“It’s terribly difficult to recapture the sense of wonder those men felt when they found this place,” Window said. “That’s why these films are so valuable, to remind us. We’re so used to it here.”

“I just don’t get it,” Proteus said. “No later ruins? I don’t suppose that somebody dug these out from under later ones?”

“Not unless they made them disappear completely,” Window answered. “And there’s no evidence of anything else having been here.”

“The Floaters have complete records of the entire Earth,” Proteus said. “Are you sure that—”

Window interrupted, smiling. “Our men went over all those records. There were various towns and small cities here, particularly in the last centuries of Earth’s habitation—and no ruins of them in this particular spot. The first dig checks out perfectly, for example. There are a few possible explanations, but they don’t hold up.

“Remember,” he continued, “buildings in the later centuries weren’t made to last, for one thing. Civilization was remaking itself, tearing itself down at an ever-increasing rate, and rebuilding. They destroyed a good deal of evidence of their past, so that only records or pictures remained. The whole so-called Urban Renewal Era began in a small way, but it ended up so that few cities were ever in decent shape or in stages of completion at any given time. They ripped down the old buildings to put up newer ones to house the greater numbers of people. But the new buildings seldom lasted over ten years. Material got low, until finally there was nothing else to do. They left for the floating cities and these took nearly a century to complete—”

“But Earth’s been under observation all this time,” Proteus said.

“Yes, but the race has concentrated all its attention and energy on off-Earth survival. Actually, there haven’t been any real overall systematic explorations of the planet since man left. For so long it was just stripped bare, they had to let it rest. Portions are still scarred, maybe permanently, by radioactivity from the nuclear skirmishes of the early twenty-first century. Even many of the old famous ruins were destroyed. The Greek and Roman edifices are completely gone, for example. But here, I’ll switch the video back—”

The picture came into focus. Bradwick said: “The thing is, these ruins have no right to be here. You get the insane feeling that they’re … fresh. They’re ancient, of course, but you think in terms of … freshly created age, or some such. And they’re too complete—”

As Bradwick spoke, the camera ranged around the area once more. The three pyramids came into view. “That middle one is the one we emerged from when we got here,” Window said.