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star to star via your TP powers, no limits. Which of us is the real cripple?
    Idle thoughts on a long night, nothing else.
    Jan is tired of looking at Saul’s stamps. I heard her ask him to go for a walk with her, but he said no, he’s got some cataloging to do. So Jan came over and asked me instead. Second choice, as usual.
    We’ll go out and stroll a while, unless it’s still raining. She’s a nice kid. This fixation she has on Saul makes no sense to me—he’s twice her age, obviously a confirmed bachelor, and must have been frightened by a woman at an early age, judging by the way he hides behind those stamp albums—but maybe Jan’s got a need for pursuing shy older men. We’re each of us chimpo in our special way, I guess. Anyhow, if she wants to walk a while, why should I say no? It’s a way of passing time.
    So I’ll wrap up this cube here. Perhaps next time I’ll tell you how we uncovered the tomb of the Emperor of the High Ones and found him still alive, in suspended animation. Or how we found the Secret Treasure of the High Ones, fifty billion credits worth of uranium. Fantasy comes cheap on a dull night. Tomorrow arrives the moment of truth at last. Out into the cold and dark, now. Off.

four
    August 28, 2375
    Higby V
    S O WE STARTED DIGGING , and right away we came to this sleek solid plutonium sarcophagus with a platinum button on its side, and Dr. Horkkk pushed the button and the coffin popped open, and inside it we saw the Emperor of the High Ones, who came out of suspended animation and sat up and said, “Greetings, O beings of a distant future age!”
    So we began to follow this narrow winding tunnel through the hill, and Kelly cored into a side passage where there was this vault of blue fusion-glass, and upon command of “Open, Sesame,” the vault door swung back and we saw, neatly stacked, the cubes of uranium that we realized had to be the imperial treasure of the High Ones, worth at least fifty billion credits.
    So we—
    Well, as a matter of fact nothing like that has happened yet. Or is really likely to happen. But I thought I’d start this letter off with some zing. It is true, though, that we’ve been excavating for several days and that the site looks promising. More than promising—downright exciting.
    This is the twenty-third High Ones site that’s been discovered. Possibly you know that the first site came to light a dozen years ago in the Syrtis Major region of Mars and was mistaken at first for the remains of some extremely ancient Martian culture. But nothing else like it turned up on Mars, whereas a couple dozen sites very similar to it have been found on widely spaced planets occupying a sphere with a radius of about a hundred light-years. So we know that the people who left these deposits must have been members of some galactic race that covered a lot of territory in its travels. Very early in the story, the newstape reporters christened them the High Ones, and the name has stuck. Even we archaeologists use it. It isn’t very scientific, but somehow it seems appropriate.
    All the High Ones sites found so far follow the same general pattern. That is, they represent outposts rather than permanent settlements, as if the High Ones had sent roving bands of explorers all over the galaxy and these explorers had stopped off at a given planet for twenty or thirty or fifty years, then moved along. At each site archaeologists have uncovered typical High Ones artifacts—intricate, incomprehensible objects, usually well preserved, downright baffling in their function. The workmanship is superb. They used gold and metallic plastics as their materials, usually, and some of the artifacts seem almost new.
    They aren’t new. They come to us across a billion years.
    We have fairly exact methods for dating ancient sites, and we know that the High Ones lived on Mars approximately a billion years back, with a possible range of error of ten million years, or one percent. The other sites have