"Before we go on with this conflicting egoism, let's revive one of the bodies, if possible, and see if its consciousness, its mind, really still lives as you've insisted that it does. Or whether only its physical body exists in some state of preservation resembling life. Perhaps all these countless bodies are no better than mindless pieces of cold storage." The robot backed away uncertainly. "I never thought of that possibility. It is quite possible, too. Perhaps their minds, their neural circuits don't really function at all. None has ever awakened to tell." Suddenly, the teleo-electronic man spun forcefully, and strode to the side of the first sleeper whom he had indicated before to Amco. "We'll revive this one," he radiated. "His sleep has been the longest. He was the first sleeper." "How are they awakened?" questioned Amco "--if they can be awakened at all." "I--I don't know," radiated the electronic man humbly. "That was never included in my training. Evidently it wasn't planned at all." A sound startled Amco as a sudden sound might be expected to do in a place that seemed dead and soundless. A human moan. It rasped alienly down the hall, echoing eerily through the loneliness. The teleo-electronic man stared. The first sleeper was moving. "None of them have stirred before," radiated the robot. "Look! His arms are moving." Amco was watching. The arms that hadn't moved for so very long were moving now. The wrists flexed. The forearms quivered, then the whole arm moved up. Fingers spread, clenched, spread again. Lips parted, eye-lids flickered slightly. The robot hastily removed the mechanism from the first sleeper's head and bent over him. Amco felt the mystic awakening vapor of the sleeper's brain. Abruptly the first sleeper sat up and looked at them. Amco felt that he was looking into space and time. The eyes of the now awakened sleeper seemed circuitous, spinning pools of eternity. "How long?" his extra-sensory communication centers radiated, weakly at first. "Where I've been, you know, there's no time." "One million nine hundred and fifty thousand years," radiated the robot. "By last table of reckoning, Arnim 500 A.S." The first sleeper smiled. It was a thin, strangely alien smile for human lips. "One million nine hundred and fifty thousand years. I sense that such a span impresses you. To me it might have been a trillion years multiplied by itself, or the fraction of a second's most minute fraction. "Time, and matter, there is a point of difference. Matter is limited. It has a beginning, an end. I can't explain it to you. You would have to travel through it all, as I have, before you could understand. Anyway, I am tired. It is an ultimate incredible weariness." The sleeper understood. Amco was lost. He was thinking frantically, how could one be tired of eternity?