"_You hid, and I Now bid you die!_" Rosco toyed with the ash tray in which he'd put the disk. "There's a clue to the Masters right in this gadget," he said. "Maybe it's simply a servo-mechanism that was set once and has been functioning automatically ever since. But on the other hand it may still be linked directly to the Masters." "Good point," the skipper said. "Give it a run-through for what it's worth. If it does give us a line on where they got to, I'll ask the Flagship for permission to track them down." Doc Braddon said to Ernest: "You said the Masters were godlike. You're not implying anything supernatural?" "No. That was the androids' view, not mine. As a race of almost-people created in a laboratory they naturally held their creators in a certain awe. They hoped for liberation, and even tried to do something about it; but they knew it was futile. The Masters built them so they'd turn to dust if they misbehaved and when they left they fixed it so the vibrations of any spaceship other than their own would do the same thing--presumably so their creations wouldn't fall into other hands. The sad thing is that the almost-people knew it. One of their verses went: "_If comes the ship to make us free, It killeth you, it killeth me._" "Do you mean we could have saved them if we'd come in with engines silent?" the skipper asked. "I don't know," Ernest said. "They certainly didn't think much of their potential. There's a fatalism, a sense of thwarted destiny running all through their literature. Their hope died on the vine, so to speak. If you can stand one more of their verses, this one might sum up their philosophy: "_This they give to us they make: They give us thirst, deny the slake._" * * * * * The skipper was silent for a time, staring down at the little mounds of gray dust. Then he said to his technicians: "You've done a good job, all of you. We'll send a coordinated report to the Flagship tomorrow and stand by for orders. In the meantime, if there's anyone here with an honest physical thirst, I'd be glad to have him join me in slaking it in my cabin. No offense implied, Ernest." "None taken, sir."