Some were statues of human beings. Others were of bipeds of some kind, and some were of quadrupeds.
That one there"—she fixed her light on it—"was a bird. You can see that those projections were once wings."
Sloosh started to buzz but changed his mind.
The Shemibob spoke with a note of exasperation. "Those were statues carved from granite. But they are eroded. Yet there have been no winds in there. The air, I'm sure, doesn't even move. Or, if it does, very slowly. And I'll wager that there has been no change of temperature or humidity in there since The
House was built.
"But the hard granite has decayed and has eroded as if it had been subject to eons of exposure to sun, wind, sand, and extremes of heat and cold.
"Now can you see how old this House is?"
They were awe-struck.
The Shemibob had brought along another device from her bag. She unfolded it into a thing which looked like an egg that had been cut in half and the cut part sealed over with a silvery screen. A tripod folded from the artifact. She put the three legs down against the window with the round end of the egg pointing downward. The discs on the ends of the legs stuck to the transparent material.
She turned a little dial on the side. On the flat end of the device a picture appeared. She adjusted the dial, and the objects in the center of the room became large and bright.
There was a huge block of dark material, the same unchanging stuff of which The House was made.
Twelve steps up it led to a large chair, also of the same material. It had a high back and arms covered with designs. Deyv could not see them clearly because of the angle and also because the arms of the being in the chair partly covered them.
The man sat stiffly, upright, unmoving, staring straight ahead.
Deyv had a creepy feeling that the man was looking into eternity. Perhaps into infinity.
He wore a cap of scarlet edged with white fur. Its long tasseled top lay behind his head against the back of the chair. Under it was a broad round face, red-nosed, red-cheeked, red-lipped. .The thick eyebrows were white, as was the long hair flowing from under the cap.
A long and thick white beard fell over a large round paunch to the belt-line. His jacket was scarlet, edged with white fur. His belt was wide and black. His pants were scarlet. His calf-length boots were scarlet with, white fur around the tops. On the third finger of his left hand was a simple gold ring.
"It certainly looks lifelike," Sloosh said. "It must be made of the same material as The House, though."
"I am not sure that it's just a statue," The Shemibob said.
Deyv felt like leaving at once. If he'd been alone, he might have. However, if that had been the case, he wouldn't have thought that it might be other than a figure made by the ancients.
"Why do you say that?" Sloosh asked.
"There's no dust on it Also ..."
She swung the device so that they could see the floor' in front of the block. There were footprints in the dust. They led away from and to the block.
"Let's get away from here!" the Yawtl said.
Nobody replied, but Deyv wondered if the others felt their skin prickling coldly, too.
The Shemibob moved the device so that they could see on its screen the thin slab towering behind the block. This bore a gigantic yellow arrow attached at one end to a knob in the center of the slab. In a circle around the arrow were very small characters evenly spaced. These startled Deyv and added to his unease. They were the same figures as those that flew through the sky. They were in the same order if the character at the top was to be the first and those that followed were read toward the right.
A little to the left and below the top character was a knob. The point of the arrow rested against the knob.
"Aha!" The Shemibob said loudly.
A moment later, Sloosh said, "I know what you mean."
Dew asked what they were talking about.
"The hand and the figures constitute a thrigz," Sloosh said. "Your language doesn't have a word for it.
It's a machine to tell the passage of time."
"Be still," the snake-centaur said. "I'm counting."
After a long while, she looked up from the screen.
"One thousand and fifty characters," she said. "Exactly the number of those that have appeared over the
Earth since I've been here and probably long, long before that. Exactly the number of strokes we heard.
These, I presume, came from the time-teller."
"And the hand has stopped," Sloosh said. "Does that mean that time itself ... no, that couldn't be."
"Earth's time is done," she said. "Practically done, anyway. What is a few hundred or even a few thousand more circlings of The Beast to the passage of time this instrument has registered?"
"Then," Sloosh said, "when the hand has passed from one figure to the next, twenty-one million years have passed?"
"Approximately."
"And this machine strikes each such passage?"
"I suppose so."
"But why? What is all this about?"
"That is the type of question which the humans sometimes have asked you. And you have told them that the questions are unanswerable. Therefore, foolish."
Sloosh said, "I am justly reprimanded. My apologies."
"We heard the final telling of the time. The flying figures have come home to roost forever." "Until the new universe is formed," Sloosh said.
Deyv did not understand this. The Shemibob, however, looked as if she comprehended it too well.
"The flying figures," the Yawtl said. "They must have come from someplace in the column. But you'll never be able to open it and see what mechanism makes them, sends them out around the world, pulls them back, shrinks them so they can enter the column. Even if you could, you still wouldn't be able to learn what they mean."
He seemed pleased by this. The Shemibob and the Archkerri might be higher beings, but they too could be mystified. In the presence of this eons-old enigma, they were as helpless as he.
The Shemibob said, "Some of the figures are letters which humans used in their writing from the beginning. That X, that T, that H, and that O, and others have always been used here. They are simple, naturally formed figures, so natural that they've been used on other worlds, including my native planet.
"But many of the characters are unfamiliar to me. And I believe they were unfamiliar to the great civilizations which saw them floating above in the sky when the Earth rotated more swiftly on its axis.
They probably had more success than I've had in interpreting the message. It must be a message, a spelling out of Earth's doom and, perhaps, the means for escaping the doom."
Sloosh said, "Perhaps. It would have been better if, instead of letters of some alphabet, the sender of the message had used moving pictures. These could have been understood by anyone."
"That does seem the logical thing to do," she said. "Perhaps the figures were designed as directions to
The House. Anybody could follow them to it. In which case, we should be able to see something that will enlighten us."
From somewhere in Deyv's mind a thought seeped out like water that had forced its way up through rock.
"Now I know what you meant when you said that the figures won't go out again until a new universe is formed!" he said. "But ... if the House and its occupant are waiting until then, wouldn't they—perhaps—
have come from an older universe to this one? I mean, couldn't they have survived the death of the universe that existed before ours? They passed unscathed through the fall of all matter and the formation of the giant fireball and its explosion and the formation of this universe? The House is made of something which will outlast the deaths of many worlds!"