The robot said, “I will confirm. The orbital period of this asteroid is one year, six months, five days, three hours, two minutes, and forty-one seconds.”
“That’s right,” said Captain Ludwig.
“Very well,” Dr. Horkkk said briskly, as though it were not at all a miracle that this alien machine could learn so fast and that it could calculate orbital periods by a mere glance at the sky. “Now we may proceed. Can you give us an estimate in our terms of the time elapsed since the most recent visit of the Mirt Korp Ahm to this asteroid?”
Again the robot studied the sky — this time, apparently, scanning the stars and measuring the shifts in constellations that had taken place since its last look at the outside world.
Shortly the robot said, “941,285,008 years, two months, twelve days—”
It was like a high-voltage jolt to hear those calm words. The robot confirmed, to superhuman exactness, the calculations of Luna City Observatory. I don’t know how many computers Luna City put on that job, or how long they spent at it, but they certainly didn’t hand out an instant real-time reply the way Dihn Ruuu had just done. Something like that tends to puncture your pride in human attainments. How much superior to us the High Ones must have been, if they could build a robot that would wait patiently in a cave for 941 million years, still be in prime working order when visitors come, and be capable of tossing off computations of that sort! Zit!
“When was the last time you had contact with the Mirt Korp Ahm?” Pilazinool asked.
“941,285,008 years, two months, twelve—”
“That is, not since the sealing of the vault?”
“Correct. It is my task to await their return.”
“They won’t return,” said Pilazinool. “They haven’t been seen in this galaxy for millions of years.”
“This is contrary to possibility,” Dihn Ruuu replied smoothly. “Their existence could not have ceased. Therefore they must continue to occupy substantial portions of this galaxy. And thus they will return to this place. I must await them.”
Dr. Schein cut in, “Do you understand what I mean when I refer to the home world of the Mirt Korp Ahm?”
“The world on which their first evolution occurred,” said the robot. “The world which is basic to their history.”
“That’s it, yes.” Dr. Schein leaned forward eagerly. “We’ve tried to discover this world, but we’ve had no success. Can you give us information about it? For example: is it located in this galactic cluster?”
“Yes,” the robot said.
Dr. Schein looked distressed. He belonged to the school of thought that says the High Ones came from another galaxy. Dr. Horkkk hopped about in triumph. He was one of the first to argue that the High Ones originated right here.
Though shaken, Dr. Schein went on, “Is the star that is the sun of the Mirt Korp Ahm’s home world visible from this place?”
“Yes,” the robot said.
“I mean, is it still visible, after all the time that’s passed since you came here?”
“Yes,” the robot said.
“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 scanned the sky, halted, thought, scanned the sky again.
“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 planned to show it to us. And there was no mistaking the despair and confusion that the robot displayed when it was unable to find the star. Dihn Ruuu wasn’t designed to show much emotion; but that robot was shaken when it came back into the vault.
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 scanned data terminals in a sort of panicky quest for information. I think it was looking for recorded messages from others of its kind that might have come in during its hundreds of millions of years of hibernation — something that might explain the inexplicable catastrophe that had befallen the High Ones. But it didn’t appear to get much satisfaction.
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.