"One million nine hundred and fifty thousand years," radiated the robot. "By last table of reckoning, Arnim 500 A.S."
The first sleeper smiled. It was a thin, strangely alien smile for human lips. "One million nine hundred and fifty thousand years. I sense that such a span impresses you. To me it might have been a trillion years multiplied by itself, or the fraction of a second's most minute fraction.
"Time, and matter, there is a point of difference. Matter is limited. It has a beginning, an end. I can't explain it to you. You would have to travel through it all, as I have, before you could understand. Anyway, I am tired. It is an ultimate incredible weariness."
The sleeper understood. Amco was lost. He was thinking frantically, how could one be tired of eternity?
"Because I have experienced everything," said the sleeper. "I have gone back to the first of the beginning. I have been into the future where it merges with the beginning I found in the past. I have floated through space that seemed limitless, but I found that it only eventually became the beginning I found in the past. Well, in all the dimensions, in all the spaces and times and imaginative worlds, I found only one path—it led back to the beginning. But I have had the foresight to save one world for the last."
Amco was aware of an emptiness creeping through his heart.
"But what could remain, sleeper?" he murmured.
The sleeper continued: "My experience is completely inconceivable to you. The splendor of traveling as light does, effacing space, bending as it bends, repeating itself into endless prisms of existence. The swirling of the electron, or the frantic swimming through the plasma of monsters. I have lived and relived all the complexities of all the combinations. But I've anticipated the ultimate. I've prepared for it. I saved what might prove to be the final eternal moment for the last."
The sleeper closed his eyes and relaxed. His lips moved slightly. "You know what to do, Robot."
Amco backed away. He swallowed hard, and brushed his eyes. He turned toward the teleo-electronic man—