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The third card in that part of the array, placed in line above the Satellite and the Wheel, represented future obstacles. Lando cringed when he saw what had appeared.

“Gepta again! Well, I suppose that’s only logical. Want to see the final outcome, old clockwork? Well, you’re going to, anyway. Here we go. Well, that’s not too bad, after all. It’s the Universe. It means we’ll have a shot at everything we want to do. Join the human race and see the world. Something like that.”

“Master.”

“Yes, Vuffi Raa, what is it?”

“Master, that Six of Sabres: that’s a journey over with?”

“That’s what I said although it can mean other things, in other—”

“Master, our journey’s over with.”

And, indeed, so it appeared to be. The floor slowed as they came upon the towering doorway of a chamber large enough to park a fleet of spaceships in. A long, long distance away, something resembling a giant altar was raised, all the lights in the cavernous room focused upon it.

Even from several hundred meters off, Lando could tell it was the Mindharp of Sharu. It hurt his eyes to look at it.

• XVIII •

IT WASN’T AS easy as all that.

There were other things inside the hall besides the podium or altar where the Mindharp stood, and a giant replica of the Key Lando had carried until the wall of the pyramid had taken it.

“What do you make of that, Vuffi Raa?”

The robot, standing now as high as Lando’s knee, peered into the same odd well-lighted gloom that had filled the tunnel behind them. The light was a brownish amber and seemed to emanate from the floor. The room, a vast auditorium of a place, was lined with something between sculpture and painting—a pageant that seemed, to the gambler, to recapitulate his dreams of the night before.

Here, at the entrance, shaggy forms, barely erect, shambled along the walls in a frozen march, growing straighter, taller, beginning to carry things in their hands, to lose their furry coverings, to wear clothing.

Lando and Vuffi Raa followed the right wall, which curved gently into the vast circularity that was the chamber of the Mindharp. By the time the figures on the wall were playing with internal combustion engines and rocketry, the pair had only walked a few dozen meters. Uncounted thousands of centuries of history lay ahead of them.

The robot hadn’t spoken. Lando looked down at him. His eye was glowing peculiarly—or perhaps the peculiarity was in the lighting of the chamber.

“Vuffi Raa, did you hear me?”

“Why yes, Lando,” the droid said, seeming to be waking from a sort of walking dream. “What do I make of this? The same that you do—that this is somehow the center of Sharu culture. What they left behind of it, anyway. That the Harp is somehow even more important than we thought it was.”

Lando hadn’t been thinking that at all. He’d been thinking that the chamber was a place of worship, that the figures on the wall were human—Toka—that the bas-relief murals would convey to them the story of how they arose on some far-off planet and came to the Rafa System. That somewhere along the wall the story would be told of how they met the Sharu and discovered their masters.

He didn’t want to wait. “I’m going on across the room—enough of this historical nonsense. Coming with me?”

Vuffi Raa turned, followed Lando without a word.

It was a long, long trip. The Sharu had discovered the same secret that many human cultures had: that if you make the floors of a public building slick enough, keep them polished and slippery, they’ll force the people who have to walk there into little mincing steps that magnify the distances and humble the spirit—just as high ceilings tend to do.

Lando wasn’t having any. He took a few running steps and slid along the floor.

“Wheee! This is fun! Come on, old tinhorn, try it!”

“Master!” said the robot in a scandalized voice. “Have you no respect?”

Lando stopped, gave the robot a sober look. “Not a grain of it—not when it’s being imposed on me by the architecture.”

He took another running start, slid several meters this time. The robot