Nagel sighed. “Okay, agreed. Sark, you take over here. Buzz if you find something out of whack, otherwise do a survey and mark ’em. We’ll see about turning on the lights.”

“ ’Bout time,” Sark grumbled. “Why didn’t you do that in the first place?”

There were several possible answers to that one, not the least of which was that there simply wasn’t any safe place to put down the shuttle close to the cliffs, between the density of the greenhouses and the tremendous, swirling winds with their sandblasting effects, effects which were magnified close in to the cliffs.

“Stay with me and move fairly quickly,” Jerry Nagel cautioned. “We still don’t know if anything’s inside ahead of us.”

“You worry too much,” she told him. “Anything here is long dead.” But she wasn’t foolish enough not to heed his caution.

Each of the greenhouses was connected by a flexible tube along which metallic flooring had been laid so that humans and robotic units could walk between without having to go outside. The seals had held remarkably well considering the constant buffeting from the outside winds, and the flooring was rock steady.

There had been some initial worry that some of the robotic devices might well still be present, might even view them as invaders or interlopers, but orbital and close-in scans showed no sign that the power grid was active. It was cold and dead, save only well below and inside the cliffs where the fusion reactors were in the process of cooling down. It would take them another few hundred years for reaction to cease completely, though, so turning the lights back on shouldn’t be a problem. The real question was, why was everything turned off?