David took the child with a startled cry and stood eyeing the tottering robot. Tau's consciousness was centered upon his dragging limbs and for a moment his mentality flickered as though it were gone, then returned. He saw that his metallic body was dark and stained with an odd encrustation, and he turned and made his way to the cubicle in which he had sat while an aeon of time slipped away in the depths of interplanetary space, and the life-line of one aeon had merged with another. There was one hooded mechanism at which he always sat, and when he was just so, the mind of the Master would speak from down the ages, and the image of Kendall Smith arose, as it had always done, in his mind. He thought he visualized the Master now, out of the dim consciousness of the past. Tall and arresting with the vigorous personality of a dynamic intelligence, the keen grey eyes peered at him again, as they had done in the distant past. "You, Tau, are just a man of metal," the Master was saying "and yet I've a feeling that part of myself is implanted within you just as part of my mind is implanted into the mechanisms of your consciousness. As a thing of metal, floating in a non-conducting void, you are something that is almost eternal. Yet if you succeed in finding a habitable world, such as the earth has been in the past, the atmosphere of that planet will suffuse about you, and in the triumph of my wishes will lie your downfall. Oxides of the surrounding air will cause your gradual deterioration, and the only one who could help you will be nothing more than motes of cosmic dust in the unpredictable corners of the surrounding universe." Unseen by David or any of the others, Tau slipped to the door and down a corridorway. Through an aperture he could glimpse the inner room where Myri lay, nursing the infant at her breast. For just an instant he paused, for the Master had never seemed closer than in that single moment. Turning finally, the metal man walked impassionately through the doorway and vanished into the driving blasts of the lashing storm.