“No living things at all?”
“Just machines.” Ken Star nodded.
“Such machines as those four robots we saw.”
“Mortal great machines!” gasped old Habibula.
“On their fearful scale of time and size, we’re less than any insect!”
“But still they are machines.”
Ken Star smiled bleakly at him.
“They are excellent machines.
They do what they were built to do, and that is all—I am quoting Giles.
He observed them.
He saw their function in their form.
That’s how we escaped alive—”
“I thought we had escaped.”
Old Habibula sat staring sadly at the empty bottle.
“Until we found we were still caught in this old game the robots play.”
“A game?”
Squeezing Lilith’s hand, I tried not to shiver.
“With robots?”
“I suppose they’ve been playing it, in different times and spaces, since our universe was born.
They make a crossing.
They prepare a base.
They signal for the fleet.
Of course it cannot come—except for those few hulks that are caught and drawn through by the forces of the nexus itself.”
“What happens then?”
Sitting hunched and tense and old, Ken Star peered at the screen.
“We’re waiting to find out,” he said.
“I hope the robots conclude that the invasion point was somehow unsuitable.
I hope they retreat, to try some other point—perhaps in some other universe.”
“Do you think they will?”
“The evidence hints that in the past they have.”
His gaunt head nodded.
“Hundreds of thousands of times, I imagine.
The mother machine is old enough itself—though time is almost stopped in the anomaly and those wrecked ships have been exposed to perhaps a billion-fold the time—
“Look at that!” His voice lifted sharply.
“Another spray of debris, I suppose, from the shot that hit this asteroid.”
The screen glowed again, with sparks and plumes of pale green fire. Born among the dim stars around that circle of darkness, they flowed into it, spilling over the lip of that dreadful funnel, flowing before us in a giddy torrent toward that midnight universe.
They lit the mother machine.
It looked bright and near, terribly huge and terribly strange.
Parts of it sprang out at me—jutting things that were not booms or planes or antennas or jets.
It was swiftly turning—swinging so that its seven fused spheres merged into one, so that their enclosing cage became three projecting tabs.
“It’s pointing straight at us!”
Alarmed, I turned to Ken Star.
“What does that mean?”
“We’ll soon know.”
Desperately, I swung to the chart on the opposite wall.
The green point of Nowhere Near was deep in the creature’s belly.
The machine was a bright red point.
They were creeping together.
“A collision course!” I gasped.
“That’s what the computer shows.