“I injected a fast-drying glue between the break,” the thing said. “What’s so astounding about that?”
“Well then,” Simon said, “why are you able to speak English? Has some other Earthman been here?”
“Some of us learned English when we found out you were coming.”
“How’d you find out?” Simon said.
“The information was on the computer tapes,” the thing said. “It’d been there for a few billion years, but we didn’t know about it until Bingo told us a few days ago.”
Bingo, it seemed, was the head Clerun-Gowph. He had gotten his position by right of seniority.
“After all,” the attendant said casually, “he’s almost as old as the universe. By the way, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Gviirl.”
“It’s too bad the reception was spoiled by the accident,” Simon said.
“It wasn’t any accident,” Gviirl said. “At least, not from our point of view.”
“You mean you knew I was going to crash?” Simon said, goggling.
“Oh, yes.”
“Then why didn’t you do something to prevent it?”
“Well,” Gviirl said, “we didn’t know just when your drive would quit. Bingo did, but he wouldn’t tell us. He said it’d take all the fun out of it. So you had a lot of money on you. I got odds of four to one that you’d crash from about twenty feet. I really cashed in.”
“Son of a bitch!” Simon said. “Oh, I don’t mean you!” he said. “That’s just an Earth exclamation. But how come you, the most advanced race in the universe, indulge in such a primitive entertainment as gambling?”
“It helps pass the time,” Gviirl said.
Simon was silent for a while. Gviirl handed him a glass of foaming golden liquid. Simon drank it and said, “That’s the best beer I’ve ever tasted.”
“Of course,” Gviirl said.
Simon became aware then that Anubis and Athena were hiding under the bed. He didn’t blame them, though they should have been used to monstrous-looking creatures by then. Gviirl was as big as an African elephant. She had four legs as thick as an elephant’s to support her enormous weight. The arms, ending in six-fingered hands, must once have been legs in an earlier stage of evolution. Her head was big and high-domed, containing, she said, a brain twice as large as Simon’s. She was too heavy to fly, of course, but she had vestigial wings. These were a pretty lavender color edged with scarlet. Her body was contained in an exoskeleton, a hard chitinous shell striped like a zebra’s. This had an opening underneath to give her lungs room to expand. Simon asked her why she was able to speak such excellent English. She didn’t have the oral cavity of a human, so her pronunciation should have been weird, to say the least.
“Old Bingo fitted me with a device which converts my pronunciation into English sounds,” she said. “Any more questions?”
“Yes, why did my drive fail?”
“That scream you heard?” she said. “That was the last of the stars expiring in a death agony.”
“You mean?” Simon said, stunned.
“Yes. You barely made it in time. The suns in the transdimensional universes have been sucked dry of their energies. There isn’t any more power for the 69X drive.”
“I’m stuck here!”
“Afraid so. There will be no more interstellar travel for you or anyone else, for that matter.”
“I won’t mind if I can get the answer to my question,” Simon said.
“No sweat,” Gviirl replied. “Speaking of which, I suggest you take about three showers a day. You humans don’t smell very good, you know.”
Gviirl wasn’t being nasty. She was just stating a fact. She was condescending but in a kindly way. After all, she was a million years old and couldn’t be expected to treat Simon as any other than a somewhat retarded child. Simon didn’t resent this attitude, but he was glad that he had Anubis and Athena around. They not only kept him from feeling utterly alone, they gave him someone to look down on, too.
Gviirl took Simon on a tour. He visited the museums, the library, and the waterworks and had lunch with some minor dignitaries.
“How’d you like it?” Gviirl said afterward.
“Very impressive,” he said.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “you’ll meet Bingo. He’s dying, but he’s granted you an audience.”
“Do you think he’ll have the answer to my question?” Simon said breathlessly.
“If anyone can answer you, he can,” she said. “He’s the only survivor of the first creatures created by It, you know.”
The Clerun-Gowph called the Creator It because the Creator had no sex, of course.
“He walked and he talked with It?” Simon said. “Then surely he’s the one I’ve been looking for!”
The next morning, after breakfast and a shower, Simon followed Gviirl through the streets to the Great House. Anubis and Athena had refused to come out from under the bed despite all his coaxing. He supposed that they, being psychic, felt the presence of the numinous. It was to be presumed some of it must have rubbed off onto Bingo during his long association with the Creator. Simon didn’t blame them for being frightened. He was scared too.
The Great House was on top of a hill. It was the oldest building in the universe and looked it.
“It lived there while It was getting the Clerun-Gowph started,” Gviirl said.
“And where is It now?” Simon said.
“It went out to lunch one day and never came back,” she said. “You’ll have to ask old Bingo why.”
She led him up the steps and onto a vast porch and into halls that stretched for miles and had ceilings half a mile high. Bingo, however, was in a cozy little room with thick rugs and a blazing fireplace. He was crouching on a mass of rugs around which giant pillows were piled. By him was a pitcher of beer and a big framed photograph.
Bingo was a hoary old cockroachoid who seemed to be asleep at the moment. Simon took advantage of this to look at the photograph. It was a picture of a blue cloud.
“What does that writing under it say?” he asked Gviirl.
“To Bingo With Best Wishes From It.”
Gviirl coughed loudly several times, and after a while Bingo’s eyelids fluttered open.
“The Earthling, Your Ancientship,” Gviirl said.
“Ah, yes, the little creature from far off with some questions,” Bingo said. “Well, son, sit down. Make yourself at home. Have a beer.”
“Thank you, Your Ancientship,” Simon said. “I’ll have a beer, but I prefer to stand.”
Bingo gave a laugh which degenerated into a coughing fit. After he’d recovered, he drank some beer. Then he said, “It took you three thousand years to get here so you could transact a few minutes of business. I admire that, little one-eyeling. As a matter of fact, that’s what’s been keeping me alive. I’ve been hanging on just for this interview.”
“That’s very gratifying, Your Ancientship,” Simon said. “First, though, before I ask the primal question, I’d like to clear up a few of the secondary. Gviirl tells me that It created the Clerun-Gowph. But all life elsewhere in the universe was created by you people.”
“Gviirl’s a young thing and so tends to use imprecise language,” Bingo said. “She shouldn’t have said we created life. She should have said we were responsible for life existing elsewhere.”
“And how’s that?” Simon said.
“Well, many billions of years ago we started to make a scientific survey of every planet in the world. We sent out scouting expeditions first. These didn’t find any sign of life anywhere. But we were interested in geochemistry and all that kind of stuff, you know. So we sent out scientific expeditions. These built bases, the towers that you no doubt have run into. The teams stayed on these planets a long time—from your ephemeral viewpoint, anyway. They dumped their garbage and their excrement in the soupy primeval seas near the towers. These contained microbes and viruses which flourished in the seas. They started to evolve into higher creatures, and so the scientists hung around to observe their development.”