The atmosphere of McBurney IV tested out as breathable, maybe, but risky on account of a heavy carbon dioxide concentration and some whiffs of something hexafluoride. So we went outside in breathing-suits, with Dihn Ruuu leading the way. The gravity was a bit more than Earthnorm; the weather was hot.
A dozen robots of Dihn Ruuu’s general shape greeted us. Clustered about us, like vast walking statues. Peered at us, sniffed us, touched us. Communicated with one another about us, via an audio channel we could not pick up.
“What are they saying?” I asked Dihn Ruuu. “Do the Mirt Korp Ahm still occupy this planet?”
“I have not yet been able to obtain information on that subject,” said the robot.
“Why are they so excited, then?”
“They have never seen protoplasmic life before,” Dihn Ruuu replied. “These are machines that were created by other machines. They are captured by you.”
“Captivated,” I corrected.
Dihn Ruuu didn’t acknowledge the correction. Our robot had hooked itself into the conversation and had ceased to take notice of us. For perhaps five minutes the delegation of metal beings conferred earnestly. Pilazinool seemed to be getting more than his share of attention; I realized finally that the High Ones robots thought that he was our robot, since so much of his body was nonorganic, and they were trying to draw him into the discussion. Dihn Ruuu explained, I think.
Vehicles appeared. Six long, slim aircars made of green plastic came whistling down, and from their bellies descended metal scoops, onto which we moved at the instructions of Dihn Ruuu. Up we went, into the aircars, and away, flying at a height of perhaps a hundred meters. To the city.
The city was everywhere. Once we were beyond the concentric rings of the spaceport and its intricate landing devices, we were in the city. It resembled in general look the High Ones cities we had seen on our globe, but in actual point of detail there were very few correspondences at all. The buildings did not dangle; each was firmly rooted, although there were so many levels that we had difficulty tracing any one row of buildings through the maze. The design of each building was different from those we had seen earlier; these were sleek pyramid-shaped structures, mostly, whose surfaces glowed with a soft inner light. I saw no windows.
We were taken to a particularly large pyramid and left by ourselves in a spherical room of colossal size. Little blobs of golden light drifted freely near the ceiling. Abstract decorative patterns, red streaks and purple dots and blue spirals, rotated dizzyingly in panels on the walls. There was nothing to sit on except the floor, which was carpeted in something soft and spongy and seemingly alive, for it wriggled and writhed whenever someone put his weight on it. All the robots left us. Including Dihn Ruuu, our one link to the real universe, our guide, our interpreter.
Two hours passed, and then two hours more.
We hardly spoke. We sat or stood or sprawled around the great room, puzzled, ill at ease, off guard, baffled into a state of total spinlessness. This episode had taken on all the qualities of a dream: our floating descent, the jostling and pinching given us by the towering robots, our inability to communicate with anyone, the eerie silence, the strangeness of the city, the unreality of this bare cavernous room in which we now found ourselves… prisoners.
Conversation, such as it was, tended to be made up mostly of phrases like:
“Where are we?”
“What does it all mean?”
“How long will they keep us here?”
“Where are the High Ones?”
“Are there any High Ones?”
“Why doesn’t Dihn Ruuu come back?”
“Whose pocket are we in?”
“What’s the whole giboo about?”
Since we had no answers to any of these questions, conversations that began with them tended to be rather brief. By the end of the second hour we had exhausted most immediate themes of this sort and had lapsed into silence all around. Mirrik and Kelly, as usual, were fairly cheerful; Dr. Horkkk sat by himself in a kind of black meditation, all his legs tightly crossed; Pilazinool unscrewed limbs; Dr. Schein wore a frown that deepened and deepened, as though he were having a great many second thoughts all at once; Leroy Chang skulked; Saul Shahmoon seemed to be asleep, possibly dreaming about the postage stamps of Mc-Burney IV; Nick Ludwig paced like a caged beast; Jan and I sat close together, and occasionally one of us flashed a quick nervous grin at the other. We tried not to show our fear; but, after all, this was no dream.
In the third hour we began to wonder when, if ever, the robots planned to let us out. Or feed us. We had a couple of days’ supply of food tablets, but for all we knew we’d be left here two or three months before anyone considered our needs. We had hardly any supply of water. There weren’t any hygienic facilities in here either.
It was the longest afternoon of my life, I think. Here we were in the midst of an incredible city of an ancient civilization — and unable to see a thing, unsure of what was in store.
Finally a place in the wall below one of the stripe-and-dot panels began to swell and pucker; it popped open and Dihn Ruuu stepped through. I could see a couple of the other robots lurking just beyond the opening. Dihn Ruuu moved slowly to the center of the room and swiveled to scan us all.
“The Mirt Korp Ahm,” the robot announced solemnly, “no longer inhabit the present planet. I have learned that this outpost was abandoned by them 84,005,675 years ago, and is currently occupied only by the Dihn Ruuu, that is to say, the Machines To Serve.”
The calm words, delivered in that weird metallic imitation of my own voice, hit us with tremendous impact.
We weren’t amazed to find that there were no High Ones here, just a population of self-sufficient, virtually immortal robots. But to learn that the High Ones had abandoned McBurney IV only some eighty-four million years ago — !
Funny how your perspective changes. On Earth eighty-four million years ago the dinosaurs still went stumbling around, and the only mammals that existed were little ratty things with long noses and sharp teeth. Nor had intelligent life evolved on any of the other planets of our galaxy that currently have it, such as Shilamak, Dinamon, or Thhh. So by any human perspective, eighty-four million years ago is pre-pre-pre-pre-historic.
Yet I said only eighty-four million years. And I wasn’t jesting.
Up to this point all archaeological evidence had indicated, as I’m sure I’ve told you, that the High Ones had mysteriously disappeared from our galaxy 850 million years ago. No trace of them more recent than that had ever been found. On that scale, eighty-four million years ago was practically last week. With one brief statement Dihn Ruuu had lopped away 90 percent of the time-span since the vanishing of the High Ones.
The implications of the robot’s statement staggered us. Seemingly we would have to rethink our entire outlook on the High Ones and their place in the sequence of time. A dozen questions jiggled my brain at once, and it must have been the same for everyone else. But before we could get anything out, Dihn Ruuu iced us on all wavelengths with a far more sposhing statement.