‘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. Vemadsky said, ‘You showed them where they could get it?’

‘Yes.’

Hawkins said, ‘I can heardly hear the thing.’

‘There’s something wrong with it,’ said Vemadsky worriedly. He shouted again, ‘Are you well?’

‘Not well. Air gone at once. Something wrong inside.’

Vemadsky 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 Vemadsky. ‘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?’

Vemadsky 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.

Vemadsky 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 Vemadsky. 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 Vemadsky. ‘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?’

Vemadsky 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 Vemadsky 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.’

Vemadsky 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 bit as unreal as its owner.

That owner sat in a combination armchair-desk which was bathed in the only focus of bright light in the room. Slowly he turned the sheets of official reports he held in his hand. His hand moved otherwise only to adjust the thick spectacles which threatened at any moment to fall completely from his round and completely unimpressive nubbin of a nose. His paunch lifted and fell quietly as he read.

He was Dr Wendell Urth, who, if the judgment of experts counted for anything, was Earth’s most outstanding extraterrologist. On any subject outside Earth men came to him, though Dr Urth had never in his adult life been more than an hour’s-walk distance from his home on the University campus.

He looked up solemnly at Inspector Davenport. ‘A very intelligent man, this young Vernadsky,’ he said.

‘To have deduced all he did from the presence of the silicony? Quite so,’ said Davenport.

‘No, no. The deduction was a simple thing. Unavoidable, in fact. A noodle would have seen it. I was referring’ – and his glance grew a trifle censorious – ’ to the fact that the youngster had read of my experiments concerning the gamma-ray sensitivity of Siliconeus asteroidea.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Davenport. Of course, Dr Urth was the expert on siliconies. It was why Davenport had come to consult him. He had only one question for the man, a simple one, yet Dr Urth had thrust out his full lips, shaken his ponderous head, and asked to see all the documents in the case.

Ordinarily that would have been out of the question, but Dr Urth had recently been of considerable use to the T.B.I. in that affair of the Singing Bells of Luna and the singular non-alibi shattered by Moon gravity, and the Inspector had yielded.

Dr Urth finished the reading, laid the sheets down on his desk, yanked his shirttail out of the tight confines of his belt with a grunt and rubbed his glasses with it. He stared through the glasses at the light to see the effects of his cleaning, replaced them precariously on his nose, and clasped his hands on his paunch, stubby fingers interlacing.

‘Your question again, Inspector?’

Davenport said patiently, ‘Is it true, in your opinion, that a silicony of the size and type described in the report could only have developed on a world rich in uranium—’

‘Radioactive material,’ interrupted Dr Urth. ‘Thorium, perhaps, though probably uranium.’

‘Is your answer yes, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘How big would the world be?’