“I agree. Still, we’ve got a long, hopefully boring examination of all these buildings, and sooner or later we should turn up something.

“I’d almost prefer that howling wind outside to walking blindly through here,” Nagel added, sounding uncharacteristically nervous. “I don’t like going down dark corridors blind.”

“Not blind,” Dr. Queson said from in front of him. She put her light on a wall plaque at the far end of the greenhouse, near the connecting tube to the next unit. He walked over to it and stared. The characters meant nothing to him; whatever language it was in was way different from the one he knew. Still, it was very clearly a drawing of the entire complex, and, right near the end, in one of the two units farthest out, there was the drawing of a stick figure inside a circle. The message was universal.

“You are here,” he said, nodding. He looked over at the far end, which extended to and actually inside the cliffs beyond. By that point the greenhouses were twenty across and it would be easy to get lost without maps like this.

“It’s gonna be a week before we get to the living quarters,” he commented.

“Why wait that long?” she responded. “Looks like a standard layout. We should be able to pinpoint the master control building and get any records that might be there. We might even be able to get some power going again. It would make looking through this jungle of empty greenhouses easier and more tolerable. In fact, if you see the finely etched maintenance keys along each unit, and trace them back, I’d say that the control center was about… here.” She pointed to a section almost dead center and embedded in the cliffs.

“Long walk,” he noted. “Want to bring in the shuttle?”

“It’s a good hike, that’s for sure, but we’ve already seen the problems the shuttle has in flying low under these conditions, and it should be all inside. I’m not in the shape I used to be in, but this is eighty-six percent standard gee, and I think the exercise would do me good. Besides, I’m more curious to find out what’s going on here than to keep walking through deserted buildings for days on end.”