And every one of them looked lonely. Lonely and not quite understanding — like a dog that's been kicked out of a chair he thinks of as his own. Their windows gaping like dead eyes. No cheerful glow of light within them. Their colors dulled by the wash of seasons that had rolled over them.

This was worse, I told myself, than if we'd found the place all smashed to hell by bombs. Because, brutal as it is, one can understand a bombed city. And one can't understand, or feel comfortable in a city that's just been left behind to die.

And the people!

Thinking about them gave me the jitters. Were all the people like old Daniel Boone? We had seen how he and his family lived, and it wasn't pretty. People who had backed down the scale of progress. People who had forgotten the printed word, had twisted the old truths and the old history into screwy legends.

It was easy enough to understand how it had happened. Pull the economic props from under a civilization and there's hell to pay. First you have mad savagery and even madder destruction as class hatred flames unchecked. And when that hatred dies down after an orgy of destruction there is bewilderment, and then some more savagery and hatred born of bewilderment.

But, sink as low as he may, man always will climb again. It's the nature of the beast. He's an ornery cuss.

But man, apparently, hadn't climbed again. Civilization, as Herb and I knew it, had crashed all of three hundred years before — and man still was content to live in the shadow of his former greatness, not questioning the mute evidences of his mighty past, uninspired by the soaring blocks of stone that reared mountainous above him.

There was something wrong. Something devilish wrong.

Dust rose and tickled my nose, and suddenly I realized my throat was hot and dry. I wanted a beer, if I could only step down the street to the Dutchman" s- Then it smacked me straight between the eyes, the thing that had been whispering around in the back of my head all day.

I remembered Billy Larson's face and the way his ears wiggled when he got excited and how hopped up he had been about a sunspot story.

"By Heaven, Herb, I got it," I yelled, turning from the window.

Herb's mouth sagged, and I knew he thought that I was nuts.

"I know what happened now," I said. "We have to get a telescope."

"Look here, Mike," said Herb, "if you feel-"

But I didn't let him finish.

"It's the sunspots," I yelled at him.

"Sunspots?" he squeaked.

"Sure," I said. "There aren't any."

My hunch bad been right.

There weren't any sunspots. No black dots on that great ball of flame.

It had taken two days before we found a pair of powerful field glasses in the rubbish of what once had been a jewelry store. Most of the stores and shops were wiped clean. Raided time after time in the violence which must have followed the breakdown of government, they later would have been looted systematically.

"Herb," I said, "there must have been something in what Billy said. Lots of sunspots and we have good times. No sunspots and we have bad times."

"Yeah," said Herb, "Billy was plenty smart. He knew his science, all right."

I could almost see Billy, his ears wiggling, his eyes glowing, as he talked tome that morning.

Wall Street followed the sunspot cycle, he had said. Business boomed when sunspots were riding high, went to pot when they blinked out.

I remembered asking him what would happen if someone passed a law against sunspots. And now it seemed that someone had!

It was hard to believe, but the evidence was there. The story lay in those musty files up in the — Globe- office. Stories that told of the world going mad when business scraped rock bottom. Of governments smashing, of starving hordes sweeping nation after nation.

I put my head down between my hands and groaned. I wanted a glass of beer. The kind Louie used to push across the bar, cool and with a lot of foam on top. And now there wasn't any beer. There hadn't been for centuries. All because of sunspots!

Ultraviolet light. Endocrine glands and human behavior. Words that scientists rolled around in their mouths and nobody paid much attention to. But they were the things that had played the devil with the human race.

Herb chuckled behind me. I swung around on him, my nerves on edge.

"What's the matter with you?" I demanded.

"Boy," said Herb, "this Wash Tubbs can get himself into some of the damnedest scrapes!"

"What you got there?" I asked, seeing he was reading a paper.

"Oh, this." he said. "This is that old paper we found up at the office. The one published in "85. I'm going to take it back and give it to J.R. But right now I'm reading the funnies-"

I grunted and hunkered down, turning my mind back to the sunspots. It sounded wacky, all right, but that was the only explanation.

It didn't seem right that a body of matter ninety-three million miles away could rule the lives of mankind — but, after all, all life depended on the Sun. Whiff out the Sun and there wouldn't be any life. Those old savages who had worshiped the Sun had the right idea.

Say, then, that sunspots had gone out of style. What would happen? Exactly what those files back at the — Globe- office had shown. Depression, ever deepening. Business failures, more and more men out of work, taxes piling higher and higher as a panicky government fought to hold off the day of reckoning.

I heard Herb making some strangling sounds and swung around again. I was getting annoyed with Herb.

But the look on Herb's face halted the words that were bubbling on my lips. His face was stark. It was white as a sheet and his eyes were frozen wide.

He shoved the paper at me, babbling, a shaking finger pointing at a small item,

I grabbed the sheet and squinted to make out the faded type. Then I read, slowly, but with growing horror:

LANGER DIES

"James Langer, convicted in 1951 of tampering with the time machine in which Mike Hamilton and Herb Harding, — Globe- newsmen, set out on a flight into the future the preceding year, died in Rocky Point prison today at the age of sixty-five.

"Langer, at his trial, confessed he had bribed the guard placed in charge of the machine, to allow him to enter the plane in which it was installed. There, he testified, he removed that portion of the mechanism which made it possible for the machine to move backward in time.

"Langer, at that time, was an employee of the — Standard-, which went out of business a few years later.

"National indignation aroused by the incident resulted in the passage by Congress of a law prohibiting further building or experimentation with time machines. Heartbroken, Dr. Ambrose Ackerman, inventor of the machine, died two weeks after the trial."

I sat numb for a few minutes, my hand tightening in a terrible grip upon the paper, grinding its yellowed pages into flaking shreds.

Then I looked at Herb, and as I looked into his fear-stricken face I remembered something.

"So." I said, and I was so mad that I almost choked.

"So, you just had a few drinks with the boys that night before we left. You just met up with some — Standard- boys and had a few."

I remembered the way Jimmy Langer had laughed in my face as I was leaving the Dutchman" s. I remembered how nervous the guard had been that morning.

"You didn't spill your guts, did you?" I rasped.

"Look, Mike-" said Herb, getting up off the ground.

"You got drunk, damn you," I yelled at him, "and your brains ran right out of your mouth. You told that — Standard- crowd everything you knew. And Old Man Johnson sent Langer out to do the dirty work."

I was mad, mad clear down to the soles of my boots.

"Damn you, Mike-" said Herb, and right then I let him have it. I gave him a poke that shook him clear down to the ground, but he came right back at me. Maybe he was mad, too.