“You must hear me out,” Preston was saying. “I have to tell you about the Disc.”
“There must be more of these buoys,” Konklin said. “This one must have drifted down here; pulled down by the intense gravity. There must be thousands of them, all exactly alike.”
It came slowly to Groves. “We came in contact with a series of buoys, not a ship. Each one directed us to the next. We followed a trail of buoys all the way here, step by step.”
“Do whatever you want,” the dry, inexorable voice broke in. “But listen to what I have to say.”
“Shut up!” Konklin shouted.
“I have to remain here,” Preston said, slowly and painfully, picking his words with infinite care. “I don’t dare leave. If I-”
“Preston,” Konklin shouted wildly. “What’s the sum of two and two?”
“I know nothing about you,” the relentless whisper continued.
“Repeat after me!” Konklin shouted. “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow!”
“Stop it,” Groves snarled, on the verge of hysteria. “Have you gone crazy?”
“The search has been long,” Preston’s withered whisper rasped on monotonously. “And it has brought me nothing. Nothing at all.”
Konklin sagged. He moved away, back toward the rent they had cut. “It’s not alive. That isn’t a nourishing bath. That’s some kind of volatile substance on which a vid image is being projected. Vid and aud tapes synchronized to form a replica. He’s been dead a hundred and fifty years.”
There was silence, except for the dry, whispering voice of Preston and it went on and on.
Konklin tore away the patch and scrambled out of the sphere. “Come on,” he signalled to the others. “Come on in.”
“We got most of that on our phones,” Jereti said, as he struggled into the sphere. “What was it all about? What the hell was that Mary had a little lamb?”
He saw the replica of John Preston and his voice stopped. The others scrambled in after him, excited and breathless. One by one they came to a halt as they saw the old man, and heard the faint, dry words whispering through the thinning air of the sphere.
“Seal it up,” Groves ordered, when the last of the Japanese optical workers was in.
“Is it—” Mary began doubtfully. “But why’s he talking like that? Just sort of . . . reciting.”
Konldin put his stiff pressure-glove on the girl’s shoulder. “It’s only an image. He left hundreds of them, maybe thousands, scattered through space, all around here. To attract ships and lead them to the Disc.”
“Then he’s dead!”
“He died a long time ago,” Konldin said. “You can tell by looking at him that he died a very old man. Probably a few years after he found the Disc. He knew ships would be coming out in this direction, someday. He wanted to bring one of them here, to his world.”
“I guess he didn’t know there would be a Society,” Mary said sadly. “He didn’t realize anybody would actually be looking for the Disc.”
“No,” Konldin agreed. “But he knew there would be ships heading out this way.”
“It’s sort of . . . disappointing.”
“No,” Groves corrected. “I don’t think so. Don’t feel bad about it. It’s only the physical part of John Preston that’s dead, and that part isn’t really very important.”
“I guess so,” Mary said. She brightened. “It’s sort of wonderful, too. In a way, it’s sort of a miracle.”
“Shut up and listen,” Konklin said softly.
They all became silent and listened.
“It isn’t senseless drive,” the withered image of the old man was saying. Its blind eyes gazed out over the group of people, not seeing them, not hearing them, not aware of their presence. It was speaking, instead, to listeners far off, watchers far away. “It isn’t a brute instinct that keeps us restless and dissatisfied. I’ll tell you what it is: it’s the highest goal of man—the need to grow and advance . . . to find new things . . . to expand. To spread out, reach areas, experiences, comprehend and live in an evolving fashion. To push aside routine and repetition, to break out of mindless monotony and thrust forward. To keep moving on . . .”