Lee took a deep breath and began once more. "This million-year-business throws a new light on the whole subject. Up to now, I think, we've all been looking at this machine on a day-to-day basis. I mean, we've been examining what it's doing _now_. It might be worth our while to sit back a little and try to extrapolate the behavior we've observed back over a million years." "Could you be a bit more explicit?" Richards asked. "I'll try. It's mostly a matter of viewpoint, I think. Let's start looking at this machine as something that's been in operation for a million years. Let's admit to ourselves that what we see today is only a very small slice of the whole picture. Dr. Petchkovich, you're an astronomer; you're accustomed to studying a star for a few months and coming up with a story that covers perhaps billions of years. Right?" "Yes, but this is entirely different...." "I know. I know," Lee said. "But the line of attack isn't so different. For instance: Dr. Childe, suppose you send your wave patterns to the Orbital Computation Center at Earth and have the Big Brain work them over. Do you think it might come up with something useful?" Childe shrugged elaborately. "Maybe. If we try to extrapolate the sample patterns we have now over a million years, maybe something will show up." "It'll take months to get the Big Brain's time," Elaine said. "They're waiting in line all the way back to Mars for it." "What are months compared to the time we've already spent?" Bennett countered. "Or to a million years?" Lee added. Kulaki suddenly started to bob up and down in his chair. "Say, we might be on the track of something here," he said. "If those circuits have been in continuous operation for a million years ... we could learn an awful lot about reliability...." Lee nodded in agreement. "We have a lot to learn, that's true enough." He cleared his throat nervously. "There's one more thing, I am about to publish a paper ... it's a sort of a general paper, but it has some bearing on the work going on here. I wonder if you'd be good enough to be a tryout audience for me?" They sat back to listen. * * * * * Lee gave only the basic outline of his paper. He discussed his findings among the ruins on Mars and on the lone planet circling the star Tau Ceti; and he drew some conclusions from his investigations of the primitive human cultures found on the planetary systems of Sirius and Vega. First, both Sirius and Vega have both been long known to be comparatively young stars. Astrophysical evidence compiled from the Twentieth Century onward, and finally geophysical data from the planets themselves, showed that Sirius and Vega--and their planets--were considerably less than a billion years old. By contrast, the Solar System was known to be at least five billion years old.