Next morning, Conan Lang was off with the dawn on his final check. He pretty well knew what he would find—Julio Medina was an experienced hand, and his information was reliable. But it was always a shock when you saw it for yourself. You never got used to it. To think that such a tiny, seemingly insignificant thing could change a planet beyond recognition. A ricefruit—

  It was already hot when he passed the native fields. Their ricefruit plants were tall and healthy, and their irrigation channels well constructed. He shook his head and walked on to the native village.

  Where the open, crude, friendly village had stood there was a great log wall. In front of the wall was a series of deep and ugly-looking moats. Behind the wall, he could see the tops of sturdy wooden buildings, a far cry from the huts of only a few short years ago. Conan Lang made no attempt at concealment but walked openly up to the moats and crossed them on a log bridge. He stopped outside the closed gate.

  “You will remember me who walked through the flames,” he said loudly in the Oripesh tongue. “You will open the gate for your brother as he would visit you.”

  For a moment nothing happened, and then the gate swung open. Conan Lang entered the village.

  The native guard eyed him with suspicion, but he kept his distance. Conan Lang noticed that he had a bow by the log wall. There was nothing like constant warfare for the production of new weapons, he reflected. Civilization was bringing its blessings to the Oripesh with leaps and bounds.

  Conan Lang walked through the village unmolested, taking rapid mental notes. He saw storehouses for ricefruit and observed slaves being marched off to work in the fields. The houses in the village were strong and comfortable, but there was a tense air in the village, a feeling of strain. Conan Lang approached a native and stopped him.

  “Brother,” he said, “I would see your chiefs. Where are they?”

  The native looked at him warily. “The Oripesh have no chiefs,” he said. “Our king is in council.”

  Conan Lang nodded, a sick feeling inside him. “It is well, he said. “Ren—I would see him.”

  The native jerked his thumb contemptuously toward the back of the village. “He is there,” he said. “Outside.”

  Conan Lang moved through the village, watching, missing nothing. He went all the way through and came out through the back wall. There, the old-style native huts baked in squalor under the blazing sun. There was no log wall around them, although they were inside the moat system. A pig rooted around for garbage between the huts.

  “Slums,” Conan Lang said to himself.

  He walked among the huts, ignoring the fearful, suspicious eyes of the natives. He found Ren preparing to go out into the fields. The chiefs son was thin. He looked tired, and his eyes were dull. He saw Conan and said nothing.

  “Hello, Ren,” said Conan Lang.

  The native just looked at him.

  Conan Lang tried to think of something to say. He knew what had happened—the chiefs and their sons had been so busy with ritual work for the tribe that they had lagged behind in the cultivation of the new ricefruit. They had stuck to the old ways too long, and their people had passed them by.

  “I can help you, my brother,” Conan Lang said softly. “It is not too late.”

  Ren said nothing.

  “I will help you with a field of your own,” said Conan Lang. “Will you let me help you?”

  The native looked at him, and there was naked hate in his eyes. “You said you were my friend,” he said. Without another word, he turned and left. He did not look back.

  Conan Lang wiped the sweat from his forehead and went on with his work. The sensitive part of his mind retreated back into a dark, insulated comer, and he let his training take over. He moved along, asking questions, watching, taking mental notes.

  A little thing, he thought.

  A new kind of plant.

  A week later, Conan Lang had completed his check. He sat by the evening cook fire with Julio, smoking his pipe, watching the shadows in the field.

  “Well, we did a good job,” he said. ‘It’s awful.”

  “It would have come without us,” Julio reminded him. “It does no good to brood about it. It is tough, sometimes, but it is a small price to pay for survival.”

  “Yes,” said Conan Lang. “Sure.”

  “Your results check out with mine?”

  “Mostly. It’s the same old story, Julio.”

  Conan Lang puffed slowly on his pipe, reconstructing what had happened. The new ricefruit had made it valuable for a family to hang on to one piece of land that could be used over and over again. But only a limited amount of the land could be used, because of natural factors like the presence or absence of available water. The families that had not taken the plunge right away were virtually excluded, and the society was divided into the landed and the landless. The landless gradually had to move farther and farther from the main village to find land upon which to grow the older type of ricefruit—sometimes their fields were so far away that they could not make the round trip in a single day. And they could not get too far away and start over, because of the tribal warfare that had broken out between villages now that valuable stores of ricefruit were there for the taking. The old joint family cooperation broke down, and slaves became economically feasible.

  Now that the village need not be periodically moved, it too became valuable and so was strongly fortified for defense. One old chief, grown powerful with fields of the staple ricefruit, set himself up as a king, and the other chiefs went to work in his fields.

  Of course, Sirius Ten was still in transition. While the old patterns were being destroyed, new ones, less obvious to the untrained eye, were taking their place. Disintegration and reintegration marched hand in hand, but it would be tough on the natives for a while. Process Corps techniques had speeded up the action almost beyond belief, but from here on in the Oripesh were on their own. They would go on and on in their individual development—although no two peoples ever went through exactly the same stages at the same time, it was possible to predict a general planet-wide trend. The Oripesh would one day learn to write, since they already had a crude pictographic system for ritual use. When the contact finally came from the hostile stars in the future, what histories would they have written? Whom would they remember, what would they forget? Would there be any twisted legend or myth left that recalled the long-ago time when the gods had come out of the mountains to change the fives of their people?

  That was the way to look at it. Conan Lang tapped out his pipe on a rock. Just look at it like a problem, a textbook example. Forget about the people, the individuals you could not help, the lives you had made and the lives you had destroyed. Turn off that part of your mind and think in terms of the long-range good.

  Or try to.

  “We’re all through here, Julio,” Conan Lang said. “We can head for home now.”

  “Yes,” said Julio Medina. “It has been a long time.”

  The two men sat silently in the darkness, each thinking his own thoughts, watching the yellow moon sail through silver stars.

  After the patrol ship had been signaled, there was nothing to do but wait until their pickup could be coordinated with the time schedules of the other Corps men and the operational schedule of the star cruiser. Conan Lang busied himself with his reports while Julio sprawled in the shade and devised intricate and impossible card games with a battered deck that was old enough to be in itself of anthropological interest.

  Conan Lang was playing a game, too. He played it with his mind and he was a somewhat unwilling participant. His mind had played the game before, and he was tired of it, but there was nothing he could do about it. There wasn’t any button that would turn his mind off, and while it was on, it played games.

  It was engaged in putting two and two together.

  This was not in itself uncommon, although it was not as widespread as some people fondly imagined it to be. But Conan Lang played the game where others did not see even one, much less a set of twos with a relationship between them. There is nothing so hard to see as what is termed obvious after the fact. Conan Lang’s mind had played with the obvious all his life; it would not let well enough alone. He didn’t like it, there were times when he would have preferred to junk it all and go fishing without a thought in his head, but he was stuck with it. When his mind wanted to play the game, it played and that was that

  While he waited for the patrol ship, his mind was playing with a set of factors. There was the history of Earth, taken as a vast overall sequence. There were thinking machines, atomic power, and the field techniques of the Process Corps. There was the fact that Earth had no record of ever having been contacted by another world—they had always done the contacting themselves. There was the new principle that Admiral White had spoken to him about, the integration-acceleration factor for correlating data. There was the incredible, explosive energy of man that had hurled him light-years into space. There was his defiant heart that could tackle the prodigious job of reshaping a galaxy when the chips were down.

  Conan Lang put two and two together, and he did not get four. He got five.

  He didn’t know the answers yet, but he knew enough to formulate the right questions. From past experience, he knew that that was the toughest part of the game. Incorrect answers were usually the products of off-center questions. Once you had the right question, the rest was a matter of time.

  The patrol ship came for them finally, and Conan Lang and Julio Medina walked across the soil of Sirius Ten for the last time. They crossed the field where the green plants grew, and neither tried to say what was in his heart. Three had come and only two could leave. Andy Irvin had lived and worked and dreamed only to fall on an alien planet light-years away from Earth that could have been his. He was part of the price that was exacted for survival—and he was also a kid with stars in his eyes who had gotten a rotten, senseless break.

  After the patrol ship had gone, the green leaves of the ricefruit plants stretched hungrily up toward the flaming sun. The clean water chuckled along the irrigation trenches, feeding the roots in the field. Softly, as though sad with all the memories it carried, the lonesome breeze whispered through the empty hut that had housed the men from Earth.

  VI.

  Through the trackless depths of interstellar space the star cruiser rode on the power from her atomics. The hum that filled the ship was a good sound, and she seemed to quiver with pride and impatience. It did make a difference which way you were going in space, and the ship was going home.

  Conan Lang paced through the long white corridors and walked around the afterhold where the brown sacks of ricefruit had been. He read in the library and joked with the medics who had salvaged his burned body. And always ahead of him, swimming in the great emptiness of space, were the faces of Kit and of his son, waiting for him, calling him home again.

  Rob must have grown a lot, he thought. Soon, he wouldn’t be a boy any longer—he would be a man, taking his place in the world. Conan remembered his son’s voice from a thousand quiet talks in the cool air of evening, his quick, eager eyes—

  Like Andy’s.

  “Dad, when I grow up can I be like you? Can I be an agent and ride on the ships to other worlds and have a uniform and everything?”

  What could you tell your son now that you had lived so long and were supposed to know so much? That life in the Process Corps filled a man with things that were perhaps better unknown? That the star trails were cold and lonely? That there were easier, more comfortable lives? All that was true; all the men who rode the ships knew it. But they knew, too, that for them this was the only life worth living.

  The time passed slowly. Conan Lang was impatient to see his family again, anxious to get home. But his mind gave him no rest. There were things he had to know, things he would know before he went home to stay.

  Conan Lang had the right questions now. He had the right questions, and he knew where the answers were hidden.

  Fritz Gottleib.

  The star cruiser had hardly touched Earth again at Space One before Conan Lang was outside on the duralloy tarmac. Since the movements of the star ships were at all times top-secret matters, there was no one at the port to greet him, and for once Conan was glad to have a few extra hours to himself. Admiral White wouldn’t expect him to check in until tomorrow anyway, and before he saw Kit he wanted to get things straight once and for all.

  The friendly sun of Earth warmed him gently as he hurried across the tarmac, and the air felt cool and fresh. He helped himself to an official bullet, rose into the blue sky, and jetted eastward over the city. His brain was seething, and he felt cold sweat in the palms of his hands. What was it that Gottleib had said to him on that long-ago day?

  “Sometimes it is best not to know the answers to one’s questions, Dr. Lang”

  Well, he was going to know the answers anyhow. All of them. He landed the bullet in the space adjoining the cybernetics building and hurried inside, flashing his identification as he went He stopped at a switchboard and showed his priority credentials.

  “Call the Nest, please,” he told the operator. “Tell Dr. Gottleib that Conan Lang is down here and would like to see him.”

  The operator nodded and spoke into the intercom. There was a moment’s delay, and then he took his earphones off and smiled at Conan Lang.

  “Go right on up, Dr. Lang,” the operator said. “Dr. Gottleib is expecting you.”

  Conan Lang controlled his astonishment and went up the lift and down the long white corridors. Expecting him? But that was impossible. No one even knew the star cruiser was coming back, much less that he was coming here to the Nest Impossible-

  All around him in the great building he felt the gigantic mechanical brain with its millions of circuits and flashing tubes. The brain crowded him, pressed him down until he felt tiny and insignificant. It hummed and buzzed through the great shielded walls.

  Laughing at him.

  Conan Lang pushed past the attendants and security men and opened the door of the Nest. He moved into the small, dark room and paused to allow his eyes to become accustomed to the dim fight. The room was silent. Gradually, the shadow behind the desk took form and he found himself looking into the arctic eyes of Fritz Gottleib.

  “Dr. Lang,” he croaked softly. “Welcome to the Buzzard’s Nest.”

  The man had not changed; he was timeless, eternal. He was still dressed in black, and it might have been minutes ago instead of years when Conan Lang had last seen him. His black eyebrows slashed across his white face, and his long-fingered hands were bent slightly like claws upon his desk.

  “How did you know I was coming here?” Now that he was face to face with Gottleib, Conan Lang felt suddenly uncertain, unsure of himself.

  “I know many things, Dr. Lang,” Fritz Gottleib said sibilantly. “Had I cared to, I could have told you ten years ago the exact date, within a day or so, upon which we would have this meeting. I could even have told you what you would say when you came through the door, and what you are going to say five minutes from now.”

  Conan Lang just stared at him, feeling like an absurd little child who had presumed to wrestle a gorilla. His mind recoiled from the strange man before him, and he knew at last that he knew nothing.

  “I do not waste words, Dr. Lang,” Gottleib said, his eyes cold and unmoving in his head. “You will remember that when we last met you said you wanted to ask some questions of the machine. Do you remember what I said, Dr. Lang?”

  Conan Lang thought back across the years. “Perhaps one day, Dr. Lang,” Gottleib had said. “When you are old like me.”

  “Yes,” said Conan Lang. ‘Yes, I remember.”

  ‘You were not ready then,” Dr. Gottleib said, his white face ghostly in the dim fight. You could not even have framed the right questions, at least not all of them.”

  Conan Lang was silent How much did Gottleib know? Was there anything he didn't know?

  You are old enough now,” said Fritz Gottleib.

  He turned a switch, and the surface of his desk glowed with dull red light. His face, reflected in the flamelike glow, was unearthly. His cold eyes looked out of hell. He rose to his feet, seeming to loom larger than life, filling the room. Moving without a sound, he left the room, and the door clicked shut behind him.

  Conan Lang was alone in the red room. His heart hammered in his throat and his lips were dry. He clenched his fists and swallowed hard. Alone-

  Alone with the great machine.

  Conan Lang steadied himself. Purposefully, he made himself go through the prosaic, regular motions of lighting up his pipe. The tobacco was healthily full-bodied and fragrant, and it helped to relax him. He smoked slowly, taking his time.

  The red glow from the desk filled the room with the color of unreality. Crimson shadows seemed to crouch in the corners with an impossible life of their own. But was anything impossible, here? Conan Lang felt the pulse of the great machine around him and wondered.

  Trying to shake off a persistent feeling of dreamlike unreality, Conan Lang moved around and sat down behind Gottleib’s desk. The red panel was a maze of switches which were used to integrate it with technical panels in other sections of the building. In the center of the panel was a keyboard on an open circuit to the machine and set into the desk was a clear square like a very fine telescreen. Conan Lang noticed that there was nothing on Gottleib’s desk that was not directly connected with the machine—no curios, no pictures, no paperweights, not a single one of the many odds and ends most men picked up for their desks during a long lifetime. The whole room was frightening in its very impersonality, as though every human emotion had been beaten out of it long ago and the room had been insulated against its return.

  The machines never slept, and the circuits were open. Conan Lang had only to ask, and any question that could be answered would be answered. The red glow in the room reminded him of the fire, and he shuddered a little in spite of himself. Had that really been over three years ago? How much had he learned in those three years when he had seen the Oripesh change before his eyes and had had time for once to really think his life through? How much did he still have to learn?