Beyond the chamber was another hall, and at its end was another room. It was a small, bare, windowless cell of the same blue stone. Dull light came from the walls themselves, a waste-disposal hole opened downward, a porous circle in the ceiling breathed fresh air. Otherwise the place was featureless. When the black guards had urged the humans through and the dilated wall had returned to a blank barrier, they were alone. They felt drained and light-headed in the thin atmosphere. Its dryness caught at their throats and its cold gnawed toward their bones. But most terrible, perhaps, was the silence. Holbrook said at last, for them all: "Now what?" Unhelmeted, Ekaterina's sunlight-colored hair seemed to crackle with frost. Suddenly his living universe had narrowed to her--though he could do worse, he thought in the dimness--with Grushenko hovering on its fringes. Beyond, mystery; the stone walls enclosed him like the curvature of space. The woman said with a forlorn boldness, the breath smoking from her lips, "I suppose they will feed us. Else it would have been most logical just to shoot us. But they do not seem to care if we die of pneumonia." "Can we eat their food?" muttered Holbrook. "The odds are against it, I'd say. Too many incompatible proteins. The fact we can live on Novaya is nearly a miracle, and Zolotoy isn't that Earthlike." "They are not stupid," snorted Grushenko. "On the basis of our blood samples they can synthesize an adequate diet for us." "And yet they took our metallic possessions--even the most harmless." Ekaterina sat down, shivering. "And that computer, did it not give them orders? Is the computer the most powerful brain on this planet?" "No." Holbrook joined her on the floor. Oxygen lack slowed his thoughts, but he plowed doggedly toward an idea. "No, I don't believe in robots with creative minds. That's what intelligence itself is for. You wouldn't build a machine to eat for you, or ... or make love ... or any truly human function. Machines are to help, to amplify, to supplement. That thing is a gigantic memory bank, a symbolic logic manipulator, what you like; but it is not a personality." "But then why did they _obey_ it?" she cried. Grushenko smiled wearily. "I suppose a clever dog might wonder why a man obeys his slide rule," he said. "A good enough analogy," said Holbrook. "Here's my guess. It's obvious the Zolotoyans have been civilized for a very long time. So I imagine they visited all the nearer stars ... ages ago, maybe. They took data home with them. That computer is, as Ekaterina said a few hundred years back, the commissar of interstellar relations. It has all the data. It identifies us, our home planet--" "Yes, of course!" exclaimed Grushenko. "At this moment, the rulers of Zolotoy--whatever they have, perhaps the entire population--they are studying the report on us!" Ekaterina closed her eyes. "And what will they decide?" she asked in a dead voice.