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Dear Dave,

I called last night, and the operator said your phone has been temporarily disconnected. I presume these letters will be forwarded, so please let me know where you are. I’m usually at home between 1800 and 2300, so call me collect within the next three or four days.

All the best,
Jim

* * * * *

The third letter was dated 10 November 2187. Turnbull wondered why it had been sent. Obviously, the manager of the Excelsior had sent Duckworth a notice that Dr. Turnbull was off-planet and could not be reached. He must have received the notice on the afternoon of 22 August. That would account for his having sent a second letter before he got the notice. Then why the third letter?

* * * * *

Dear Dave,

I know you won’t be reading this letter for six months or so, but at least it will tell you where I am. I guess I wasn’t keeping as close tabs on your work as I thought: otherwise I would have known about the expedition to Lobon. You ought to be able to make enough credit on that trip to bring you to the attention of the Board.

And don’t feel too bad about missing my first letters or the call. I was off on a wild goose chase that just didn’t pan out, so you really didn’t miss a devil of a lot.

As a matter of fact, it was rather disappointing to me, so I’ve decided to take a long-needed sabbatical leave and combine it with a little research on the half-intelligent natives of Mendez. I’ll see you in a year or so.

As ever,
Jim Duckworth

* * * * *

Well, that was that, Turnbull thought. It galled him a little to think that he’d been offered a chance to do research with Scholar Duckworth and hadn’t been able to take it. But if the research hadn’t panned out…. He frowned and turned back to the first letter.

A theory that would “literally kick the supports right out from under every theory that’s been evolved for the existence of that city,” he’d said. Odd. It was unlike Duckworth to be so positive about anything until he could support his own theory without much fear of having it pulled to pieces.

Turnbull poured himself a second glass of sherry, took a sip, and rolled it carefully over his tongue.

The Centaurus Mystery. That’s what the explorers had called it back in 2041, nearly a century and a half before, when they’d found the great city on one of the planets of the Alpha Centaurus system. Man’s first interstellar trip had taken nearly five years at sublight velocities, and bing!–right off the bat, they’d found something that made interstellar travel worthwhile, even though they’d found no planet in the Alpha Centaurus system that was really habitable for man.

They’d seen it from space–a huge domed city gleaming like a great gem from the center of the huge desert that covered most of the planet. The planet itself was Marslike–flat and arid over most of its surface, with a thin atmosphere high in CO_2 and very short on oxygen. The city showed up very well through the cloudless air.

From the very beginning, it had been obvious that whoever or whatever had built that city had not evolved on the planet where it had been built. Nothing more complex than the lichens had ever evolved there, as thousands of drillings into the crust of the planet had shown.