Lom Seel fought rising panic by recounting ways in which he'd been a fool. First, one never flew a shuttle alone, which he had. And you never flew in bad weather unless qualified, which he wasn't. Finally, a qualified pilot wouldn't have wrecked the reaction control grids by slamming down onto the planet's rocky coastline, which he'd also managed.

Lightning flickered beyond the ports. Thunder grumbled as the storm lumbered off towards the ancient city. There had been no logical reason for his return; all the important work was done there, the data analyzed and recorded.

Something elemental had drawn him back though. After all the millennia of searching and hundreds of light cycles from the twin suns Toy and Sarus, his species had finally found the world of its origin. For the first time in his life, on the surface of this dead world, he felt that he belonged.

Through a pall of heavy rain he gazed at the ruins. A very long time ago a magnificent city had been there, not unlike thousands of others Toysarian scientists had excavated throughout the galaxy. This world, though, was different. The fractured and crumbled walls; the warped and blistered pavement of once broad thoroughfares; the towers of steel now little more than time-devoured remnants? All of this had drawn him back one last time, but nothing more so than the ghosts of the people who had built a grand planet-wide civilization. Tragic that it had been their very resourcefulness and creativity which had destroyed them and their world. The bloated star above testified to that universal frailty. Nothing remained now but a barren, blasted planet.

He pressed closer to the port to peer upward. Nothing but churning clouds. Unlikely that he could spot the orbiting ship anyway. So dark out there, barren and featureless. Even time here seemed frozen. Fear wormed deeper and he cringed away from the port, forcing his thoughts elsewhere.

They'd found answers here, and learned about the supreme global species of this lost world. Long ago a frail craft had lofted into space upon which they'd wistfully placed a plaque telling of themselves, their world, and where it was in the galaxy. Also on that primitive wanderer, and more important than anything else, had been a crude recording of sounds and voices. Incredibly, imbedded among the sounds, was one that linguists identified as an aboriginal form of the Toysarian tongue.

No one knew just how long Toysarus had searched the galaxy. But then, suddenly, along came that time-battered space probe. More was known about its origins and builders than about the Toysarian species itself.

All that could be said with certainty was that within the seas of Toysarus they'd flourished and advanced. Sentience united with intelligence and, in time, they'd recognized how truly unique they were. And how alone. Nowhere did there exist one fossilized scrap of bone, lingering cell, or DNA signature that could be called the fundamental beginning of the Toysarian species. They had simply, at some point millennia ago, appeared beneath the light of the twin suns.