Interesting. That she would go looking for me.

For strategic purposes I said, “Of course, those cubes haven’t all been for Lorie. I mean, you understand, not that I have any ties back on Earth of a formal kind, but there are a couple of girls who I think are interested in my adventures in the outer galaxy, and—”

“Certainly,” Jan said. “It’s thoughtful of you to keep them in mind when you’re so far away.”

Her tone was absolutely neutral. I detected no tinge of the jealousy that I was clumsily trying to arouse, and instantly I regretted the whole stupid adolescent ploy. Either Jan couldn’t care less about my supposed Earth-side amours (which of course I had invented on the spot, since the only letters I’m writing are to you) or else, even worse, she had seen through the maneuver and wasn’t awed by my pretensions to galactic playboy-hood. I wished she’d tell me about some lad far away who made her aorta palpitate, just by way of hurling back the challenge, but she didn’t even do that. Her cool brown Brolagonian eyes offered me no information whatever. I was dealing with a girl with a ten-generation heritage of professional diplomacy. The only secrets she gives away are those she wants to give away.

We picked up a new battery for the runabout and ran a couple of other errands in town. Then Jan inveigled an off-duty soldier to drive us out to the place where we had abandoned the runabout. Her technique was neat: she had me lurk in the background until the ride was arranged; then I stepped forward, and there wasn’t a thing her victim could do about it except look disgruntled. By way of consolation Jan sat snuggled up close to him in the front seat on the way out. I hope that gruntled him a little.

This is a very capable girl. In many ways.

For the past several days we’ve been getting a new sequence out of the globe. It must be an important one, because it recurs every few hours, and on occasion it has simultaneously been projected on two of the 60-degree segments into which the circular viewing field is usually divided. No other scene has so far appeared in duplicate that way.

It looks like a teaser sequence for a space-opera video show. This is how it goes:

First we see a wide-angle view of a galaxy, perhaps ours, with constellations strewn across a dark background. Camera pans back and forth to give us a dizzying view at least a thousand parsecs wide. Then we zoom forward for a close-up of one patch of sky. Supply the music yourself: a high screechy crescendo. Suspense! Now we see about ten stars: a binary, a red giant, a white dwarf, a couple of main-sequence yellow stars, two Class O and B blazers, the whole family straight out of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

We head toward the white dwarf, and now it is very clear that the camera is mounted in the nose of a star-ship on which we are the passengers. The music adds something low and ominous and throbbing, at about thirty cycles. Mystery! The white dwarf has five planets. It looks like we’re making for the fourth planet, which moves in an orbit pretty far away from number three. But no: there is a course correction and we turn our snout toward a region between the orbits of planets three and four.

Suddenly an asteroid emerges from nowhere and swims past our point of view from left to right. The music gives a sharp stab to underline the unexpectedness of it. The unknown! We realize that an asteroid belt lies between the third and fourth planets; the void is littered with all sorts of cosmic debris, just as it is between Mars and Jupiter. Remnants of a shattered planet, maybe. We are in orbit around a large, knobby asteroid whose jagged mountains gleam a dull pink in the faint light from the distant dwarf sun. We’re landing, now, on a broad pockmarked plain.

Shift of viewpoint. Camera is no longer in nose of ship; now it’s a couple of hundred meters away, looking at ship. Which is standing upright on its tail like any modern vessel, but otherwise is a thoroughly alien job. No visible sign of propulsion devices. No attempt at streamlining. The ship is squat, copper-colored, unattractive. Along its flanks are inscriptions in large High Ones hieroglyphics similar to those on the inscription nodes, except that here the lettering doesn’t shift around at random.

Hatches open high up on the ship. Cables emerge and dangle. High Ones descend to the ground.

They are wearing masks of some sort; obviously the atmosphere on this asteroid doesn’t agree with them, assuming there’s an atmosphere at all, which doesn’t look likely. They move about in their strange gliding way, now and then fluttering their arms in graceful signals to one another. About a dozen of them come from the ship. Then a hatch much lower on the ship’s side rolls open and a ramp juts forth. Down the ramp come six massive robots. They are built to the same four-arm-two-leg-domed-head design as the High Ones themselves, but there is no mistaking their artificial nature. Instead of eyes, they have a single glowing vision panel running entirely around the upper part of the head. Their arms have various mechanical attachments specialized for digging, grasping, etcetera. (408b has suggested that these six are simply High Ones surgically transformed into machines, as Shilamakka are today. But Pilazinool, who after all is a Shilamakka, doesn’t think so. It’s anybody’s guess. I think they’re robots.)

The High Ones contingent leads the robots, single file, across the plain to a low hill. A signal is given and abruptly the robot in front points an arm at the hill, and flame sprouts, and the rock begins to melt and run off in puddles. The robot keeps this laser attachment, or whatever it is, running until a goodly-sized cave has been carved in the hillside. Then the other robots move in, clearing away the debris, trimming things up. When they finish (five minutes later, in the globe’s version) there is a neat six-sided room within the hill. The camera tracks right inside to show the robots at work, gently melting the rock walls with gadgets mounted on their leftmost arms, to put a nice glaze over the surface. Then they install a heavy metal door on a colossal hinge. They carry an assortment of machinery into the room and arrange it along the back walls. Finally one of the robots sits down in the middle of the floor, and the door swings shut. They seal it, with the robot inside. Everybody returns to the ship. They get in, the robots going up the ramp, the High Ones hauled up on the cables.

The ship blasts off. End of sequence.

Why did the High Ones leave the robot marooned in the cave on that dismal asteroid? As punishment? That seems like a lot of trouble and bother. To watch for enemies? Why?

And why does the scene show up so often when we use the globe? That in itself shows that there was some special significance in building the rock vault and leaving the robot in it. But what?

Meanwhile we keep digging and have settled into a daily routine. Since my discovery of the globe nothing of special interest has come to light. Mirrik and Kelly are tireless, though. They chip away at the site, we clear it, Saul processes thousands of artifacts. On the basis of hieroglyphic styles, potassium-argon tests, and other evidence, he has now dated our site to 925,000,-000 years ago, with a probable error of 50,000,000 years in either direction. That’s a pretty big margin for error. I still like to think of the place as having been occupied a round billion years ago. There’s something boomy and majestic about the word “billion.” I say it with a good explosion on the b. I feel sorry for the poor archaeologist chaps who can claim only a pitiful few thousand years of antiquity for their sites.

Billion. Billion. One thousand million and seven years ago, the High Ones brought forth upon this planet —