"Well, I don't know," said Rollo. "I don't know about such things."

"I do," said Cushing. "Back at the university, I read about the moon shots and the Mars shots and all the other shots. There were a number of articles and books that told how it was done, and it was not done from atop a hill."

"The Trees," said Rollo. "Someone put the Trees around the butte-all around the butte-to protect whatever may be here. Maybe before the Time of Trouble, the people got up in arms against going to the stars."

"That might have been so," said Cushing. "Protection might have been needed in the last few hundred years or so before the world blew up, but they could have put the Trees around level ground just as well."

"Place of Going to the Stars or not," said Rollo, "there is something here, something protected by the Trees."

"Yes, I suppose you're right. But it was the Place of Stars I wanted."

"The thing that bothers me is why they passed us through. The Trees, I mean. They could have kept us Out. The rocks were out there waiting. All the Trees would have had to do was give the word, and the rocks would have moved in and flattened us."

"I've wondered, too. But I'm glad they let us in."

"Because they wanted to let us in. Because they decided it was best to let us in. Not just because they could see no harm in us, but because they wanted us, almost as if they had been waiting all these years for us. Cushing, what did they see in us?"

"Damned if I know," said Cushing. "Come on. I'm going back to camp.

Ezra was huddled close to the fire, fast asleep and snoring. Meg sat beside the fire, wrapped in a blanket against the chill of night. Andy stood a little distance off, hip-shot, head drooping, slack-kneed. Across the fire from Meg, Elayne sat bolt upright, feet tucked under her, hands folded in her lap, her face a blank, eyes fixed on nothing.

"So you're back," said Meg. "See anything, laddie boy?"

"Not a thing," said Cushing. He sat down beside her.

"Hungry? I could cook a slice of venison. Might as well eat it while we can. Another day and it won't be fit to eat."

"I'll get something tomorrow," said Cushing. "There must be deer about."

"I saw a small herd in a break to the west," said Rollo.

"Do you want me to cook up a slice?" asked Meg.

Cushing shook his head. "I'm not hungry."

"Tomorrow we'll climb the hill. You have any idea what we'll find up there?"

"The wardens said there are buildings," Rollo said. "Where the Sleepers sleep."

"We can forget about the Sleepers," Cushing told him. "It's an old wives' tale."

"The wardens built their life upon it," said Rollo. "You'd think it would have to be more than that. Some slight evidence."

"Entire bodies of religion have been built on less," said Cushing.

He picked up a stick of firewood, leaned forward to push the brands of the campfire together. The blaze flared up momentarily and the flare of its light flashed on something that hung in the air just beyond the fire and a short distance above their heads. Cushing reared back in astonishment, the stick of firewood still clutched in his fist.

The thing was cylindrical, three feet long, a foot and a half thick, a fat, stubby torpedo hanging in the air, hanging effortlessly, without wobbling, without any sound, with no ticking or humming that might indicate a mechanism designed to hold it in its place. Along its entire surface, not placed at regular intervals but scattered here and there, were what seemed to be little crystal eyes that glittered in the feeble firelight. The cylinder itself was metal, or seemed to be metal: it had a dull metallic sheen except for the brilliance of the shining eye spots.

"Rollo," said Cushing, "it's a relative of yours."

"I agree," said Rollo, "that it has a robotic look about it, but cross my heart and hope to die, I've never seen one like it."

And here they were, thought Cushing, sitting here and talking about it, being matter-of-fact about it, while by any rule of commonsense they should be frozen stiff with fear. Although, outrageous as it might be, there was no fearsomeness in it, no menace nor any hint of menace, just a fat, roly-poly clown hanging in the air. Looking at it, for a moment he seemed to conjure up a face, a fatuous, vacantly grinning, impish face that was there one moment, gone the next. There never had been any face, he knew; the face that he had seen was the kind of face that should go with the tubby cylinder suspended in the air.

Ezra mumbled in his sleep, gulping, and turned over, then went back to snoring. Elayne sat stark upright; she had not seen the cylinder, or, seeing it, had not deigned to notice it.

"Can you sense it, Meg?" asked Cushing.

"A nothingness, laddie boy," she said, "a cluttered nothingness, disorderly, chaotic, uncertain of itself, friendly, eager, like a homeless dog looking for a home.

"Human?"

"What do you mean, human? It's not human."

"Human. Like us. Not alien. Not strange."

It spoke to them, its words clipped, metallic. There were no moving mouth parts, no indication of where the words came from;—but there was no doubt that it was the tubby hanger-in the-air that spoke to them.

"There was a purple liquid," it said. "Not water. Liquid. Heavier than water. Thicker than water. It lay in hollows and then it humped up and flowed across the land. it was a scarlet, sandy land and strange things grew in the scarlet land, barrel-like things and tub like things and ball-like things, but big. Many times bigger than myself. With spines and needles in them that they could see and smell and hear with. And talk, but I can't remember what they said. There is so much that I cannot remember, that I knew at one time and no longer know. They welcomed the purple liquid that rolled across the land, uphill and downhill—it could go anywhere. It rolled in long waves across the scarlet sand and the barrel-like things and the other things welcomed it with song. Thanksgiving, glad the purple came. Although, why glad, I do not remember. It is hard to think why they should welcome it, for when it passed over living things, they died. Their spines and needles all hung limp and they could no longer talk and they caved in upon themselves and lay stinking in the sun. There was a great red sun that filled half the sky and one could look straight into it, for it was not a hot sun, not a bright sun. The purple flowed across the land, then rested in hollows and the barrel-things and the other things it had not yet passed over sang softly to it, inviting it to come.

Another voice said, louder than the first, trying to blot out the other, "The stars went round and round, the green star and the blue star, and they moved so fast they were not balls of fire but streaks of fire, and rising in that point in space they circled was a cloud that was alive, taking its energy from the two revolving stars, and I wondered if the stars had been this way always or if the cloud that looked to be all sparkle had made the suns go round and round, the cloud telling the two suns what to do and..

And yet another voice: Darkness, and in the darkness a seething that lived upon the darkness and could not abide the light, that took the feeble light I threw at it and ate it, draining the batteries so there was no longer any light, so that I, powerless, fell into the darkness and the seething closed upon me.

Still another voice: "A purpleness that entrapped me, that took me in and held me and made me a part of it and told me things of long ago, before the universe began

"My God," screamed Meg, "they are all around us!"

And they were. The air seemed full of them, a flock of tubby cylinders that hung above them in the firelight and beyond the firelight, all of them jabbering, each trying to outdo the others.

".. 1 could not talk with them, there was no way to talk with them; they did not think or act or see or hear or feel like me; there was nothing that I had that they had, nothing they had I had… It had one body only, a hideous, terrible body that I cannot describe because my senses and my mind rejected the very horridness of it, that I could not describe even had I not rejected it; but one thing I knew, that it had many minds and these minds conversed with one another and they all talked at me and held me in great pity that I had but one mind…. They were machines but not machines as we are machines, as I am a machine; they were living metals and sentient plastics and they had a spirit that… I was an ant and they did not notice me, they had no idea I was there and I lay there in my antdom and listened to them, experiencing some of what they experienced, not all of it, by any means, for I did not have the knowledge nor the perceptions; like gods they were, and I as dust beneath their feet, although I do not know if they had feet, and I loved them and was terrified by them, both at once…. There was this cancer that spread from world to world, that ate everything it touched, and a voice came out of it and told me, ‘Behold us, we are life. … There was a people; I don't know if I should call them people, but they had all the time there was, creatures to which time meant nothing, for they had conquered time, or maybe only understood it, and had no longer any fear of its tyranny; and they were miserable, for having obliterated it, they had found that they needed time and had tried to get it back, but could not since they had murdered it… ‘I am an exterminator, it told me. ‘I wipe Out life that has no right to be; I wipe clean the worlds that got started wrong, that had no right to be. What would you think if I exterminated you? … There was this race of laughers, laughing in their minds; all they could do was laugh, it was their one reaction to anything at all, although it was a different kind of laughter than I had ever known and there was really not that much for them to laugh about