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"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 ca
"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 ba
"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?"