Ozymandias

The planet had been dead about a million years. That was our first impression, as our ship orbited down to its sere brown surface, and as it happened our first impression turned out to be right. There had been a civilization here once—but Earth had swung around Sol ten-to-the-sixth times since the last living being of this world had drawn breath.

“A dead planet,” Colonel Mattern exclaimed bitterly. “Nothing here that’s of any use. We might as well pack up and move on.”

It was hardly surprising that Mattern would feel that way. In urging a quick departure and an immediate removal to some world of greater utilitarian value, Mattern was, after all, only serving the best interests of his employers. His employers were the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. They expected Mattern and his half of the crew to produce results, and by way of results they meant new weapons and military alliances. They hadn’t tossed in 70 per cent of the budget for this trip just to sponsor a lot of archaeological putterings.

But lucky for our half of the outfit—the archaeological putterers’ half—Mattern did not have an absolute voice in the affairs of the outfit. Perhaps the General Staff had kicked in for 70 per cent of our budget, but the cautious men of the military’s Public Liaison branch had seen to it that we had at least some rights.

Dr. Leopold, head of the non-military segment of the expedition, said brusquely, “Sorry, Mattern, but I’ll have to apply the limiting clause here.”

Mattern started to sputter. “But—”

“But nothing, Mattern. We’re here. We’ve spent a good chunk of American cash in getting here. I insist that we spend the minimum time allotted for scientific research, as long as we are here.”

Mattern scowled, looking down at the table, supporting his chin on his thumbs and digging the rest of his fingers in hard back of his jawbone. He was annoyed, but he was smart enough to know he didn’t have much of a case to make against Leopold.

The rest of us—four archaeologists and seven military men; they outnumbered us a trifle—watched eagerly as our superiors battled. My eyes strayed through the porthole and I looked at the dry windblown plain, marked here and there with the stumps of what might have been massive monuments millennia ago.

Mattern said bleakly, “The world is of utterly no strategic consequence. Why, it’s so old that even the vestiges of civilization have turned to dust!”

“Nevertheless, I reserve the right granted to me to explore any world we land on, for a period of at least one hundred sixty-eight hours,” Leopold returned implacably.

Exasperated, Mattern burst out, “Dammit, why? Just to spite me? Just to prove the innate intellectual superiority of the scientist to the man of war?”

“Mattern, I’m not injecting personalities into this.”

“I’d like to know what you are doing, then? Here we are on a world that’s obviously useless to me and probably just as useless to you. Yet you stick me on a technicality and force me to waste a week here. Why, if not out of spite?”

“We’ve made only the most superficial reconnaissance so far,” Leopold, said. “For all we know this place may be the answer to many questions of galactic history. It may even be a treasure-trove of superbombs, for all—”

“Pretty damned likely!” Mattern exploded. He glared around the conference room, fixing each of the scientific members of the committee with a baleful stare. He was making it quite clear that he was trapped into a wasteful expense of time by our foggy-eyed desire for Knowledge.

Useless knowledge. Not good hard practical knowledge of the kind he valued.

“All right,” he said finally. “I’ve protested and I’ve lost, Leopold. You’re within your rights in insisting on remaining here one week. But you’d damned well better be ready to blast off when your time’s up!”

It had been foregone all along, of course. The charter of our expedition was explicit on the matter. We had been sent out to comb a stretch of worlds near the Galactic Rim that had already been brushed over hastily by a survey mission.

The surveyors had been looking simply for signs of life, and, finding none, they had moved on. We were entrusted with the task of investigating in detail. Some of the planets in the group had been inhabited once, the surveyors had reported. None bore present life.

Our job was to comb through the assigned worlds with diligence. Leopold, leading our group, had the task of doing pure archaeological research on the dead civilizations; Mattern and his men had the more immediately practical job of looking for fissionable material, leftover alien weapons, possible sources of lithium or tritium for fusion, and other such militarily useful things. You could argue that in a strictly pragmatic sense our segment of the group was just dead weight, carted along for the ride at great expense, and you would be right.

But the public temper over the last few hundred years in America had frowned on purely military expeditions. And so, as a sop to the nation’s conscience, five archaeologists, of little empirical consequence so far as national security mattered, were tacked onto the expedition.

Us.

Mattern made it quite clear at the outset that his boys were the Really Important members of the expedition, and that we were simply ballast. In a way, we had to agree. Tension was mounting once again on our sadly disunited planet; there was no telling when the Other Hemisphere would rouse from its quiescence of a hundred years and decide to plunge once more into space. If anything of military value lay out here, we knew we had to find it before They did.

The good old armaments race. Hi-ho! The old space stories used to talk about expeditions from Earth. Well, we were from Earth, abstractly speaking—but in actuality we were from America, period. Global unity was as much of a pipedream as it had been three hundred years earlier, in the remote and primitive chemical-rocket era of space travel. Amen. End of sermon. We got to work.

The planet had no name, and we didn’t give it one; a special commission of what was laughably termed the United Nations Organization was working on the problem of assigning names to the hundreds of worlds of the galaxy, using the old idea of borrowing from ancient Terran mythologies in analogy to the Mercury-Venus-Mars nomenclature of our own system.

Probably they would end up saddling this world with something like Thoth or Bel-Marduk or perhaps Avalokitesvara. We knew it simply as Planet Four of the system belonging to a yellow-white FS IV Procyonoid sun, Revised HD Catalogue # 170861.

It was roughly Earthtype, with a diameter of 6100 miles, a gravity index of .93, a mean temperature of 45 degrees F. with a daily fluctuation range of about ten degrees, and a thin, nasty atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide with wisps of helium and hydrogen and the barest smidgeon of oxygen. Quite possibly the air had been breathable by humanoid life millions of years ago—but that was millions of years ago. We took good care to practice our breathing-mask drills before we ventured out of the ship.

The sun, as noted, was an FS IV and fairly hot, but Planet Four was a hundred eighty-five million miles away from it at perihelion, and a good deal further when it was at the other swing of its rather eccentric orbit; the good old Keplerian ellipse took quite a bit of punishment in this system. Planet Four reminded me in many ways of Mars—except that Mars, of course, had never known intelligent life of any kind, at least none that had troubled to leave a hint of its existence, while this planet had obviously had a flourishing civilization at a time when Pithecanthropus was Earth’s noblest being.

In any event, once we had thrashed out the matter of whether or not we were going to stay here or pull up and head for the next planet on our schedule, the five of us set to work. We knew we had only a week—Mattern would never grant us an extension unless we came up with something good enough to change his mind, which was improbable—and we wanted to get as much done in that week as possible. With the sky as full of worlds as it is, this planet might never be visited by Earth scientists again.

Mattern and his men served notice right away that they were going to help us, but reluctantly and minimally. We unlimbered the three small halftracks carried aboard ship and got them into functioning order. We stowed our gear—cameras, picks and shovels, camel’s-hair brushes—and donned our breathing-masks, and Mattern’s men helped us get the halftracks out of the ship and pointed in the right direction.

Then they stood back and waited for us to shove off.

“Don’t any of you plan to accompany us?” Leopold asked. The halftracks each held up to four men.

Mattern shook his head. “You fellows go out by yourselves today and let us know what you find. We can make better use of the time filing and catching up on back log entries.”

I saw Leopold start to scowl. Mattern was being openly contemptuous; the least he could do was have his men make a token search for fissionable or fusionable matter! But Leopold swallowed down his anger.

“Okay,” he said. “You do that. If we come across any raw veins of plutonium I’ll radio back.”

“Sure,” Mattern said. “Thanks for the favor. Let me know if you find a brass mine, too.” He laughed harshly. “Raw plutonium! I half believe you’re serious!”

We had worked out a rough sketch of the area, and we split up into three units. Leopold, alone, headed straight due west, towards the dry riverbed we had spotted from the air. He intended to check alluvial deposits, I guess.

Marshall and Webster, sharing one halftrack, struck out to the hilly country southeast of our landing point. A substantial city appeared to be buried under the sand there. Gerhardt and I, in the other vehicle, made off to the north, where we hoped to find remnants of yet another city. It was a bleak, windy day; the endless sand that covered this world mounted into little dunes before us, and the wind picked up handfuls and tossed it against the plastic dome that covered our truck. Underneath the steel cleats of our tractor-belt, there was a steady crunch-crunch of metal coming down on sand that hadn’t been disturbed in millennia.

Neither of us spoke for a while. Then Gerhardt said, “I hope the ship’s still there when we get back to the base.”

Frowning, I turned to look at him as I drove. Gerhardt had always been an enigma: a small scrunchy guy with untidy brown hair flapping in his eyes, eyes that were set a little too close together. He had a degree from the University of Kansas and had put in some time on their field staff with distinction, or so his references said.

I said, “What the hell do you mean?”

“I don’t trust Mattern. He hates us.”

“He doesn’t. Mattern’s no villain—just a fellow who wants to do his job and go home. But what do you mean, the ship not being there?”

“He’ll blast off without us. You see the way he sent us all out into the desert and kept his own men back. I tell you, he’ll strand us here!”

I snorted. “Don’t be a paranoid. Mattern won’t do anything of the sort.”

“He thinks we’re dead weight on the expedition,” Gerhardt insisted. “What better way to get rid of us?”

The halftrack breasted a hump in the desert. I kept wishing a vulture would squeal somewhere, but there was not even that. Life had left this world ages ago. I said, “Mattern doesn’t have much use for us, sure. But would he blast off and leave three perfectly good halftracks behind? Would he?”

It was a good point. Gerhardt grunted agreement after a while. Mattern would never toss equipment away, though he might not have such scruples about five surplus archaeologists.

We rode along silently for a while longer. By now we had covered twenty miles through this utterly barren land. As far as I could see, we might just as well have stayed at the ship. At least there we had a surface lie of building foundations.

But another ten miles and we came across our city. It seemed to be of linear form, no more than half a mile wide and stretching out as far as we could see—maybe six or seven hundred miles; if we had time, we would check the dimensions from the air.

Of course it wasn’t much of a city. The sand had pretty well covered everything, but we could see foundations jutting up here and there, weathered lumps of structural concrete and reinforced metal. We got out and unpacked the power-shovel.

An hour later, we were sticky with sweat under our thin spacesuits and we had succeeded in transferring a few thousand cubic yards of soil from the ground to an area a dozen yards away. We had dug one devil of a big hole in the ground.

And we had nothing.

Nothing. Not an artifact, not a skull, not a yellowed tooth. No spoons, no knives, no baby-rattles.

Nothing.

The foundations of some of the buildings had endured, though whittled down to stumps by a million years of sand and wind and rain. But nothing else of this civilization had survived. Mattern, in his scorn, had been right, I admitted ruefully: this planet was as useless to us as it was to them. Weathered foundations could tell us little except that there had once been a civilization here. An imaginative palaeontologist can reconstruct a dinosaur from a fragment of a thighbone, can sketch out a presentable saurian with only a fossilized ischium to guide him. But could we extrapolate a culture, a code of laws, a technology, a philosophy, from bare weathered building foundations?

Not very likely.

We moved on and dug somewhere else half a mile away, hoping at least to unearth one tangible remnant of the civilization that had been. But time had done its work; we were lucky to have the building foundations. All else was gone.

“Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away,” I muttered.

Gerhardt looked up from his digging. “Eh? What’s that?” he demanded.

“Shelley,” I told him.

“Oh. Him.”

He went back to digging.

Late in the afternoon we finally decided to call it quits and head back to the base. We had been in the field for seven hours and had nothing to show for it except a few hundred feet of tridim films of building foundations.

The sun was beginning to set; Planet Four had a thirty-five hour day, and it was coming to its end. The sky, always somber, was darkening now. There was no moon. Planet Four had no satellites. It seemed a bit unfair; Three and Five of the system each had four moons, while around the massive gas giant that was Eight a cluster of thirteen moonlets whirled.

We wheeled round and headed back, taking an alternate route three miles east of the one we had used on the way out, in case we might spot something. It was a forlorn hope, though.

Six miles along our journey, the truck radio came to life. The dry, testy voice of Dr. Leopold reached us:

“Calling Trucks Two and Three. Two and Three, do you read me? Come in, Two and Three.”

Gerhardt was driving. I reached across his knee to key in the response channel and said, “Anderson and Gerhardt in Number Three, sir. We read you.”

A moment later, somewhat more faintly, came the sound of Number Two keying into the three-way channel, and I heard Marshall saying, “Marshall and Webster in Two, Dr. Leopold. Is something wrong?”

“I’ve found something,” Leopold said.

From the way Marshall exclaimed “Really!” I knew that Truck Number Two had had no better luck than we. I said, “That makes one of us, then.”

“You’ve had no luck, Anderson?”

“Not a scrap. Not a potsherd.”

“How about you, Marshall?”

“Check. Scattered signs of a city, but nothing of archaeological value, sir.”

I heard Leopold chuckle before he said, “Well, I’ve found something. It’s a little too heavy for me to manage by myself. I want both outfits to come out here and take a look at it.”

“What is it, sir?” Marshall and I asked simultaneously, in just about the same words.

But Leopold was fond of playing the Man of Mystery. He said, “You’ll see when you get here. Take down my coordinates and get a move on. I want to be back at the base by nightfall.”

Shrugging, we changed course to head for Leopold’s location. He was about seventeen miles southwest of us, it seemed. Marshall and Webster had an equally long trip to make; they were sharply southeast of Leopold’s position.

The sky was fairly dark when we arrived at what Leopold had computed as his coordinates. The headlamps of the halftrack lit up the desert for nearly a mile, and at first there was no sign of anyone or anything. Then I spotted Leopold’s halftrack parked off to the east, and from the south Gerhardt saw the lights of the third truck rolling towards us.

We reached Leopold at about the same time. He was not alone. There was an—object—with him.

“Greetings, gentlemen.” He had a smug grin on his whiskery face. “I seem to have made a find.”

He stepped back and, as if drawing an imaginary curtain, let us take a peek at his find. I frowned in surprise and puzzlement. Standing in the sand behind Leopold’s halftrack was something that looked very much like a robot.

It was tall, seven feet or more, and vaguely humanoid; that is, it had arms extending from its shoulders, a head on those shoulders, and legs. The head was furnished with receptor plates where eyes, ears, and mouth would be on humans. There were no other openings. The robot’s body was massive and squarish, with sloping shoulders, and its dark metal skin was pitted and corroded as by the workings of the elements over uncountable centuries.

It was buried up to its knees in sand. Leopold, still grinning smugly (and understandably proud of his find) said, “Say something to us, robot.”

From the mouth-receptors came a clanking sound, the gnashing of—what? Gears?—and a voice came forth, oddly high-pitched but audible. The words were alien and were spoken in a slippery singsong kind of inflection. I felt a chill go quivering down my back.

“It understands what you say?” Gerhardt questioned.

“I don’t think so,” Leopold said. “Not yet, anyway. But when I address it directly, it starts spouting. I think it’s a kind of—well, guide to the ruins, so to speak. Built by the ancients to provide information to passersby; only it seems to have survived the ancients and their monuments as well.”

I studied the thing. It did look incredibly old—and sturdy; it was so massively solid that it might indeed have outlasted every other vestige of civilization on this planet. It had stopped talking, now, and was simply staring ahead. Suddenly it wheeled ponderously on its base, swung an arm up to take in the landscape nearby, and started speaking again.

I could almost put the words in its mouth: “—and over here we have the ruins of the Parthenon, chief temple of Athena on the Acropolis. Completed in the year 438 B.C., it was partially destroyed by an explosion in 1687 while in use as a powder magazine by the Turks—”

“It does seem to be a sort of a guide,” Webster remarked. “I get the definite feeling that we’re being given an historical narration now, all about the wondrous monuments that must have been on this site once.”

“If only we could understand what it’s saying!” Marshall exclaimed.

“We can try to decipher the language somehow,” Leopold said. “Anyway, it’s a magnificent find, isn’t it? And—”

I began to laugh suddenly. Leopold, offended, glared at me and said, “May I ask what’s so funny, Dr. Anderson?”

“Ozymandias!” I said, when I had subsided a bit. “It’s a natural! Ozymandias!”

“I’m afraid I don’t—”

“Listen to him,” I said. “It’s as if he was built and put here for those who follow after, to explain to us the glories of the race that built the cities. Only the cities are gone, and the robot is still here! Doesn’t he seem to be saying, ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair’?”

“‘Nothing beside remains,’” Webster quoted. “It’s apt. Builders and cities all gone, but the poor robot doesn’t know it, and delivers his spiel nonetheless. Yes. We ought to call him Ozymandias!”

Gerhardt said, “What shall we do with it?”

“You say you couldn’t budge it?” Webster asked Leopold.

“It weighs five or six hundred pounds. It can move of its own volition, but I couldn’t move it myself.”

“Maybe the five of us—” Webster suggested.

“No,” Leopold said. An odd smile crossed his face. “We will leave it here.”

“What?”

“Only temporarily,” he added. “We’ll save it—as a sort, of surprise for Mattern. We’ll spring it on him the final day, letting him think all along that this planet was worthless. He can rib us all he wants—but when it’s time to go, we’ll produce our prize!”

“You think it’s safe to leave it out here?” Gerhardt asked.

“Nobody’s going to steal it,” Marshall said.

“And it won’t melt in the rain,” Webster added.

“But—suppose it walks away?” Gerhardt demanded. “It can do that, can’t it?”

Leopold said, “Of course. But where would it go? It will remain where it is, I think. If it moves, we can always trace it with the radar. Back to the base, now; it grows late.”

We climbed back into our halftracks. The robot, silent once again, planted knee-deep in the sand, outlined against the darkening sky, swivelled to face us and lifted one thick arm in a kind of salute.

“Remember,” Leopold warned us as we left. “Not one word about this to Mattern!”

At the base that night, Colonel Mattern and his seven aides were remarkably curious about our day’s activities. They tried to make it seem as if they were taking a sincere interest in our work, but it was perfectly obvious to us that they were simply goading us into telling them what they had anticipated—that we had found absolutely nothing. This was the response they got, since Leopold forbade mentioning Ozymandias. Aside from the robot, the truth was that we had found nothing, and when they learned of this they smiled knowingly, as if saying that had we listened to them in the first place we would all be back on Earth seven days earlier, with no loss.

The following morning after breakfast Mattern announced that he was sending out a squad to look for fissionable materials, unless we objected.

“We’ll only need one of the halftracks,” he said. “That leaves two for you. You don’t mind, do you?”

“We can get along with two,” Leopold replied a little sourly. “Just so you keep out of our territory.”

“Which is?”

Instead of telling him, Leopold merely said, “We’ve adequately examined the area to the southeast of here, and found nothing of note. It won’t matter to us if your geological equipment chews the place up.”

Mattern nodded, eyeing Leopold curiously as if the obvious concealment of our place of operations had aroused suspicions. I wondered whether it was wise to conceal information from Mattern. Well, Leopold wanted to play his little game, I thought; and one way to keep Mattern from seeing Ozymandias was not to tell him where we would be working.

“I thought you said this planet was useless from your viewpoint, Colonel,” I remarked.

Mattern stared at me. “I’m sure of it. But it would be idiotic of me not to have a look, wouldn’t it—as long as we’re spending the time here anyway?”

I had to admit that he was right. “Do you expect to find anything, though?”

He shrugged. “No fissionables, certainly. It’s a safe bet that everything radioactive on this planet has long since decomposed. But there’s always the possibility of lithium, you know.”

“Or pure tritium,” Leopold said acidly. Mattern merely laughed, and made no reply.

Half an hour later we were bound westward again to the point where we had left Ozymandias. Gerhardt, Webster, and I rode together in one halftrack, and Leopold and Marshall occupied the other. The third, with two of Mattern’s men and the prospecting equipment, ventured off to the southeast towards the area Marshall and Webster had fruitlessly combed the day before.

Ozymandias was where we had left him, with the sun coming up behind him and glowing round his sides. I wondered how many sunrises he had seen. Billions, perhaps.

We parked the halftracks not far from the robot and approached, Webster filming him in the bright light of morning. A wind was whistling down from the north, kicking up eddies in the sand.

“Ozymandias have remain here,” the robot said as we drew near.

In English.

For a moment we didn’t realize what had happened, but what followed afterwards was a five-man quadruple-take. While we gabbled in confusion the robot said, “Ozymandias decipher the language somehow. Seem to be a sort of guide.”

“Why—he’s parroting fragments from our conversation yesterday,” Marshall said.

“I don’t think he’s parroting,” I said. “The words form coherent concepts. He’s talking to us!”

“Built by the ancients to provide information to passersby,” Ozymandias said.

“Ozymandias!” Leopold said. “Do you speak English?”

The response was a clicking noise, followed moments later by, “Ozymandias understand. Not have words enough. Talk more.”

The five of us trembled with common excitement. It was apparent now what had happened, and the happening was nothing short of incredible. Ozymandias had listened patiently to everything we had said the night before; then, after we had gone, he had applied his million-year-old mind to the problem of organizing our sounds into sense, and somehow had succeeded. Now it was merely a matter of feeding vocabulary to the creature and letting him assimilate the new words. We had a walking and talking Rosetta Stone!

Two hours flew by so rapidly we hardly noticed their passing. We tossed words at Ozymandias as fast as we could, defining them when possible to aid him in relating them to the others already engraved on his mind.

By the end of that time he could hold a passable conversation with us. He ripped his legs free of the sand that had bound them for centuries—and, serving the function for which he had been built millennia ago, he took us on a guided tour of the civilization that had been and had built him.

Ozymandias was a fabulous storehouse of archaeological data. We could mine him for years.

His people, he told us, had called themselves the Thaiquens (or so it sounded)—had lived and thrived for three hundred thousand local years, and in the declining days of their history had built him, as indestructible guide to their indestructible cities. But the cities had crumbled, and Ozymandias alone remained—bearing with him memories of what had been.

“This was the city of Durab. In its day it held eight million people. Where I stand now was the temple of Decamon, sixteen hundred feet of your measurement high. It faced the Street of the Winds—”

“The Eleventh Dynasty was begun by the accession to the Presidium of Chonnigar IV, in the eighteen thousandth year of the city. It was in the reign of this dynasty that the neighboring planets first were reached—”

“The Library of Durab was on this spot. It boasted fourteen million volumes. None exist today. Long after the builders had gone, I spent time reading the books of the Library and they are memorized within me—”

“The Plague struck down nine thousand a day for more than a year, in that time—”

It went on and on, a cyclopean newsreel, growing in detail as Ozymandias absorbed our comments and added new words to his vocabulary. We followed the robot as he wheeled his way through the desert, our recorders gobbling in each word, our minds numbed and dazed by the magnitude of our find. In this single robot lay waiting to be tapped the totality of a culture that had lasted three hundred thousand years! We could mine Ozymandias the rest of our lives, and still not exhaust the fund of data implanted in his all-encompassing mind.

When, finally, we ripped ourselves away and, leaving Ozymandias in the desert, returned to the base, we were full to bursting. Never in the history of our science had such a find been vouchsafed: a complete record, accessible and translated for us.

We agreed to conceal our find from Mattern once again. But, like small boys newly given a toy of great value, we found it hard to hide our feelings. Although we said nothing explicit, our overexcited manner certainly must have hinted to Mattern that we had not had as fruitless a day as we had claimed.

That, and Leopold’s refusal to tell him exactly where we had been working during the day, must have aroused Mattern’s suspicions. In any event, during the night as we lay in bed I heard the sound of halftracks rumbling off into the desert; and the following morning, when we entered the messhall for breakfast, Mattern and his men, unshaven and untidy, turned to look at us with peculiar vindictive gleams in their eyes.

Mattern said, “Good morning, gentlemen. We’ve been waiting for some time for you to arise.”

“It’s no later than usual, is it?” Leopold asked.

“Not at all. But my men and I have been up all night. We—ah—did a bit of archaeological prospecting while you slept.” The Colonel leaned forward, fingering his rumpled lapels, and said, “Dr. Leopold, for what reason did you choose to conceal from me the fact that you had discovered an object of extreme strategic importance?”

“What do you mean?” Leopold demanded—with a quiver taking the authority out of his voice.

“I mean,” said Mattern quietly, “the robot you named Ozymandias. Just why did you decide not to tell me about it?”

“I had every intention of doing so before our departure,” Leopold said.

Mattern shrugged. “Be that as it may. You concealed the existence of your find. But your manner last night led us to investigate the area—and since the detectors showed a metal object some twenty miles to the west, we headed that way. Ozymandias was quite surprised to learn that there were other Earthmen here.”

There was a moment of crackling silence. Then Leopold said, “I’ll have to ask you not to meddle with that robot, Colonel Mattern. I apologize for having neglected to tell you of it—I didn’t think you were quite so interested in our work—but now I must insist you and your men keep away from it.”

“Oh?” Mattern said crisply. “Why?”

“Because it’s an archaeological treasure-trove, Colonel. I can’t begin to stress its value to us. Your men might perform some casual experiment with it and short circuit its memory channels, or something like that. And so I’ll have to assert the rights of the archaeological group of this expedition. I’ll have to declare Ozymandias part of our preserve, and off bounds for you.”

Mattern’s voice suddenly hardened. “Sorry, Dr. Leopold. You can’t invoke that now.”

“Why not?”

“Because Ozymandias is part of our preserve. And off bounds for you, Doctor.”

I thought Leopold would have an apoplectic fit right there in the messhall. He stiffened and went white and strode awkwardly across the room towards Mattern. He choked out a question, inaudible to me.

Mattern replied, “Security, Doctor. Ozymandias is of military use. Accordingly we’ve brought him to the ship and placed him in sealed quarters, under top-level wraps. With the power entrusted to me for such emergencies, I’m declaring this expedition ended. We return to Earth at once with Ozymandias.”

Leopold’s eyes bugged. He looked at us for support, but we said nothing. Finally, incredulously, he said, “He’s—of military use?”

“Of course. He’s a storehouse of data on the ancient Thaiquen weapons. We’ve already learned things from him that are unbelievable in their scope. Why do you think this planet is bare of life, Dr. Leopold? Not even a blade of grass? A million years won’t do that. But a superweapon will. The Thaiquens developed that weapon. And others, too. Weapons that can make your hair curl. And Ozymandias knows every detail of them. Do you think we can waste time letting you people fool with that robot, when he’s loaded with military information that can make America totally impregnable? Sorry, Doctor. Ozymandias is your find, but he belongs to us. And we’re taking him back to Earth.”

Again the room was silent. Leopold looked at me, at Webster, at Marshall, at Gerhardt. There was nothing that could be said.

This was basically a militaristic mission. Sure, a few archaeologists had been tacked onto the crew, but fundamentally it was Mattern’s men and not Leopold’s who were important. We weren’t out here so much to increase the fund of general knowledge as to find new weapons and new sources of strategic materials for possible use against the Other Hemisphere.

And new weapons had been found. New, undreamed-of weapons, product of a science that had endured for three hundred thousand years. All locked up in Ozymandias’ imperishable skull.

In a harsh voice Leopold said, “Very well, Colonel. I can’t stop you, I suppose.”

He turned and shuffled out without touching his food, a broken, beaten, suddenly very old man.

I felt sick.

Mattern had insisted the planet was useless and that stopping here was a waste of time; Leopold had disagreed, and Leopold had turned out to be right. We had found something of great value.

We had found a machine that could spew forth new and awesome recipes for death. We held in our hands the sum and essence of the Thaiquen science—the science that had culminated in magnificent weapons, weapons so superb they had succeeded in destroying all life on this world. And now we had access to those weapons. Dead by their own hand, the Thaiquens had thoughtfully left us a heritage of death.

Grey-faced, I rose from the table and went to my cabin. I wasn’t hungry now.

“We’ll be blasting off in an hour,” Mattern said behind me as I left. “Get your things in order.”

I hardly heard him. I was thinking of the deadly cargo we carried, the robot so eager to disgorge its fund of data. I was thinking what would happen when our scientists back on Earth began learning from Ozymandias.

The works of the Thaiquens now were ours. I thought of the poet’s lines: “Look on my works, ye Mighty—and despair.”