The room was bare except for several mind-probing machines, and wire mesh cages with graph screens. There was little on the screens. Johlan's amnesia injection had been very effective, thought Cadmus. Too effective. He was helpless now unless he got his memory back. He knew part of the answer. His father was the first Cadmus. And there had been a reason for calling himself that. It was of vast importance. But that threshold response word. The key word—it might never be heard now.
He was fully clothed but he was without weapons. The force-field generator was gone. His antigrav belt had been taken from him.
Cadmus said, "I never expected to meet you alive, Consar."
Consar's mountain of flesh trembled in a rumbling laugh. "So many unpredictable games the jester Chance plays, eh. It doesn't matter now what you did or didn't expect."
Cadmus started. He knew that Consar was mad with power. He knew nothing else about Consar III, except that Zaleel was to have killed him with a lithium capsule, and that she had failed.
"We tapped your mind, Cadmus. I know a great deal about you, but so little, too. You submitted a problem to the Machine—we shall refer to it as a Machine as neither of us are quite convinced that it's a god—and your purpose was that the Machine was to have destroyed itself."
Consar laughed. "It was a ridiculous purpose. You rebels with your high ideals of progress and change! Progress and change are the great errors of entropy, Cadmus. But it's too late to discuss that now. You submitted the problem but the Machine still functions."
Consar smiled. "You have driven the Machine insane!"
Cadmus' throat was dry, thick. He didn't understand.
"Come, I'll show you." Consar III pressed a button. The throne carried his bulk across the marble floor to the wide windows overlooking the council tower and the valley of the Machine.