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garrison—no, that couldn't have been, or we'd see the marks of fighting. Perhaps it was revolution, on the earth. That might explain everything—if the missiles are used up.”
    He led us up again, along an endless silent tunnel, and down another dark ladder-well. We spun stiff wheels to open three heavy safety-doors, and came at last into one of the magazines.
    Doyle gasped, in blank astonishment.
    For on row, as far as our lights could reach, long racks were loaded with the robot-missiles. They were sleek cylinders of bright metal, gracefully tapered, every part of them beautiful with precise machining. Space ships, really, they were six feet thick and sixty long, each powered with its own atomic generator, driven with its own ion-jets, controlled with the fine and costly mechanism of its own robot-pilot, each burdened with its own terrible cargo of plutonium-fused lithium hydrides or crystalline biotoxins.
    Stunned, almost, Doyle walked to the nearest. He examined it expertly, lifting inspection plates, flashing his light on serial numbers. He came slowly back to us, baffled. “All abandoned!” he muttered. “I can't believe it. Why, those babies cost twenty million apiece, even in mass production. They are loaded with the finest precision machines that men ever made. One of them, in forty minutes, could obliterate a thousand square miles of earth. And never a one was fired!”
    We climbed again, up a black narrow shaft, to the launcher which Doyle had once commanded. Bright, satiny metal shimmered against our lights. The huge vertical barrel cast monstrous, leaping shadows. Doyle slipped into a familiar seat and touched familiar buttons. An emergency engine began drumming. A huge periscope lens was suddenly bright with the broad crescent earth—with thin black cross hairs intersecting upon it.
    He flashed his light on a blank log-sheet, and shook his head.
    “Never a missile was fired.”
    Cameron was whistling through his teeth—a gray bit of melody that made a grotesque counterpoint to the themes of lifeless quiet and ghastly dark and deadly cold, to the whole haunting riddle of the abandoned fortress.
    “Are these weapons still serviceable?” he asked.
    “Not without some missing parts.” Doyle opened an inspection door, to show a dark cavity. “The computer has been removed, and the gyros are gone from the projectiles.”
    “Too bad,” Cameron's voice held the hint of irony. “I imagine Mr. Hudd is going to need them.”
    “They can be repaired,” Doyle assured him soberly. “Our spares for the ships’ launchers are interchangeable.” Doyle looked at his chronometer. “Now it's time to report to Mr. Hudd—that our mission has failed.”
    The stern simplicity of the life-craft, when we were safely back aboard, seemed luxurious. We relaxed in the acceleration chairs and gulped hot soup against the chill of those abandoned tunnels while we answered the peevish and uneasy questions of little Victor Lord.
    When the signal officer reported that he had contact with the Great Director, we crowded into the narrow television room. Hudd's heavy, blue-wattled face filled the screen.
    “Let's have it, Jim.” His loud, hearty voice was edged with tension. “What happened to the fort?”
    “Evacuated, Mr. Hudd.”
    “But why?”
    “We failed to discover that,” Cameron reported. “The withdrawal was deliberate and orderly. The records were mostly removed or destroyed; the weapons were disabled without unnecessary destruction; the men took their personal belongings. There's no evidence whatever of trouble or violence.”
    “When did it happen?”
    “About two years, I think, after the task force left. The dates on calendar pads and inspection cards show that men were here that long. The lowered air pressure, the accumulated dust, and the low counter readings we got about the main power plant—everything shows that they weren't here much longer.”
    Hudd turned, on the screen, to rap a few questions