"It's only three hours and never any more, if we aren't lucky in the morning. And if we aren't lucky, I don't want to have wasted our last three hours."
Tal-Karanth stood before the window again and watched the City as it slept in the pre-dawn darkness. How many slept in the City? Once there had been three million in the City but each census found the population to be less. Five years before there had been less than a million—two-thirds of the City was a beautiful shell that housed only the robots that cared for it.
What was wrong? And why had it never occurred to him before that there was something wrong?
He went back to his desk, where the material from the Terran ship littered the eternalloy top of it, and sat down again. He was tired, and frustrated. A menace faced Tharnar, and no one seemed to realize it. The coming of the barbarians had awakened him to the fallacy of trusting the robot fleet, but there was still another danger. And the robot fleet would be more helpless before the newly discovered danger than it would be before the Terran ships.
He pressed a button and music filled the room; music that had always before been soothing and restful to hear. But it sounded flat and meaningless compared with the throbbing barbarian music he had heard that night and he switched it off again.
What was wrong? It was one of the latest compositions; one that had been acclaimed as almost as good as one of the classics.
Almost as good.... Like the play Thralna had attended, like the art exhibits, the athletic records, the scientific discoveries, like everything in the City and on Tharnar. Almost as good—but never quite as good as they had been fifty thousand years before.
Was that part of the answer?
No—not part of the answer. Part of the problem, part of the danger greater than a barbarian invasion. There was no answer that he could see. Something had been lost by the Tharnarians fifty thousand years before and he was neither sure what it was nor how to give it back to them.