"Yes, Amco."
Amco shrugged. He watched the three-dim screen fade.
Amco stood beside the space-time converter on the periphery of a dead sea. A slight cold wind blew from it, whispering of a worldly loneliness. Away from the sea stretched an undulating plane of naked clay, unblemished, glossy, cruel. An anemic pale red sun shown fitfully through a slight dust-mist on the dead sea's horizon.
Realizing that outside his plastic suit, the air was crackling cold, Amco shivered.
He had plunged two million years into the plegarthic flow.
Amco turned away from the barren area that had been a teeming sea. He faced the City. Yes. It still stood as he had left it. It seemed incredible that it was still intact. And yet, if it was perfect, how could it have been touched even by time?
But it appeared quite dead like the rest of Dhoma. He began walking toward it.
Fear crawled like a live parasite into his heart, as he approached the City. Fear coupled with its antecedents, anxiety and uncertainty.
The City, dead? His brain balked at such a possibility. Let the sea die. And the sun and all of Dhoma. Let space shrivel and freeze and the stars go out. But the City had to go on living. It was too illogical that the humanoid and its inexhaustible ego should step off into oblivion. The City had to go on living.