A Heritage of Stars

"You mistake me, friend," the warden said. "It's best we palaver." He made a sign to the other four and slid down off his horse. He ambled forward and squatted. "You might as well hunker down," he said, "and let us have a talk."

The other four came up and hunkered down beside him. The first man's horse wandered back to join its fellows.

"Well, all right," said Cushing, "we'll sit a while with you, if that is what you want. But we can't stay long. We have miles to cover.

"This one?" asked the warden, making a thumb at Rollo. "I never saw one like him before."

"He's all right," said Cushing. "You have no need to worry. Looking at the five of them more closely, he saw that except for one roly-poly man, the rest of them were as gaunt and grim as scarecrows, as if they had been starved almost to emaciation. Their faces were little more than skulls with brown, parchment like skin stretched tightly over bone. Their arms and legs were pipe stems.

From the slight rise of ground, Thunder Butte could be plainly seen, a dominant feature that rose above all the terrible flatness. Around its base ran a darker ring that must be the trees that Rollo had said formed a protective circle about it—and more than likely Ezra's trees as well, although perhaps not exactly the kind of trees that Ezra claimed the sunflowers and the other plants had told him.

"This morning," Cushing said to the squatting wardens, "through the glasses, I caught a glimpse of whiteness at the very top of Thunder Butte. They had the look of buildings, but I could not be certain. Do you know if there are buildings up there?"

"There are magic habitations," said the spokesman of the group. There sleep the creatures that will follow men.

"How do you mean, ‘will follow men'?"

"When men are gone, they will come forth and take the place of men. Or, if they wake first, even before the last of men are gone, they will come forth and displace men. They will sweep men off the earth and take their place."

"You say that you are wardens," Meg said to them. "Do you mean you guard these creatures, that you keep them free of interference?"

"Should anyone approach too closely," said the warden, "they might awake. And we do not want them to awake. We want them to sleep on. For, once they wake and emerge, men s days on Earth are numbered."

"And you are on patrol to warn anyone who comes too close?"

"For centuries on centuries," said the warden, "we have kept patrol. This is but one patrol; there are many others. It takes a great many of us to warn wanderers away. That is why we stopped you. You had the appearance of heading for the butte."

"That is right," said Cushing. "We are heading for the butte."

"There is no use of going there," the warden said. "You can never reach the butte. The Trees won't let you through. And even if the Trees don't stop you, there are other things that will. There are rocks to break your bones

"Rocks!" cried Meg.

"Yes, rocks. Living rocks that keep watch with the Trees."

"There, you see!" Meg said to Cushing. "Now we know where that boulder came from.

"But that was five hundred miles away, said Cushing. "What would a rock be doing there?"

"Five hundred miles is a long way," said the warden, "but the rocks do travel. You say you found a living rock? How could you know it was a living rock? They aren't any different; they look like any other rock."

"I could tell," said Meg.

"The Trees shall let us through," said Ezra. "I shall talk with them."

"Hush, Grandfather," said Elayne. "These gentlemen have a reason for not wanting us to go there. We should give them hearing."

"I have already told you," said the warden, "we fear the Sleepers will awake. For centuries we have watched—we and those other generations that have gone before us. The trust is handed on, from a father to his son. There are old stories, told centuries ago, about the Sleepers and what will happen when they finish out their sleep. We keep the ancient faith

The words rolled on—the solemn, dedicated words of a man sunk deep in faith. The words, thought Cushing, paying slight attention to them, of a sect that had twisted an ancient fable into a body of belief and a dedication that made them owe their lives to the keeping of that mistaken

The sun was sinking in the west and its slanting light threw the landscape into a place of tangled shadows. Beyond the rise on which they squatted, a deep gully slashed across the land, and along the edges of it grew thick tangles of plum trees. In the far distance a small grove of trees clustered, perhaps around a prairie pond. But except for the gully and its bushes and the stand of distant trees, the land was a gentle ocean of dried and withered grass that ran in undulating waves toward the steep immensity of Thunder Butte.

Cushing rose from where he had been squatting and moved over to one side of the two small groups facing one another. Rollo, who had not squatted with the others but had remained standing a few paces to the rear, moved over to join him.

"Now what?" the robot asked.

"I'm not sure," said Cushing. "I don't want to fight them. From the way they act, they don't want any fighting, either. We could just settle down, I suppose, and try to wear them out with waiting, but I don't think that would work. And there's no arguing with them. They are calm and conceited fanatics who believe in what they're doing."

"They aren't all that tough," said Rollo. "With a show of force.

Cushing shook his head. "Someone would get hurt."

Elayne rose to her feet. Her voice came to them, calm, unhurried, so precise it hurt. "You are wrong," she said to the wardens. "The things you have been telling us have no truth in them. There are no Sleepers and no danger. We are going on."

With that, she walked toward them, slowly, deliberately, as if there were no one there to stop her. Meg rose swiftly, clutching at her arm, but Elayne shook off the hand. Ezra came quickly to his feet and hurried to catch up with Elayne. Andy flicked his tail and followed close behind.

The wardens sprang up quickly and began to back away, their eyes fastened on the terrible gentleness of Elayne's face.

From off to one side came a coughing roar and Cushing spun around to face in its direction. A huge animal, gray and brown, humped of shoulder, great mouth open in its roar, had burst from a clump of plum bushes that grew beside the gully and was charging the wardens' huddled horses. The horses, for an instant, stood frozen in their fear, then suddenly reacted, plunging in great arcing leaps to escape the charging bear.

Rollo catapulted into action, at full speed with his second stride; his spear, held two-handed, extended straight before him.

"A grizzly!" he shouted. "After all this time, a grizzly!"

"Come back, you fool," yelled Cushing, reaching for an arrow and nocking it to the bowstring.

The horses were running wildly. Straight behind them came the bear, screaming in his rage, rapidly closing on the frightened animals. Running directly at the bear was Rollo, with leveled spear thrusting out toward it.

Cushing raised the bow and drew back the arrow, almost to his cheek. He let it go and the arrow was a whicker in the golden sunshine of late afternoon. It struck the bear in the neck and the bear whirled, roaring horribly. Cushing reached for another arrow. As he raised the bow again, he saw the bear, rearing on its hind legs, its face a foaming frenzy, its forelegs lifted to strike down, with Rollo almost underneath them, the spear thrusting up to strike. Out of the tail of his eye, Cushing saw Andy, head stretched forward, ears laid back, tail streaming out behind him, charging down at full gallop upon the embattled bear.

Cushing let the arrow go and heard the thud, saw its feathered end protruding from the bear's chest, just below the neck. Then the bear was coming down, its forearms reaching out to grasp Rollo in their clutches, but with Rollo's spear now buried deeply in its chest. Andy spun on his front legs, his hind legs lashing out. They caught the bear's belly with a sickening, squashy sound.

The bear was down and Rollo was scrambling out from underneath it, the bright metal of his body smeared with blood. Andy kicked the bear again, then trotted off, prancing, his neck bowed in pride. Rollo danced a wild war jig around the fallen bear, whooping as he danced.

"Grease!" he was yelling. "Grease, grease, grease!"

The bear kicked and thrashed in reflex action. The wardens' horses were rapidly diminishing dots on the prairie to the south. The wardens, running desperately behind them, were slightly larger dots.

"Laddie boy," Meg said, watching them, "I would say this broke up the parley."

"Now," said Elayne, "we'll go on to the butte."

"No,~~ said Cushing. "First we render out some oil for Rollo."

As the wardens had said, the living rocks were waiting for them, just outside the Trees. There were dozens of them, with others coming up from either side, rolling sedately, with a flowing, effortless, apparently controlled motion, moving for a time, then stopping, then rolling once again. They were dark of color, some of them entirely black, and they measured—or at least the most of them measured—up to three feet in diameter. They did not form a line in front of the travelers, to block their way, but moved out, to range themselves around them, closing to the back of them and to each side, as if they were intent upon herding them toward the Trees.

Meg moved close to Cushing. He put his hand upon her arm and found that she was shivering. "Laddie buck," she said, "I feel the coldness once again, the great uncaring. Like the time we found the rock on the first night out.

"It'll be all right," he said, "if we can make our way through

the Trees. The rocks seem to want us to move in toward the Trees."

"But the wardens said the Trees would not let us through."

"The warden~," he said, "are acting out an old tradition that may not have any meaning now or may never have had a meaning, something that they clung to through the centuries because it was the one reality they had, the one thing in which they could believe. It gave them a sense of continuity, a belonging to the ancient past. It was something that set them apart as special people and made them important."

"And yet," said Meg, "when the bear stampeded the horses, they left us and went streaking after them, and they've not been back."

"I think it was Elayne," said Cushing. "Did you see their faces when they looked at her? They were terrified. The bear, running off the horses, took them off a psychological hook and gave them an excuse to get out of there."

"Maybe, too," said Meg, "it was being without horses. To the people of the plains, a horse is an important thing. They're crippled without horses. Horses are a part of them. So important that they had to run after them, no matter what."

The Trees loomed before them, a solid wall of greenery, with the greenery extending down to the very ground. They had the look of a gigantic hedge. There was an ordinary look about them, like any other tree, but Cushing found himself unable to identify them. They were hardwoods, but they were neither oak nor maple, elm nor hickory. They were not exactly like any other tree. Their leaves, stirring in the breeze, danced and talked the language of all trees, although, listening to them, Cushing gained the impression they were saying something, that if his ears had been sharp enough and attuned to the talk that they were making, he could understand the words.

Shivering Snake, positioned in a halo just above Rollo's head, was spinning so fast that in one's imagination one could hear it whistle with its speed. The Followers had come in closer, smudged shadows that dogged their heels, as if they might be staying close to seek protection.

Ezra had halted not more than ten feet from the green hedge of the Trees and had gone into his formal stance, standing rigidly, with his arms folded across his chest, his head thrown back, his eyes closed. Slightly behind him and to one side, Elayne had flopped down to the ground, feet tucked beneath her, hands folded in her lap, and bowed, with the ragged elk skin pulled up to cover her.

Now there was a new sound, a faint clicking that seemed to come from back of them, and when Cushing turned to see what it might be, he saw it was the rocks. They had joined in a semicircular formation, extending from the forefront of the Trees on one hand, around an arc to the forefront of the Trees on the other hand, spaced equidistantly from one another, no more than a foot or so apart, forming an almost solid line of rocks, hemming in the travelers, holding them in place. The clicking, he saw, resulted when the rocks, each one standing in its place, but each one rocking slightly, first to one side, then the other, struck against the neighbors next in line.

"It's horrible," said Meg. "That coldness—it is freezing me.

The tableau held. Ezra stood rigid; Elayne sat unmoving; Andy switched a nervous tail. The Followers came in closer, now actually among them, blobs of shadows that seemed to merge with the others huddled there. Shivering Snake outdid itself in its frantic spinning.

Rollo said, softly, "We are not alone. Look back of us."

Cushing and Meg twisted around to look. Half a mile away, five horsemen sat their mounts, graven against the skyline.

"The wardens," said Meg. "What are they doing here?"

As she spoke, the wardens raised a wail, a lonesome, forsaken lament, a thin keening in which was written an ultimate despair.

"My God, laddie boy," said Meg, "will there never be an end to it?"

And, saying that, she deliberately strode forward until she stood beside Ezra, raising her arms in a supplicating pose.

"In the name of all that's merciful," she cried, "let us in! Please, do let us in!"

The Trees seemed to come alive. They stirred, their branches rustling and moving to one side to form a doorway so the travelers could come in.

They walked into a place where lay a templed hush, a place from which the rest of the world seemed forever sealed. Here was no low-hanging greenery but a dark and empty vastness that rose up above them, a vastness supported by enormous tree boles that went up and up into the dimness, like clean churchly pillars that soared into the upper reaches of a sainted edifice. Beneath their feet was the carpet like duff of a forest floor—the cast-off debris that had fallen through the centuries and lain undisturbed. Behind them the opening closed, the outer greenery falling into place.

They halted, standing in the silence that they discovered was really not a silence. From far above came the soughing of trees put in motion by the wind, but, strangely, the soughing did no more than emphasize the basic hush that held here in the dimness.

Well, we made it, Cushing thought to say, but the deep hush and the dimness strangled him and no words came out. Here was not a place where one engaged in idle conversation. Here was something that he had not bargained for, that he had never dreamed. He'd set out on a forthright quest for a Place of Going to the Stars, and even in those times when he could bring himself to think that he had a chance of finding it, he had thought of it as being a quite ordinary installation from which men had launched their great ships into space. But the Trees and the living rocks, even the wardens, had about them a touch of fantasy that did not square with the place he had sought to find. And if this butte was, in all reality, the Place of Going to the Stars, what the hell had happened?

Ezra was on his knees and his lips were moving, but the words he spoke, if he was speaking words, were mumbled.

"Ezra," Cushing asked sharply, "what is going on?"

Elayne was not sitting with her grandfather, as had been her habit, but was standing over him. Now she turned to Cushing. "Leave him alone," she said coldly. "Leave him alone, you fool."

Meg plucked at Cushing's sleeve. "The Holy of Holies?" she asked.

"What in the name of God are you talking about?"

"This place. It is the Holy of Holies. Can't you feel it?"

He shook his head. To him there seemed nothing holy about it. Frightening, yes. Forsaken, yes. A place to get away from as soon as one was able. A place of quiet that suddenly seemed to hold a strange unquietness. But nothing that was holy.

You are right, the Trees said to him. There is nothing holy here. This is the place of truth. Here we find the truth; here we extract the truth. This is the place of questioning, of examination. This is where we look into the soul.

For an instant he seemed to see (in his imagination?) a grim and terrible figure dressed in black, with a black cowl that came down about a bony face that was merciless. The figure and the face struck terror into him. His legs were watery and bending; his body drooped and his brain became a blob of shaking jelly. His life, all his life, everything that he had ever been or seen or done, spilled out of him, and although it was out of him, he could feel sticky fingers with unclean fingernails plucking at it busily, sorting it out, probing it, examining it, judging it and then balling it all together in a scrawny, bony fist and stuffing it back into him again.

He stumbled forward on jerky legs that still seemed watery, and only by the greatest effort kept himself from falling. Meg was beside him, holding him and helping him, and in that moment his heart went out to her—this marvelous old hag who had trod uncomplainingly all the weary miles that had led them to this place.

"Straight ahead, laddie boy," she said. "The way is open now. Just a little farther."

Through bleary eyes he saw ahead of him an opening, a tunnel with light at its other end, not just a little way, as she had said, but some distance off. He staggered on, with Meg close beside him, and although he did not look back to see-fearful that, looking back, he would lose the way—he knew that the others were coming on behind him.

Time stretched out, or seemed to stretch out, and then the tunnel's mouth was just ahead of him. With a final effort he lurched through it and saw ahead of him a rising slope of ground that went up and never seemed to stop, ground covered with the beautiful tawniness of sun-dried grass, broken by rocky ledges thrusting from the slope, dotted by clumps of bushes and here and there a tree.

Behind him Rollo said, "We made it, boss. We are finally here. We are on Thunder Butte."

A short distance up the slope, they found a pool of water in a rock basin fed by a stream that barely trickled down a deep gully, with misshapen, wind-tortured cedars forming a halfhearted windbreak to the west. Here they built a meager fire of dead branches broken off the cedar trees, and broiled steaks cut off a haunch of venison that was on the point of becoming high.

They were up the slope far enough that they could see over the ring of the Trees to the plains beyond. There, just over the tip of the Trees, could be seen the toy like figures of the wardens. Their horses were bunched off to one side and the five wardens stood in line, facing toward the butte. At times they would fling their arms up in unison, and at other times, when the wind died down momentarily, those around the fire could hear their shrill keening.

Meg studied them through the glasses. "it's some sort of

lament," she said. "Rigid posturing, then a little dance step or two, then they throw up their arms and howl."

Ezra nodded gravely. "They are devoted but misguided men," he said.

Cushing growled at him. "How the hell do you know? You are right, of course, but tell me how you know. I don't mind telling you that I have a belly full of your posturing, which is as bad as anything the wardens may be doing."

"You do me wrong," said Ezra. "I was the one who got us through the Trees. I spoke to them and they opened a way for us; then I spoke to them again and they let us out."

"That's your version," said Cushing. "Mine is that Meg got us in, then got us out again. All you did was mumble."

"Laddie boy," said Meg, "let's not quarrel among ourselves It doesn't really matter who got us through the Trees. The important thing is they did let us through."

Elayne looked at Cushing and for once her eyes had no blankness in them. They were cold with hatred. "You have never liked us," she said. "You have patronized us, made fun of us. I'm sorry that we joined you.

"Now, now, my pet," said Ezra, "we all are under tension, but the tension now is gone, or should be. I'll admit that I may have been over-clowning to a small degree, although I swear to you that my belief in my own ability has not faded; that I believe, as always, that I can talk with plants. I did talk with the Trees; I swear I talked with them and they talked to me. In a different way from the way any plant has ever talked with me before. A sharper conversation, not all of which I understood, a great part of which I did not understand. They talked of concepts that I have never heard before, and though I knew they were new and important, I could grasp but the very edges of them. They looked deep inside of me and let me look, for a little distance, into them. It was as if they were examining me—not my body but my soul—and offered me a chance to do the same with them. But I did not know how to go about it; even with them trying to show me, I did not know the way to go about it."

"Space is an illusion," said Elayne, speaking in a precise textbook voice, as if she were speaking not to them, nor indeed to anyone, but was merely reciting something that she knew or had newly learned, speaking as if it were a litany. "Space is an illusion, and time as well. There is no such factor as either time or space. We have been blinded by our own cleverness, blinded by false perceptions of those qualities that we term eternity and infinity. There is another factor that explains it all, and once this universal factor is recognized, everything grows simple. There is no longer any mystery, no longer any wonder, no longer any doubt; for the simplicity of it all lies before us—the simplicity… the simplicity… the simplicity.

Her voice ran down on the single word and she lapsed into silence. She sat staring out beyond the campfire circle, her hands folded in her lap, her face again assuming the look of horrifying emptiness and terrible innocence.

The rest of them sat silent, stricken, and from somewhere a chill came off the slope of ground above them and held them motionless with an uncomprehending dread.

Cushing shook himself, asked in a strained voice, "What was that all about?"

Ezra made a motion of resignation. "I don't know. She has never done a thing like that before."

"Poor child," said Meg.

Ezra spoke angrily. "I've told you before, I tell you now:

never pity her; rather, it is she who should pity us. Meg said, "No pity was intended."

"There are more wardens out there," said Rollo. "A new band of them just showed up. Six or seven, this time. And from

far to the east there seems to be others coming in. A great dust cloud, but I can see no more.

"It was a shame about the wardens," said Meg. "We messed them up after all their years of watching. All those generations and no one had ever got through."

"Perhaps there has never been anyone before who wanted to," said Rollo.

"That may be true," said Meg. "No one who wanted to get through as badly as we wanted to. No one with a purpose.

"If it hadn't been for the bear," said Rollo, "we might not have made it, either. The bear provided a distraction. And they lost their horses. They were naked and defenseless without the horses."

"The bear shook them up," said Ezra. "No man in his right mind goes against a bear with nothing but a spear."

"I'm not a man," said Rollo, reasonably, "and I was not alone. Cushing put some arrows in the beast and even Andy came in on the kill."

"My arrows did nothing," said Cushing. "They only irritated him."

He rose from where he was sitting and went up the slope, climbing until the campfire was no more than a small red eye glowing in the dusk. He found a small rock-ledge that cropped out from the slope, and sat upon it. The dusk was deepening into night. The Trees were a hump of blackness and out beyond them what must have been the campfires of the wardens flickered on and off, sometimes visible, sometimes not.

Sitting on the ledge, Cushing felt an uneasy peace. After miles of river valley and of high dry plains, they had finally reached the place where they were going. The goal had been reached and the daily expectation of reaching it had vanished and there seemed to be little to fill the void that was left by the lapsing of the expectations. He wondered about that, a bit confused. When one reached a goal, there should be, if nothing else, at least self-congratulation.

Below him, something grated on a stone, and when he looked in that direction, he made out the dull gleam of something moving. Watching, he saw that it was Rollo.

The robot came up the last few paces and without a word sat down on the ledge beside Cushing. They sat for a moment in silence; then Cushing said, "Back there, a while ago, you called me boss. You should not have done that. I'm not any boss."

"It just slipped out," said Rollo. "You ran a good safari—is that the right word? I heard someone use it once. And you got us here."

"I've been sitting here and thinking about getting here," said Cushing. "Worrying a little about it."

"You shouldn't be doing any worrying," said Rollo. "This is the Place of Going to the Stars."

"That's what I'm worrying about. I'm not so sure it is. It's something, but I'm fairly sure it's not the Place of Stars. Look, to go to the stars, to send ships into space, you need launching pads. This is not the kind of place to build launching pads. Up on top of the butte, perhaps, if there is any level ground up there, you might build launching pads. But why on top of a butte? The height of the land would be no advantage. The job of getting materials up to the launching site… It would be ridiculous to put pads up there when out on the plains you have thousands of acres of level ground."

"Well, I don't know," said Rollo. "I don't know about such things."

"I do," said Cushing. "Back at the university, I read about the moon shots and the Mars shots and all the other shots. There were a number of articles and books that told how it was done, and it was not done from atop a hill."

"The Trees," said Rollo. "Someone put the Trees around the butte-all around the butte-to protect whatever may be here. Maybe before the Time of Trouble, the people got up in arms against going to the stars."

"That might have been so," said Cushing. "Protection might have been needed in the last few hundred years or so before the world blew up, but they could have put the Trees around level ground just as well."

"Place of Going to the Stars or not," said Rollo, "there is something here, something protected by the Trees."

"Yes, I suppose you're right. But it was the Place of Stars I wanted."

"The thing that bothers me is why they passed us through. The Trees, I mean. They could have kept us Out. The rocks were out there waiting. All the Trees would have had to do was give the word, and the rocks would have moved in and flattened us."

"I've wondered, too. But I'm glad they let us in."

"Because they wanted to let us in. Because they decided it was best to let us in. Not just because they could see no harm in us, but because they wanted us, almost as if they had been waiting all these years for us. Cushing, what did they see in us?"

"Damned if I know," said Cushing. "Come on. I'm going back to camp.

Ezra was huddled close to the fire, fast asleep and snoring. Meg sat beside the fire, wrapped in a blanket against the chill of night. Andy stood a little distance off, hip-shot, head drooping, slack-kneed. Across the fire from Meg, Elayne sat bolt upright, feet tucked under her, hands folded in her lap, her face a blank, eyes fixed on nothing.

"So you're back," said Meg. "See anything, laddie boy?"

"Not a thing," said Cushing. He sat down beside her.

"Hungry? I could cook a slice of venison. Might as well eat it while we can. Another day and it won't be fit to eat."

"I'll get something tomorrow," said Cushing. "There must be deer about."

"I saw a small herd in a break to the west," said Rollo.

"Do you want me to cook up a slice?" asked Meg.

Cushing shook his head. "I'm not hungry."

"Tomorrow we'll climb the hill. You have any idea what we'll find up there?"

"The wardens said there are buildings," Rollo said. "Where the Sleepers sleep."

"We can forget about the Sleepers," Cushing told him. "It's an old wives' tale."

"The wardens built their life upon it," said Rollo. "You'd think it would have to be more than that. Some slight evidence."

"Entire bodies of religion have been built on less," said Cushing.

He picked up a stick of firewood, leaned forward to push the brands of the campfire together. The blaze flared up momentarily and the flare of its light flashed on something that hung in the air just beyond the fire and a short distance above their heads. Cushing reared back in astonishment, the stick of firewood still clutched in his fist.

The thing was cylindrical, three feet long, a foot and a half thick, a fat, stubby torpedo hanging in the air, hanging effortlessly, without wobbling, without any sound, with no ticking or humming that might indicate a mechanism designed to hold it in its place. Along its entire surface, not placed at regular intervals but scattered here and there, were what seemed to be little crystal eyes that glittered in the feeble firelight. The cylinder itself was metal, or seemed to be metal: it had a dull metallic sheen except for the brilliance of the shining eye spots.

"Rollo," said Cushing, "it's a relative of yours."

"I agree," said Rollo, "that it has a robotic look about it, but cross my heart and hope to die, I've never seen one like it."

And here they were, thought Cushing, sitting here and talking about it, being matter-of-fact about it, while by any rule of commonsense they should be frozen stiff with fear. Although, outrageous as it might be, there was no fearsomeness in it, no menace nor any hint of menace, just a fat, roly-poly clown hanging in the air. Looking at it, for a moment he seemed to conjure up a face, a fatuous, vacantly grinning, impish face that was there one moment, gone the next. There never had been any face, he knew; the face that he had seen was the kind of face that should go with the tubby cylinder suspended in the air.

Ezra mumbled in his sleep, gulping, and turned over, then went back to snoring. Elayne sat stark upright; she had not seen the cylinder, or, seeing it, had not deigned to notice it.

"Can you sense it, Meg?" asked Cushing.

"A nothingness, laddie boy," she said, "a cluttered nothingness, disorderly, chaotic, uncertain of itself, friendly, eager, like a homeless dog looking for a home.

"Human?"

"What do you mean, human? It's not human."

"Human. Like us. Not alien. Not strange."

It spoke to them, its words clipped, metallic. There were no moving mouth parts, no indication of where the words came from;—but there was no doubt that it was the tubby hanger-in the-air that spoke to them.

"There was a purple liquid," it said. "Not water. Liquid. Heavier than water. Thicker than water. It lay in hollows and then it humped up and flowed across the land. it was a scarlet, sandy land and strange things grew in the scarlet land, barrel-like things and tub like things and ball-like things, but big. Many times bigger than myself. With spines and needles in them that they could see and smell and hear with. And talk, but I can't remember what they said. There is so much that I cannot remember, that I knew at one time and no longer know. They welcomed the purple liquid that rolled across the land, uphill and downhill—it could go anywhere. It rolled in long waves across the scarlet sand and the barrel-like things and the other things welcomed it with song. Thanksgiving, glad the purple came. Although, why glad, I do not remember. It is hard to think why they should welcome it, for when it passed over living things, they died. Their spines and needles all hung limp and they could no longer talk and they caved in upon themselves and lay stinking in the sun. There was a great red sun that filled half the sky and one could look straight into it, for it was not a hot sun, not a bright sun. The purple flowed across the land, then rested in hollows and the barrel-things and the other things it had not yet passed over sang softly to it, inviting it to come.

Another voice said, louder than the first, trying to blot out the other, "The stars went round and round, the green star and the blue star, and they moved so fast they were not balls of fire but streaks of fire, and rising in that point in space they circled was a cloud that was alive, taking its energy from the two revolving stars, and I wondered if the stars had been this way always or if the cloud that looked to be all sparkle had made the suns go round and round, the cloud telling the two suns what to do and..

And yet another voice: Darkness, and in the darkness a seething that lived upon the darkness and could not abide the light, that took the feeble light I threw at it and ate it, draining the batteries so there was no longer any light, so that I, powerless, fell into the darkness and the seething closed upon me.

Still another voice: "A purpleness that entrapped me, that took me in and held me and made me a part of it and told me things of long ago, before the universe began

"My God," screamed Meg, "they are all around us!"

And they were. The air seemed full of them, a flock of tubby cylinders that hung above them in the firelight and beyond the firelight, all of them jabbering, each trying to outdo the others.

".. 1 could not talk with them, there was no way to talk with them; they did not think or act or see or hear or feel like me; there was nothing that I had that they had, nothing they had I had… It had one body only, a hideous, terrible body that I cannot describe because my senses and my mind rejected the very horridness of it, that I could not describe even had I not rejected it; but one thing I knew, that it had many minds and these minds conversed with one another and they all talked at me and held me in great pity that I had but one mind…. They were machines but not machines as we are machines, as I am a machine; they were living metals and sentient plastics and they had a spirit that… I was an ant and they did not notice me, they had no idea I was there and I lay there in my antdom and listened to them, experiencing some of what they experienced, not all of it, by any means, for I did not have the knowledge nor the perceptions; like gods they were, and I as dust beneath their feet, although I do not know if they had feet, and I loved them and was terrified by them, both at once…. There was this cancer that spread from world to world, that ate everything it touched, and a voice came out of it and told me, ‘Behold us, we are life. … There was a people; I don't know if I should call them people, but they had all the time there was, creatures to which time meant nothing, for they had conquered time, or maybe only understood it, and had no longer any fear of its tyranny; and they were miserable, for having obliterated it, they had found that they needed time and had tried to get it back, but could not since they had murdered it… ‘I am an exterminator, it told me. ‘I wipe Out life that has no right to be; I wipe clean the worlds that got started wrong, that had no right to be. What would you think if I exterminated you? … There was this race of laughers, laughing in their minds; all they could do was laugh, it was their one reaction to anything at all, although it was a different kind of laughter than I had ever known and there was really not that much for them to laugh about

Babble, babble, babble. Jabber, jabber, jabber. Clatter, clatter, clatter. Disjointed and fragmentary, although if one of them could have been listened to alone, perhaps the story that it told might be comprehensible. But this was impossible— each with its own story to tell insisted on talking while the others talked so that all of them were talking all at once.

By now there were so many of them and the chatter of them so insistent and intermingled that there was no way of hearing anything except an occasional phrase. Cushing found himself unconsciously hunching his shoulders and tucking in his head, hunkering lower to the ground, assuming a protective stance, as if the increasing babble were an actual physical attack.

Ezra tossed in his sleep and sat up, dazed, scrubbing at his eyes with his fists. His mouth moved, but there was so much babble, there were so many other voices, that he could not be heard.

Cushing turned his head to look at Elayne. She sat as she had before, staring out into the night with the sense of seeing nothing. Ezra had said of her, that first day they had stumbled on the two of them, "She is of another world," and that, Cushing thought, must be the explanation—that she dwelt in

two worlds, of which this one, perhaps, was the least important.

Rollo stood on the other side of the fire and there was something wrong about him. Cushing wondered what it was and suddenly he knew: Rollo was alone; Shivering Snake was no longer with him. Thinking back, he tried to recall when he had last seen the snake, and could not be sure.

We are here, Cushing told himself, we are finally here— wherever here might be. Denied access by the wardens, herded by the rocks, let in by the Trees. But before the Trees had let them in, there had been a questioning and a probing, an inquisition, a looking for heresy or sin. Although not probing all of them, perhaps; perhaps only a probing of himself. Certainly not of Meg, for she had helped him when his legs were water and his senses scattered. Not of Ezra, for he had claimed he held a conversation with the Trees. And of Elayne? Of Elayne, who would know? She was a secret person, an exclusive person who shared with no one. Andy? he asked himself. What of Andy, the hunter of water, the killer of rattlesnakes, the battler of bears? He chuckled to himself as he thought of Andy.

Had it been himself alone who had been questioned and examined, the surrogate for all the rest of them, the leader answering for all the rest of them? And in the questioning, in the quest of the dirty fingernails that had pulled the essential being of him apart, what had they found? Something, perhaps, that had persuaded the Trees finally to let them through. He wondered vaguely what that something might have been, and could not know, since he could not know himself.

The babbling stopped of a single instant and the tubby cylinders were gone. Somewhere off in the night a chirping cricket could be heard.

Cushing shook himself, his mind still benumbed by the babble. He felt a physical ache, his entire body aching.

"Someone called them off," said Meg. "Something called them home, reproving them, angry at them."

Elayne said, in her textbook voice, "We came into a homeless frontier, a place where we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must know the universe…

They stopped for their noon rest at the edge of a small grove of trees. Cushing had bagged a deer, which Andy had carried up the slope. Now Cushing and Rollo butchered it and they had their fill of meat.

The going had been hard, uphill all the way, the climb broken by jutting ledges of rocks they had to work their way around, gashed by gullies that time after time forced them to change their course. The dried grass was slippery, making the footing uncertain, and there had been many falls.

Below them the Trees were a dark band of foliage that followed the course of the lower reaches of the butte. Beyond the Trees the high plain was a blur of brown and deeper shadows, thinning out to a lighter, almost silvery hue as it stretched to the horizon. Using the glasses, Cushing saw that now there were more than wardens out on the plains. He could see at least three separate bands, encamped or going about the process of encampment. And these, he knew, must be tribes, or delegations from tribes, perhaps alerted by the wardens as to what had happened. Why, he wondered, should the tribes be moving in? It might mean that the wardens were not a small society of fanatics, as it had seemed, but had the backing of at least some of the western tribes, or were acting for the tribes. The thought worried him, and he decided, as he put the glasses back in their case, to say nothing of it to the others.

There was as yet no sign of the buildings that had been glimpsed through the glasses several days before and that the wardens had said were there. Ahead of them lay only the everlasting slope that they must climb.

"Maybe before the day is over," Rollo said, "we may be in sight of the buildings."

"I hope so," Meg told him. "My feet are getting sore with all this climbing."

The only signs of life they saw were the herd of deer from which Cushing had made his kill, a few long-eared rabbits, a lone marmot that had whistled at them from its ledge of rock, and an eagle that sailed in circles high against the blueness of the sky. The tubby cylinders had not reappeared.

In the middle of the afternoon, as they were toiling up an unusually steep and treacherously grass-slicked slope, they saw the spheres. There were two of them, looking like iridescent soap bubbles, rolling cautiously down the slope toward them. They were a considerable distance off, and as the little band stopped to watch them, the two spheres came to a halt on a fairly level bench at the top of the slope.

From where he stood, Cushing tried to make out what they were. Judging the distance he was from them, he gained the impression they might stand six feet tall. They seemed smooth and polished, perfectly rounded and with no sense of mass; insubstantial beings—and beings because there seemed in his mind no question that they were alive.

Meg had been looking at them through the glasses and now she took them from her face.

"They have eyes," she said. "Floating eyes. Or, at least, they look like eyes and they float all about the surface."

She held out the glasses to him, but he shook his head. "Let's go up," he said, "and find out what they are.

The spheres waited for them as they climbed. When they reached the bench on which the spheres rested, they found themselves no more than twenty feet from their visitors.

As Meg had said, the spheres were possessed of eyes that were scattered all about their surfaces, moving from time to time to new positions.

Cushing walked toward them, with Meg close beside him, the others staying in the rear. The spheres, Cushing saw, were about the size that he had estimated. Except for the eyes, they seemed to have no other organs that were visible.

Six feet from them, Cushing and Meg halted, and for a moment nothing happened. Then one of the spheres made a sound that was a cross between a rumble and a hum. Curiously, it sounded as if the sphere had cleared its throat.

The sphere rumbled once again and this time the rumble defined itself into booming speech. The words were the kind that a drum would make had a drum been able to put together words.

"You are humans, are you not?" it asked. "By humans, we mean— "I know what you mean," said Cushing. "Yes, we are human beings."

"You are the intelligent species that is native to this planet?"

"That is right," said Cushing.

"You are the dominant life form?"

"That's correct," said Cushing.

"Then allow me," said the sphere, "to introduce ourselves.

We are a team of investigators who come from many light years distant. I am Number One and this one that stands beside me is termed Number Two. Not that one of us is first or the other second, but simply to give us both identity."

"Well, that is fine," said Cushing, "and we are pleased to meet you. But would you mind telling me what you are investigating."

"Not at all," said #1. "In fact, we'd be most happy to, for we have some hope that you may be able to shed light upon some questions that puzzle us exceedingly. Our field of study is the technological civilizations, none of which seem to be viable for any length of time. They carry within themselves the seeds of their destruction. On other planets we have visited where technology has failed, that seems to have been the end of it. The technology fails and the race that had devised and lived by it then fails as well. It goes down to barbarism and it does not rise again, and on the face of it that has happened here. For more than a thousand years the humans of this planet have lived in barbarism and give all signs that they will so continue, but the A and R assures us that it is not so, that the race has failed time and time again and after a certain period of rest and recuperation has risen to even greater heights. As so, says the A and R, will be the pattern of this failure…."

"You are talking riddles," said Cushing. "Who is this A and R?"

"Why, he is the Ancient and Revered, the A and R for short. He is a robot and a gentleman and—"

"We have with us a robot," Cushing said. "Rollo, please step forward and meet these new friends of ours. Our company also includes a horse."

"We know of horses," said #2 in a deprecatory tone. "They are animals. But we did not know—"

"Andy is no animal," Meg said acidly. "He may be a horse,

but he is a fey horse. He is a searcher-out of water and a battler of bears and many other things besides."

"What I meant to say," said #2, "is that we did not know there were any robots other than the ones that live upon this geographic eminence. We understood that all other robots had been destroyed in your so-called Time of Trouble."

"I am, so far as I am aware," said Rollo, "the only robot left alive. And yet, you say the Ancient and Revered—"

"The Ancient and Revered," said #1, "and a host of others. Surely you have met them. Nasty little creatures that descend upon one and regale one with endless, senseless chatter, all talking at the same time, all insistent that one listen." He sighed. "They are most annoying. For years we have tried to listen to them, in the hope they would provide a clue. But they provide us nothing but a great confusion. I have the theory, not shared by the other member of the Team, they are naught but ancient storytellers who are so programmed that they recite their fictional adventures to anyone they may chance upon, without regard as to whether what they have to tell—"

"Now, wait a minute," said RoIlo. "You're sure these things are robots? We had thought so, but I had a hope-"

"You have met them, then?"

"Indeed we have," said Meg. "So you think the things they tell us are no more than tales designed for entertainment?"

"That's what I think," said #1. "The other member of the Team believes, mistakenly, that they may talk significances which we, in our alien stupidness, are not able to understand. Let me ask you, in all honesty, how did they sound to you? As humans you may have been able to see in them something we have missed."

"We listened to them for too short a time," said Cushing, "to arrive at any judgment."

"They were with us for only a short while," said Meg, "then someone called them off."

"The A and R, most likely," said #1. "He keeps a sharp eye on them."

"The A and R—" asked Cushing, "how do we go about meeting him?"

"He is somewhat hard to meet," said #2. "He keeps strictly to himself. On occasion he has granted us audiences."

"Audiences," said #1. "For all the good it did."

"Then he tells you little?"

"He tells us much," said #1, "but of such things as his faith in the human race. He pretends to take an extremely long-range view, and, to be fair about it, he does not seem perturbed."

"You say he is a robot?"

"A robot, undoubtedly," said #2, "but something more than that. As if the robotic part of him is no more than a surface indication of another factor that is much greater."

"That is what you think," said #1. "He is clever, that is all. A very clever robot."

"We should have told you sooner," said #2, "but we tell you now. We are very glad to meet you. No other humans come. We understand the Trees will not let them through. How did you manage to get through the Trees?"

"It was no sweat," said Cushing. "We just asked them and they let us through."

"Then you must be very special persons.

"Not at all," said Meg. "We simply seek the Place of Going to the Stars."

"The going to the what? Did we hear you rightly?"

"The stars," said Meg. "The Place of Going to the Stars."

"But this is not," said #1, "a Place of Going to the Stars. In all the time we ye been here, there has been no mention of

going to the stars. We know, of course, that one time men went into space, but whether to the stars—"

"You are sure," asked Cushing, "that this is not the Place of Going to the Stars?"

"We have heard no mention of it," said #2. "There is no evidence it was ever used as such. We have the impression that this is the last place of refuge for those elite intellectuals who may have foreseen the Time of Trouble and sought to save themselves. But if this is so, there is no record of it. We do not know; we simply have surmised. The last stronghold of reason on this planet. Although, if that is true, the refuge failed, for there is no indication there have been any humans here for many centuries."

Cushing said, "Not the Place of Going to the Stars?"

"I fear not," said #1.

Rollo said to Cushing, "I never guaranteed it. I simply told you what I heard."

"You said a while ago," said Meg, "that we are the first people ever to come here, implying that you are glad we have. But if you had wanted to meet and talk with people, it would have been quite simple. All you had to do was go and find them. Unless, of course, the Trees would not let you out."

"We did go and seek out people many years ago," said #2. "The Trees are no barrier to us. We can elevate ourselves and sail over them quite easily. But the people would have none of us—they were frightened of us. They ran howling from us or, in desperation, launched attacks upon us."

"And now that we are here," said Cushing, "now that humans have come to you rather than you going to the humans, what can we do for you?"

"You can tell us," said #1, "if there is any basis for the hope and faith expressed so blindly by the A and R that your race will rise to greatness once again."

"Greatness," said Cushing. "I don't know. How do you measure greatness? What is the greatness? Perhaps you can tell me. You say you have studied other planets where technology has failed."

"They all have been the same as this," said #2. "This planet is a classic example of a classic situation. The technological civilization fails and those intelligences that have brought it about go down to nothingness and never rise again.

"Then why does the rule not apply here? What are you worrying about?"

"It's the A and B," said #1. "He insists upon his faith

"Has it occurred to you that A and R may be pulling your leg?"

"Pulling our—?"

"Misleading you. Covering up. Perhaps laughing at you.

"It hasn't occurred to us," said #2. "The A and R is very much a gentleman. He'd not do such a thing. You must realize that we have spent millennia collecting our data. This is the first time that data has ever been in question, the only time there has been any doubt at all. All the other studies checked out in every detail. Here you can see our great concern.

"I suppose I can," said Cushing. "Let me ask you this—have you ever gone further than your data, your immediate data? You say you are convinced that when technology fails, the race is done, that there is no coming back. But what happens next? What happens after that? If, on this planet, man sinks into insignificance, what takes his place? What comes after man? What supersedes man?"

"This," said #1, in a stricken tone, "we have never thought about. No one has ever raised the question. We have not raised the question. It had not occurred to us."

The two of them rested for a time, no longer talking, but jiggling back and forth, as if in agitation. Finally #2 said,

"We'll have to think about it. We must study your suggestion." With that, they started rolling up the slope, their eyes

skittering all about their surfaces as they rolled, gathering speed as they went up the slope, so that it did not take long before they were out of sight.

Before nightfall, Cushing and the others reached the approach to the City, a huge stone-paved esplanade that fronted on the massive group of gray-stone buildings. They halted to make the evening camp, with an unspoken reluctance to advance into the City itself, preferring to remain on its edge for a time, perhaps to study it from a distance or to become more accustomed to its actuality.

A dozen stone steps went up to the broad expanse of the esplanade, which stretched for a mile or more before the buildings rose into the air. The broad expanse of stone paving was broken by masonry-enclosed flowerbeds that now contained more weeds than flowers, by fountains that now were nonfunctional, by formal pools that now held drifted dust instead of water, by stone benches where one might sit to rest. In one of the nearby flowerbeds a few straggly rosebushes still survived, bearing faded blossoms, with bedraggled rose petals blown by the wind across the stones.

The City, to all appearances, was deserted. There had been, since the evening before, no sign of the tubby gossipers. The Team was not in evidence. There was nothing but a half dozen twittering, discontented birds that flew about from one patch of desiccated shrubs to another desiccated patch.

Above the City stretched the lonely sky, and from where they stood they could see far out into the misty blueness of the plains.

Cushing gathered wood from some of the dead or dying shrubs and built a fire on one of the paving stones. Meg got out the frying pan and sliced steaks off a haunch of venison. Andy, free of his load, clopped up and down the esplanade, like a soldier doing sentry beat, his hoofs making a dull, plopping sound. Ezra sat down beside the stone flower bed that contained the few straggly roses, assuming a listening attitude. Elayne, this time, did not squat down beside him, but walked out several hundred yards across the esplanade and stood there rigidly, facing the City.

"Where is Rollo?" asked Meg. "I haven't seen him all the afternoon."

"Probably out scouting," said Cushing.

"What would he be scouting for? There's nothing to scout."

"He's got a roving foot," said Cushing. "He's scouted every mile since he joined up with us. It's probably just a habit. Don't worry about him. He'll show up.

She put the steaks into the pan. "Laddie boy, this isn't the place we were looking for, is it? It is something else. You have any idea what it is?"

"No idea," said Cushing, shortly.

"And all this time you have had the heart of you so set on finding the Place of Going to the Stars. It's a crying shame, it is. Where did we go wrong?"

"Maybe," said Cushing, "there is no such place as Going to the Stars. It may be just a story. There are so many stories."

"I can't think that," said Meg. "Somehow, laddie buck, I just can't think it. There has to be such a place."

"There should be," Cushing told her. "Fifteen hundred years ago or more, men went to the moon and Mars. They wouldn't have stopped with that. They'd have gone farther out. But this is not the right kind of place. They'd have had to have launching pads, and it's ridiculous to build launching pads up here. Up here, it would be difficult to transport the sort of support such a base would need."

"Maybe they found a different way of going to the stars. This might be the place, after all."

Cushing shook his head. "I don't think so."

"But this place is important. It has to be important. Why else would it be guarded by the Trees? Why were the wardens out there?"

"We'll find out," said Cushing. "We'll try to find out."

Meg shivered. "I have a funny feeling in my bones," she said. "As if we shouldn't be here. As if we're out of place. Jean feel those big buildings looking down at us, wondering who we are and why we're here. When I look at them, I go all over goose pimples."

A voice said, "Here, let me do that."

Meg looked up. Elayne was bending over her, reaching for the pan.

"That's all right," said Meg. "I can manage it."

"You've been doing it all the time," said Elayne. "Doing all the cooking. I haven't done a thing. Let me do my part."

"All right," said Meg. "Thank you, lass. I'm tired."

She rose from her crouch, moved over to a stone bench and sat down. Cushing sat beside her.

"What was that?" he asked. "What is going on? Can she be getting human?"

"I don't know," said Meg. "But whatever the reason, I'm glad. I'm bone tired. It's been a long, hard trip. Although I wouldn't have missed it for the world. I'm glad we're here, uneasy as I may be about it."

"Don't let the uneasiness get you down," he said. "It will seem different in the morning."

When they came in at Elayne's call to supper, Ezra roused himself from his communion with the roses and joined them. He wagged his head in perplexity. "I do not understand at all," he said, "the things the roses tell me. There is about them a sense of ancientness, of far places, of time for which there is no counting. As if they were trying to push me to the edge of the universe, from which I could look out upon eternity and infinity, and then they ask me what I see and I cannot tell them, because there is too much to see. There are powerful forces here and mysteries that no man can fathom

He went on and on, mumbling in a rambling way as he ate the meal. No one interrupted him; no one asked him questions. Cushing found himself not even listening.

Hours later, Cushing woke. The others were asleep. The fire had burned to a few glowing embers. Andy stood a little way off, head hanging, either fast asleep upon his feet or dozing.

Cushing threw aside his blanket and rose to his feet. The night had turned chilly, and overhead the wind made a hollow booming among the brilliant stars. The moon had set, but the buildings were a ghostly white in the feeble starlight.

Moving off, he walked in the direction of the City, stopped to face it, his eyes traveling up the cliff like face of it. I could do without you, he told the City, the words dribbling in his mind. I have no liking for you. I did not set out to find you.

Too big, he thought, too big, wondering if he, in that moment, might be thinking as other men had thought when they struck the blow that had toppled that great, impersonal technology that had engulfed and overwhelmed them.

Striking, they had toppled a way of life that had become abhorrent to them, but instead of replacing it with another way of life, they had left an emptiness, a vacuum in which it was impossible to exist, retreating back to an older existence, back almost to where they'd started, as a man might go back to old roots to seek a new beginning. But they had made no beginning; they had simply stood in place, perhaps content for a while to lick their wounds and rest, to catch their breath again. They had caught their breath and rested and the wounds had healed and they still had stood in place—for centuries they had not moved. Perhaps fearful of moving, fearful that if they moved, they would create another monster that in time to come they'd also have to destroy, asking themselves how many false starts a race might be allowed.

Although, he knew, he was romanticizing, philosophizing on insufficient grounds. The trouble had been that the people after the Collapse had not thought at all. Bruised and battered after all the years of progress, they had simply huddled, and were huddling still.

And this great building—or perhaps many buildings, each masking the other, so that there seemed but one building— what could it be, standing here in a place that was a wilderness and had always been a wilderness? A special structure, built for a specific reason, perhaps a mysterious and secretive reason, guarded as it was by the Trees and the living stones? So far, there was no clue as to what might be the reason. Nor a clue to the Trees and stones. And none, for that matter, to the Followers and to Shivering Snake.

He walked slowly across the esplanade toward the City. Directly ahead of him rose two great towers, square-built and solid, endowed with no architectural foolishness, guarding a darkness that could be either a shadow or a door.

As he drew closer, he could see that it was a door and that it was open. A short and shallow flight of stone stairs led up to the door, and as he began to climb them, he saw a flash of light in the darkness that lay beyond the door. He halted and stood breathless, watching, but the flash was not repeated.

The door was larger than he'd thought, twenty feet wide or more, and rising to a height of forty feet or so. It opened into a place of darkness. Reaching it, he stood undecided for a moment, then moved through it, shuffling his feet to guard against any drop or irregularity in the floor.

A few feet inside, he stopped again and waited for his eyes to adapt, but the darkness was so deep that little adaptation was possible. The best that he could do was make out certain graduations in the darkness, the darker loom of objects that stood along the walls of the corridor through which he moved.

Then, ahead of him, a light flashed, and then another, and after that many flashes of light, strange, quivering, looping lights that sparkled rather than shone, and, after a moment of near panic, he knew what they were: hundreds of shivering snakes, dancing in the darkness of a room that opened off the corridor.

Heart halfway up his throat, he headed for the door and reached it. Standing in it, neither in nor out, he could see the room, or half see it, a place of large dimensions with a massive table set in the middle of it, the room lighted in a flickering manner by the zany loopings of the zany snakes; and standing at the head of the table, a form that did not seem to be a man, but a form that was suggestive of a man.

Cushing tried to speak, but the words dried up before he could get them out and shattered into a dust that seemed to coat his mouth and throat, and when he tried to speak again, he found that he could not remember what he had meant to say, and even if he had been able to, he could not have spoken.

A soft hand touched his arm and Elayne's voice sounded. "Here we stand on the edge of eternity," she said. "One step and we'll be into eternity and it would reveal itself to us. Cannot you feel it?"

He shook his head abjectly. He was feeling nothing except a terrible numbness that so paralyzed him he doubted he would ever be able to move from the spot where he was rooted.

He was able, with an effort, to turn his head slightly to one side, and he saw her standing there beside him, slim and straight in the tattered, smudged robe that once had been white, but was no longer. In the flicker of the snakes her face and its emptiness were more terrible than he had ever seen it, a frightening, soul-withering face, but his basic numbness precluded further fright and he looked upon the face without a quiver of emotion, simply noting to himself the utter horror of

Her voice, however, was clear and precise. There was no emotion in it, not a tremor, as she said, "As my grandfather told us, as the plants had told him, eternity is here. It lies within our grasp. It is just beyond our fingertips. It is a strange condition, unlike the eternity we have thought about—a place with neither time nor space, for there is not room in it for either time or space. It is an all-encompassing endlessness that never had a beginning and will not have an end. Embedded in it are all those things that have happened or are about to happen.

" Then she gasped and her grip on Cushing's arm tightened until he could feel her nails cutting deep into his flesh. She sobbed, "It's not like that at all. That was only superficial. It is a place-no, not a place She sagged and Cushing caught her as she slumped, holding her upright.

The figure at the head of the table stood unmoving. Cushing looked at it across the intervening space and it looked back at him out of gleaming eyes that sparkled in the dazzle of the light supplied by the spinning, twisting snakes.

Elayne sagged, her legs buckling under her. Cushing swept her up in his arms and turned about, heading for the door. He felt the eyes of the figure at the table's head burning into him, but he did not turn his head. He stumbled out the door and down the corridor until he had passed through the outer door and down the steps onto the esplanade. There he stopped and let Elayne down, and her knees did not buckle under her. She stood erect, clinging to him for support. In the pale starlight, her vacant face held a stricken look.

Off to one side came a clatter of hoofs, and switching his head about, Cushing saw that it was Andy, prancing and gamboling in a mad abandon, neck bowed, tail straight out behind him, dancing on the paving stones. For a moment it seemed that he was alone; then Cushing saw the others—faint shadows in the starlight, running madly with him like a pack of joyous wolves, circling him and leaping over him, running underneath his belly, leaping up playfully to confront him and fawn on him, as a pack of puppies might play with a delightedly shrieking four-year-old.

Elayne jerked away from him and began to run, back toward the camp, running silently, robe fluttering behind her. Cushing pounded after her, but she outdistanced him. Meg rose up from the camp and confronted her, grappling with her to halt the frenzied flight.

"What's the matter with her, laddie boy?" asked Meg as he came up. "What have you done to her?"

"Not a thing," said Cushing. "She just saw reality, is all. We were inside the City and she was delivering some of that insipid nonsense, mostly about eternity, she has been spouting all the time, and then—"

"You were in the City?"

"Yes, of course," said Cushing. "They left the door wide open.

Elayne had sunk to her ritual position, feet tucked under her, hands folded in her lap, head bowed. Ezra, fumbling out of his blanket, was fussing over her.

"What did you find in there?" asked Meg. "And what has got into Andy?"

"He's dancing with a gaggle of Followers," said Cushing. "Never mind about him. He's making out all right."

"And folio? Where is folio?"

"Damned if I know," said Cushing. "He is never here when we have need of him. Just ambling about."

A cylinder appeared in the air above them, hanging motionless, its receptors gleaming at them.

"Go away," said Cushing. "Right now, we don't need another story."

"No story have I to tell you," said the gossiper. "I carry information for you. I have a message from the A and B."

"The A and R?"

"The Ancient and Revered. He said for me to tell you that the City is closed to you. He said to say we have no time to waste on a group of gaping tourists."

"Well, that's all right," said Meg. "We aren't gaping tourists, but we'll be glad to leave."

"That you cannot do," said the gossiper. "That will not be allowed. You are not to leave; for if you do, you will carry foolish tales with you, and that we do not want."

"So," said Cushing, "we are not allowed to leave and the City is closed to us. What do you expect us to do?"

"That is up to you," said the gossiper. "It is no concern of ours.

Three days later they knew that what the gossiper had said was true. Meg and Cushing had toured the City, looking for a means of getting into it. They found none. There were doors, a lot of doors, but all were closed and locked. The windows, and there were few of them, were no lower than the second or third floors. The few they were able to reach were locked as well and constructed of something other than glass, impossible to break. What was more, they were opaque and there was no way of looking through them. Ventilating shafts, of which there were only a few, were baffled in such a manner that they offered no opportunity of crawling through them.

The City was much larger than it had appeared, and it was, they found, a single building with many wings; in fact, with wings added on to wings, so the scheme of construction, at times, became confusing. The heights of the divers wings varied, some only five or six stories tall, others rising to twenty

stories or more. The entire structure was flanked all the way around by the stone-paved esplanade.

Except for one occasion, on the second day, they saw no one. On that second day, late in the afternoon, they had come upon the Team, apparently waiting for them when they came around the corner of one of the many wings.

Meg and Cushing stopped in astonishment, yet somewhat glad at meeting something with which they could communicate. The two great globes rolled forward to meet them, their eyes floating randomly. When they reached one of the stone benches, they stopped to wait for the humans to come up.

#1 boomed at them in his drumlike voice. "Please to sit down and rest yourselves, as we note is the custom of your kind. Then it will be possible to have communication very much at leisure."

"We have been wondering," Meg said, "what had happened to you. That day we talked, you left in something of a hurry."

"We have been cogitating," said #2, "and very much disturbed by the thing you told us—the question that you asked."

"You mean," said Cushing, "What comes after man?"

"That is it," said #1, "and it was not the concept that was so disturbing to us, but that it could be asked of any race about itself. This is much at odds with the viewpoint of the A and B, who seems quite convinced that your race will recover from the late catastrophe and rise again to greater heights than you have ever known before. By any chance, have you met the A and B?"

"No," Cushing said, "we haven't."

"Ah, then," said #2, "to return to the question that you asked. Can you explain to us how you came to ask it? To say of something else that in time it will be superseded by some other form of life is only logical, but for a species to entertain the idea that it will be superseded argues a sophistication that we had not considered possible."

"To answer that one," said Cushing, "is really very simple. Such a speculation is only commonsense and is quite in line with evolutionary mechanics. Life forms rise to dominance because of certain survival factors. On this planet, through the ages, there have been many dominant races. Man rose to his dominance because of intelligence, but geological history argues that he will not remain dominant forever. And once that is recognized, the question naturally rises as to what will come after him. What, we might ask, has a greater survival value than intelligence? And though we cannot answer, we know there must be something. As a matter of fact, it might seem that intelligence has turned out to have poor survival value."

"And you do not protest?" asked #2. "You do not pound your chest in anger? You do not tear your hair? You do not grow weak and panicky at the thought the day will come when there will be none of you, that in the universe there will be nothing like you, that there will be none to remember or to mourn you?"

"Hell, no," said Cushing. "No, of course we don't."

"You can so disregard your own personal reactions," said #2, as to actually speculate upon what will follow you?"

"I think," said Meg, "it might be fun to know."

"We fail to comprehend," said #1. "This fun you speak about. What do you mean by ‘fun'?"

"You mean, poor things," cried Meg, "that you never have any fun? That you don't know what we mean by ‘fun'?"

"We catch the concept barely," said #2, "although perhaps imperfectly. It is something we have not heretofore encountered. We find it hard to understand that any being could derive even the slightest satisfaction in regarding its own extinction."

"Well," said Cushing, "we aren't extinct as yet. We may have a few more years.

"But you don't do anything about it."

"Not actively," said Cushing. "Not now. Perhaps not at any time. We just try to get- along. But, now, suppose you tell us—do you have even an inkling of an answer to the question that we asked? What does come after us?"

"It's a question we can't answer," said #1, "although since you spoke of it to us, we have given thought to it. The A and B contends that the race will continue. But we think the A and B is wrong. We have seen other planets where the dominant races have fallen and that was the end of it. There was nothing that gave promise of coming after them."

"Perhaps," said Cushing, "you weren't able to hang around long enough. It might take some time for another form of life to move in, to fill the vacuum.

"We don't know about that," said #2. "It was something that did not greatly concern us; it was a factor, actually, that we never once considered. It fell outside the area of our study. You understand, the two of us have spent a lifetime on the study of certain crisis points resulting in the terminations of technological societies. On many other planets we have found a classic pattern. The technology builds up to a certain point and then destroys itself and the race that built it. We were about to return to our home planet and inscribe our report when we happened on this planet and the doubt crept in….

"The doubt crept in," said #1, "because of the evasiveness and the stubbornness of the A and B. He refuses to admit the obvious. He pretends, sometimes convincingly, to hold fast to the faith that your human race will rise again, that it is unconquerable, that it has a built-in spirit that will not accept defeat. He talks obliquely about what he calls a phoenix rising from its ashes, an allusion that escapes us in its entirety."

"There is no need to beat among the bushes," said #2. "It seems to us you may be able to abstract an answer more readily than we, and it is our hope that once you have it, you would, in all friendliness, be pleased to share it with us. It seems to us the answer, if there is one, which we doubt exceedingly, is locked within this City. As natives of this planet, you might have a better chance of finding it than we, who are travel-worn aliens, battered by our doubts and inadequacies."

"Fat chance," said Cushing. "We are locked out of the City and, supposedly, marooned here. We are forbidden by the A and B to leave."

"We thought you had said you had not seen the A and B."

"We haven't. He sent a message to us by one of his gossipers."

"The nasty little thing was malicious about it," Meg told them.

"That sounds like the A and B," said #1. "A sophisticated old gentleman, but at times a testy one.

"A gentleman, you say? Could the A and B be human?"

"No, of course he's not," said #2. "We told you. He's a robot. You must know of robots. There is one who is a member of your party."

"Now, wait a minute," said Cushing. "There was something standing at the table's head. It looked like a man and yet not like a man. It could have been a robot. It could have been the A and B."

"Did you speak to it?"

"No, I did not speak to it. There were too many other things.

"You should have spoken to it."

"Dammit, I know I should have spoken to it, but I didn't. Now it is too late. The A and B is inside the City and we can't get to him."

"It's not only the A and B," said #1. "There is something else shut up behind those walls. We know not directly of it. We but suspicion it. We have only recepted it."

"You mean that you have sensed it."

"That is right," said #1. "Our feeling of it is most unreliable, but it is all that we can tell you."

Cushing and Meg went back at the end of the day to the deserted camp. A little later, Andy came ambling in to greet them. There was no sign of the other three. Ezra and Elayne had gone down the butte to talk with the Trees, and Rollo had simply wandered off.

"We know now, laddie buck," said Meg. "The A and B meant exactly what he said. The City's closed to us.

"It was that damn Elayne," said Cushing. "She was Cushing this eternity stuff that she has a hang-up on.

"You're too harsh with her," said Meg. "Her brain may be a little addled, but she has a certain power. I am sure she has. She lives in another world, on another level. She sees and hears things we do not see and hear. And anyhow, it does no good to talk about it now. What are we going to do if we can't get off this butte?"

"I'm not ready to give up yet," said Cushing. "If we want to get out of here, we'll find a way.

"Whatever happened to the Place of Stars," she asked, "that we started out to find? How did we go wrong?"

"We went wrong," said Cushing, "because we were going blind. We grabbed at every rumor that we heard, at all the campfire stories that Rollo had picked up. It wasn't Rollo's fault. It was mine. I was too anxious. I was too ready to accept anything I heard."

Rollo came in shortly after dark. He squatted down beside the other two and sat staring at the fire.

"I didn't find much," he said. "I found a quarry over to the west, where the rock was quarried for the City. I found an old road that led off to the southwest, built and used before the Trees were planted. Now the Trees close off the road. I tried to get through them and there was no getting through. I tried in several places. They simply build a wall against you. Maybe a hundred men with axes could get through, but we haven't got a hundred men with axes."

"Even with axes," said Meg, "I doubt we would get through."

"The tribes are gathering," said Rollo. "The plains off to the east and south are simply black with them, and more coming all the time. The word must have traveled fast."

"What I can't understand," said Cushing, "is why they should be gathering. There were the wardens, of course, but I thought they were just a few small bands of deluded fanatics."

"Perhaps not so deluded," said Meg. "You don't keep a watch for centuries out of pure delusion."

"You think this place is important? That important?"

"It has to be," said Meg. "It is so big. It took so much work and time to build it. And it's so well protected. Men, even men in the old machine days, would not have spent so much time and effort

"Yes, I know," said Cushing. "I wonder what it is. Why it's here. If there were only some way for us to dig out the meaning of it."

"The gathering of the tribes," said Rollo, "argues that it may be more important than we know. It was not just the wardens alone. They were backed by the tribes. Maybe sent here and kept here by the tribes. There may be a legend

"If so," said Meg, "a well-guarded legend. I have never heard of it. The city tribes back home, I'm sure, never heard of

it.

"The best legends," said Cushing, "might be the best guarded. So sacred, perhaps, that no one ever spoke aloud of them."

The next day, Rollo went with them for another tour of the City. They found nothing new. The wails stood up straight and inscrutable. There was no indication of any life.

Late in the afternoon, Ezra and Elayne returned to camp. They came in footsore and limping, clearly worn out.

"Here, sit down," said Meg, "and rest yourselves. Lie down if you want to. We have water and I'll cook some meat. If you want to sleep a while before you eat.

Ezra croaked at them, "The Trees would not let us through. No argument can budge them. They will not tell us why. But they would talk of other things. They talked of ancestral memories, their ancestral memories. On another planet, in some other solar system, very far from here. They had a name for it, but it was a complicated name with many syllables, and I failed to catch it and did not want to ask again, for it seemed of no importance. Even if we knew the name, it would be of no use to us. They either had forgotten how they got here or did not want to tell us, although I think they may not know. I'm not sure they ever saw the planet that they talked of. They were talking, I think, of ancestral memories, facial memories, carried forward from one generation to the next."

"You are certain of this?" asked Cushing. "Their saying they came from another planet?"

"I am very certain," Ezra said. "There is no question of it. They talked to me of the planet, as a man marooned in some strange place would talk about the country of his boyhood. They showed the planet to me-admittedly, a very fuzzy picture, but one could recognize certain features of it. An idealized picture, I am certain. I think of it as a pink world-you know, the delicate pink of apple blossoms in the early spring, blowing on a hill against a deep-blue sky. Not only was the color of the world pink, but the feel of it. I know I'm not telling this too well, but that's how it seemed to me. A glad world—not a happy world, but a glad world."

"Gould it be?" asked Cushing. "Could it be that men did go to the stars, to this pink world, bringing back with them the seeds of the Trees?"

"And," said Meg, "the Followers and the Shivering Snakes? The living stones as well? For these things cannot be of this world of ours. There is no way they could be natives of this world."

"And if all of this is true," said Rollo, "then this, after all, may be the Place of Going to the Stars."

Cushing shook his head. "There are no launching pads. We would have found them if there had been any. And so remote, so far from all the sources of supply. The economics of such a place as this would be illogical."

"Perhaps," said Rollo, "a certain amount of illogic could make a certain sense.

"Not in a technological world," said Cushing. "Not in the kind of world that sent men to the stars."

That night, after Ezra and Elayne were sound asleep, Rollo disappeared on another walkabout, and with Andy off to gambol with the Followers, Cushing said to Meg, "One thing keeps bothering me. Something that the Team told us. There is something else here, they said. Something other than the A and B. Something hidden, something we should find."

Meg nodded. "Perhaps, laddie boy," she said. "Perhaps there's a deal to find. But how do we go about it? Has that driving, adventurous brain of yours come up with a fresh idea?

"You sensed the living rock," said Cushing, "that night long ago. You sensed the Followers. They were a crowd, you said. A conglomerate of many different people, all the people they had ever met. You sensed that the robotic brain still lived. Without half trying, you sensed all these things. You knew I was sleeping in the lilac thicket."

"I've told you and told you, time and time again," she said, "that I'm a piss-poor witch. I'm nothing but an old bag who used her feeble talents to keep life within her body and ill-wishers off her back. A dowdy old bitch, vicious and without ethics, who owes you, laddie buck, more than I ever can repay you for taking me on this great adventure."

"Without half trying," said Cushing, "just as a flippant, everyday exercise of your talents

"There's Elayne. She's the one you should be—"

"Not Elayne. Her talents are of a different kind. She gets the big picture, the overview. You get down to basics; you can handle detail. You see the nuts and bolts, sense what is taking place."

"Mad you are," she said. "Madder than a hare."

"Will you do it, Meg?"

"It would be a waste of time."

"We've got to crack this puzzle. We have to know what's going on. If we don't want to stay here forever, penned upon this butte."

"Okay. Tomorrow, then. Just to show you are wrong. If you have the time to waste."

"I have time to waste, said Cushing. "I have nothing more to do with it."

She didn't want to do it, but, she told herself, she had to try, if for no other reason than to get it over with. As well, she was afraid to try it, because then she might learn the true smallness of her powers. If she had any powers at all. Although, she told herself, with slim comfort, she had done certain things.

"I hope," she said to Cushing, "that you are satisfied."

The early morning sun lit the great metal doors, embossed with symbolic figures that meant nothing to her. The stone towers that rose on either side and above the doors were forbidding in their solidness. She gained the impression, as she and the others stood there, at the foot of the shallow stone steps that went up to the door, that the entire building was frowning down upon them.

The Team had said that there was something somewhere behind the doors, somewhere in the City, but they had not known what it was and now it was her job to find out. It was an impossible task, she knew, and she would not have even tried, but laddie boy had faith in her and she could not let him down. The others, she knew, had no faith in her, for she had given them no reason. She looked at Elayne and, for a moment, thought she could glimpse in the other woman's eyes a hint of quiet amusement, although, God knows, she told herself, there is none to know what might be in Elayne's vacant eyes.

She dropped to her knees and settled comfortably, her haunches resting on her heels. She tried to make her mind reach out, easily at first, not pushing too hard, driving out, gently, the tendrils of her mind, seeking, probing, as the tendrils of a climbing vine might seek out crevices in the wall on which it climbed. She sensed the hardness of the stone, the polished toughness of the metal, and then was through them, into the emptiness beyond. And there was something there.

The tendrils pulled back as they touched the strangeness of it—a sort of thing (or things) she had never known before, that no one had ever known before. Not a thing, she told herself, but many slippery different things that had no definition. That would not define themselves, she realized, as her mind veered away from them, because they were not alive, or at least seemed to have no life, although there was no doubt that they were entities of some sort. A tingling fear went through her—a shuddering, a loathing—as if there were spiders there, a billion scurrying spiders with swollen, distended bodies, and legs covered with quivering black hairs. A scream welled in her throat, but she choked it back. They can't hurt me, she told herself; they can't reach me; they're in there and I'm out here.

She thrust her mind at them and was in the midst of them, and now that she was there, she knew they weren't spiders, that there was no harm in them, for they were not alive. But despite the fact of their being lifeless, they somehow held a meaning. That was senseless, she knew. How could something lifeless hold a meaning, or many tiny lifeless things hold many, many meanings? For she was surrounded and engulfed by the meanings of them, little lifeless meanings that whispered vaguely at her, thrusting themselves forward, pressing themselves against her, seeking her attention. She sensed the countless buzzings of many tiny energies, and within her mind, fleeting images built up momentarily, then faded, fading almost as soon as they had formed—not one of them, but hordes of them, like a swarm of gnats flying in a shaft of sunlight, not really seeing them, but knowing they were there by the glint of light off the vibrations of their wings.

She tried to concentrate, to bring her mental tendrils down to sharper focuses that could spear and hold at least one of the little dancing images, to seize upon and hold it long enough to make out what it was. She felt, as if from far away, as if it were happening to someone other than herself, the sweat upon her forehead and running down her face. She bent even farther forward, squeezing her upper torso down against her thighs, concentrating her body into a smaller space, as if by this concentration she could concentrate her powers. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, trying to block out all light, to form within her mind a black mental screen upon which she could bring into focus one of the shimmering gnats that danced within her head.

The images did seem to sharpen, but they still danced and flitted, the glitter still came off the whirring wings, masking the half forms that she forced them to take, dim and shadowy, with no real definition. It was no use, she thought; she had driven herself as far as she could go and then had failed. There was something there, some subtle strangeness, but she could not grasp it.

She collapsed, pitching forward, rolling over on her side, still compressed into a fetal position. She let her eyes come open and dimly saw Cushing bending over her.

She whispered at him. "I'm all right, laddie boy. There is something there, but I could not catch it. I could not sharpen it, bring it into focus."

He knelt beside her and half lifted her, holding her in his arms. "It's all right, Meg," he said. "You did what you could."

"If I'd had my crystal ball," she whispered.

"Your crystal ball?"

"Yes. I had one. I left it back at home. I never did place much faith in it. It was just window dressing."

"You think it would have helped you?"

"Maybe. It would help me concentrate. I had trouble concentrating."

The others stood around, watching the two of them. Andy shuffled in closer, stretching out his long neck to snuffle at Meg. She patted his nose. "He always worries about me," she said. "He thinks it's his job to take care of me.

She pulled herself away from Cushing and sat up.

"Give me a little time," she said. "Then I'll try again."

"You don't have to," Cushing said.

"I have to. The Team was right. There is something there." The great stone walls rose up against the cloudless sky— stolid, mocking, hostile. High in the blueness a great bird, reduced by distance to a fly-sized speck, appeared to hang motionless.

"Bugs," she said. "A million little bugs. Scurrying. Buzzing. Like ants, like spiders, like gnats. All the time moving. Confused. And so was I. Never so confused."

Elayne spoke in her hard, cold voice. "I could help," she said.

"Deane, you stay out of this," said Meg. "I have trouble enough without you butting in."

She got to her knees again, settled back so her haunches rested on her heels.

"This is the last go I have at it," she said. "Absolutely the last. If it doesn't work this time, that's the end of it."

It was easier this time. There was no need of breaking through the stone and metal. Immediately, once again, she was with the spiders and the gnats. And, this time, the gnats flew in patterns, forming symbols that she could glimpse, but never clearly and never with an understanding, although it seemed to her that the understanding was just a hairsbreadth beyond perception. If she could only drive in a little closer, if somehow she could slow the dancing of the gnats or retard the scurry of the spiders, then it seemed to her that she might catch and hold some small bit of understanding. For there must be purpose in them; there must be a reason they flew or scurried as they did. It could not all be random; there must be reason somewhere in the tapestry they wove. She tried to drive in, and for an instant the mad dance of the gnats slowed its tempo, and in that instant she felt the happiness, the sudden rose-glow of happiness so deep and pure that it was a psychic shock, rocking her back on her mental heels, engulfing her in the abandoned sweetness of

it. But even as she knew it, she knew as well that it was somehow wrong—that it was immoral, if not illegal, to know so deep a happiness. And in the instant that she thought that, there came to her the knowing of what was wrong with it. It was, she knew instinctively, a manufactured happiness, a synthetic happiness; and her groping, confused mind caught a fleeting image of a complicated set of symbols that might explain the happiness, that might even cause the happiness. All this within so short a span of time that it was scarcely measurable; then the happiness was gone, and despite the synthetic nature of it, the place seemed bleak and cold and hard without it, an emptiness despite the fact that it was still inhabited by a billion billion insects that she knew weren't really insects but only something that her human mind translated into insects. Moaning, she sought for the happiness again; phoney as it might be, it was a thing she needed, with an hysterical desperation, to touch again, to hold it only for a moment, to know the rose-glow of it. She could not continue in the drabness that was the world without it. Moaning piteously, she reached out for it and had it once again, but even as her mind's fingers touched it, the rose-glow slipped away and was gone again.

From far away, from another world, someone spoke to her, a voice that she once had known but could not identify. "Here, Meg," it said, "here is your crystal ball."

She felt the hardness and the roundness of the ball placed between her palms, and, opening her eyes a slit, saw the polished brightness of it, shining in the rays of the morning sun.

Another mind exploded and impacted in her mind—a cold, sharp, dark mind that screamed in triumph and relief, as if the thing that it had awaited had finally happened, while at the same time shrinking back in fear against the gross reality of a condition it had not known for centuries piled on centuries, that it had forgotten, that it had lost all hope of regaining and that now it found thrust so forcefully upon it.

The unsuspected mind clung to her mind, fastening upon it as the one security it knew, clinging desperately, afraid of being alone again, of being thrust back into the darkness and the cold. It clung to her mind in frantic desperation. It ran along the projections of her mind into that place where spiders and gnats cavorted. It recoiled for a fraction of a second, then drove in, taking her mind with it, deep into the swarm of glittering wings and frantic hairy legs, and as it did, the wings and legs were gone, the spiders and the gnats were gone, and out of the whirlpool of uncertainty and confusion came an orderliness that was as confusing as the spiders and gnats. An orderliness that was confusing because it was, in most parts, incomprehensible, a marshaling and a sorting of configurations that even in their neatness seemed to have no meaning.

Then the meanings came—half meanings, guessed meanings, shadowy and fragmented, but solid and real in the shadow and the fragments. They piled into her mind, overwhelming it, clogging it, so that she only caught a part of them, as a person listening to a conversation delivered in so rapid-fire a manner that only one word in twenty could be heard. But beyond all this she grasped for a moment the larger context of it, of all of it—a seething mass of knowledge that seemed to fill and overflow the universe, all the questions answered that ever had been asked.

Her mind snapped back, retracting from the overpowering mass of answers, and her eyes came open. The crystal ball fell from her hands and rolled off her lap, to bounce upon the stony pavement. She saw that it was no crystal ball, but the robotic brain case that Rollo had carried in his sack. She reached out and stroked it with her fingers, murmuring at it, soothing it, aghast at what she'd done. To awaken it, to let it know it was not alone, to raise a hope that could not be carried out—that, she told herself, was a cruelty that could never be erased, for which there could be no recompense. To wake it for a moment, then plunge it back again into the loneliness and the dark, to touch it for a moment and then to let it go. She picked it up and cuddled it against her breasts, as a mother might a child.

"You are not alone," she told it. "I'll stay with you." Not knowing, as she spoke the words, if she could or not. In that time of doubt she felt its mind again—no longer cold, no longer alone or dark, a warmth of sudden comradeship, an overflowing of abject gratitude.

Above her the great metal doors were opening. In them stood a robot, a larger and more massive machine than folio, but very much akin to him.

"I'm called the Ancient and Revered," the robot told them. "Won't you please come in? I should like to talk with you."

They sat at the table in the room where Cushing and Elayne had first met the A and B, but this time there was light from a candle that stood at one end of the table. There were Shivering Snakes as well, but not as many as there had been that first time, and those that were there stayed close against the ceiling, looping and spinning and making damn fools of themselves.

The A and R sat down ponderously in the chair at the table's head and the others of them took chairs and ranged themselves on either side. Meg laid the robot's brain case on the table in front of her and kept both hands upon it, not really holding it but just letting it know that she was there. Every now and then she felt the presence probing gently at her mind, perhaps simply to assure itself that she had not deserted it. Andy stood in the doorway, half in the room, half out, his head drooping but watching everything. Behind him in the corridor fluttered the gray shapes of his pals the Followers.

The A and B settled himself comfortably in the chair and

looked at them for a long time before he spoke, as if he might be evaluating them, perhaps debating with himself the question of whether he might have made a mistake in inviting them to this conference.

Finally, he spoke. "I am pleased," he said, "to welcome you to the Place of Going to the Stars."

Cushing hit the table with his open hand. "Cut out the fairy tales," he yelled. "This can't be the Place of Going to the Stars. There are no launching pads. In a place like this the logistics would be impossible."

"Mr. Cushing," the A and R said gently, "if you'll allow me to explain. No launching pads, you say. Of course there are no launching pads. Have you ever tried to calculate the problems of going to the stars? How far they are, the time that it would take to reach them, the shortness of a human life?"

"I've read the literature," said Cushing. "The library at the university—"

"You read the speculations," said the A and B. "You read what was written about going to the stars centuries before there was any possibility of going to the stars. Written when men had reached no farther into space than the moon and Mars."

"That is right, but—"

"You read about cryogenics: freezing the passengers and then reviving them. You read the controversies about faster-than-light. You read the hopefulness of human colonies planted on the earthlike planets of other solar systems."

"Some of it might have worked," said Cushing stubbornly. "Men, in time, would have found better ways to do it."

"They did," said the A and R. "Some men did go to some of the nearby stars. They found many things that were interesting. They brought back the seeds from which sprouted the belt of Trees that rings in this butte. They brought back the living rocks, the Shivering Snakes and the Followers, all of which you've seen. But it was impractical. It was too costly and the time factor was too great. You speak of logistics, and the logistics of sending human beings to the stars were wrong. Once you get into a technological system, once it's actually in operation, you find what's wrong with it. Your perspectives change and your goals tend to shift about. You ask yourself what you really want, what you're trying to accomplish, what values can be found in the effort you are making. We asked this of ourselves once we started going to the stars and the conclusion was that the actual landing on another planet of another solar system was, in itself, of not too great a value. There was glory, of course, and satisfaction, and we learned some things of value, but the process was too slow; it took too long. If we could have sent out a thousand ships, each pointed toward a different point in space, the returns would have been speeded up. It would have taken as long, but with that many ships there would have been a steady feedback of results, after a wait of a few hundred years, as the ships began coming back, one by one. But we could not send out a thousand ships. The economy would not withstand that sort of strain. And once you had sent out a thousand ships, you'd have to keep on building them and sending them out to keep the pipeline full. We knew we did not have the resources to do anything like that and we knew we didn't have the time, for some of our social scientists were warning us of the Collapse that finally overtook us. So we asked ourselves—we were forced to ask ourselves—what we were really looking for. And the answer seemed to be that we were seeking information.

"Without having lived through the era of which I talk, it is difficult to comprehend the pressures under which we found ourselves. It became, in time, not a simple matter of going to the stars; it was a matter of pulling together a body of knowledge that might give us a clue to actions that might head off the Collapse foreseen by our social scientists. The common populace was not fully aware of the dangers seen by the scientists and they were generally not aware at all of what we were doing. For years they had been bombarded by warnings from all sorts of experts, most of whom were wrong, and they were so fed up with informed opinions that they paid no attention to anything that was being said. For they had no way of knowing which of them were sound.

"But there was this small group of scientists and engineers— and by a small group I mean some thousands of them—who saw the danger clearly. There might have been a number of ways in which the Collapse could have been averted, but the one that seemed to have the best chance was to gamble that from the knowledge that might be collected from those other civilizations among the stars, an answer might be found. It might, we told ourselves, be a basic answer we simply had not thought of, an answer entirely human in its concept, or it might be a completely alien answer which we could adapt."

He stopped and looked around the table. "Do you follow me?" he asked.

"I think we do," said Ezra. "You speak of ancient times that are unknown to us."

"But not to Mr. Cushing," said the A and B. "Mr. Cushing has read about those days."

"I cannot read," said Ezra. "There are very few who can. In all my tribe there is not a one who can.

"Which leads me to wonder," said the A and B, "how it comes about that Mr. Cushing can. You spoke of a university. Are there still universities?"

"Only one I know of," said Cushing. "There may be others, but I do not know. At our university a man named Wilson, centuries ago, wrote a history of the Collapse. It is not a good history; it is largely based on legend."

"So you have some idea of what the Collapse was all about?"

"Only in a general way," said Cushing.

"But you knew about the Place of Going to the Stars?"

"Not from the history. Wilson knew of it, but he did not put it in his history. He dismissed it, I suppose, because it seemed too wild a tale. I found some of his notes, and he made mention of it in them."

"And you came hunting for it. But when you found it, you did not believe it could the place you were looking for. No launching pads, you said. At one time there were launching pads, quite some distance from this place. Then, after a time, after we saw that it wouldn't work, we asked ourselves if robotic probes would not work as well as men.

"The gossipers," said Cushing. "That is what they are— robotic interstellar probes. The Team looks on them as story tellers."

"The Team," said the A and B, "are a pair of busybodies from some very distant planet who intend some day to write what might be called ‘The Decline and Fall of Technological Civilizations. They have been vastly puzzled here, and I've made no attempt to set them straight. As a matter of fact, I've made it my business to further puzzle them. If I gave them any help, they would hang around for another hundred years, and I don't want that. I've had enough of them.

"The travelers—those probes you call the gossipers—could be made far more cheaply than starships. The research and development was costly, but once the design was perfected, with the various sensors all worked out, the information processing design—so that the probes could use their own data to work out information instead of just bringing back to us masses

of raw data—once all this was done, they could be made much more cheaply than the ships. We built and programmed them by the hundreds and sent them out. In a century or so, they began coming back, each of them crammed with the information he'd collected and stored as code in his memory storage. There have been a few of them who have not come back. I suppose that accidents of various kinds might have happened to them. By the time the first of them started coming back, however, the Collapse had come about, and there were no humans left at this station. Myself and a few other robots, that was all. Now even the few other robots are gone. Through the years, there has been attrition: one of them killed in a rockfall; another falling victim to a strange disease—which puzzles me exceedingly, since such as we should be disease-immune. Another electrocuted in a moment of great carelessness, for despite the candle, we do have electricity. It is supplied by the solar panels that top this building. The candle is because we have run out of bulbs and there is no way to replace them. But, however that may be, in one way or another all the robots but myself became dysfunctional until only I was left.

"When the travelers came back, we transferred their coded data to the central storage facility in this place, reprogrammed them and sent them out again. In the course of the last few centuries I have not sent them out again as they came back. There has seemed little sense in doing so. Our storage banks are already crowded almost to capacity. As I transferred the data, I should, I suppose, have deactivated the travelers and stored them away, but it seemed a shame to do so. They do enjoy life so much. While the transfer to the central banks removes all the actual data, there is a residue of impressions remaining in the probes, only a shadow of the information that they carried, so that they retain a pseudomemory of what they have experienced and they spend their time telling one another of their great adventures. Some of them got away that first night you arrived, and before I called them hack, they had given you a sample of their chatter. They do the same with the Team and I have made no attempt to stop them, for it gives the Team something to do and keeps those two roly-poly worthies off my back."

"So, laddie boy," said Meg to Cushing, you have found your Place of Stars. Not the kind of place you looked for, but an even greater place."

"What I don't understand," said Cushing to the A and B, "is why you're talking to us. You sent us word—remember? — that the place was banned to us. What made you change your mind?"

"You must realize," said the A and R, "the need for security in a place as sensitive as this. When we began developing the facility, we looked for an insolated location. We planted the belt of Trees, which were genetically programmed to keep all intruders out, and planted around and outside the belt a ring of living rocks. The Trees were a passive defense; the rocks, if need be, active. Over the years, the rocks have been largely dispersed. Many of them have wandered off. The Trees were supposed to keep them in control, but in many cases this has not worked out. At the time this station was established, it seemed to be apparent that civilization was moving toward collapse, which meant not only that the station should be kept as secret as possible but that defenses be set up. Our hope was, of course, that collapse could be staved off for another few hundred years. If that had been possible, we might have been able to offer some assurance that we were working toward solutions. But we were given somewhat less than a hundred years. For a long time after the Collapse came about, we held our breath. By that time the Trees were well grown, but they

probably would not have held against a determined attack made with flamethrowers or artillery. But our remote situation, plus the secrecy which had surrounded the project, saved us. The mobs that finally erupted to bring about the Collapse probably were too busy, even had they known of us, to take any notice of us. There were richer pickings elsewhere."

"But this doesn't explain what happened with our party, said Cushing. "Why did you change your mind?"

"I must explain to you a little further what has happened here," said the A and R. "After the human population finally died off, there were only robots left and, as I've told you, as the years went on, fewer and fewer of them. There was not much maintenance required, and so long as there were several of us left, we had no problem with it. You must realize that the data-storage system has been simplified as much as possible, so that there are no great intricacies that could get out of whack. But one system has got out of whack and presents some difficulties. For some reason that I am unable to discover, the retrieval system—"

"The retrieval system?"

"That part of the installation that enables the retrieval of data. There are mountains of data in there, hut there is no way to get it out. In my humble and fumbling way I have tried to make some head or tail of it in hopes I could repair whatever might be wrong, hut you must understand, lam no technician. My training is in administrative work. So we have the situation of having all that data and not being able to get at any of it. When you came along, I felt the faint flutter of some hope when the Trees reported to me that there were sensitives among you. I told the Trees to let you through. I had hopes that a sensitive might get at the data, might be able to retrieve it. And was shocked to find that your one outstanding sensitive was not looking at our data at all, but at something beyond our data, overlooking it as a thing of small consequence.

"But you said the Trees told you," protested Cushing. "It must be that you're a sensitive, yourself."

"A technological sensitivity," said the A and B. "I am so designed as to be keyed in to the Trees, but to nothing else. A sensitivity, of course, but a contrived and most selective one.

"So you thought that a human sensitive might get at the data. But when Elayne didn't do it—"

"I thought it was all a failure at the time," said the A and B, "but I've thought it over since, and now I know the answer. She is in no way a failure, but a sensitive that is too far reaching, too keyed in to universal factors, to be of any use to us. When she inadvertently caught a glimpse of what we have in the data storage, she was shocked at it, shocked at the chaos of it; for I must admit that it is chaos—billions of pieces of data all clumped into a pile. But then there came this morning another one of you. The one that you call Meg. She reached into the data; she touched it. She got nothing from it, but she was aware of it.

"Not until I had the brain case," said Meg. "It was the brain case that made it possible."

"I gave you the brain ease as a crystal ball," said Rollo. "That was all it was. Just a shiny thing to help you concentrate.

"Rollo," said Meg. "Please forgive me, Rollo. It is more than that. I had hoped you would never have to know. Laddie boy and I knew, but we never told you.

"You're trying to tell us," said the A and R, "that the brain still lives within its ease; that when a robotic body is inactivated or destroyed, the brain is unaffected, that it still lives

on.

"But that can't be right," cried Rollo in a strangled voice. "It could not see or hear. It would be shut up inside itself

"That is right," said Meg.

"For a thousand years," said Rollo. "For more than a thousand years."

Cushing said, "Rollo, we are sorry. That night long ago when you showed Meg the brain case—you remember, don't you? — she sensed then that the brain was still alive. She told me and we agreed that you should never know, that no one should ever know. You see, there was nothing anyone could do."

"There are millions of them," said Rollo. "Hidden away in places where they fell and will never be found. Others collected by the tribes and stacked in pyramids. Others used as childish playthings to roll along the ground

"Being a robot, I mourn with you," said the A and B. "I am as shocked as you are. But I agree with the gentleman that there is nothing one can do."

"We could build new bodies," said Rollo. "At the least we could do something to give them back their sight and hearing. And their voices."

"Who would do all this?" asked Cushing bitterly. "A blacksmith at the forge of a farm commune? An ironworker who beats out arrowheads and spearpoints for a tribe of nomads?"

"And yet," said the A and B, "this present brain, isolated for all these years, was able to respond when it was touched by the probing of a human brain. Responded and was of help, I believe you said."

"I could see the spiders and the gnats," said Meg, "but they meant nothing to me. With the robot's brain, they became something else-a pattern, perhaps, a pattern in which there must have been a meaning, although I did not know the meaning."

"I think, however," said the A and B, "that herein lies some hope. You reached the data bank; you sensed the data; you were able to put them into visual form."

"I don't see how that helps too much," said Cushing. "Visual form is meaningless unless it can be interpreted."

"This was a beginning only," said the A and B. "A second time, a third time, a hundredth time, the meaning may become apparent. And this is even more likely if we should be able to muster, say, a hundred sensitives, each tied in with a robotic brain that might be able to reinforce the sensitive, as this robotic brain was able to make Meg see more clearly."

"This is all fine," said Cushing, "but we can't be sure that it will work. If we could repair the retrieval system.

"I'll use your words," said the A and B. "Who'd do it? Blacksmiths and metalworkers? And even if we could repair it, how could we be sure that we could read the data and interpret it. It seems to me a sensitive would have a better chance of understanding what's packed away in there…

"Given time," said Cushing, "we might find men who could figure out a way to repair the retrieval. If they had diagrams and specs.

"In this place," said the A and B, "we have the diagrams and specs. I have pored over them, but to me they have no significance. lean make nothing of them. You say that you can read?"

Cushing nodded. "There's a library back at the university. But that would be of little help. It underwent an editing process, purged of everything that had been written some centuries before the Time of Trouble."

"We have a library here," said the A and B, "that escaped the editing. Here there'd be materials which might help to train the men you say might repair the system."

Ezra spoke up. "I've been trying to follow this discussion and am having trouble with it. But it appears there are two ways to go about it: either repair the retrieval system, or use sensitives. I'm a sensitive and so is my granddaughter, but I fear neither one of us could be of any help. Our sensitivities, it appears, are

A Heritage of Stars

specialized. She is attuned to universalities, whereas I am attuned to plants. I fear this would be the case if we sought out sensitives. There are, I would suspect, very many different kinds of them."

"That is true," said Cushing. "Wilson had a chapter in his history that dealt with the rise of sensitives after the Collapse. He felt that technology had served as a repressive factor against the development of sensitives and that once the pressure of technology was removed, there were many more of them."

"This may be true," said Ezra, "but out of all of them, I would guess you could find very few who could do what Meg has done."

"We are forgetting one thing," said Meg, "and that is the robotic brain. I'm not so sure that my powers were so much reinforced by the brain. I would suspect I did no more than direct the brain into the data banks, making it aware of them, giving it a chance to see what was there and then tell me what was there."

"Sorrowful as the subject is to me," said Rollo, "I think that Meg is right. It's not the human sensitives but the brains that will give us answers. They have been shut up within themselves for all these centuries. In the loneliness of their situations, they would have kept on functioning. Given no external stimuli, they were forced back upon themselves. Since they had been manufactured to think, they would have thought. They would have performed the function for which they were created. They would have posed problems for themselves and tried to work through the problems. All these years they have been developing certain lines of logic, each one of them peculiar to himself. Here we have sharpened intellects, eager intellects…

"I subscribe to that," said Ezra. "This makes sense to me. All we need are sensitives who can work with the brains, serve as interpreters for the brains."

"Okay, then," said Cushing. "We need brains and sensitives. But I think, as well, we should seek people who might train themselves to repair the retrieval system. There is a library here, you say?"

"A rather comprehensive scientific and technological library," said the A and B. "But to use it, we need people who can read."

"Back at the university," said Cushing, "there are hundreds who can read."

"You think," said the A and B, "that we should attack our problem on two levels?"

"Yes, I do," said Cushing.

"And so do I," said Ezra.

"If we should succeed," said Cushing, "what would you guess we'd get? A new basis for a new human civilization? Something that would lift us out of the barbarism and still not set us once again on the old track of technology? I do not like the fact that we may be forced, through the necessity of repairing the retrieval system if the sensitive plan should fail, to go back to technology again to accomplish what we need."

"No one can be certain what we'll find," said the A and B. "But we would be trying. We'd not just be standing here."

"You must have some idea," Cushing insisted. "You must have talked to at least some of the returning probes, perhaps all of them, before transferring the data that they carried into the storage banks."

"Most of them," said the A and B, "but my knowledge is only superficial. Only the barest indication of what might be in the storage. Some of it, of course, is of but small significance. The probes, you must understand, were programmed only to visit those planets where there was a possibility life might have

risen. If their sensors did not show indication of life, they wasted no time on a planet. But even so, on many of the planets where life had risen, there was not always intelligence or an analogue of intelligence. Which is not to say that even from such planets we would not discover things of worth."

"But on certain planets there was intelligence?"

"That is so," said the A and B. "On more planets than we had any reason to suspect. In many instances it was a bizarre intelligence. In some cases, a frightening intelligence. Some five hundred light years from us, for instance, we know of something that you might describe as a galactic headquarters, although that is a human and therefore an imprecise interpretation of what it really is. And even more frightening, a planet, perhaps a little shorter distance out in space, where dwells a race advanced so far beyond the human race in its culture that we would view its representatives as gods. In that race, it seems to me, is a real danger to the human race, for you always have been susceptible to gods."

"But you think there are some factors, perhaps many factors, from which we could choose, that would help to put we humans back on track again?"

"I'm positive," said the A and B, "that we'll find something if we have the sense to use it. As I tell you, I got just a faint impression of what the travelers carried. Just a glimpse of it, and perhaps not a glimpse of the important part of it. Let me tell you some of the things I glimpsed: a good-luck mechanism, a method whereby good luck could be induced or engineered; a dying place of a great confederation of aliens, who went there to end their days and, before they died, checked all their mental and emotional baggage in a place where it could be retrieved if there were ever need of it; an equation that made no sense to me, but that I am convinced is the key to faster than-light travel; an intelligence that had learned to live parasitically elsewhere than in brain tissue; a mathematics that had much in common with mysticism and which, in fact, makes use of mysticism; a race that had soul perception rather than mere intellectual perception. Perhaps we could find use for none of these, but perhaps we could. It is a sample only. There is much more, and though much would be useless, I can't help but believe we'd find many principles or notions that we could adapt and usefully employ."

Elayne spoke for the first time. "We pluck only at the edge of it," she said. "We see all imperfectly. We clutch at small particulars and fail to comprehend the whole. There are greater things than we can ever dream. We see only those small segments that we can understand, ignoring and glossing over what we are not equipped to understand."

She was not talking to them but to herself. Her hands were folded on the tabletop in front of her and she was staring out beyond the walls that hemmed them in, staring out into that other world which only she could see.

She was looking at the universe.

"You're mad," Meg told Cushing. "If you go out to face them, they will gobble you. They're sore about our being here. Angry about our being here

"They are men," said Cushing. "Barbarians. Nomads. But still they are men. I can talk with them. They are basically reasonable. We need brain cases; we need sensitives; we need men who have a technological sense. A native technologic sense. In the old days there were people who could look at something and know how it worked, instinctively know how it worked—able, almost at a glance, to trace out the relationship of its working parts."

"People in the old days," said Rollo, "but not now. Those people you talk about lived at a time when machines were commonplace. They lived with machines and by machines and they thought machines. And another thing: what we are talking about here is not crude machines, with interlocking gears and sprockets. The retrieval system is electronic and the electronic art was lost long ago. A special knowledge, years of training were required

"Perhaps so," Cushing agreed, "but here the A and R has a tech library; at the university we have men and women who can read and write and who have not lost entirely the capacity and discipline for study. It might take a longtime. It might take several lifetimes. But since the Collapse we have wasted a number of lifetimes. We can afford to spend a few more of them. What we must do is establish an elite corps of sensitives, of brain cases, of potential technologists, of academics

"The brain cases are the key," said Meg. "They are our only hope. If there are any who have kept alive the old tradition of logic, they are the ones. With the help and direction of sensitives, they can reach the data and probably are the only ones who can interpret it and understand it once it's interpreted."

"Once they reach and explain it," said Cushing, "there must be those who can write it down. We must collect and record a body of data. Without that, without the meticulous recording of it, nothing can be done."

"I agree," said Rollo, "that the robotic brains are our only hope. Since the Collapse there has not been one iota of technological development from the human race. With all the fighting and raiding and general hell-raising that is going on, you would think that someone would have reinvented gunpowder. Any petty chieftain would give a good right arm for it. But no one has reinvented it. So far as I know, no one has even thought to do so. You hear no talk of it. I tell you, technology is dead. Nothing can be done to revive it. Deep down in the fiber of the race, it has been rejected. It was tried once and failed, and that is the end of it. Sensitives and brain cases—those are what we need."

"The A and B indicated there are brain cases here," said Ezra. "The robots died, he's the only one that's left."

"A half dozen cases or so," said Meg. "We may need hundreds. Brain cases would not be the same. They'd be, I would guess, highly individualistic. Out of a hundred, you might find only one or two who could untangle what is to be found in the data banks."

"All right, then," said Cushing. "Agreed. We need a corps of sensitives; we need brain cases by the bagful. To get them, we have to go to the tribes. Each tribe may have some sensitives; many of them have a hoard of cases. Some of the tribes are out there on the plain, just beyond the Trees. We don't have to travel far to reach them. I'll go out in the morning."

"Not you," said Rollo. "We."

"You'll stay here," said Cushing. "Once they caught sight of you, they'd run you down like a rabbit and have your brain case out

"I can't let you go alone," protested Rollo. "We traveled all those miles together. You stood with me against the bear. We are friends, whether you know it or not. I can't let you go alone."

"Not just the one of you or the two of you," said Meg. "If one goes, so do all the rest of us. We're in this together."

"No, dammit!" yelled Cushing. "I'm the one to go. The rest of you stay here. I've told Rollo it's too dangerous for him. There is some danger for me, as well, I would imagine, but I think I can handle it. The rest of you we can't risk. You are sensitives and we need sensitives. They may be hard to find. We need all that we can find."

"You forget," said Ezra, "that neither Elayne nor I are the kind of sensitives you need. I can only talk with plants, and Elayne—"

"How do you know you can only talk with plants? You wanted it that way and that is all you've done. Even if it's all you can do, you can talk with the Trees and it maybe important that we have someone who can talk with them. As for Elayne, she has an overall—a universal—ability that may stand us in good stead when we begin digging out the data. She might be able to see relationships that we couldn't see."

"But our own tribe maybe out there," insisted Ezra. "If they

are, it would help to have us along."

"We can't take the chance," said Cushing. "You can talk with

your tribe for us later on.

"Laddie buck," said Meg, "mad I think you are."

"This is the kind of business," said Cushing, "that may call

for a little madness."

"How can you be sure the Trees will let you out?"

"I'll talk with the A and B. He can fix it up for me.

Seen from close range, more of the nomads were camped on the prairie than Cushing had thought. The tepees, conical tents adapted from those used by the aboriginal North American plains tribes, covered a large area, gleaming whitely in the morning sun. Here and there across the level land were grazing horse bands, each of them under the watchful eyes of half a dozen riders. Trickles of smoke rose from fires within the encampment. Other than the horse herders and their charges, there was little sign of life.

The sun, halfway up the eastern sky, beat down mercilessly

upon the prairie. The air was calm and muggy, bearing down so

heavily that it required an effort to breathe.

Cushing stood just outside the Trees, looking the situation over, trying to calm the flutter of apprehension that threatened to tie his stomach into knots. Now that he was actually here, ready to begin his trudge across the naked land to the camp, he realized for the first time that there could be danger. He had said so when he had talked about it the previous afternoon, but it was one thing to think about it intellectually and another to be brought face to face with its possibility.

But the men out there, he told himself, would be reasonable. Once he had explained the situation, they would listen to him. Savages they might be, having turned to barbarism after the Collapse, but they still had behind them centuries of civilized logic that even a long string of generations could not have completely extinguished.

He set out, hurrying at first, then settling down to a more reasonable and less exhausting pace. The camp was some distance off and it would take a while to get there. He did not look back, but kept tramping steadily forward. Halfway there, he paused to rest and then turned to look back at the butte. As he turned, he saw the flash of the sun off a glittering surface well clear of the Trees.

Rollo, the damned fool, tagging along behind him!

Cushing waved his arms and shouted. "Go back, you fool! Go back!"

Rollo hesitated, then began to come on again.

"Go back!" yelled Cushing. "Get out of here. Vamoose. I told you not to come."

Rollo came to a stop, half lifted an arm in greeting.

Cushing made shoving motions at him.

Slowly Rollo turned, heading back toward the Trees. After a few steps, he stopped and turned. Cushing was still standing there, waving at him to go back.

He turned again and went plodding back the way he'd come. He did not turn again.

Cushing stood and watched him go. The sun still burned down, and far in the west a blackness loomed above the horizon. A storm, he wondered? Could be, he told himself; the very air smelled of heavy weather.

Convinced that Rollo would not follow him, he proceeded toward the camp. Now there was evidence of life. Dogs were sallying out from the fringes of the tepees, barking. A small band of horsemen were moving toward him at a walk. A gang of boys came out to the edge of the camp and hooted at him, the hoots small and tinny in the distance.

He did not break his stride. The horsemen came on at their steady gait.

They came up and halted, facing him. He said, gravely, "Good morning, gentlemen."

They did not respond, regarding him with stony faces. The line parted in the middle to let him through and, when he resumed his march, fell back to flank him on either side.

It was not good, he knew, but he must act as if it were. There could be no sign of fright. Bather, he must pretend that this was a signal honor, the sending out of an escort to conduct him into camp.

He strode along, not hurrying, eyes straight ahead, paying no attention to those who paced on either side of him. He felt sweat popping out of his armpits and trickling down his ribs. He wanted to wipe his face, but with an iron will refrained from doing so.

The camp was directly ahead and he saw that it was laid out with wide spaces serving as streets between the lines of tepees. Women and children stood before many of the tepees, their faces as stony as those of the men who moved beside him. Bands of small boys went whooping up and down the street.

Most of the women were hags. They wore misshapen woolen dresses. Their hair hung raggedly and was matted and dirty, their faces seamed and leathered from the sun and wind. Most of them were barefoot and their hands were gnarled with work. Some of them opened toothless mouths to cackle at him. The others were stolid, but wore a sense of disapproval.

At the far end of the street stood a group of men, all facing in his direction. As he came up the street, one of them moved forward with a shuffle and a limp. He was old and stooped. He wore leather breeches and a cougar hide was tossed across one shoulder, fastened with thongs in front. His snow-white hair hung down to his shoulders. It looked as if it had been cut off square with a dull knife.

A few feet from him Cushing stopped. The old man looked at him out of ice-blue eyes.

"This way," he said. "Follow me."

He turned and shuffled up the street. Cushing slowed his pace to follow.

To him came the smell of cooking, laced by the stink of garbage that had been too long in the summer heat. At the doorways of some of the lodges stood picketed horses, perhaps the prize hunters or war horses of their owners. Dogs, slinking about, emitted yelps of terror when someone hurled a stick at them. The heat of the sun was oppressive, making warm the very dust that overlay the street. Over all of this rode the sense of approaching storm—the smell, the feel, the pressure, of brewing weather.

When the old man came up to the group of men, they parted to let him through, Cushing following. The mounted escort dropped away. Cushing did not look to either side to glimpse the faces of the men, but he knew that if he had looked, he would have seen the same hardness that had been on the faces of the horsemen.

They broke through the ranks of men and came into a circle, rimmed by the waiting men. Across the circle a man sat in a heavy chair over which a buffalo robe was thrown. The old man who had served as Cushing's guide moved off to one side and Cushing walked forward until he faced the man in the chair.

"I am Mad Wolf," said the man, and having said that, said no more. Apparently he felt that anyone should know who he was once he had said his name.

He was a huge man, but not a brute. There was in his face a disquieting intelligence. He wore a thick black beard and his head was shaven. A vest of wolf skin, decorated by the tails of wolves, was open at the front, displaying a bronzed and heavily muscled torso. Ham like hands grasped the chair arms on either side.

"My name is Thomas Cushing," Cushing told him.

With a shock, Cushing saw that the scarecrow man who had been spokesman for the wardens stood beside the chair.

"You came from Thunder Butte," rumbled Mad Wolf. "You are one of the party that used your magic tricks to get through the Trees. You have disturbed the Sleepers."

"There are no Sleepers to disturb," said Cushing. "Thunder Butte is the Place of Going to the Stars. There lies hope for the human race. I have come to ask for help."

"How for help?"

"We need your sensitives."

"Sensitives? Talk plainly, man. Tell me what you mean.

"Your witches and warlocks. Your medicine men, if you have such. People who can talk with trees, who bring the buffalo, who can divine the weather. Those who throw carven bones to see into the future."

Mad Wolf grunted. "And what would you do with those? We have very few of them. Why should we give the ones we have to you, who have disturbed the Sleepers?"

"I tell you there are no Sleepers. There were never any Sleepers."

The warden spoke. "There was one other among them who told us this same thing. A tall woman with emptiness in her eyes and a terrible face. ‘You are wrong, she told us, ‘there aren't any Sleepers. "

"Where is this woman now," Mad Wolf asked of Cushing, "with her empty eyes and her terrible face?"

"She stayed behind," said Cushing. "She is on the butte."

"Waking the Sleepers

"Goddammit, don't you understand? I've told you, there are no Sleepers."

"There was with you, as well, a man of metal, one once called a robot, a very ancient term that is seldom spoken now."

"It was the metal man," the warden said, "who killed the bear. This one who stands before us shot arrows, but it was the metal man who killed the bear, driving a lance into the chest."

"That is true," said Cushing. "My arrows did but little."

"So you admit," said Mad Wolf, "that there is a metal man."

"That is true. He may be the last one left and he is a friend of mine.

"A friend?"

Cushing nodded.

"Are you not aware," asked Mad Wolf, "that a robot, if such it be, is an evil thing—a survival from that day when the world was held in thrall by monstrous machines? That it's against the law to harbor such a machine, let alone be a friend of one?"

"It wasn't that way," said Cushing. "Back there, before the Collapse, I mean. The machines didn't use us; we used the machines. We tied our lives to them. The fault was ours, not theirs."

"You place yourself against the legends of the past?"

"I do," said Cushing, "because I have read the History."

Perhaps, he thought, it was not wise to argue so with this man sitting in the chair, to contradict so directly all that he had said. But it would be worse, he sensed, to buckle in to him. It would not do to show a weakness. There still might be reason here. Mad Wolf still might be willing, once the initial sparring had been done, to listen to the truth.

"The History?" asked Mad Wolf, speaking far too softly. "What is this history that you speak of?"

"A history written by a man named Wilson, a thousand years ago. It's at a university.

"The university on the bank of the Mississippi? That is where you came from—a sniveling, cowardly egghead hoeing his potato patch and huddling behind a wail? You come walking in here, as if you had a right, wanting what you call our sensitives

"And that's not all," said Cushing, forcing himself to speak as brashly as he could. "I want your blacksmiths and your spear- and arrow-makers. And I want the brain cases that you have."

"Ah, so," said Mad Wolf, still speaking softly. "This is all you want. You're sure there's nothing else?"

There was a secret amusement, a sly amusement, on the faces of the men who circled them. These men know their chief, knew the ways of him.

"That is all I'll need," said Cushing. "Given these things, it will be possible to find a better way of life."

"What is wrong with the way we live?" asked Mad Wolf. "What is bad about it? We have food to fill our bellies; we have far lands to roam in. We do not have to work. It is told that in the old days all men had to work. They woke and ate their breakfasts so they could get to work. They labored all the day and then went home again and tumbled early into bed so they could get up early to return to work. They had no time to call their own. For all this, they were no better off than we are. For all their labor, they got only food and sleep. This we get, and much more, and do not have to work for it. You have come from that egghead fort of yours to change all this, to go back to the olden ways, where we will labor dawn to dusk, working out our guts. You would wake the Sleepers, an event we have stationed guards all these centuries to guard against, so they cannot come ravening from the butte

"I have told you there are no Sleepers," Cushing said. "Can't you take my word for that? Up there on the butte is knowledge that men have gathered from the stars. Knowledge that will help us, not to regain the old days, which were bad, but to find a new way.

It was no use, he knew. They did not believe him. He had been mistaken. There was no reason here. They would never believe him.

"The man is mad," the warden said.

"Yes, he truly is," said Mad Wolf. "We have wasted time on him."

Someone who had come up behind him seized Cushing, almost gently, but when he lunged to get away, hard hands closed upon him, forced his arms behind him and held him helpless.

"You have sinned," Mad Wolf told him. "You have sinned most grievously." To the men who had their hands on Cushing, he said, "Tie him to the post."

The men who had stood in the circle now were breaking up, wandering away, and as they left, Cushing saw the post which until now had been hidden by their massed bodies. It stood no more than five feet high, fashioned from a new-cut tree, perhaps a cottonwood, with the bark peeled from it.

Without a word the men who held him forced him to the post, pulled his arms behind the post and tied them there, the thongs positioned in deep notches on either side of the post so he could not slide them free. Then, still without a word, they walked away.

He was not alone, however, for the gangs of small boys still were on the prowl.

He saw that he was in what appeared to be the center of the

encampment. The larger space where the post was planted was the hub of a number of streets that ran between the lodges.

A clod of dirt went humming past his head, another hit him in the chest. The gang of boys ran down the street, howling at their bravado.

For the first time, Cushing noticed that the sun had gone and the landscape darkened. An unnatural silence encompassed everything. A great black cloud, almost purple in its darkness, boiled out of the west. The first broken forerunners of the cloud, racing eastward, had covered the sun. Thunder rumbled far off, and above the butte a great bolt of lightning lanced across the heavy blackness of the cloud.

Somewhere in one of the lodges, he told himself, the principal men of the tribe, among them Mad Wolf and the warden, were deciding what was to be done with him. He had no illusions, no matter the form their decision took, what the end result would be. He pulled against the thongs, testing them. They were tight; there was no give in them.

It had been insane, of course, this gamble of his—that men still might listen to reason. He realized, with a faint, ironic amusement, that he'd not been given a chance to explain what it was all about. His conversation with Mad Wolf had been in generalities. The failure of his attempt, he knew, hung on the concept of the Sleepers, a myth repeated so many times over so long a time that it had taken on the guise of gospel. Yet, yesterday, when he had talked it over with the others, he had been convinced that if his arguments were properly presented, there was better than an even chance they would be listened to. It was his years at the university, he told himself, that had betrayed him. A man who dwelled in a place of sanity was ill-equipped to deal with reality, a reality that still was colored by Collapse fanaticism.

He wondered, with a quaint sense of unreality, what would happen now. None of those still on the butte was equipped to carry forward the work, even to attempt to begin to form the organization of an elite corps that over the years could wrest the secrets from the data banks. folio was canceled out; as a robot he had no chance at all. Through Meg, for all her ability, ran a streak of timidity that would make her helpless. Ezra and Elayne were simply ineffectual.

Andy, he thought, half-grinning to himself. If Andy could only talk, he would be the best bet of them all.

Heavy peals of thunder were rippling in the west, and above the crest of Thunder Butte the lightning ran like a nest of nervous snakes. Heat and mugginess clamped down hard against the land. The huge cloud of purple blackness kept on boiling higher into the sky.

People were coming out of the lodges now—women and children and a few men. The hooting boys threw more clods and stones at him, but their aims were poor. One small pebble, however, hit him on the jaw and left a paralyzing numbness. Down the street he could see, still far out on the prairie, the guards driving a herd of horses toward the camp.

Watching the horses, he saw them break into a run, thundering toward the camp, with the guards frantically hurrying their mounts in an endeavor to head them off or slow them down. Something had spooked the herd—that was quite evident. A sizzling lightning bolt, perhaps, or a nearby crack of thunder.

At the far edge of the camp someone shouted in alarm and the shout was picked up by others, the frightened shouts ringing through the camp between the pealing of the thunder. People were piling in panic out of the lodges, filling the street, running and screaming, instinctively reacting to the terror of the shouting.

Then he saw it, far off—the flicker of the lights, the zany sparkle of many Shivering Snakes against the blackness of the sky, riding before the approaching storm, sweeping toward the camp. He caught his breath and strained against the thongs. The Snakes, he asked himself, what were those crazy Snakes about?

But it was not, he saw, as the Snakes swept closer, the Snakes alone. Andy ran at the head of them, mane and tail flowing in the wind, his feet blurred with the speed of his running, while beside him raced the pale glimmer that was Rollo, and behind them and to each side of them, the dark blobs of a great horde of Followers, seen in the darkness only by virtue of the Snakes that spun in dizzy circles about each of them, illuminating them, picking out the wolf like shape of them. And behind the pack, the bouncing, bobbing spheres that were the Team, straining to keep up.

At the edge of the camp the frightened horse herd came plunging down the street, rearing madly, screaming in their terror, careening into lodges that came tumbling down. People were running madly and without seeming purpose, screaming mouths open like wide 0's in the center of their faces. Not only women and children but men as well, running as if the hounds of hell were snapping at their heels.

As the horses came at him, Cushing hunkered low against the post. A lashing hoof grazed a shoulder as a screaming horse reared and swerved to go around him. Another crashed into a lodge and fell, bringing the lodge down with him, collapsed, tangled amid the leather and the poles, kicking and striking with its forefeet in an effort to get free. Out from under the fallen lodge crawled a man, clawing to pull himself along until he was able to get on his legs and run. A lightning flash, for a moment, lined his face, lighting it so it could be recognized. It was Mad Wolf.

Then Rollo was beside Cushing, knife in hand, slashing at the thongs. The camp was deserted now except for a few people still trapped beneath the fallen lodges, howling like gut-shot dogs as they fought their way to freedom. All about, the Shivering Snakes swirled in loops of fire and the Followers

were dancing, with Andy capering in their midst.

Rollo put his head down close to Cushing's ear and shouted so he could hear above the steady roll of thunder. "This should take care of it," he shouted. He swept an arm at the camp. "We don't need to worry about them anymore. They won't stop running until they are over the Missouri.~~

Beside RoIlo bounced one of the Team, uttering in excitement. It bellowed at Cushing, "Fun you say we do not have and we know not what you speak of. ‘it now we know. Rollo say to come and see the fun."

Cushing tried to answer Rollo, but his words were swept away and drowned as the forefront of the storm crashed down upon them in a howl of rushing wind and a sudden sheet of water that heat like a hammer on the ground.

The dry cactus plains of the Missouri were behind them and ahead lay the rolling home prairies of the one-time state of Minnesota. This time, Cushing reminded himself, with some satisfaction, they need not follow the winding, time-consuming course of the gentle Minnesota River, but could strike straight across the prairie for the ruined Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and their final destination, the university. No nomad band, no city tribe, would even think of interfering with their march.

The first frosts of autumn had touched the trees with brushes of gold and red; hardy prairie flowers bloomed on every side. When spring came around, they would head back again for Thunder Butte, this time with a string of packhorses carrying supplies and with at least a few university residents added to the expedition. Perhaps, he thought, with more than that—some sensitives, perhaps, and a few brain cases, for during the winter, they would contact some of the city tribes and more eastern bands, who might be more open to reason than the nomad encampment had proved to be.

Far ahead of them Rollo ranged, scouting out the land, and, at a shorter distance, Andy, with his pack of Followers gamboling all about him like a bunch of pups at play. The Team rolled along sedately to one side, and, sparkling in the pleasant autumn sunshine, the swarms of Shivering Snakes were everywhere. They accompanied Rollo on his scouting runs; they danced with the Followers and with Andy; they swung in shimmering circles about everyone.

"You'll clean me out," the A and B had said in mock sorrow when they left. "You'll leave me not a single Follower or Snake. It's that silly horse of yours and that equally silly robot. They, the two of them, blot up all the crazy things they meet. Although, I'm glad they're going, for any roving band that might intend to do you dirt will reconsider swiftly when they see the escort that goes along with you.

"We'll head back," promised Cushing, "as soon as winter lifts enough to travel. We'll waste no time. And I hope we'll have others with us."

"I've been alone so long," the A and f had said, "that such a little interval does not really matter. I can wait quite easily, for now I have some hope."

Cushing cautioned him, "You must realize that it all may come to nothing. Try as hard and earnestly as we may, we may not be able to untangle the mysteries of the data. Even if we do, we may find nothing we can use.

"All that man has done throughout his history," said the A and B, "has been a calculated gamble without assurance of success. The odds, I know, are long, but in all honesty, we can ask for nothing better."

"If Mad Wolf had only gone along with us. If he had only listened."

"There are certain segments of society that will never lend an ear to a new idea. They squat in a certain place and will not budge from it. They will find many reasons to maintain a way of life that is comfortable to them. They'll cling to old religions; they'll fasten with the grip of death on ethics that were dead, without their knowing it, centuries before; they will embrace a logic that can be blown over with a breath, still claiming it is sacrosanct.

"But I'm not like this. I am a foolish sentimentalist and my optimism is incurable. To prove that, I shall start, as soon as you are gone, sending out the probes again. When they begin returning, a hundred years from now, a millennium from now, we shall be here and waiting, eager to find out what they have brought back, hoping it will be something we can use.

At times there had been small bands of scouts who sat their horses on a distant skyline and looked them over, then had disappeared, carrying back their word to the waiting tribes. Making sure, perhaps, that the march of this defiant group still traveled under the protection of the grotesques from Thunder Butte.

The weather had been good and the travel easy. Now that they had reached the home prairies, Cushing estimated that in another ten days they'd be standing before the walls of the university. There they would be accepted. There they would find those who would listen and understand. It might be, he thought, that it was for that very moment that the university had preserved itself all these long years, keeping intact a nucleus of sanity that would be open to a new idea—not accepting it blindly, but for study and consideration. When they set out next spring for Thunder Butte, there would be some from the university, he was certain, who would travel the return journey with them.

Meg was a short distance ahead of him and he trotted to catch up with her. She still carried the brain case, awkward as it might be to carry. During all the miles they'd traveled, it had been always with her. She had clutched it to her, even in her sleep.

"One thing we must be sure of," she had told him days before. "Any sensitive who uses a brain case must realize and accept the commitment to it. Once having made contact with it, that contact must continue. You cannot awaken a brain, then walk away from it. It becomes, in a way, a part of you. It becomes best friend, your other self."

"And when a sensitive dies?" he asked. "The brain case can outlive many humans. When the best friend human dies, what then?"

"We'll have to work that out," she said. "Another sensitive standing by, perhaps, to take over when the first one's gone. Another to replace you. Or, by that time, we may have been able to devise some sort of electronic system that can give the brain cases access to the world. Give them sight and hearing and a voice. I know that would be a return to technology, which we have foresworn, but, laddie boy, it may be we'll have to make certain accommodations to technology."

That might be true, he knew—if they only could. Thinking of it, he was not sure that it was possible. Many years of devoted research and development lay as a background to the achievement of even the simplest electronic device. Even with the technological library at the Place of Going to the Stars, it might not be possible to pick up the art again. For it was not a matter of the knowledge only, of knowing how it worked. It was, as well, the matter of manufacturing the materials that would be needed. Electronics had been based not on the knowledge of the art alone but on a massive technological capability. Even in his most hopeful moments he was forced to realize that it was probably now beyond man's capacity to reproduce a system that would replace that old lost capability. In destroying his technologic civilization, man might have

made an irreversible decision. In all likelihood, there was no going back. Fear alone might be a deterrent, the deep, implanted fear that being successful, there'd be no stopping place; that once reinstituted, technology would go on and on, building up again the monster that had once been killed. It was unlikely that such a situation could come about again, and so the fear would not be valid, but the fear would still be there. It would inhibit any move to regain even a part of what had been lost in the Time of Trouble.

So, if mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology. In sleepless nights he had tried to imagine that other method, that other path, and there had been no way to know. It was beyond his mental capability to imagine. The primordial ancestor who had chipped a rock to fashion the first crude tool could not have dreamed of the kind of tools that his descendants would bring about, based on the concept implicit in the first stone with a contrived cutting edge. And so it was in the present day. Already mankind, unnoticed, might have made that first faltering step toward the path that it would follow. If it had not, the answer, or many different answers, might be in the data banks of Thunder Butte.

He caught up with Meg and walked beside her.

"There is one thing, laddie boy, that worries me," she said. "You say the university will let us in and accept us and I have no doubt of that, for you know the people there. But what about the Team? Will they accept the Team? How will they relate to them?"

Cushing laughed, realizing it was the first time he had laughed in days.

"That will be beautiful," he said. "Wait until you see it. The Team picking the university apart, the university picking the Team apart. Each of them finding out what makes the other tick."

He threw up his head and laughed again, his laughter rolling across the plains.

"My God," he said, "it will be wonderful. I can't wait to see it."

Now he let the thought creep in—the thought that until now he had firmly suppressed in a reluctance to allow himself even to think of a hope that might not be there.

The Team was made up of two alien beings, living representatives of another life form that had achieved intelligence and that must have formed a complex civilization earmarked by an intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity would be, almost by definition, a characteristic of any civilization, but a characteristic that might vary in its intensity. That the Team's civilization has more than its full share of it was evidenced by their being here.

It was just possible that the Team might be willing, perhaps even eager, to help mankind with its problems. Whether they could offer anything of value was, of course, unknown; but, lacking anything else of value, the alien direction of their thought processes and their viewpoints might provide new starting points for man's own thinking, might serve to short-circuit the rut in which man was apt to think, nudging him into fresh approaches and nonhuman logic.

In the free interchange of information and opinion that would take place between the Team and the university, much might be learned by both sides. For although the university no longer could qualify as an elite intellectual community, the old tradition of learning, perhaps even of research, still existed there. Within its wails were men and women who could still be stirred by that intellectual thirst which in ages past had shaped the culture mankind had built and then in a few months time had brought down to destruction.

Although not entirely to destruction, he reminded himself. On Thunder Butte the last remnants, the most sophisticated remnants, of that old, condemned technology still remained. Ironically, that remnant was now the one last hope of mankind.

What might have happened, he asked himself, if man had withheld his destruction of technology for a few more centuries? If he had, then the full force of it would have been available to work out the possible answers contained in the data banks of Thunder Butte. But this, he realized, might not necessarily have followed. The sheer weight, the arrogant power, of a full-scale, runaway technology might have simply rejected, overridden and destroyed what might he there as irrelevant. After all, with as great a technology as mankind possessed, what was the need of it?

Perhaps, just possibly, despite all man's present shortcomings, it might be better this way. As a matter of fact, we're not so badly off, he told himself. We have a few things on which to pin some hopes—Thunder Butte, the Team, the university, the still-living robotic brains, the unimpeded rise of sensitive abilities, the Trees, the Snakes, the Followers.

And how in the world could the Snakes or Followers—? And then he sternly stopped this line of thought. When it came to hope, you did not write off even the faintest hope of all. You held on to every hope; you cherished all; you let none get away.

"Laddie boy," said Meg. "I said it once before, and I'll say it now again. It's been a lovely trip."

"Yes," said Cushing. "Yes, you are right. It has been all of that."