The story of the Cromp-ton Rums is one of the most melancholy of recent years as stones of failed hopes always are Unlike most subjects touched on by the discovery of the Rakis crystals, this one did not expand our honzons but diminished them The story is well documented at every step beginning with the voyage of explora CROMPTON RUINS 181 CROMPTON RUINS tion of Guild Ship Tharondelai, captained by Levas Crompton, ID 14701 On the farthest borders of human space they investigated a G type star, Sutterer 4041, the fourth planet of which was comfortably within the star's ecosphere Members of the crew descended to the planet's surface, and found the chief variation from human-optimal conditions to be relatively high percentage of water vapor in the atmosphere, otherwise, the planet seemed ideal for colonization Tharondelai returned to Spacing Guild headquarters, where Captain Crompton registered the planet and received his discovery bonus In 14702 the usual follow-up expedition was sent to the planet for confirmation of the first findings and for a more thorough scientific investigation of its value as a habitat The planet had now been named Crompton A normal part of the procedure was the launching of a low-altitude satellite for photomapping in detail While ground teams began studying climate, mineralogy, and biology the orbital survey team combined the photomaps and began searching for anything of interest to which to direct die scien usts on the surface Within days they discovered the presence of something that looked like an artificial structure, nearly a kilometer across, on the shore of the largest lake on die central continent Acting under long-standing regula Uonb governing possible alien contact, the captain, Reola senSbek, directed the satellite to a closer and continuous reconnaissance while she ordered the ground crews to return to the ship The new photos revealed that the structure was considerably damaged, with no sign of activity of any kind in the area The ground teams returned to the surface, this time to the site of the structure and started carefully investigations No trace of intelligent life was found near the structure, nor anywhere on the surface of Crompton After completing their original mission, the crew of the ship returned to headquarters with their news Search of tee comprehensive Gudd records showed previous investigation neither of Sutterer 4041 nor indeed of anything in that quadrant As far as the Guild could determine (and they were certainly in a positron to be definite) no human being had ever set foot on Crompton The second expedition of 14702, consisting of five heighhners carrying a host of personnel and a mass of equipment returned to Crompton while the news of alien contact spread through the inhabited worlds Teams of archaeologists architects xenobiologists and the like, combed ever} centimeter of the structure and performed the most intensive survey of an uninhabited planet ever undertaken Their results were straightforward and have never been challenged the structure, now being called the Crompton Ruins was between three thousand and five thousand years old It was entirely empty, except for debris where sections had collapsed No other structure or indication of intelligent life was found anywhere on the planet, although small patches of ground near the structure showed high concentrations of feme oxides It was speculated that these patches could have been the positions of heavy construe toon equipment that had entirely decomposed Crompton hosts many microorganisms that efficiently break down metals vegetable and animal fibers, and tissues A high degree of synthetics in the structure had greatly retard ed but not entirely halted this process of decomposition The stellar neighborhood of Sutterer 4041 was explored, but nothing was found to shed light on the mystery of the huge old structure There the matter rested Theories of all degrees of respectability were proposed to account for the Crompton Rums, but as the decades mounted into centimes, the Rums were forgotten except for an occasional reference now and then Nevertheless the consensus was mat the Rums represented the one solid evidence of the existence of intelligent alien life And it was not hard to maintain this belief the universe is a vast region, and some argued that it was not unlikely that chance occurrence put humanity on the scene some thousands of years after the aliens had been on Crompton Still, they argued, while we might not encounter the aliens tomorrow or next year or even in the next hundred years, we know from the Rums that they are out there and we need to think about what to do when contact does take place Then came the Rakis Finds Several years after the initial discovery on Rakis, when the results from that planet had been widely 182 publicized, the archaeologist Joona Kritapar pointed out that if Leto II's no-room were a free-standing structure instead of an excavation, and if tiie heights of the different floors varied instead of being constant, the no-room would be only a slightly smaller duplicate of die Crompton Ruins.