The teleo-electronic man was radiating: "If you'll accept my proposition amiably, I'll make a pact with you. We'll alternate. You'll administer the sleepers for a certain agreed on period of time, then I'll relieve you. Say at intervals of a thousand years."
Amco decided suddenly that it would be more propitious for him if he tried to run away from the robot, get back to the space-time converter and go back to his own time. He was involving himself too deeply in aeons.
"No. I'll not let you return," radiated the robot. "My mind is set on the sleep."
"Wait," said Amco, bursting into speech again. "I've just thought of something rather vast."
"What," radiated the robot.
"Have any of the sleepers ever awakened?"
"Of course not," radiated the robot. "Why should they?"
"If they've never awakened," said Amco. "How do you know that all you've explained to me about their timeless paradise is really true? Their state resembles death. Too much so. Human kind used to delude themselves with the dream that they continued a kind of super life after they were dead. But alas, no one ever came back from paradise to prove it, and the paradoxical concept gradually died out. It was just wishful thinking. Exactly the same kind of suggestion has dulled your rationale mind.
"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."