But he could see no life. Nothing moved. Not the faintest aura suggestive of life. A coldness permeated the thin air, radiating from the gleaming plastoid of the City's towering structures, gelid as from a corpse interned in eternal ice.
He found himself walking stiffly and fearfully through its familiar intricacies. He climbed other almost forgotten shafts and hurtled through the tubeways to remote sectors of the City. He stood, a pigmy among gigantic towers he had helped create two million years before, and felt crushed by grandeur, and vague terror.
He had found the answer for the Coordinator. It was simple enough in its futile horror. The City had died. There was not a trace of its inhabitants. There was no clue as to their fate. The City might have been abandoned yesterday, or two million years ago. It didn't matter. There was no life in it. There weren't even ghosts of things or of memories. Only grey, thick, crushing silence.
He looked over collonades toward the red, ugly nakedness of the plane, toward the space-time converter. It was a minute silver blob waiting beside the barren sea. This was the answer he had been sent across the millennia to find. Somehow, it seemed unjust, irrational.
Death, only death.
He would return and tell the Coordinator. The only cycle, the story of the plenum is merely an eruption that falls back as dust which some galactic wind would swirl away. A vacuum would efface the bloated plenum. And out of the vacuum would appear the dust again; and out of it would crawl colloidal mucous that would only return inexplicably to the dust again. And the galactic wind would again—
Amco shivered. But in spite of the growing terror, he was grateful that he had found out the truth. Now the Coordinator could frustrate, defeat completely the aimless, ridiculous evolving that led to—emptiness. Then for no cause repeated itself. He was grateful that he could be a factor in blotting out the whole illogical process. He started back out of the City toward the space-time converter.
Then he heard, or rather sensed the radiations. A vague, almost imperceptible tickling of hidden mental potentials flooded his heart with hope.
He plummeted down into the City's heart. Somehow, he knew there was still a form of life in the City.
The smooth, soft walls of plastic stretched away and disappeared in a mauve green distance. Amco stood humbled, sensing something of magnitude beyond his ken in the scene.