They carried it gingerly and carefully, their metal-sheated fingers handling the greasy surface of the creature almost lovingly.
Hawkins held it while kicking off the Robert Q.
It lay in the control room of the cruiser now. The two men had removed their helmets and Hawkins was shucking his suit. Vernadsky could not wait.
He said, You can read our minds?'
He held his breath until finally the gratings of rock surfaces modulated themselves into words. To
Vernadsky no finer sound could, at the moment, be imagined.
The silicony said, 'Yes.' Then he said, 'Emptiness all about. Nothing.'
'What?' said Hawkins.
Vernadsky shushed him. 'The trip through space just now, I guess. It must have impressed him.'
He said to the silicony, shouting his words as though to make his thoughts clearer, The men who were with you gathered uranium, special ore, radiations, energy.'
'They wanted food,' came the weak, gritty sound.
Of course! It was food to the silicony. It was an energy source. Vernadsky said, 'You showed them where they could get it?'
'Yes.'
Hawkins said, 'I can hardly hear the thing.'
There's something wrong with it,' said Vernadsky worriedly. He shouted again. 'Are you well?'
'Not well. Air gone at once. Something wrong inside.'
Vernadsky muttered. The sudden decompression must have damaged it. Oh, Lord- Look, you know what I want. Where is your home? The place with the food?'
The two men were silent, waiting.
The silicony's ears lifted slowly, very slowly, trembled, and fell back. There,' it said. 'Over there.'
'Where?' screamed Vernadsky. There.'
Hawkins said, 'It's doing something. It's pointing in some way.'
'Sure, only we don't know in what way.'
'Well, what do you expect it to do? Give the coordinates?'
Vernadsky said at once, 'Why not?' He turned again to the silicony as it lay huddled on the floor. It was motionless now and there was a dullness to its exterior that looked ominous.
Vernadsky said, The captain knew where your eating place was. He had numbers concerning it, didn't he?' He prayed that the silicony would understand, that it would read his thoughts and not merely listen to his words.
'Yes,' said the silicony in a rock-against-rock sigh.
'Three sets of numbers,' said Vernadsky. There would have to be three. Three coordinates in space with dates attached, giving three positions of the asteroid in its orbit about the sun. From these data the orbit could be calculated in full and its position determined at any time. Even planetary perturbations could be accounted for, roughly.
'Yes,' said the silicony, lower still.
'What were they? What were the numbers? Write them down, Hawkins. Get paper.' But the silicony said, 'Do not know. Numbers not important. Eating place there.'
Hawkins said. That's plain enough. It didn't need the coordinates, so it paid no attention to them.'
The silicony said 'Soon not'-a long pause, and then slowly, as though testing a new and unfamiliar word- 'alive. Soon'-an even longer pause-'dead. What after death?'
'Hang on,' implored Vernadsky. Tell me, did the captain write down these figures anywhere?'
The silicony did not answer for a long minute and then, while both men bent so closely that their heads almost touched over the dying stone, it said, 'What after death?'
Vernadsky shouted, 'One answer. Just one. The captain must have written down the numbers. Where? Where?'
The silicony whispered, 'On the asteroid.' And it never spoke again.
It was a dead rock, as dead as the rock which gave it birth, as dead as the walls of the ship, as dead as a dead human.
And Vernadsky and Hawkins rose from their knees and stared hopelessly at each other.
'It makes no sense,' said Hawkins. 'Why should he write the coordinates on the asteroid. That's like locking a key inside the cabinet it's meant to open.'
Vernadsky shook his head. 'A fortune in uranium. The biggest strike in history and we don't know where it is.'
* * *
H. Seton Davenport looked about him with an odd feeling of pleasure. Even in repose, there was usually something hard about his lined face with its prominent nose. The scar on his right cheek, his black hair, startling eyebrows, and dark complexion all combined to make him look every bit the incorruptible agent of the Terrestrial Bureau of Investigation that he actually was.
Yet now something almost like a smile tugged at his lips as he looked about the large room, in which dimness made the rows of book-films appear endless, and specimens of who-knows-what from who-knows-where bulk mysteriously. The complete disorder, the air of separation, almost insulation, from the world, made the room look unreal. It made it look every