"Exactly. I thought that Rawlings Scientific Corporation—or else you, personally—were concealing something from the rest of us and from the Advisory Board. I thought that Scholar Duckworth had found out about it and that he'd been kidnaped to hush him up. It certainly looked that way."
"I must admit it did, at that," Duckworth said. "But tell me—how does it look now?"
Turnbull frowned. "The picture's all switched around now. You came here for a purpose—to check up on your own data. Tell me, is everything here on the level?"
Duckworth paused before he answered. "Everything human," he said slowly.
"That's what I thought," said Turnbull. "If the human factor is eliminated—at least partially—from the data, the intuition comes through quite clearly. We're being fed information."
Duckworth nodded silently.
Rawlings said: "That's it. Someone or something is adding new material to the City. It's like some sort of cosmic bird-feeding station that has to be refilled every so often."
Turnbull looked down at his big hands. "It never was a trade route focus," he said. "It isn't even a city, in our sense of the term, no more than a birdhouse is a nest." He looked up. "That city was built for only one purpose—to give human beings certain data. And it's evidently data that we need in a hurry, for our own good."
"How so?" Rawlings asked, a look of faint surprise on his face.
"Same analogy. Why does anyone feed birds? Two reasons—either to study and watch them, or to be kind to them. You feed birds in the winter because they might die if they didn't get enough food."