They had reached the house. C’mell paused:

“Remember, we are the servants of the Lady Frances Oh. She promised Jestocost that she would order us to do anything that I asked her to. So she’s going to order us to have a good, hearty breakfast. Then she is going to order us to look for something far under the surface of Earthport.”

“She is? But why—”

“No questions, Rod.” The smile she gave him would have melted a monument. He felt well. He was amused and pleased by the physical delight of hiering and spieking with the occasional true people who passed by. (Some underpeople could hier and spiek but they tried to conceal it, for fear that they would be resented.) He felt strong. Losing C’mell was a sad thing to do, but it was a whole day off; he began dreaming of things that he could do for her when they parted. Buying her the services of thousands of people for the rest of her life? Giving her jewelry which would be the envy of Earth mankind? Leasing her a private planoform yacht? He suspected these might not be legal, but they were pleasant to think about.

Three hours later, he had no time for pleasant thoughts. He was bone-weary again. They had flown into Earthport city “on the orders” of their hostess, the Lady Oh, and they had started going down. Forty-five minutes of dropping had made his stomach very queasy. He felt the air go warm and stale and he wished desperately that he had not given up his sense of smell.

Where the dropshafts ended, the tunnels and the elevators began.

Down they went, where incredibly old machinery spun slowly in a spray of oil, performing tasks which only the wildest mind could guess at.

In one room, C’mell had stopped and had shouted at him over the noise of engines:

“That’s a pump.”

It did not look obvious. Huge turbines moved wearily. They seemed to be hooked up to an enormous steam engine powered by nuclear fuel. Five or six brightly polished robots eyed them suspiciously as they walked around the machine, which was at least eighty meters long by forty-five high.

“And come here…” shouted C’mell.

They went into another room, empty and clean and quiet except for a rigid column of moving water which shot from floor to ceiling with no evidence of machinery at all. An underman, sloppily formed from a rat body, got up from his rocking chair when they entered. He bowed to C’mell as though she were a great lady but she waved him back to his chair.

She took Rod near the column of water and pointed to a shiny ring on the floor.

“That’s the other pump. They do the same amount of work.”

“What is it?” he shouted.

“Force-field, I guess. I’m not an engineer.” They went on.

In a quieter corridor she explained that the pumps were both of them for the service of weather control. The old one had been running six or seven thousand years, and showed very little wear. When people had needed a supplementary one, they had simply printed it on plastic, set it in the floor, and turned it on with a few amps. The underman was there just to make sure that nothing broke down or went critical.

“Can’t real people design things any more?” asked Rod.

“Only if they want to. Making them want to do things is the hard part now.”

“You mean, they don’t want to do anything?”

“Not exactly,” said C’mell, “but they find that we are better than they are at almost anything. Real work, that is, not statesmanship like running the Instrumentality and the Earth government. Here and there a real human being gets to work, and there are always offworlders like you to stimulate them and challenge them with new problems. But they used to have secure lives of four hundred years, a common language, and a standard conditioning. They were dying off, just by being too perfect. One way to get better would have been to kill off us underpeople, but they couldn’t do that all the way. There was too much messy work to be done that you couldn’t count on robots for. Even the best robot, if he’s a computer linked to the mind of a mouse, will do fine routine, but unless he has a very complete human education, he’s going to make some wild judgments which won’t suit what people want. So they need underpeople. I’m still cat underneath it all, but even the cats which are unchanged are pretty close relatives of human beings. They make the same basic choices between power and beauty, between survival and self-sacrifice, between common sense and high courage. So the Lady Alice More worked out this plan for the Rediscovery of Man. Set up Ancient Nations, give everybody an extra culture besides the old one based on the Old Common Tongue, let them get mad at each other, restore some disease, some danger, some accidents, but average it out so that nothing is really changed.”

They had come to a storeroom, the sheer size of which made Rod blink. The great reception hall at the top of Earthport had astounded him; this room was twice the size. The room was filled with extremely ancient cargoes which had not even been unpacked from their containers. Rod could see that some were marked outbound for worlds which no longer existed, or which had changed their names; others were inbound, but no one had unpacked them for five thousand years and more.

“What’s all this stuff?”

“Shipping. Technological change. Somebody wrote it all off the computers, so they didn’t have to think of it any more. This is the thing which underpeople and robots are searching, to supply the ancient artifacts for the Rediscovery of Man. One of our boys-rat stock, with a human I.Q. of 300 — found something marked Muse National. It was the whole National Museum of the Republic of Mali, which had been put inside a mountain when the ancient wars became severe. Mali apparently was not a very important ‘nation,’ as they called those groupings, but it had the same language as France, and we were able to supply the real material with almost everything they needed to restore some kind of a French civilization. China has been hard. The Chinesians survived longer than any other nation, and they did their own grave robbing, so that we have found it impossible to reconstruct China before the age of space. We can’t modify people into being Ancient Chinese.”

Rod stopped, thunderstruck. “Can I talk to you here?”

C’mell listened with a faraway look on her face. “Not here. I feel the very weak sweep of a monitor across my mind now and then. In a couple of minutes you can. Let’s hurry along.”

“I just thought,” cried Rod, “of the most important question in all the worlds!”

“Stop thinking it, then,” said C’mell, “until we come to a safe place.”…

Instead of going straight on through the big aisle between the forgotten crates and packages, she squeezed between two crates and made her way to the edge of the big underground storeroom.

“That package,” she said, “is stroon. They lost it. We could help ourselves to it if we wanted to, but we’re afraid of it.”

Rod looked at the names on the package. It had been shipped by Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan XXVI to Adaminaby Port and reconsigned to Earthport. “That’s one hundred and twenty-five generations ago, shipped from the Station of Doom. My farm. I think it turns poison if you leave it for more than two hundred years. Our own military people have some horrible uses for it, when invaders show up, but ordinary Norstrilians, when they find old stroon, always turn it in to the Commonwealth. We’re afraid of it. Not that we often lose it. It’s too valuable and we’re too greedy, with a twenty million percent import duty on everything…”

C’mell led on. They unexpectedly passed a tiny robot, a lamp fixed to his head, who was seated between two enormous piles of books. He was apparently reading them one by one, because he had beside him a pile of notes larger in bulk than he was. He did not look up, nor did they interrupt him.