at it all means.

Answerer could answer anything, provided it was a legitimate question.
And he wanted to! He was eager to!

How else should an Answerer be?

What else should an Answerer do?

So he waited for creatures to come and ask.

* * * * *

"How do you feel, sir?" Morran asked, floating gently over to the old
man.

"Better," Lingman said, trying to smile. No-weight was a vast relief.
Even though Morran had expended an enormous amount of fuel, getting
into space under minimum acceleration, Lingman's feeble heart hadn't
liked it. Lingman's heart had balked and sulked, pounded angrily
against the brittle rib-case, hesitated and sped up. It seemed for a
time as though Lingman's heart was going to stop, out of sheer pique.

But no-weight was a vast relief, and the feeble heart was going again.

Morran had no such problems. His strong body was built for strain and
stress. He wouldn't experience them on this trip, not if he expected
old Lingman to live.

"I'm going to live," Lingman muttered, in answer to the unspoken
question. "Long enough to find out." Morran touched the controls, and
the ship slipped into sub-space like an eel into oil.

"We'll find out," Morran murmured. He helped the old man unstrap
himself. "We're going to find the Answerer!"

Lingman nodded at his young partner. They had been reassuring
themselves for years. Originally it had been Lingman's project. Then
Morran, graduating from Cal Tech, had joined him. Together they had
traced the rumors across the solar system. The legends of an ancient
humanoid race who had known the answer to all things, and who had
built Answerer and departed.

"Think of it," Morran said. "The answer to everything!" A physicist,
Morran had many questions to ask Answerer. The expanding universe; the
binding force of atomic nuclei; novae and supernovae; planetary
formation; red shift, relativity and a thousand others.

"Yes," Lingman said. He pulled himself to the vision plate and looked
out on the bleak prairie of the illusory sub-space. He was a biologist
and an old man. He had two questions.

What is life?

What is death?

* * * * *

After a particularly-long period of hunting purple, Lek and his
friends gathered to talk. Purple always ran thin in the neighborhood
of multiple-cluster stars--why, no one knew--so talk was definitely in
order.

"Do you know," Lek said, "I think I'll hunt up