Grushenko shook his head. "I wonder if we can even speak with them," he admitted in a lost voice. "What does a dog have to say to a man?" Then, straightening himself: "But we are going to try!"

At the end of a long flight, they landed on a flange, dizzyingly far above the street (?). Watching Zolotoyan hands on the platform controls, Holbrook found the steering mechanism superbly simple. But then he was urged through an arched doorway and down a dim corridor of polished blue stone. He saw faint grooves worn in the floor. This place was old.

Ekaterina whispered to him, "Eben Petrovitch,"—she had never so called him before—"have you seen even one ornament here? One little picture or calendar or ... anything? I would give a tooth for something humanly small."

"The city is its own ornament," said Grushenko. His words came louder than required.

They reached a dead-end wall. One of the black figures touched a stud, and the wall dilated.

Beyond was a room so large that Holbrook could not make out its ceiling through the sourceless muted radiance. But he saw the machine that waited, tier upon tier where tiny red lights crawled like worms, and he saw a hundred silent green-clad Zolotoyans move through the intricate rituals of servicing it. "A computer," he mumbled. "In ten thousand years we may be able to build a computer like that."

A guard trilled to a technician. The technician waved calmly at some others, who hurried to him. They conferred in a few syllables and turned to the humans with evident purpose.

"Gospodny pomiluie," breathed Ekaterina. "It is a ... a routine! How many like us have come here?"

Holbrook felt himself shoved onto a metal plate in the floor. He braced himself for death, for enlightenment, for God. But the machine only blinked and muttered. A technician stepped up with an instrument, touched it to Holbrook's neck, and withdrew an unfelt few cubic centimeters of blood. He bore it off into the twilight. Holbrook waited.

The machine spoke. It was hard to tell its voice from the sweet Zolotoyan trills. The guards leveled their guns. Holbrook gasped and ran toward Ekaterina. Two black giants caught and held him.

"By heaven," he found himself howling, foolish and futile melodrama in the twilight, "if you touch her, you bastards—!"

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