He saw that it had been more than a month since he had made an entry. Not, he thought, that there had been any real reason to make an entry then. Life ran so placidly that there were few ripples to record. Perhaps it would be better to put the book back on the shelf with nothing written in it, although it seemed, somehow, an act of faith to write an occasional paragraph at not too long an interval from the last one written. In the last month nothing of any consequence had happened—no one had come back to visit, there had been nothing but routine contacts from those out among the stars, there had been no word of the Indian bands, there had been no robots passing by and stopping, so there had been no news— although what the robots brought was rumor more often than it was news. There had been gossip, of course. Martha kept up a running conversation with others of the clan and when they sat on the patio to hear the nightly concert, she would fill him in on what had been said that day. But mostly it was woman talk and nothing to put down.

A narrow shaft of morning sun, slotted through the slit where the heavy drapes at one of the tall windows failed to come together, fell across him, lighting up the gray hair and the square and solid shoulders. He was a tall man, thin, but with a sense of strength that offset the thinness. His face was rugged, creased with tiny lines. The mustache bristled and was matched by the craggy brows that sat above the deep-sunken eyes that held a steely look in them. He sat in the chair, unmoving, looking at the room and wondering again at the quiet satisfaction that he always found within it, and at times more than satisfaction, as if the room, with its book-lined loftiness and vastness, carried a special benediction. The thoughts of many men, he told himself, resided in this space—all the great thinkers of the world held secure between the bindings of the volumes on the shelves, selected and placed there long ago by his grandfather so that in the days to come the essence of the human race, the heritage of recorded thought, would always be at hand.