Or would he even try?

The flyers were ready when they got to the field, but Mara was gone.  Les Harcourt met them at the radio office on the edge of the field; he was the communications man out here.  He led them into the low, quick-concrete construction office and shoved some forms at Manning to be signed.

“If there’s any trouble, you’ll be responsible for it,” he said to Manning.  “The men can look out for themselves, but the flyers are Company property.”

Manning scowled impatiently and bent to sign the papers.

“Where’s Mara?” Rynason asked.

“She’s already taken one of the flyers out,” Harcourt said.  “Left ten minutes ago.  We’ve got her screen in the next room.”  He waved a hand toward the door in the rear of the room.

Rynason went on back and found the live set.  The screen, monitored from a camera on the flyer, showed the foothills of the southern mountains over which Mara was flying.  They were bare and blunt; the rock outcroppings which thrust up from the Flat had been weathered smooth in the passage of years.  Mara was passing over a low range and on to the desert beyond.

Rynason picked up the mike.  “Mara, this is Lee; we just got here.  Have you found them yet?”

Her voice came thinly over the speaker.  “Not yet.  I thought I saw some movement in one of the passes, but the light wasn’t too good.  I’m looking for that pass again.”

“All right.  We’ll be going up ourselves in a few minutes; if you find them, be careful.  Wait for us.”

He refitted the mike in its stand and rose.  But as he turned to the door her voice came again:  “There they are!”

He looked at the screen, but for the moment he couldn’t see anything.  Mara’s flyer was coming down out of the rocky hills now, the Flat stretching before her on the screen.  Rynason could see the pass through which she had been flying, but there was no movement there; it took him several seconds to see the low ruins off to the right, and the figures moving through them.

The screen banked and turned toward them; she was lowering her altitude.

“I see them,” he said into the mike.  “Can’t make out what they’re doing, on the screen.  Can you see them any more clearly?”

“They’re entering one of the buildings down there,” she said after a moment.  “I’ve counted almost twenty of them so far; they must all be here.”

“Can you go down and see what they’re doing?  The sooner we find out, the better:  Manning’s got a pretty ugly bunch of so-called vigilantes on the way out there.”

She didn’t reply, but on the screen he saw the crumbling buildings grow larger and nearer.  He could make out individual structures now:  a wall had fallen and was half-buried in the dust and sand; an entire roof had caved in on another building, leaving only rubble in the interior.  It was difficult to tell sometimes when the original lines of the buildings had fallen:  they had all been smoothed by the wind-blown sand, so that broken pillars looked almost as though they had been built that way, smooth and upright, solitary.