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.