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Gosseyn waited. It was a minor item, but interesting, implying that the machine was busy thinking even during off hours.

Dan Lyttle continued: “Maybe it was also phoning other night clerks; but I think not. Because, after you showed up for the Games, and it started evaluating your situation, and the meaning of the great armies that were arriving in the vicinity of earth, it used me as its outside ally in case of an emergency. So one day I went over, and that was when the machine gave me a duplicate it had made of itself.”

“That was the small transistorized plate you showed me?” Gosseyn asked.

“That’s it. Believe it or not, until you came along with your duplicate body, it had not thought of such a solution as a duplicate of itself.”

“Well—” Gosseyn was thoughtful—“that still doesn’t entirely explain you’re not going to Venus.”

“I became its special agent.” The eyes on the other side the restaurant table gazed at him earnestly. “You’ll have to admit that was a worthwhile status. As for the woman, after I became GS oriented I urged her to take the training. She did, and, after a while, I discovered that something inside her was beginning to adjust to her husband’s death; and that in fact a male acquaintance had suddenly noticed her, and had asked her to go out to dinner with him. Not too long after that, she stopped seeing me. But there was a change in her. She held herself differently, somehow.”

Gosseyn had no additional question, or comment. What he had heard gave him a new view of the late, great Games Machine. As for the woman, and her association with an hotel clerk—there had always been a human problem to solve in that area.

It had been observed that men normally preferred women who had a lot of outer appearance, and who, as a consequence, showed some kind of inner strength. Interesting that, perhaps, the inner strength was all that was needed.

He stopped. Because… inside him… an odd, tugging sensation had started suddenly.

He rose hastily to his feet. He said, “You take Enin back to the Institute.” By the time he finished those words, he had hastily taken out the Blayney billfold and tossed it on the table. “You pay for the dinner out of that.”

He was thinking: this time it was not the earlier spinning feeling but—

He wondered vaguely:… Tugging—to where?—

CHAPTER 21

On a planet of a sun in the Milky Way, a man named Neggen stood gazing down at a machine—a small, cigarshaped spaceship.

The spacecraft was below him in a natural hollow that was half garden and half smooth marble. It was a man-smoothed marble and a man-made garden, which provided a decorative setting for the little machine.

The man was thinking with a dark regret: “All these years, these millenia, that ship has been down there—and we didn’t realize what it was.”

And now, a message had come from a Gilbert Gosseyn on far Earth. It was a message authorized by the Galactic League, stating that many such craft would probably be findable, at least one each on tens of thousands of planets. The message had described exactly what he was looking at.

The accompanying photograph showed the interior of the ship, with its four containers. Two of these were large enough to hold, each, one male adult human. The other two were slightly smaller, and each was designed to hold a woman.

The details had been described in Gosseyn’s message, which concluded: “Advise at once if such a vessel has ever been found on your planet, and where it is now!”

So he had sent the information requested… and now here was the man himself, who had himself been shown in an accompanying photograph; except that now he was walking up the marble steps toward Neggen.

… What bothered Gosseyn Three a minute or so later, as he stood beside Neggen and gazed at the photographs, was a feeling of overwhelm. And even instant that now went by he had the strong conviction: he should have some purpose of his own.

But what?

Naturally, there was always an obvious goal in even situation: stay alive! However, that really led nowhere in terms of the specific situation he was in.

What bothered him most was the precision of awareness the Troogs were displaying. Somehow, they had become aware of how mankind had originally, perhaps as long ago as a million years, come from that other galaxy.

And they had used League authorization and his name in their attempt to locate one of these four-passenger spaceships. And, when a reply came, they had immediately had available a twenty-decimal method of their own to transport Gilbert Gosseyn Three to a location where neither he nor any other Gosseyn had ever been. Transport him at twenty-decimal speed from a restaurant near the Institute of General Semantics on Earth.

And the fact that he had arrived fully dressed indicated that they had taken note of what he had done with business man Gorrold’s jacket with a precision that did not simply derive from Gosseyn’s own mind. Because he himself had not yet taken his extra-brain photographs of this new suit of clothes.

When he had come up to the level of the man in the Roman toga-like garment, who stood at the top of the

steps, Gosseyn had had the thought: “Maybe just noticing how skilful they are is the only purpose I need right now.”

All the details might tell him something eventually.

Neggen said—in English: “What do you hope to gain from discovering such machines as this?”

As he heard the familiar language, Gosseyn was aware of a tiny purpose forming inside him. For later. Incredibly—again—these Troog must now know how they had learned English, because here they had utilized a method of transmitting it to someone else.

All by itself, during a later confrontation, that would enable him to Find out how 178,000 Dzan had automatically spoken English, the language of the sleeping Gosseyn body in the space capsule they had found in space… after the Dzan and their ship were mysteriously transported at twenty-decimal speed from their own galaxy a million light-years away.

… Should I leave? Should I return and pick up Erin?

And head for the Dzan battleship, and to whatever protection it could give?

“—What do you think, Alter?…”

It was a spontaneous question, with no advance thought about it; simply, acceptance that perhaps he should have some advice. What startled him, then, was that there was no reply; and, worse, no sensation of that other Gosseyn mind… out there.

It was not clear why the Troogs were taking the trouble to keep the two Gosseyns mentally disconnected in this situation. If it was another attempt to demonstrate their capability, that had already been established earlier; though—the thought came—not for such a long time.

His rapid speculation was interrupted. Footsteps. He turned, with Neggen. And saw that a woman, also dressed in a toga-like outfit, was approaching from a long, squat building visible through heavy brush in that direction. In terms of earth age she seemed about forty, which was also the age appearance of the man.

The woman stopped about ten feet away on the slightly higher level of steps at that point, and said something like:

“… N’ya dru hara tai, Neggen?” Her voice sounded troubled, and had a question in it.

The man’s voice widened. “Good God!” he said. “Rubri, what kind of gibberish is that?”

The shock waves of the interchange had also reverberated through Gosseyn. It required several moments to come to terms with his instant feeling of being somehow responsible for what had been done to these people. Addressing Neggen, he asked, “Your wife?”

The man nodded, but his face still had a critical look on it. “What’s the matter with her?”