Across a Billion Years

  Shortly the robot said, "941,285,008 years, two months, twelve days—"

  It was like a high-voltage jolt to hear those calm words. The robot confirmed, to superhuman exactness, the calculations of Luna City Observatory. I don't know how many computers Luna City put on that job, or how long they spent at it, but they certainly didn't hand out an instant real-time reply the way Dihn Ruuu had just done. Something like that tends to puncture your pride in human attainments. How much superior to us the High Ones must have been, if they could build a robot that would wait patiently in a cave for 941 million years, still be in prime working order when visitors come, and be capable of tossing off computations of that sort! Zit!

  "When was the last time you had contact with the Mirt Korp Ahm?" Pilazinool asked.

  "941,285,008 years, two months, twelve—"

  "That is, not since the sealing of the vault?"

  "Correct. It is my task to await their return."

  "They won't return," said Pilazinool. "They haven't been seen in this galaxy for millions of years."

  "This is contrary to possibility," Dihn Ruuu replied smoothly. "Their existence could not have ceased. Therefore they must continue to occupy substantial portions of this galaxy. And thus they will return to this place. I must await them."

  Dr. Schein cut in, "Do you understand what I mean when I refer to the home world of the Mirt Korp Ahm?"

  "The world on which their first evolution occurred," said the robot. "The world which is basic to their history."

  "That's it, yes." Dr. Schein leaned forward eagerly. "We've tried to discover this world, but we've had no success. Can you give us information about it? For example: is it located in this galactic cluster?"

  "Yes," the robot said.

  Dr. Schein looked distressed. He belonged to the school of thought that says the High Ones came from another galaxy. Dr. Horkkk hopped about in triumph. He was one of the first to argue that the High Ones originated right here.

  Though shaken, Dr. Schein went on, "Is the star that is the sun of the Mirt Korp Ahm's home world visible from this place?"

  "Yes," the robot said.

  "I mean, is it still visible, after all the time that's passed since you came here?"

  "Yes," the robot said.

  "Will you point it out for us?" Dr. Schein asked.

  I found myself trembling. The others were equally tense. This weird and dreamlike interview with an age-old machine had suddenly erupted into something of incredible importance. Passionate scientific controversies were being settled. The machine would tell us everything. All we had to do was ask! And now it was going to give us the fundamental solution to our quest —the location of the home world of the High Ones.

  It stepped out of the vault again for a clear view of the heavens. It looked up.

  A minute passed. Two minutes. Three.

  No doubt the robot was comparing its recorded memory of the constellations of 941 million years ago against what it saw now, and making the necessary adjustments that would enable it to trace the wanderings of the High Ones' sun during the elapsed time.

  Something was wrong, though. The robot seemed frozen. It scanned the sky, halted, thought, scanned the sky again.

  "Perhaps an internal command against revealing the location of the home world has taken control," Dr. Horkkk suggested.

  The robot stumbled back into the vault. Stumbled, I say. This flawless machine moved with the shambling, staggering gait of someone who's just learned that he's been wiped out by a quick twitch of the stock market, or who's just heard that seven generations of his family were caught in a sunglider accident.

  "The star is not there," said the robot in a terrible voice.

  "You can't find it?" Dr. Schein asked. "It's not visible from this part of space?"

  "It should be visible," the robot said. "I have computed its location precisely, and there is no possibility of error. But the star is gone from the sky. I look at the place where I know it must be, and I see only darkness. I detect no energy radiation at all. The star is gone. The star is gone."

  "How can a star vanish?" Jan whispered.

  "Maybe it went supernova," Saul suggested. "Blew up half a billion years ago—the robot wouldn't have any way of knowing that—"

  "The star is gone," said the robot again. The colors of its vision panel dulled in obvious shock and bewilderment. This perfect mechanical brain, with its total grasp on all data, had hit a horrible, numbing inconsistency in its universe—in the most vital part of its universe, too.

  We hardly knew what to say. How can you console a robot on the disappearance of its builders' home star?

  After a long pause Dihn Ruuu said, "There is no need for me to wait here longer. The star is gone. Where have the Mirt Korp Ahm gone? The Mirt Korp Ahm will never return to this place. The star is gone. The star is gone. It is beyond all understanding, but the star is gone."

  FOURTEEN

  January 11, 2376

  The Asteroid

  Dr. Horkkk, always suspicious, went on believing for several days that the robot was lying to us—deliberately concealing the location of the High Ones' home world. The rest of us, led by Pilazinool, felt otherwise.

  Pilazinool intuitively thinks the robot is incapable of lying. He argues that it wouldn't have offered to look for its masters' home star unless it really planned to show it to us. And there was no mistaking the despair and confusion that the robot displayed when it was unable to find the star. Dihn Ruuu wasn't designed to show much emotion; but that robot was shaken when it came back into the vault.

  Where has the star gone?

  Maybe Saul's supernova theory is the right one. No one's suggested anything any better, so far. If it's true, it's pretty dismal news for us, since it forecloses our chances of finding and excavating the central planet of the High Ones' empire. A world that's been cooked by a supernova isn't generally of much use to archaeology afterward.

  The robot spent the first day and a half after its upsetting discovery at its instruments. It ignored us completely. Standing in the back of the vault, it twiddled dials and scanned data terminals in a sort of panicky quest for information. I think it was looking for recorded messages from others of its kind that might have come in during its hundreds of millions of years of hibernation—something that might explain the inexplicable catastrophe that had befallen the High Ones. But it didn't appear to get much satisfaction.

  We kept away from it during this time. Perhaps even a robot can feel grief; and Dihn Ruuu had apparently lost its creators, its masters, its whole reason for existence. It deserved privacy while it found a way of coping with the changes that had befallen its universe.

  Then Dihn Ruuu came to us. Leroy Chang saw the robot standing patiently beside the ship, and we went out to it. Consulting the translation machine that it carried, studying the flowing hieroglyphics for a long while, it said at last to us, "Do you have the star travel? The way of going faster than light?"

  "We call it ultradrive," Dr. Schein said. "We have it. Yes."

  "Good. There is a planet not far from here on which the Mirt Korp Ahm built a large colony. Perhaps you will take me there. I must learn a great deal, and that is the nearest place where I can learn it."

  "How far from here?" Pilazinool asked. "In terms of the distance light travels in one year."

  Dihn Ruuu paused for one of those astonishing quick calculations. "Thirty-seven times the journey of light in one year."

  "Thirty-seven light-years," Dr. Schein repeated. "That won't be too expensive. We can manage it. As soon as the cruiser comes back to check on us—"

  "Possibly we would not even have to go there," the robot said. "Have you the way of transmitting messages at faster than light?"

  "Yes," said Dr. Schein.

  "No," said Dr. Horkkk in the same instant.

  Dihn Ruuu swung its gaze from one to the other in bewilderment. "Yes and no? I do not register this."

  Dr. Schein laughed. "There is a way to communi
cate at faster-than-light speeds," he said. "But it requires the services of human beings with special gifts. What Dr. Horkkk meant is that we don't have any of those specially gifted people with us now."

  "I see," said Dihn Ruuu sadly.

  "Even if we did, they probably wouldn't be of much use," Dr. Schein went on. "They can only communicate human-to-human. They wouldn't be able to reach the minds of anyone on a Mirt Korp Ahm planet."

  The robot said, "They work by thought amplification, then?"

  "That's right. Did the Mirt Korp Ahm have such a way of sending messages?"

  "Among themselves, yes," said Dihn Ruuu. "But only protoplasm-life can use the thought amplifiers. Even if other machines of my type still exist in the, universe, I could not reach them with the thought amplifier. Only by radio. Which would require thirty-seven years to get to them. I do not wish to wait so long for the answers I need."

  Pilazinool said, "We can take you to this other planet, if you have any way of showing us where it is."

  "Do you have"—the robot hesitated—"star charts?"

  "Sure," Nick Ludwig said. "The whole galaxy's been mapped."

  "I will show you, then, on the charts."

  Dihn Ruuu looked quickly at the stars, as if taking a fast fix on the constellations, and followed Ludwig into the ship. It moved with great care, perhaps afraid that its bulk and weight would do damage; but we had already tested the sturdiness of the ship on Mirrik, who outweighed even the robot, and had no fears. I wondered, though, what Dihn Ruuu made of the quaint, primitive technology of our ship.

  The captain and the robot entered the chart room. Ludwig keyed in the chart tank; its dark surface began to glow, and at a punched command from the captain the ship's computer beamed into the tank an image of the heavens as seen from this asteroid. "Tell us where you want to go," Ludwig said, and Dihn Ruuu pointed to the upper right quadrant of the tank. Ludwig nodded to Webber Fileclerk, who amplified the image; Dihn Ruuu went on indicating quadrants until, three or four step-ups later, a small G-type star with six planets occupied the center of the image.

  Fileclerk checked the coordinates, looked it up in the catalog, and found that it was GGC 2787891, also known as McBurney's Star. It had been mapped and surveyed in 2280, but no landings had ever been made on any of its planets.

  Nothing surprising about that, of course. There are millions of stars, billions of planets; and the exploration of the galaxy is a long way from complete. We don't share Dihn Ruuu's pathetic belief that there still is a thriving outpost of High Ones in the system of McBurney's Star, but certainly we'll find a major archaeological site there. Which is reason enough for making the trip.

  So our expedition, instead of tying us down for two cold and rainy years on Higby V, is turning into a galactic odyssey. First to this asteroid in the system of GGC 1145591, then to McBurney's Star, and who knows where Dihn Ruuu will lead us next? We'll follow. The profits from that mercury mine will take care of the stash problem, and we can worry about detailed archaeological excavation later; these sites won't vanish. Mysteries that we thought forever insoluble are cracking open every day. I mean, here we are talking to a robot of the High Ones, asking all kinds of questions about the civilization of its masters and getting answers. And we have the projections from our globe to study, and also the scenes Dihn Ruuu has shown us, and all this machinery in the vault—

  The one sad thing is that 408b isn't here to share in the glory and the wonder of it all. Everything we're learning would have been right in its pocket.

  We leave here next week—I hope.

  When Dr. Schein hired that ultradrive cruiser to bring us here from Higby V last October, he shrewdly hedged his bet. He knew there was a good chance that we wouldn't find the vault in this system, in which case we'd be stranded here with nothing to do and without a TP to summon a ship to pick us up. (Nick Ludwig's ship isn't equipped for ultraspace travel; it's strictly local-haul chartering.) Therefore Dr. Schein arranged that when the cruiser made its return trip through this part of the universe in mid-January, it would detour and come within radio range of us so we could request pickup, if necessary. Buying that detour was expensive, but it put a lid on the possible span of time we could waste here in the event of our pulling a zero in the asteroid belt.

  The cruiser will be within radio range in three days. We've already begun broadcasting an all-band pickup signal, just in case they forget to call us. We assume that they'll come down and get us; the big bosses can then negotiate a new ultraspace hop, and off we go to McBurney's Star with Dihn Ruuu as our guide.

  Maybe.

  Meanwhile we zig along in busywork and routine; we quiz Dihn Ruuu a lot (it's amazing how fast the vocabulary of the robot is growing) and study the machinery in the vault. Now that Dihn Ruuu feels released from its orders by the disappearance of the High Ones' star, and is about to abandon the vault, we have free access to all the gadgetry. Most of it is communications equipment, we now know—not too different in principle, I gather, from our radio setup—but there's also a lot of weaponry. Dihn Ruuu is disarming it now. The robot claims that one small snub-nosed tube sticking out of the side wall is capable of blowing up a sun at a distance of three light-years. We haven't asked for a demonstration. The other stuff includes the High Ones' equivalent of computer banks—more bits of data recorded on one electron than we get into a whole long protein chain—and some kind of energy accumulator that works off starlight and keeps this whole array powered.

  We're just a little worried about the impact of all these wondrous things on the technology of twenty-fourth-century Earth, Thhh, Calamor, Dinamon, and Shilamak. Are we ready for such a horde of High Ones marvels? Assuming that we can learn to use one one-thousandth of what we've found in this vault alone, we're in for a third Industrial Revolution that may transform society more radically than the steam engine did in the eighteenth century and the computer in the twentieth.

  As I say, we worry. But it's not up to us to make the decision; as scientists we have no right to suppress this find. We're not administrators; we're archaeologists. We discovered this vault, but we have no responsibility for the later use or misuse of its contents.

  If that sounds like moral wishy-washiness, so be it. I'd rather be considered wishy-washy than be considered an enemy of knowledge. There are always some risks in making discoveries; but we'd still be living in caves and eating our meat raw if somebody, somewhere along the line, hadn't taken the risk of using his brain. The big difference here is that these gadgets aren't the products of slow, patient human toil, developed within the context of our civilization. They're coming to us all in one shot as hand-me-downs from a vastly more mature and complex race. Whether we're capable of handling such things at this stage in our development is yet to be seen.

  I repeat: it's not our decision to make. Like Pontius Pilate in that episode in the Near East twenty-four centuries ago, we wash our hands of the matter and accept no blame for what follows. It's our job to find things, and we can't help it if they may be dangerous.

  Somehow, though humans are a chimpo lot, I'm not really worried. If we haven't succeeded in blowing ourselves up by A.D. 2376, we're probably going to make out all right.

  Maybe.

  * * *

  It's January 14, and we've made contact with the cruiser. It'll be landing shortly to pick us up. We won't go immediately to McBurney's Star; the cruiser has its own route to consider. But it will take us (and Ludwig's ship, riding piggyback through ultraspace) to the Aldebaran system, where we can hire an outbound ultradrive ship to get us where we want to go.

  The stash from the mercury mine isn't going to cover all this. We'd better come up with a uranium mountain the next time.

  * * *

  Three weeks more have passed since I last put down this cube. It's February 8, and we've just completed a two-day stop at Aldebaran IX. Aldebaran is a big red thing, rather handsome, and it has a pack of planets, several of them colonized. We didn't sightsee. We didn't even la
nd, in fact. Dr. Schein handled the whole thing by radio, arranging for an immediately outbound ultraspace cruiser to take us to McBurney's Star. We are currently hanging in orbit around Al-debaran IX in Nick Ludwig's ship, waiting for the cruiser to come up and meet us; Nick will once again piggyback his little ship to the cruiser and off we'll

  go.

  This is the first time we've been within reach of a TP communications net since leaving Higby V. So Dr. Schein has sent a full report on our discoveries back to Galaxy Central. I hope everybody is duly croggled by the amazing news.

  I wish I had been able to find some excuse for putting a skull-to-skull call through to you, Lorie. I want so much to say hello, to tell you what a grand time I'm having, how well we're doing. But you know that private chitchat by TP is prohibitively expensive, especially calling Earth from Aldebaran. My biggest hope is that you've taken part in the relay work on some of our messages and that you know a little of what we're up to.

  We leave tonight for McBurney's Star. They calculate that we'll be there by the end of the month.

  * * *

  February 30

  Right on the old zogger! Here it is the last day of the month, and here we are in orbit around the fourth world of the McBurney system. The ultradrive crew, as usual, didn't stay even for a peek. More fools they.

  The view is fabulous. You can sposh your mind looking at that planet from up here, maybe ten thousand kilometers out in space. The survey team that whizzed through this system in 2280 ought to be resurrected and flayed for failing to spot what's down there on McBurney IV.

  It's a complete planet-wide city of the High Ones. Not a crumpled ancient relic, but a clean, functioning, perfectly preserved living city. We can see vehicles moving, construction under way, lights going on and off.

  What we can't see are any High Ones. We've given the planet a thorough scanning in the hour since we got here, and Dihn Ruuu has had a look with its own scanning equipment, which is superior to ours. We and the robot conclude that McBurney IV is populated by plenty of robots. But if there are any Mirt Korp Ahm down there, they're hidden from view.