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“Such as?” Duckworth asked.

“Such as invisibility, or a cheap method of transmutation, or even a new and faster space drive. I wasn’t sure, but it certainly looked like it might be something of that sort.”

Rawlings nodded thoughtfully. “A very good intuition, considering the fact that you had a bit of erroneous data.”

“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.”

“Maybe we’re being studied and watched, then,” said Duckworth, probingly.

“Possibly. But we won’t know for a long time–if ever.”

Duckworth grinned. “Right. I’ve seen this City. I’ve looked it over carefully in the past few months. Whatever entities built it are so far ahead of us that we can’t even imagine what it will take to find out anything about them. We are as incapable of understanding them as a bird is incapable of understanding us.”

“Who knows about this?” Turnbull asked suddenly.

“The entire Advanced Study Board at least,” said Rawlings. “We don’t know how many others. But so far as we know everyone who has been able to recognize what is really going on at the City has also been able to realize that it is something that the human race en masse is not yet ready to accept.”

“What about the technicians who are actually working there?” asked Turnbull.

Rawlings smiled. “The artifacts are very carefully replaced. The technicians–again, as far as we know–have accepted the evidence of their eyes.”

* * * * *

Turnbull looked a little dissatisfied. “Look, there are plenty of people in the galaxy who would literally hate the idea that there is anything in the universe superior to Man. Can you imagine the storm of reaction that would hit if this got out? Whole groups would refuse to have anything to do with anything connected with the City. The Government would collapse, since the whole theory of our present government comes from City data. And the whole work of teaching intuitive reasoning would be dropped like a hot potato by just those very people who need to learn to use it.

“And it seems to me that some precautions–” He stopped, then grinned rather sheepishly. “Oh,” he said, “I see.”

Rawlings grinned back. “There’s never any need to distort the truth. Anyone who is psychologically incapable of allowing the existence of beings more powerful than Man is also psychologically incapable of piecing together the clues which would indicate the existence of such beings.”