He shrugged. "No fissionables, certainly. It's a safe bet that everything radioactive on this planet has long since decomposed. But there's always the possibility of lithium, you know."
"Or pure tritium," Leopold said acidly. Mattern merely laughed, and made no reply.
Half an hour later we were bound westward again to the point where we had left Ozymandias. Gerhardt, Webster and I rode together in one halftrack, and Leopold and Marshall occupied the other. The third, with two of Mattern's men and the prospecting equipment, ventured off to the southeast toward the area Marshall and Webster had fruitlessly combed the day before.
Ozymandias was where we had left him, with the sun coming up behind him and glowing round his sides. I wondered how many sunrises he had seen. Billions, perhaps.
We parked the halftracks not far from the robot and approached, Webster filming him in the bright light of morning. A wind was whistling down from the north, kicking up eddies in the sand.
"Ozymandias have remain here," the robot said as we drew near.
In English.
For a moment we didn't realize what had happened, but what followed afterward was a five-man quadruple-take. While we gabbled in confusion the robot said, "Ozymandias decipher the language somehow. Seem to be a sort of guide."
"Why—he's parroting fragments from our conversation yesterday," Marshall said.
"I don't think he's parroting," I said. "The words form coherent concepts. He's talking to us!"