3 x T

"I don't know. I'm just glad they couldn't. Aren't you?"

"Now that you mention it, yes." Je

"We're lucky," Greenberg said. "Looks like we didn't damage anything much in here."

"We didn't, did we?" Je

"But what's been keeping the Great Unknown alive all that time?" Greenberg said, a note of doubt in his voice. "The Great Ones had a higher technology than ours."

"It couldn't be," Je

What happened next made her think of the closing line of a classic Clarke story: "One by one, without any fuss, the stars were going out." This surprise was not on such a cosmic scale, but it more than sufficed for the occasion. One by one, without any fuss, the ceiling lights in the chamber came on.

"Oh, my," Je

"You've got a point," said Greenberg, who had to have been thinking along with her. But when they turned around to scramble out through the hole the shaped charge had blasted, they discovered it was no longer there. The i

Je

"What's 'real'?" Greenberg countered. People had been wondering that since long before the days of Pontius Pilate, Je

"I can't argue with you there," Je

Bernard Greenberg evidently reached the same conclusion at the same time. He went over to the wall opposite the reconstituted one that led to the outside, began rapping on it here and there, as the Foitani did when they used their u

"Try higher up," Je

"If humans had built this thing, it would have come with holovid instructions," Greenberg said. All the same, he raised his hand most of a meter. That produced results. In fact, it produced them twice: two doors opened up, less than a meter apart. They led into different rooms, one into a chamber much like the one in which Je

"The lady or the tiger," Je

He plucked at his graying beard. "That room looks like more of the same. The hall is something different. Let's try it and see what happens."

"Makes as much sense as anything," Je

They stepped into the hall together. Je

They didn't find themselves all at once in another part of the building. They weren't surrounded and overwhelmed by flashing lights. The hallway was just a hallway. But when Je

Every so often, Greenberg reached up to rap on the hallway wall. For more than fifty meters, nothing happened when he did; he must not have been picking the right spots. Then, with the u

Greenberg and Je

"He's not quite the same as the ones from Odern or from Rof Golan," Greenberg said.

"No," Je

"Everything we're doing in here seems stage-managed somehow," Greenberg said. "We've known all along that this is a center for the Great Ones. What else are we supposed to learn from seeing one almost in the flesh?"

"I don't know," Je

VII

Without conscious thought, Je

The Great One scratched vehemently, all over. "It's real," Greenberg said. He sounded as if he was accusing Je

"I'm glad you thought it couldn't be, too," she said. She put the stu

The Foitan walked toward her. He didn't act outraged, just curious. He said something in his own language. The words didn't sound too different from the ones the Foitani from Odern used. The only trouble was that without a translator she couldn't understand any of them. She spread her hands, shook her head, and bared her teeth in a Foitani-style frown. "I wish I could wiggle my ears," she whispered to Greenberg.

A look of intense concentration came over him. His ears did wiggle, close to a centimeter to and fro. Je