Across A Billion Years

“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 sca

“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 pla

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 sca

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 communicate 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.