Part 2

Ernest spoke again to the man. Listening to his reply, he found it difficult to think of him as non-human. There was a sadness, a fatalism, in his eyes, yet a dignity that came only with humanity. Only a hairline separated these two from mankind.

The impatience of the others made Ernest interrupt, so he could give them a resumé.

"As I said, they're the last. They survived only because they'd made a pilgrimage to a kind of underground shrine. The signals that killed the others didn't reach them through the layers of rock. Apparently the shrine had something to do with a planned revolt against the electronic law that governed them.

"It was an insidious law," Ernest went on, "with built-in enforcement. Any infraction could be punished instantly from central control in the palace. The infraction would trigger a shock wave, tuned to the individual frequency of the offender. The intensity of the wave was geared to the seriousness of the offense. Treason meant death from the strongest wave of all--the one that turned them to dust."

"Absolute rule," Doc said. "Pretty hopeless."

"Yes, in one way. But paradoxically they had an infinite amount of freedom of speech. You see that in their verses. No one was punished for what he said--only for what he did. I suppose it had to be that way, otherwise there'd have been wholesale slaughter."

"Which there was, at the end," Doc pointed out. "Who do you think exercised the control that killed all the others?"

"We did," Ernest said. "We killed them."

* * * * *

"We killed them?" Doc said. "You're crazy!"

"You'd better explain yourself, Hotaling," the skipper said. "Stop talking in riddles."

"Aye, aye, sir. When I say we killed them, I don't mean directly or deliberately. And of course I don't mean killed, since they were all androids. But we de-activated them by triggering some mechanism when our ship came to the planetoid their masters had left."

"Hold on," the skipper said. "Now you're going too fast. Since they were androids, and were created, the important thing is to find out where these creators went--and whether it was last month or ten thousand years ago."

Ernest spoke to the couple.

"It was a long time before we came," he translated. "They don't know how long--their feeling of time is vague. They kept no records of their own and because there were no children they have no conception of generations. They were created adults, in various stages of maturity. As for who the others were--they were the Masters, with a capital M; gods, almost, in their view, with absolute power over them."

"Where did they go?" the skipper asked. "And why? Let's try to get more facts and less philosophy."

"They went looking for a better world, where conditions for life would be more favorable. Whether that means for the Masters or for their creations isn't clear. Nobody consulted them. They'd been given experimental life, only it was more a loan than a gift, to be foreclosed if they displeased the Masters or in any way threatened their experiment.

"The Masters were like themselves in appearance. Whether they were air breathers isn't clear because these two have no conception of what breathing is. The Masters did wear elaborate costumes but whether these were breathing suits or merely the trappings of their superiority is a question.

"I asked if the Masters were trying to create a new set of bodies for themselves, possibly because their own were breaking down or were diseased. The answer to that, like the answer to so many other questions, is that they simply don't know."

There was a commotion at the doorway. The soldier on guard there made a futile grab at something. The something was the puppet-like creature Ernest had named Andy, which evaded him and ran into the room. It jumped lightly to the table, faced the old couple and pointed both its arms at them.

Their expressions, as they regarded the puppet, were of sorrowful resignation. The man clasped the woman's hand.

The puppet spoke, in a brief piercing hum. There was an instant of quiet, then the dullest of popping sounds. The couple, who one second had seemed as alive as any of the Earthmen, the next second were little mounds of gray powder on the chairs and under the chairs.

The lieutenant burst in, followed by the sergeant. "The Andy doll got out of the cage!" he cried. "Did it come in here?"

"Did it come in here?" the skipper mimicked. "Get out, lieutenant, and take your comic-opera soldiers with you." To the technicians at the table he yelled: "Grab that obscene thing!"

The doll, grabbed from several directions, was torn apart, spilling out a reddish-brown spongelike substance.

Something else came out, too: a perforated disk the size of a fist. Rosco retrieved it as it rolled along the table, then quickly dropped it in an ash tray.

"The damn thing's hot," he said.

Doc Braddon, still looking stunned, asked Ernest: "What did the doll say to them before it destroyed them?"

"It was a sort of law-enforcing robot. They told me about it. A kind of custodian the Masters left behind to keep things in line." Ernest stared dully at the empty chairs.

"It said:

"_You hid, and I Now bid you die!_"

Rosco toyed with the ash tray in which he'd put the disk. "There's a clue to the Masters right in this gadget," he said. "Maybe it's simply a servo-mechanism that was set once and has been functioning automatically ever since. But on the other hand it may still be linked directly to the Masters."

"Good point," the skipper said. "Give it a run-through for what it's worth. If it does give us a line on where they got to, I'll ask the Flagship for permission to track them down."

Doc Braddon said to Ernest: "You said the Masters were godlike. You're not implying anything supernatural?"

"No. That was the androids' view, not mine. As a race of almost-people created in a laboratory they naturally held their creators in a certain awe. They hoped for liberation, and even tried to do something about it; but they knew it was futile. The Masters built them so they'd turn to dust if they misbehaved and when they left they fixed it so the vibrations of any spaceship other than their own would do the same thing--presumably so their creations wouldn't fall into other hands. The sad thing is that the almost-people knew it. One of their verses went:

"_If comes the ship to make us free, It killeth you, it killeth me._"

"Do you mean we could have saved them if we'd come in with engines silent?" the skipper asked.

"I don't know," Ernest said. "They certainly didn't think much of their potential. There's a fatalism, a sense of thwarted destiny running all through their literature. Their hope died on the vine, so to speak. If you can stand one more of their verses, this one might sum up their philosophy:

"_This they give to us they make: They give us thirst, deny the slake._"

* * * * *

The skipper was silent for a time, staring down at the little mounds of gray dust.

Then he said to his technicians:

"You've done a good job, all of you. We'll send a coordinated report to the Flagship tomorrow and stand by for orders. In the meantime, if there's anyone here with an honest physical thirst, I'd be glad to have him join me in slaking it in my cabin. No offense implied, Ernest."

"None taken, sir."