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.
Fileclerk checked the coordinates, looked it up in the catalog, and found that it was GGC 2787891, also known as McBurney’s Star. It had been mapped and surveyed in 2280, but no landings had ever been made on any of its planets.
Nothing surprising about that, of course. There are millions of stars, billions of planets; and the exploration of the galaxy is a long way from complete. We don’t share Dihn Ruuu’s pathetic belief that there still is a thriving outpost of High Ones in the system of McBurney’s Star, but certainly we’ll find a major archaeological site there. Which is reason enough for making the trip.
So our expedition, instead of tying us down for two cold and rainy years on Higby V, is turning into a galactic odyssey. First to this asteroid in the system of GGC 1145591, then to McBurney’s Star, and who knows where Dihn Ruuu will lead us next? We’ll follow. The profits from that mercury mine will take care of the stash problem, and we can worry about detailed archaeological excavation later; these sites won’t vanish. Mysteries that we thought forever insoluble are cracking open every day. I mean, here we are talking to a robot of the High Ones, asking all kinds of questions about the civilization of its masters and getting answers. And we have the projections from our globe to study, and also the scenes Dihn Ruuu has shown us, and all this machinery in the vault —
The one sad thing is that 408b isn’t here to share in the glory and the wonder of it all. Everything we’re learning would have been right in its pocket.
We leave here next week — I hope.
When Dr. Schein hired that ultradrive cruiser to bring us here from Higby V last October, he shrewdly hedged his bet. He knew there was a good chance that we wouldn’t find the vault in this system, in which case we’d be stranded here with nothing to do and without a TP to summon a ship to pick us up. (Nick Ludwig’s ship isn’t equipped for ultraspace travel; it’s strictly local-haul chartering.) Therefore Dr. Schein arranged that when the cruiser made its return trip through this part of the universe in mid-January, it would detour and come within radio range of us so we could request pickup, if necessary. Buying that detour was expensive, but it put a lid on the possible span of time we could waste here in the event of our pulling a zero in the asteroid belt.
The cruiser will be within radio range in three days. We’ve already begun broadcasting an all-band pickup signal, just in case they forget to call us. We assume that they’ll come down and get us; the big bosses can then negotiate a new ultraspace hop, and off we go to McBurney’s Star with Dihn Ruuu as our guide.
Maybe.
Meanwhile we zig along in busywork and routine; we quiz Dihn Ruuu a lot (it’s amazing how fast the vocabulary of the robot is growing) and study the machinery in the vault. Now that Dihn Ruuu feels released from its orders by the disappearance of the High Ones’ star, and is about to abandon the vault, we have free access to all the gadgetry. Most of it is communications equipment, we now know — not too different in principle, I gather, from our radio setup — but there’s also a lot of weaponry. Dihn Ruuu is disarming it now. The robot claims that one small snub-nosed tube sticking out of the side wall is capable of blowing up a sun at a distance of three light-years. We haven’t asked for a demonstration. The other stuff includes the High Ones’ equivalent of computer banks — more bits of data recorded on one electron than we get into a whole long protein chain — and some kind of energy accumulator that works off starlight and keeps this whole array powered.
We’re just a little worried about the impact of all these wondrous things on the technology of twenty-fourth-century Earth, Thhh, Calamor, Dinamon, and Shilamak. Are we ready for such a horde of High Ones marvels? Assuming that we can learn to use one one-thousandth of what we’ve found in this vault alone, we’re in for a third Industrial Revolution that may transform society more radically than the steam engine did in the eighteenth century and the computer in the twentieth.
As I say, we worry. But it’s not up to us to make the decision; as scientists we have no right to suppress this find. We’re not administrators; we’re archaeologists. We discovered this vault, but we have no responsibility for the later use or misuse of its contents.