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"No. Not a computer. A robot. Another one of us, except it is so big it has no mobility."

"We are talking to no point at all," said Red Cloud. "A robot is nothing more than a walking computer."

'There are points of difference," said Jason, gently. "That, Horace, is what you have refused to see all these years. You've thought of a robot as a machine and it is not. It is a biological concept expressed mechanically…"

"You are quibbling," Red Cloud said.

"I don't think we'll gain anything," said John, "even by the most good-natured argument. We didn't come here, actually, to find what might be building, We came to see how the robots would react to the People, perhaps, many of them, millions of them, coming back to Earth."

"I can tell you, without any question, how the most of us would react to it," said Stanley. "We would view it with some apprehension. For they would take us back into their service or, perhaps worse than that, would have no need of us. Some of us, perhaps quite a number of us, would welcome being taken back into their service, for through all the years we have felt the lack of someone needing us. Some of us would welcome the old servitude, for to us it was never really servitude. But I think, as well, that the majority of us now feel we have started on a road along which we can work out for ourselves something approaching the destiny of mankind—not that precise kind of destiny, of course, for it would not fit us and we would not want it. For that reason we would not want the humans to come back. They would interfere. They could not help the interference; it is intellectually impossible for them not to interfere in any affairs that touch them, even most remotely. But that is not a decision we can make for ourselves alone. The decision is the province of the Project…"

"You mean the monster you have built," said Hezekiah.

Stanley, who had been standing all the time, slowly lowered himself into a chair. He swiveled his head around to stare at Hezekiah. "You do not approve?" he asked. "You do not understand? Of all these people, I would have thought you would."

"You have committed sacrilege," said Hezekiah, sternly. "You have erected an abomination. You have chosen to elevate yourself above your creators. I have spent many lonely, terrible hours, wondering if I and my associates may not be committing sacrilege, devoting our time and utmost effort to a study and a task that should be mankind's study and its task, but at least we still are working for the good of mankind…"

"Please," said Jason. "Let us not debate that now. How can any of us tell if we're right or wrong in any of our actions? Stanley says that it is up to the Project to decide…"

"The Project will know," said Stanley. "It has far more background knowledge than any one of us. We have traveled widely through the years to obtain material that has been fed into its memory cores. We have given it all the knowledge it has been our fortune to lay our hands upon. It knows history, science, philosophy, the arts. And now it is adding to this knowledge on its own. It is talking with something very far in space."

John jerked upright. "How far in space?" he asked.

"We are not sure," said Stanley. "Something, we believe, in the center of the galaxy."

21

He felt the crying need of the creature in the glen, the lack of something that it sought and the damnation of that lack. He stopped so quickly that Evening Star, walking close behind, bumped into him.

"What is it?" she whispered.

He stood rigid, feeling the lack and need, and he did not answer. The wash of feeling from the glen came pouring over him and into him—the hopelessness, the doubt, the longing and the need. The trees stood straight and silent in the breathless afternoon and for a moment everything in the forest—the birds, the little animals, the insects—fell into a silence. Nothing stirring, nothing making any noise, as if all of nature held its breath to listen to the creature in the glen.

"What's wrong?" asked Evening Star.

"There is something suffering," he said. "Can't you feel the suffering? It's just there ahead of us."

"You can't feel suffering," she said.

He moved ahead slowly and the silence held and there the creature was—a terrible can of worms crouched against the nest of boulders that lay beneath the arching birch. But he did not see- the can of worms, he only heard the cry of need and something turned over in his mind and for a moment he held the need within his mental grip.

Evening Star recoiled and came up against the tough bark of an oak that stood beside the path. The can of worms kept changing, exactly as a can of worms would change, all the worms crawling over one another in the seething ferment of some nameless, senseless urge. And out of that seething mass came a cry of gladness and relief—a cry of gladness and relief that had no sound at all, and a cry that somehow was intertwined with a sense of compassion and of power that had nothing to do with the can of worms. And over all of this was spread, like a mantle of hope and understanding, what the great white oak had said, or tried to say, or failed to say, and within her mind the universe opened up like a flower awakened by the rising sun. For an instant she sensed and knew (not saw or heard or understood, for it all was beyond simple sight or understanding) the universe to its very core and out to its farthest edges—the mechanism of it and the purpose of its existence and the place that was held in it by everything that held the touch of life.

Only for an instant, a fractional second of realizing, of knowing, and then unknowing, then she was back again within herself, an incomplete, insignificant life form that crouched against the tree, feeling the rough bark of the massive oak against her shoulders and her back, with David Hunt standing in the path beside her and in the glen a squirming can of worms that seemed to shine with a holy light, so bright and glittering that it was beautiful as no can of worms could ever be, and crying over and over inside her brain, with a meaning in the cry she could not comprehend.

"David," she cried, "what have we done? What happened?"

For there had been a great happening, she knew, or perhaps great happenings and she was confused, although in the confusion there was something that was at once a happiness and wonder. She crouched against the tree and the universe seemed to lean down above her and she felt hands fastening upon her and lifting her and she was in David's arms, clinging to him as she had never clung to anyone before, glad that he was there in what she sensed must be the great moment of her life, secure within the strength of his lean, hard body.

"You and I," he was saying. "You and I together. Between the two of us…"

His voice faltered and she knew that he was frightened and she put her arms about him and held him with ail the comfort that she had.