There was as yet no sign of the buildings that had been glimpsed through the glasses several days before and that the wardens had said were there. Ahead of them lay only the everlasting slope that they must climb.
"Maybe before the day is over," Rollo said, "we may be in sight of the buildings."
"I hope so," Meg told him. "My feet are getting sore with all this climbing."
The only signs of life they saw were the herd of deer from which Cushing had made his kill, a few long-eared rabbits, a lone marmot that had whistled at them from its ledge of rock, and an eagle that sailed in circles high against the blueness of the sky. The tubby cylinders had not reappeared.
In the middle of the afternoon, as they were toiling up an unusually steep and treacherously grass-slicked slope, they saw the spheres. There were two of them, looking like iridescent soap bubbles, rolling cautiously down the slope toward them. They were a considerable distance off, and as the little band stopped to watch them, the two spheres came to a halt on a fairly level bench at the top of the slope.
From where he stood, Cushing tried to make out what they were. Judging the distance he was from them, he gained the impression they might stand six feet tall. They seemed smooth and polished, perfectly rounded and with no sense of mass; insubstantial beings—and beings because there seemed in his mind no question that they were alive.
Meg had been looking at them through the glasses and now she took them from her face.
"They have eyes," she said. "Floating eyes. Or, at least, they look like eyes and they float all about the surface."
She held out the glasses to him, but he shook his head. "Let's go up," he said, "and find out what they are.
The spheres waited for them as they climbed. When they reached the bench on which the spheres rested, they found themselves no more than twenty feet from their visitors.
As Meg had said, the spheres were possessed of eyes that were scattered all about their surfaces, moving from time to time to new positions.
Cushing walked toward them, with Meg close beside him, the others staying in the rear. The spheres, Cushing saw, were about the size that he had estimated. Except for the eyes, they seemed to have no other organs that were visible.
Six feet from them, Cushing and Meg halted, and for a moment nothing happened. Then one of the spheres made a sound that was a cross between a rumble and a hum. Curiously, it sounded as if the sphere had cleared its throat.
The sphere rumbled once again and this time the rumble defined itself into booming speech. The words were the kind that a drum would make had a drum been able to put together words.
"You are humans, are you not?" it asked. "By humans, we mean— "I know what you mean," said Cushing. "Yes, we are human beings."
"You are the intelligent species that is native to this planet?"
"That is right," said Cushing.
"You are the dominant life form?"
"That's correct," said Cushing.
"Then allow me," said the sphere, "to introduce ourselves.
We are a team of investigators who come from many light years distant. I am Number One and this one that stands beside me is termed Number Two. Not that one of us is first or the other second, but simply to give us both identity."
"Well, that is fine," said Cushing, "and we are pleased to meet you. But would you mind telling me what you are investigating."
"Not at all," said #1. "In fact, we'd be most happy to, for we have some hope that you may be able to shed light upon some questions that puzzle us exceedingly. Our field of study is the technological civilizations, none of which seem to be viable for any length of time. They carry within themselves the seeds of their destruction. On other planets we have visited where technology has failed, that seems to have been the end of it. The technology fails and the race that had devised and lived by it then fails as well. It goes down to barbarism and it does not rise again, and on the face of it that has happened here. For more than a thousand years the humans of this planet have lived in barbarism and give all signs that they will so continue, but the A and R assures us that it is not so, that the race has failed time and time again and after a certain period of rest and recuperation has risen to even greater heights. As so, says the A and R, will be the pattern of this failure…."
"You are talking riddles," said Cushing. "Who is this A and R?"
"Why, he is the Ancient and Revered, the A and R for short. He is a robot and a gentleman and—"
"We have with us a robot," Cushing said. "Rollo, please step forward and meet these new friends of ours. Our company also includes a horse."
"We know of horses," said #2 in a deprecatory tone. "They are animals. But we did not know—"
"Andy is no animal," Meg said acidly. "He may be a horse,
but he is a fey horse. He is a searcher-out of water and a battler of bears and many other things besides."
"What I meant to say," said #2, "is that we did not know there were any robots other than the ones that live upon this geographic eminence. We understood that all other robots had been destroyed in your so-called Time of Trouble."
"I am, so far as I am aware," said Rollo, "the only robot left alive. And yet, you say the Ancient and Revered—"
"The Ancient and Revered," said #1, "and a host of others. Surely you have met them. Nasty little creatures that descend upon one and regale one with endless, senseless chatter, all talking at the same time, all insistent that one listen." He sighed. "They are most annoying. For years we have tried to listen to them, in the hope they would provide a clue. But they provide us nothing but a great confusion. I have the theory, not shared by the other member of the Team, they are naught but ancient storytellers who are so programmed that they recite their fictional adventures to anyone they may chance upon, without regard as to whether what they have to tell—"
"Now, wait a minute," said RoIlo. "You're sure these things are robots? We had thought so, but I had a hope-"
"You have met them, then?"
"Indeed we have," said Meg. "So you think the things they tell us are no more than tales designed for entertainment?"
"That's what I think," said #1. "The other member of the Team believes, mistakenly, that they may talk significances which we, in our alien stupidness, are not able to understand. Let me ask you, in all honesty, how did they sound to you? As humans you may have been able to see in them something we have missed."
"We listened to them for too short a time," said Cushing, "to arrive at any judgment."
"They were with us for only a short while," said Meg, "then someone called them off."
"The A and R, most likely," said #1. "He keeps a sharp eye on them."
"The A and R—" asked Cushing, "how do we go about meeting him?"
"He is somewhat hard to meet," said #2. "He keeps strictly to himself. On occasion he has granted us audiences."
"Audiences," said #1. "For all the good it did."
"Then he tells you little?"
"He tells us much," said #1, "but of such things as his faith in the human race. He pretends to take an extremely long-range view, and, to be fair about it, he does not seem perturbed."