It was just a curious sing-song humming for the rest of them, but Ernest listened with rapt attention and apparent comprehension, though not without strain. Finally the man stopped. "What did he say?" Rosco demanded. "Let me get the rest of it first," Ernest said. He spoke to the man briefly. His expression became grave as he listened to the reply. "Well, come _on_!" Doc said impatiently. "Give us a translation." "All right," Ernest said. He looked troubled. "These two are the only ones left of their race. The rest are dead--de-activated. The others--the other race--left the planetoid some time ago." Ernest spoke again to the man. Listening to his reply, he found it difficult to think of him as non-human. There was a sadness, a fatalism, in his eyes, yet a dignity that came only with humanity. Only a hairline separated these two from mankind. The impatience of the others made Ernest interrupt, so he could give them a resumé. "As I said, they're the last. They survived only because they'd made a pilgrimage to a kind of underground shrine. The signals that killed the others didn't reach them through the layers of rock. Apparently the shrine had something to do with a planned revolt against the electronic law that governed them. "It was an insidious law," Ernest went on, "with built-in enforcement. Any infraction could be punished instantly from central control in the palace. The infraction would trigger a shock wave, tuned to the individual frequency of the offender. The intensity of the wave was geared to the seriousness of the offense. Treason meant death from the strongest wave of all--the one that turned them to dust." "Absolute rule," Doc said. "Pretty hopeless." "Yes, in one way. But paradoxically they had an infinite amount of freedom of speech. You see that in their verses. No one was punished for what he said--only for what he did. I suppose it had to be that way, otherwise there'd have been wholesale slaughter." "Which there was, at the end," Doc pointed out. "Who do you think exercised the control that killed all the others?" "We did," Ernest said. "We killed them." * * * * * "We killed them?" Doc said. "You're crazy!" "You'd better explain yourself, Hotaling," the skipper said. "Stop talking in riddles." "Aye, aye, sir. When I say we killed them, I don't mean directly or deliberately. And of course I don't mean killed, since they were all androids. But we de-activated them by triggering some mechanism when our ship came to the planetoid their masters had left." "Hold on," the skipper said. "Now you're going too fast. Since they were androids, and were created, the important thing is to find out where these creators went--and whether it was last month or ten thousand years ago." Ernest spoke to the couple.