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have seemed a good Life,” Monty said. “You enjoyed it. It helped to wipe away the memories. Buried them to some extent; softened them, perhaps.”
    Cushing nodded. “I suppose it was a good life. I still think back on it and recall how good it was, remembering the good things only. Not all of it was good.”
    â€œAnd now perhaps you want to go again just to see how good it was. To find out if it was as good as you remembered it. And the Place of Going to the Stars, of course.”
    â€œThe Place of Stars,” said Cushing, “has haunted me ever since I found Wilson’s notes. I keep asking myself, what if there should be such a place and no one went to find it?”
    â€œYou plan to be leaving, then?”
    â€œYes, I think I will. But I’ll be back. I won’t stay away forever. Only until I’ve found the Place or know it can’t be found.”
    â€œYou’ll be going west. Have you ever gone into the West?”
    Cushing shook his head.
    â€œIt’s different from the woods,” said Monty. “When you get out a hundred miles or so, you come to open prairie. You’ll have to watch yourself. We have word, remember, that there is something stirring out there. Some warlord pulling some of the tribes together and going on the prod. They’ll be heading east, I would imagine, although one can never know what goes on in a nomad’s head.”
    â€œI’ll watch myself,” said Cushing.

5
    The Team rolled along the boulevard, as they did each morning. It was their time for cogitation, for the absorption and classification of all that they had learned or sensed or otherwise acquired the day before.
    The sky was clear, without a cloud in sight, and once the star got up it would be another scorcher. Except for the birds that chirped discontentedly in the scraggly trees and the little rodents that went skittering through the tunnels in the grass, there was nothing else astir. Rank grass and lusty weeds grew in the pavement cracks. Time-grimed statuary and no-longer-operative fountains lurked in the jungle of unattended shrubbery. Beyond the statuary and the fountains the great piles of the buildings went up against the sky.
    â€œI have thought much upon the situation,” said #1, “and still I fail to comprehend the logic of the Ancient and Revered in pretending to be hopeful. By all the criteria that we have developed in our millennia of study throughout the galaxy, the dominant race upon this planet is lost beyond redemption. The race has gone through basically the same process that we have witnessed elsewhere. They built their civilization without realizing the inherent flaw that brought them to destruction. And yet the A and R insists that what has happened is no more than a temporary setback. He tells us that there have been many other setbacks in the history of the race and that in each case it has triumphed over them and emerged in greater strength than it knew before. I sometimes wonder if his thinking could be twisted by the loyalty he still carries in this precious race of his. Certainly one can understand his ingrained faith in these creatures, but the evidence all would indicate the faith is wrongly placed. Either he is unconsciously being intellectually dishonest or is naive beyond our estimation of him.”
    #2, who had been gazing up into the sky, now floated a group of eyes down across the smooth ball of his body and stared in some disbelief at his companion.
    â€œI am surprised at you,” he said. “You surely must be jesting or are under greater strain than I had thought you were. The A and R is neither naive nor dishonest. On the face of what we know, we must accord him the honor of believing in his sincerity. What is more likely is that he has some knowledge that he has chosen not to communicate to us, perhaps an unconscious knowledge that we have failed, with all our investigation and our probing, to uncover. We