different world. I ran for home thinking only to hide, tripped over big plates — pieces of the dome — got lost in smoke, looked up and saw red figures falling out of the sky on rocket backpacks. Hundreds of them fell, like drops of blood or meteorites or pieces of the dome come to life. Red beams lanced the smoke, I fell, got up and ran head down for home. A woman lay sprawled in the street. I ran up my steps relieved to see them, but when I pulled open the door I saw I had been fooled — the apartment front had been left whole, but it was like a stage prop now, because behind it an immense tan chunk of the crater wall had crushed the apartment and its contents into a meter-thick pancake of plastic paneling. Door in my hand. I could have pulled the facade down.

Sudden time in a world without time: I found myself sitting in the street. I had broken a sweat; my suit’s thermostat had been overwhelmed. I stood carefully, finishing crossing the street, and climbed the front steps to the apartment door under the black second-story window. Hesitantly I pulled it back. Tan rock. I closed the door, sat on the step.

Vague impression of parents, sisters. They must have been killed. Perhaps not in the apartment itself, but somewhere. Otherwise they would have reunited me with them when the survivors were sorted out. Gingerly I probed my memory: what had happened after I opened the door? Nothing. The blank of the past, as empty as always. The images that had just welled up in me still lived, but they were fragments, bright in the surrounding darkness like mirror suns in a twilight sky — broken out of the past by the smell of a street, the sight of rock behind a door, or bodies in a hallway. Trembling uncontrollably I racked my mind to learn more, I rocked back and forth on the stoop under the force of feeling what it meant to raze a city and murder its inhabitants — my family-

“Professor Nederland?”

I looked up. Petrini; and behind him, among others, Satarwal.

“What.”

He looked confused. “Well, you had us brought over here.”

“Oh. Yes. We’ve found something I need your help with. A resistance center, perhaps.”

He smiled. “You want my help?”

“We need independent confirmation of what we find.”

“Oh!” His smile disappeared. “I see. Well, let’s have a look.” He extended a hand. “Need some help? You look a bit shaken.”

I declined the hand and stood. Gestured at the apartment behind us. “I used to live here.”

“You did?” He was surprised. Behind him his staff members glanced at each other. “You looked it up?”

“I remembered.” I walked through the group to the Leaky Tap.

Inside holes had been taken and the strength of the building checked, and we went to work. Xhosa and Hana and Bill directed the others, and I watched. They took seven bodies out and drove them over to the escalator we had set up to cross the rim. We would have to start a cemetery beyond the main camp when our studies were done. Lamps and heaters were turned on as night fell. I stood outside the door and watched the bodies carted away; my hands would not hold steady. Graverobbers, I thought as the last cart left.