Tzzzu Tssssin came waddling out of the ship’s airlock onto the asteroid’s surface, his tail trailing behind him in his spacesuit. He rose to his full height, some ten or twelve feet, and looked around him with satisfaction. This asteroid was exactly the right size. Not too big, like Ceres and Pallas, not too small, as Juno was. Just the right size.

He waddled back into the ship and got out the three cement-laying machines. They were of a type which a later age would know as “Partial Robots,” since they were equipped with some feed-back and individual response, but they had no function beyond that of laying a finegrained, stone-hard cement. The cement was porous at first, but dried as smooth as enamel after it was laid.

It would, he figured, take them about a week to cover the asteroid. In the meantime, he could be checking over his designs.

He went in the ship and pulled out his portfolio of xyla wood. Critically he looked over the designs it contained, shaking his heavy, bony head with satisfaction from time to time. Yes, they were really good...

at last he came up with an idea whose epic simplicity and grandeur astonished him. He would paint the History of Civilization on the cement of the asteroid.

The history of civilization! The rise of his people, the Szabor Szor, from their humble cotylosaurian beginning to their present dizzy, unchallenged eminence...

in one hand he held the completed sheaf of drawings for his great work.

He got a tractor, a pot of black paint, and a long-handled brush from the store room. He trundled the tractor outside, set it going, and sat down on it. He pressed a stud. At the speed of about a quarter of a mile an hour, he began to move over the surface of the asteroid.

He speeded up the tractor after the first hour, but even at that it took him thirty-six days to transfer his design from the cartoon in mnoo carbon to the cement. He could have made better time if he had used an ipsifex with an enlarger attachment, but he considered that the freehand method of reproduction he was using would give his painting more character. Mechanization was one of the curses of modern life, anyhow.