World Of Ptavvs

There was a moment so short that it had never been successfully measured, yet always far too long. For that moment it seemed that every mind in the universe, every mind that had ever been or that would ever be, was screaming its deepest emotions at him.

Then it was over. The stars had changed again.

Even for Kzanol, who was a good astrogator, there was no point in trying to guess where the ship was now. At.93 lights, the speed at which the average mass of the universe becomes great enough to permit entry into hyperspace, the stars become unrecognizable. Ahead they flared painful blue-white. Behind they were dull red, like a scattered coal fire. To the sides they were compressed and flattened into tiny lenses. So Kzanol sucked a gnal until the ship's brain board made a thudding sound, then went to look.

The brain screen said, "Reestimate of trip time to Thrintun: 1.72 days."

Not good, he decided. He should have come out much closer to Thrintun. But luck, more than skill, decided when a hyperspace ship would make port. The Principle of Uncertainty is the law of hyperspace. There was no need to be impatient. It would be several hours before the fusor recharged the battery.

Kzanol swung his chair around so he could see the star map on the rear wall. The sapphire pin seemed to twinkle and gleam across the length of the cabin. For a moment he basked in its radiance, the radiance of unlimited wealth. Then he jumped up and began typing on the brain board.

Sure there was reason to be impatient! Even now somebody with a map just like his, and a pin where Kzanol had inserted his sapphire marker, might be racing to put in a claim. The control of an entire slave world, for all of Kzanol's lifetime, was his rightful property; but only if he reached Thrintun first.

He typed: "How long to recharge the battery?"

The brain board thudded almost at once. But Kzanol was never to know the answer.

Suddenly a blinding light shone through the back window. Kzanol's chair flattened into a couch, a loud musical note rang, and there was pressure. Terrible pressure. The ship wasn't ever supposed to use that high an acceleration. It lasted for about five seconds. Then-

There was a sound like two lead doors being slapped together, with the ship between them. The pressure eased. Kzanol got to his feet and peered out the rear window at the incandescent cloud that had been his fusor. A machine has no mind to read; you never know when it's going to betray you-

The brain board thudded.

He read, "Time to recharge battery: " followed by the spiral hieroglyph, the sign of infinity.

With his face pressed against the molded diamond pane, Kzanol watched the burning power plant fade among the stars. The brain must have dropped it the moment it became dangerous. That was why it had been trailed half a mile behind the ship: because fusors sometimes exploded. Just before he lost sight of it altogether, the light flared again into something brighter than a sun.

Thud, said the brain. Kzanol read, "Reestimate of trip time to Thrintun: " followed by a spiral.

The shock wave from the far explosion reached the ship. It sounded like a distant door slamming.

There was no hurry now. For a long time Kzanol stood before his wall map, gazing at the sapphire pin.

The tiny star in the tiny jewel winked back at him, speaking of two billion slaves and a fully industrialized world waiting to serve him; speaking of more wealth and power than even his grandfather, the great Racarliw, had known; speaking of hundreds of mates and tens of thousands of personal retainers to serve his every whim during his long, lazy life. He was chain-sucking, and the eating tendrils at the corners of his mouth writhed without his knowledge, like embattled earthworms. Useless regrets filled his mind.

His grandfather should have sold the plantation when Plorn's tnuctip slaves produced antigravity. Plorn could and should have been assassinated in time. Kzanol should have stayed on Thrintun, even if he had to slave it for a living. He should have bought a spare fusor instead of that extra suit and the deluxe crash couch and the scent score on the air plant and, with his last commercial, the sapphire pin.

There had been a day when he'd sat clutching a blue-green plastic cord which would make him a spacecraft owner or a jobless pauper. Bowed white skeletal shapes had raced round and round him: mutated racing viprin, the fastest animal anywhere in the galaxy. But, by the Power! Kzanol's was faster than all the rest. If only he'd thrown away that thread…

For a time he relived his life on the vast stage tree plantation where he had become an adult. Kzathit Stage Logs, with its virtual monopoly on solid fuel takeoff logs, now gone forever. If only he were there now…

But Kzathit Stage Logs had been a spaceport landing field for almost ten years.

He went to the locker and put on his suit. There were two suits there, including the spare he'd bought in case one ceased to function. Stupid. If the suit failed he'd be dead anyway.

He ran a massive, stubby finger around the panic button on his chest. He'd have to use it soon; but not yet. There were things to do first. He wanted the best possible chance of survival.

At the brain board he typed: "Compute a course for any civilized planet, minimum trip time. Give trip time."

The brain purred happily to itself. Sometimes Kzanol thought it was happy only when it was working hard. He often tried to guess at the emotionless thoughts of the machine. It bothered him that he couldn't read its mind. Sometimes he even worried about his inability to give it orders except through the brain board. Perhaps it was too alien, he thought; Thrintun had never made contact with other than protoplasmic life. While he waited for his answer he experimentally tried to reach the rescue switch on his back.

He hadn't a chance; but that was the least of his worries. When he pushed the panic button the suit stasis field would go on, and time would cease to flow inside his suit. Only the rescue switch would protrude from the field. It had been placed so that Kzanol's rescuer, not Kzanol, could reach it.

Thud! The screen said, "No solution."

Nonsense! The battery had a tremendous potential, even after a hyperspace jump it must still have enough energy to aim the ship at some civilized planet. Why would the brain…?

Then he understood. The ship had power, probably, to reach several worlds, but not to slow him down to the speed of any known world. Well, that was all right. In his stasis field Kzanol wouldn't care how hard he hit. He typed: "Do not consider decrease of velocity upon arrival. Plot course for any civilized planet. Minimize trip time."

The answer took only a few seconds. "Trip time to Awtprun 72 Thrintun years 100.48 days."

Awtprun. Well, it didn't matter where he landed; he could hop a ship for Thrintun as soon as they turned oil his field generator. Would some other prospector find Racarliwun in seventy-two years? Probably.

Spirit of the Power! Hurriedly he typed: "Cancel course to Awtprun." Then he sagged back in his chair, appalled at his narrow escape.

If he had hit Awtprun at more than nine-tenths light, he could have killed upward of a million people. That was assuming he hit an ocean! The shock wave would knock every flying thing out of the air for a thousand miles around and scour the land clean, sink islands, tear down buildings half around the world.

For a blunder like that, he'd draw death after a year of torture. Torture in the hands of a telepathic, highly scientific society was a horrible thing. Biology students would watch, scribbling furiously, while members of the Penalty Board carefully traced his nervous system with stimulators.

Gradually his predicament became clear to him. He couldn't land on a civilized planet. All right. But he couldn't land on a slave planet either; he'd be certain to knock down a few overseers' palaces, as well as killing billions of commercials' worth of slaves.

Perhaps he could aim to go through a system, hoping that the enlarged mass of his ship would be noticed? But he dared not do that. To stay in space was literally unthinkable. Why, he might go right out of the galaxy! He saw himself lost forever between the island universes, the ship disintegrating around him, the rescue button being worn down to a small shiny spot by interstellar dust… No!

Gently he rubbed his closed eyes with an eating tendril. Could he land on a moon? If he hit a moon hard enough, the flash might be seen. But the brain wasn't good enough to get him there, not at such a distance. A moon's orbit is a twisty thing, and he'd have to hit the moon of a civilized planet. Awtprun was the closest, and Awtprun was much too far.

And to top it off, he realized, he was sucking his lpt gnal. He sat there feeling sorry for himself until it was gone, then began to pace the floor.

Of course!

He stood stock still in the middle of the cabin, thinking out his inspiration, looking for the flaw. He couldn't find one. Hurriedly he tapped at the brain board: "Compute course for a food planet minimizing trip time. Ship need not slow on arrival. Give details."

His eating tendrils hung limp, relaxed. It's going to be all right, he thought, and meant it.

For protoplasmic life forms, there are not many habitable planets in the galaxy. Nature makes an unreasonable number of conditions. To insure the right composition of atmosphere, the planet must be exactly the right distance from a G type sun, must be exactly the right size, and must have a freakishly oversized moon in its sky. The purpose of the moon is to strip away most of the planet's atmosphere, generally around 99 percent of it. Without its moon a habitable world becomes shockingly uninhabitable; its air acquires crushing weight, and its temperature becomes that of a «hot» oven.

Of the 219 habitable worlds found by Thrintun, 64 had life. Seventeen had intelligent life; 18 if you were broad minded. The 155 barren worlds would not be ready for Thrintun occupancy until after a long seeding process. Meanwhile, they had their uses.

They could be seeded with a tnuctipun-developed food yeast. After a few centuries the yeast generally mutated, but until then the world was a food planet, with all its oceans full of the cheapest food in the galaxy. Of course, only a slave would eat it; but there were plenty of slaves.

All over the galaxy there were food planets to feed the slave planets. The caretaker's palace was always on the moon. Who would want to live on a world with barren land and scummy seas? Not to mention the danger of bacteria contaminating the yeast. So from the moons a careful watch was kept on the food planets.

After the yeast had mutated to the point where it was no longer edible, even to a slave, the world was seeded with yeast-eating whitefood herds. Whitefoods ate anything, and were a good source of meat. The watch was continued.

At his present speed Kzanol would hit such a planet hard enough to produce a blazing plume of incandescent gas. The exploded rock would rise flaming into space, vivid and startling and unmistakable even to a watcher on the moon. The orange glow of the crater would last for days.

Chances were that Kzanol would end underground, but not far underground. The incandescent air and rock which move ahead of a meteorite usually blow the meteorite itself back into the air, to rain down over a wide area. Kzanol, wrapped safely in his stasis field; would go right back out his own hole, and would not dig himself very deep on the second fall. The caretaker could find him instantly with any kind of rock-penetrating instrument. A stasis field is the only perfect reflector.

The brain interrupted his planning. "Nearest available food planet is F124. Estimated trip time 202 years 91.4 days."

Kzanol typed: "Show me F124 and system."

The screen showed specks of light. One by one, the major planets and their moon systems were enlarged. F124 was a steamy, quick-spinning ball: a typical food planet, even its moon's rotation was almost nil. The moon seemed overlarge, but also overdistant. An outer planet made Kzanol gasp in admiration. It was ringed! Gorgeously ringed. Kzanol waited until all the major worlds had been shown. When the asteroids began to appear in order of size he typed: "Enough. Follow course to F124."

He'd left his helmet off. Other than that he was fully dressed for the long sleep. He felt the ship accelerating, a throb in the metal from the motors. The cabin's acceleration field canceled the gees. He picked up his helmet and set it on his neck ring, changed his mind and took it off. He went to the wall and tore off his star map, rolled it up and stuck it through the neck ring into the bosom of his suit. He had the helmet ready to tog down when he started to wonder.

His rescuer could claim a large sum for the altruistic act of rescuing him. But suppose the reward didn't satisfy him? If he were any kind of thrint he would take the map as soon as he saw it. After all, there was no law against it. Kzanol had better memorize the map.

But there was a better answer.

Yes! Kzanol hurried to the locker and pulled out the second suit. He stuffed the map into one arm. He was elated with his discovery. There was plenty of room left in the empty suit. Briskly he moved about the cabin collecting his treasures. The amplifier helmet, universal symbol of power and of royalty, which had once belonged to his grandfather. It was a light but bulky instrument which could amplify the thrint's native Power to control twenty to thirty non-thrints into the ability, to control an entire planet. His brother's farewell present, a disintegrator with a hand-carved handle. He had a thought which made him put it aside. His statues of Ptul and Myxylomat. May they never meet! But both females would be dead before he saw them again, unless some friend put them in stasis against his return. His diamond-geared, hulifab-cased watch with the cryogenic gears, which always ran slow no matter how many times it was fixed. He couldn't wear it to F124; it was for formal events only. He wrapped each valuable in one of his extra robes before inserting it into the suit.

There was room left over.

In a what-the-hell mood he called the little racarliw slave over from the storage locker and made it get in. Then he screwed the helmet down and pushed the panic button.

The suit looked like a crazy mirror. All the wrinkles remained, but the suit was suddenly more rigid than diamond or hulifab. He propped it in a corner, patted it fondly on the head, and left it.

"Cancel present course to F124," he typed. "Compute and follow fastest course to F124 using only half of remaining power, completing all necessary power maneuvers within the next day."

A day later, Kzanol was suffering mild gnal withdrawal symptoms. He was doing everything he could think of to keep himself busy so that he wouldn't have to think about how much he wanted a gnal.

He had, in fact, just finished an experiment. He had turned off the field in the second suit, placed the disintegrator in its glove, and turned on the field again. The stasis field had followed its metal surface. The digging instrument had gone into stasis along with the suit.

Then the drive went off. Feeling considerable relief, Kzanol went to the board and typed: "Compute fastest course to eighth planet of F124 system. Wait one-half day, then follow course." He put on his suit, picked up the disintegrator and some wire line, and went out the airlock. He used the line to stop his drift until he was motionless with respect to the ship.

Any last thoughts?

He'd done the best he could for himself. He was falling toward F124. The ship would reach the unwatched, uninhabitable eighth planet years before Kzanol hit the third. It should make a nice, big crater, easy to find. Not that he'd need it.

There was a risk, he thought, that the rescue switch might be set off by reentry heat. If that happened he would wake up underground, for it took time for the field to die. But he could dig his way out with the disintegrator.

Kzanol poised a thick, clumsy finger over the panic button. Last thoughts?

Regrettably, there were none.

Kzanol pushed the panic button.

Larry Greenberg climbed out of the contact field and stood up. His footsteps echoed in the big dolphin tank room. There were no disorientation effects this time, no trouble with his breathing and no urge to wiggle nonexistent flippers and tail. Which was natural enough, since the «message» had gone the other way.

The dolphin named Charley was lying on the bottom of the tank. He had sunk from under his own specially designed contact helmet. Larry walked around to where Charley could see him through the glass, but Charley's eyes weren't looking at anything. The dolphin was twitching, all over. Larry watched with concern, aware that the two marine biologists had come up beside him and were looking just as worried. Then Charley stopped twitching and surfaced.

"That wasss willd," said Charley in his best Donald Duck accent.

"Are you all right?" one of the seadocs asked anxiously. "We kept the field at lowest power."

"Sssure, Billl, I'mm ffine. But that was wild. I feel like I sshould have arms and legs and a long nose overhanging my teeth insstead of a hole in my head." Whatever accent Charley had, there was nothing wrong with his vocabulary. "And I havvv thiss terrible urge to make love to Larry's wife."

"Me, too," said Doctor Bill Slater, but under his breath.

Larry laughed. "You lecherous fish! Don't you dare! I'll steal your cows!"

"We trade wives?" Charley buzzed like an MG taking off, then flipped wildly around the tank. Dolphin laughter. He ended the performance by jetting straight out of the water and landing on his belly. "Has my accent improved?"

Larry decided there was no point in trying to brush off the water. It had soaked through to his skin. "Come to think of it, yes, it has. It's much better."

Charley switched to dolphinese, or to pidgin dolphinese, which is dolphinese scaled down to the human range of hearing. The rest of his conversation came in a chorus of squeaks, grunts, ear-splitting whistles, and other extremely rude noises. "When's our next session, mind buddy?"

Larry was busy squeezing water out of his hair. "I don't know, exactly, Charley. Probably a few weeks. I've been asked to take on another assignment. You'll have time to talk to your colleagues, pass on whatever you've learned about us walkers from reading my mind."

"You sure you want me to do that? Seriously, Larrry, there's something I'd like to discuss with you."

"Squeak on."

Charley deliberately speeded up his delivery. Nobody but Larry Greenberg could have followed the rapid chorus of barnyard sounds. "What's chances of a dolphin getting aboard the Lazy Eight III?"

"Huh? To Jinx? Jinx's ocean is a foot deep in scum!"

"Oh, that's right. Well, some other world, then."

"Why would a dolphin be interested in space travel?"

"Why would a walker? No, that's not an honorable question. I think the truth is you've given me the space bug, Larrry;"

A slow grin spread across Larry's urchin face. He found it curiously hard to answer. "It's a damn contagious disease, and hard to get rid of."

"Yes."

"I'll think about it, Charley. Eventually you'll have to contact the UN about it, but give me time first. We'd have to carry a lot of water, you know. Much heavier than air."

"So I've been told."

"Give me some time. I've got to go practically right now."

"But-"

"Sorry, Charley. Duty calls. Dr. Jansky made it sound like the opportunity of the decade. Now roll over."

"Tyrant," hissed Charley, which isn't easy. But he rolled over on his back. The three men spent a few minutes rubbing his belly. Then Larry had to leave. Momentarily he wondered if Charley would have any trouble assimilating his memories. But there was no danger; at the low contact power they'd been using, Charley could forget the whole experience if he had to. Including the conquest of space.

Which would be a shame.

That night he and Judy had dinner with Dr. and Mrs. Dorcas Jansky. Dr. Dorcas Jansky was a huge West Berliner with a blond beard and the kind of flamboyant, extrovert personality that had always made Larry slightly uncomfortable. Had he but known it, Larry had a very similar psyche; but it was housed in a much smaller body. It looked different that way. Mrs. Jansky was about Judy's size and almost as pretty. She was the quiet type, at least when English was being spoken.

The conversation ranged explosively during dinner. As Larry said later, "It's fun to meet someone who likes to argue about the same things you do." They compared Los Angeles' outward growth to West Berlin's reaching skyscrapers.

"The urge to reach the stars," said Jansky.

"You're surrounded by East Germany," Larry maintained.

"There's nowhere you can go but up."

They spent useless time deciding which of the eleven forms of communism most closely resembled Marxism, and finally decided to wait and see which government withered away the fastest. They talked smog- where did it come from, now that there were neither industrial concerns nor hydrocarbon-powered vehicles in the Major Los Angeles Basin? Mainly cooking, thought Judy. Cigarettes, said Jansky, and Larry suggested that electrostatic air conditioning might concentrate impurities in the outside air. They talked about dolphins. Janaky had the nerve to question dolphin intelligence, merely because they'd never built anything. Larry, touched to the quick, stood up and gave the most stirring impromptu lecture of his life. It wasn't until the coffee hour that business was mentioned.

"You were not the first man to read a dolphin's mind, Mr. Greenberg." Jansky now held a gigantic cigar as if it were a professor's blackboard pointer. "Am I right in thinking that the dolphin contacts were only training of a sort?"

Larry nodded vigorously. "Right. Judy and I were trying for a berth on the Lazy Eight III, bound for Jinx. I knew from the standard tests that I had some telepathic aptitude, and when we got the word about the bandersnatchi I knew we were in. Nobody's gotten anywhere trying to learn the bandersnatchi language, and there aren't any contact men on Jinx. So I volunteered for the dolphin work and Judy started studying linguistics, and then we put in for the trip as a husband-wife team. I thought our sizes would be the clincher. The dolphin work was just practice for contacting a bandersnatch." He sighed. "But this fool economic war with the Belt is fouling up the whole space effort. The bastards."

Judy reached across and took his hand. "We'll get there yet," she promised.

"Sure we will," said Larry.

"You may not need to," said the doctor, emphasizing his words with jerky gestures of his cigar. "If the mountain will not come to Mahomet-" He paused expectantly.

"You don't mean you've got a bandersnatch here?" Judy sounded startled, and well she might. Bandersnatchi weighed thirty tons apiece.

"Am I a magician? No bandersnatchi, but something else. Did I mention that I am a physicist?"

"No." Larry wondered what a physicist would want with a contact man.

"Yes, a physicist. My colleagues and I have been working for some twelve years on a time-retarding field. We knew it was possible, the mathematics are well known, but the engineering techniques were very difficult. It took us years."

"But you got it."

"Yes. We developed a field that will make six hours of outer, normal time equivalent to one second of time inside the field. The ratio of outer time to inner time moves in large, ahh, quantum jumps. The twenty-one-thousand-to-one ratio is all we have been able to get, and we do not know where the next quantum is."

Judy spoke unexpectedly.

"Then build two machines and put one inside the field of the other."

The physicist laughed uproariously. He seemed to shake the room. "Excuse me," he said when he had finished, "but it is very funny that you should make that suggestion so quickly. Of course, it was one of the first things we tried." Judy thought black thoughts, and Larry squeezed her hand warningly. Jansky didn't notice. "The fact is that one time-retarding field cannot exist inside another. I have worked out a mathematical proof of this."

"Too bad," said Larry.

"Perhaps not. Mr. Greenberg, have you ever heard of the Sea Statue?"

Larry tried to remember, but it was Judy who answered. "I have! Lifetimes did a pictorial on it. It's the one they found off the Brazilian continental shell."

"That's right," Larry remembered aloud. "The dolphins found it and sold it to the United Nations for some undersea gadgetry. Some anthropologists thought they'd found Atlantis." He remembered pictures of a misshapen figure four feet tall, with strangely carved arms and legs and a humped back and a featureless globe of a head, surfaced like a highly polished mirror. "It looked like an early rendition of a goblin."

"Yes, it certainly does. I have it here."

"Here?"

"Here. The United Nations Comparative Culture Exhibit loaned it to us after we explained what it was for." He crushed his now tiny cigar butt to smithereens. "As you know, no sociologist has been able to link the statue to any known culture. But I, the doctor of physics, I have solved the mystery. I believe.

"Tomorrow I will show you why I believe the statue is an alien being in a time-retarder field. You can guess what I want you to do. I want to put you and the statue in the time-retarder field, to cancel out our, er, visitor's own field, and let you read its mind."

They walked down to the corner at ten the next morning, and Judy stayed while Larry pushed the call button and waited for the cab. About two minutes passed before a yellow-and-black-checked flyer dropped to the corner.

Larry was getting in when he felt Judy grasping his upper arm. "What's wrong?" he asked, turning half around.

"I'm frightened," she said. She looked it. "Are you sure it's all right? You don't know anything about him at all!"

"Who, Jansky? Look-"

"The statue."

"Oh." He considered. "Look, I'm just going to quickly make a couple of points. All right?" She nodded. "One. The contact gadget isn't dangerous. I've been using it for years. All I get is another person's memories, and a little insight into how he thinks. Even then they're damped a little so I have to think hard to remember something that didn't happen to me personally.

"Two. My experience with dolphins has given me experience with unhuman minds. Right?"

"Right. And you always want to play practical jokes after a session with Charley. Remember when you hypnotized Mrs. Grafton and made her-"

"Nuts. I've always liked practical jokes. Third point is that the time field doesn't matter at all. It's just to kill the field around the statue. You can forget it.

"Four. Janaky won't take any chances with my life. You know that, you can see it. Okay?"

"All that scuba diving last summer-"

"That was your idea."

"Uh? I guess it was." She smiled and didn't mean it. "Okay. I thought you'd be practicing next on bandersnatchi, but I guess this is the acid test. And I'm still worried. You know I'm prescient."

"Well- oh, well. I'll call you as soon as I can." He got into the cab and dialed the address of the UCLA physics school level.

"Mark will be back with the coffee in a minute," said Dorcas Jansky. "Let me show you how the time-retarding field works." They were in a huge room whose roof contained two of those gigantic electrodes which produce ear-splitting claps of artificial lightning to impress groups of wide-eyed college students. But Jansky didn't seem concerned with the lightning maker. "We borrowed this part of the building because it has a good power source," he said, "and it was big enough for our purposes. Do you see that wire construction?"

"Sure." It was a cube of very fine wire mesh, with a flap in one side. The wire covered the top and floor as well as the sides. Busy workmen were testing and arranging great and complex-looking masses of machinery, which were not as yet connected to the wire cage.

"The field follows the surface of that wire. The wire side boundary between slow, inside time and fast, outside time. We had some fun making it, let me tell you!" Janaky ran his fingers through his beard, meditating on the hard work to which he had been put. "We think the field around the alien must be several quantum numbers higher than ours. There is no telling how long he has been in there except by the method we will use."

"Well, he might not know either."

"Yes, I suppose so. Larry, you will be in the field for six hours of outer time. That will be one second of your time. I understand that the thought transfer is instantaneous?"

"Not instantaneous, but it does take less than a second. Set things up and turn on the contact machine before you turn on the time field, and I'll get his thoughts as soon as he comes to life. Until he does that I won't get anything." Just like the dolphins, Larry told himself. It's just like contacting a Tursiops truncatus.

"Good. I wasn't sure. Ahh." Janaky went to tell Mark where to put the coffee. Larry welcomed the interruption, for suddenly he was getting the willies. It wasn't nearly as bad as it had been the night before his first session with a dolphin, but it was bad enough. He was remembering that his wife was sometimes uncomfortably psychic. He drank his coffee gratefully.

"So," Jansky gasped, having drained his cup at a few gulps. "Larry, when did you first suspect that you were telebaddic?"

"College," said Larry. "I was going to Washburn University it's in Kansas and one day a visiting bigwig gave the whole school a test for psi powers. We spent the whole day at it. Telepathy, esper, PK, prescience, even a weird test for teleportation which everybody flunked. Judy came up high on prescience, but erratic, and I topped everyone on telepathy. That's how we met. When we found out we both wanted to go starhopping…"

"Surely that wasn't why you two married?"

"Not entirely. And it sure as hell isn't why we haven't gotten divorced." Larry grinned a feral grin, then seemed to recollect himself. "Telepathy makes for good marriages, you know."

"I wouldn't know," Janaky smiled.

"I might have made a good psychologist," Larry said without regret. "But it's a little late to start now. I hope they send out the Lazy Eight III," he said between his teeth. "They can't desert the colonies anyway. They can't do that."

Jansky refilled both cups. The workmen wheeled something through the huge doorway, something covered by a sheet. Larry watched them as he sipped his coffee. He was feeling completely relaxed. Jansky drained his second cup as fast as he had finished the first. He must either love it, Larry decided, or hate it.

Unexpectedly Jansky asked, "Do you like dolphins?"

"Sure. Very much, in fact."

"Why?"

"They have so much fun," was Larry's inadequate sounding reply.

"You're glad you entered your profession?"

"Oh, very. It would have surprised my father, though. He thought I was going to be a pawnbroker. You see, I was born with…" His voice trailed off. "Hey! Is that it?"

"Um?" Jansky looked where Larry was looking. "Yes, that is the Sea Statue. Shall we go and look at it?"

The three men carrying the statue took no notice of them. They carried it into the cubical structure of fine wire mesh and set it under one of the crystal-iron helmets of the contact machine. They had to brace its feet with chocks of wood. The other helmet, Larry's end of the contact link, was fixed at the head of an old psychoanalyst's couch. The workmen left the cage, single file, and Larry stood in the open flap and peered at the statue.

The surface was an unbroken, perfect mirror. A crazy mirror. It made the statue difficult to see, for all that reached the eye was a distorted view of other parts of the room.

The statue was less than four feet tall. It looked very much like a faceless hobgoblin. The triangular hump on its back was more stylized than realistic, and the featureless globular head was downright eerie. The legs were strange and bent, and the heels stuck out too far behind the ankle. It could have been an attempt to model a gnome, except for the strange legs and feet and the stranger surface and the short, thick arms with massive Mickey Mouse, hands.

"I notice he's armed," was Larry's first, slightly uneasy comment. "And he seems to be crouching."

"Crouching? Take a closer look," Jansky invited genially. "And look at the feet."

A closer look was worse. The crouch was menacing, predatory, as if the supposed alien was about to charge an enemy or a food animal. The gun, a ringed double-barreled shotgun with no handle, was ready to deal death. But-

"I still don't see what you're driving at, but I can see his feet aren't straight. They don't lie flat to the ground."

"Right!" Jansky waxed enthusiastic. His accent thickened noticeably. "That was the first thing I thought of, when I saw a picture of the statue in the Griffith Park Observatory. I thought, the thing wasn't made to stand up. Why? Then I saw. He is in free flight!"

"Yeah!" It was startling how obvious the thing became. The statue was in a weightless spaceman's crouch, halfway toward fetal position. Of course he was!

"That was when the archaeologists were still wondering how the artist had gotten that mirror finish. Some of them already thought the statue had been left by visitors from space. But I had already completed my time field, you see, and I thought, suppose he was in space and something went wrong. He might have put himself in slow time to wait for rescue. And rescue never came. So I went to Brasilia Ciudad and persuaded the UNCCE to let me test my theory. I aimed a little laser beam at one finger…

"And what happened? The laser couldn't even mark the surface. Then they were convinced. I took it back here with me." He beamed happily.

The statue had seemed formidable, armed and crouched and ready to spring. Now it was merely pitiful. Larry asked, "Can't you bring him out of it?"

Jansky shook his head violently. "No. You see that unshiny bump on his back?"

Larry saw it, just below the apex of the triangular hump. It was just duller than the perfect mirror surface which surrounded it, and faintly reddened.

"It sticks out of the field, just a little. Just a few molecules. I think it was the switch to turn, off the field. It may have burned off when our friend came through the air, or it may have rusted away while he was at the bottom of the ocean. So now there is no way to turn it off. Poor designing," he added contemptuously.

"Well, I think they are ready."

Larry's uneasiness returned. They were ready. Machinery hummed and glowed outside the cage. The disk were steady on the humped contact machine, from which two multicolored cables led to the helmets. Four workmen in lab smocks stood nearby, not working but not idling. Waiting.

Larry walked rapidly back to the table, poured and drained half a cup of coffee, and went back into the cage. "I'm ready too," he announced.

Jansky smiled. "Okay," he said, and stepped out of the cage. Two workmen immediately closed the flap with a zipper twenty feet long.

"Give me two minutes to relax," Larry called. "Okay," said Jansky.

Larry stretched out on the couch, his head and shoulders inside the metal shell which was his contact helmet, and closed his eyes. Was Jansky wondering why he wanted extra time? Let him wonder. The contact worked better when he was resting.

Two minutes and one second from now, what wonders would he remember?

Judy Greenberg finished programming the apartment and left. Larry wouldn't be back until late tonight, if then; various people would be quizzing him. They would want to know how he took the "contact." There were things she could do in the meantime.

The traffic was amazing. In Los Angeles, as in any other big city, each taxi was assigned to a certain altitude. They took off straight up and landed straight down, and the coordinator took care of things when two taxis had the same destination. But here, taxi levels must have been no more than ten feet apart. In the three years they had been living here Judy had never gotten used to seeing a cab pass that close overhead. The traffic was faster in Kansas but at least it was set to keep its distance.

The taxi let her off at the edge of the top strip, the transparent pedestrian walk thirty stories above the vehicular traffic, in a shopping district. She began to walk.

She noticed the city's widely advertised cleanup project at work on many of the black-sided buildings. The stone came away startlingly white where the decades, sometimes centuries, of dirt had washed off. Judy noticed with amusement that only corner buildings were being cleaned.

"I should have said, 'What do you mean, experience in reading alien minds? Dolphins have been legally human since before you were born! That's what I should have said," said Judy to herself. She began to laugh I quietly. That would have impressed him! Sure it would!

She was about to enter a women's leather goods store when it happened. In the back of her mind something slowed, then disappeared. Involuntarily Judy stopped walking. The traffic around her seemed to move with bewildering speed. Pedestrians shot by on twinkling feet or were hurled at suicidal velocities by the slidewalks. She had known something was coming, but she had never imagined it would feel like this, as if something had been jerked out of her.

Judy went into the shop and began searching for gifts. She was determined not to let this throw her. In six hours he would be back.

"Zwei minuten," Doctor Jansky muttered, and threw the switch.

There was a complaining whine from the machinery, rising in pitch and amplitude, higher and louder until even Jansky blinked uncomfortably. Then it cut off, sharply and suddenly. The cage was an unbroken mirror.

The timing mechanism was inside the cage. It would cut the current in "one second."

"It is thirteen twenty," said Jansky. "I suggest we should be back here at nineteen hours." He left the room without looking back.

Kzanol dropped the wire and pushed the button in his chest. The field must have taken a moment to build up, for the universe was suddenly jagged with flying streaks of light.

Gravity snatched at him. If there were other changes in his personal universe Kzanol didn't notice. All he knew was the floor beneath him, and the block of something beneath each heel-spur, and the weight which yanked him down. There was no time to tense his legs or catch his balance. He bleated and threw both arms out to break his fall.

Jansky was the last to arrive. He came promptly at nineteen hours, pushing a keg of beer on a cart. Someone took it from him and wheeled it over to a table.

His image wavered as it passed the cube; the wire wall couldn't have been quite flat.

A newcomer was in the building, a dumpy man about forty years old, with a blond Mohican haircut. When Jansky was rid of the keg he came forward to introduce himself. "I'm Dr. Dale Snyder, Mr. Greenberg's experimental psychologist. I'll want to talk to him when he gets out of there, make sure he's all right."

Jansky shook hands and offered Snyder a fair share of the beer. At Snyder's insistence he spent some time explaining what he hoped to accomplish.

At nineteen twenty the cage remained solid. "There may be a little delay," said Jausky. "The field takes a few minutes to die. Sometimes longer."

At nineteen thirty he said, "I hope the alien time field hasn't reinforced mine." He said it softly, in German.

At nineteen fifty the beer was almost gone. Dale Snyder was making threatening noises, and one of the technicians was soothing him. Jansky, not a diplomat, sat staring fixedly at the silvered cube. At long intervals he would remember the beer in his paper cup and pour it whole down his throat. His look was not reassuring.

At twenty hours the cube flickered and was transparent. There was a cheer as Jansky and Snyder hurried forward. As he got closer Jansky saw that the statue had fallen on its face, and was no longer under the contact helmet.

Snyder frowned. Jansky had done a good job of describing the experiment. Now the psychologist suddenly wondered: Was that sphere really where the alien kept its brain? If it wasn't, the experiment would be a failure. Even dolphins were — deceptive that way. The brains were not hi the bulging "forehead," but behind the blowhole; the «forehead» was a weapon, a heavily padded ram.

Larry Greenberg was sitting up. Even from here he looked bad. His eyes were glassy, unfocused; he made no move to stand up. He looks mad, thought Dorcas Jansky, hoping that Snyder wouldn't think so too. But Snyder was obviously worried.

Larry climbed to his feet with a peculiar rolling motion. He seemed to stumble, recovered, tottered to the edge of the wire curtain. He looked like he was walking on raw eggs, trying not to break them. He stooped like a weight lifter, bending his knees and not his back, and picked up something from where it lay beside the fallen statue. As Jansky reached the wire, Larry turned to him with the thing in his hands.

Jansky screamed. He was blind! And the skin of his face was coming apart! He threw his arms over his face, feeling the same torment in his arms, and turned to run. Agony lashed his back. He ran until he hit the wall.

A moment earlier she'd been sound asleep. Now she was wide awake, sitting straight up in bed, eyes searching the dark for she didn't know what. She groped for the light switch, but it wasn't in the right place; her swinging arm couldn't even find the bed control panel. Then she knew that she was on Larry's side of the bed. She found his panel on her right and turned on the lamp.

Where was he? She'd gone to sleep about seventeen, completely beat. He must be still at UCLA. Something had gone wrong, she could feel it!

Was it just a nightmare?

If it had been a nightmare she couldn't remember a single detail. But the mood clung, haunting her. She tried to go back to sleep and found she couldn't. The room seemed strange and awful. The shadows were full of unseen crawling monsters.

Kzanol bleated and threw both arms out to break his fall.

And went insane. The impressions poured riotously through his flinching senses and overwhelmed him. With the desperation of a drowning man trying to breathe water, he tried to sort them out before they killed him.

First and most monstrous were the memories of an unfamiliar breed of slave calling itself Larry Greenberg. They were more powerful than anything that had ever reached his Power sense. If Kzanol had not spent so many years controlling alien life forms, growing used to the feel of alien thoughts, his whole personality would have been drowned.

With a tremendous effort he managed to exclude most of the Greenberg mind from his consciousness. The vertigo didn't pass. Now his body felt weird, hot and malformed. He tried to open his eye, but the muscles wouldn't work. Then he must have hit the right combination and his eye opened. Twice! He moaned and shut it tight, then tried again. His eye opened twice, two distinct and separate motions, but he kept them open because he was looking down at his own body. His body was Larry Greenberg.

He'd had enough warning. The shock didn't kill him.

Gingerly Kzanol began to probe the Greenberg mind. He had to be careful to get only a little information at a time, or he would be swamped. It was very different from ordinary use of the Power; it was a little like practicing with an amplifier helmet. He got enough to convince him that he really had been teleported, or telepathed, or some ptavv-sired thing, into an alien slave body.

He sat up slowly and carefully, using the Greenberg reflexes as much as he dared because he wasn't used to the strange muscles. The double vision tended to confuse him, but he could see that he was in a sort of metal mesh enclosure. Outside… Kzanol got the worst shock of all, and again he went insane.

Outside the enclosure were slaves, of the same strange breed as his present self. Two of them were actually coming toward him. He hadn't sensed them at all and he still couldn't.

Powerless!

A thrint is not born with the Power. Generally it takes around two Thrintun years for the Power sense to develop, and another year before the young thrint can force a coherent order on a slave. In some cases the Power never comes. If a thrint reaches adulthood without the Power, he is called a ptavv. He is tattooed permanently pink and sold as a slave, unless he is secretly killed by his family. Very secretly. There is no better ground for blackmail than the knowledge that a wealthy family once produced a ptavv.

An adult thrint who loses the Power is less predictable. If he doesn't go thrint-catatonic he may commit suicide; or he may go on a killing spree, slaughtering either every slave or every thrint that crosses his path; or he may compulsively forget even the existence of a Power. The Powerloss is more crippling than going blind or deaf, more humiliating than castration. If a man could lose his intelligence, yet retain the memory of what he had lost, he might feel as Kzanol felt; for the Power is what separates Thrint from Animal.

Still daring to hope, Kzanol looked directly at the advancing aliens and ordered them to STOP! The sense wasn't working, but maybe…. The slaves kept coming.

They were looking at him! Helplessly he cast about for some way to stop them from looking. They were witnessing his shame, these undersized furry whitefoods who now considered him an equal. And he saw the disintegrator, lying near the abandoned Kzanol body's out-flung hand.

He got to his feet all right, but-when he tried to hop he almost fell on his face. He managed to walk over, looking like a terrified novice trying to move in low gravity. The nearest slave had reached the cage. Kzanol bent his funny knees until he could pick up the disintegrator, using both hands because his new fingers looked so fragile and delicate and helpless. With a growl that somehow got stuck in his throat, he turned the digging instrument on the aliens. When they were all cowering on the floor or against the walls he whirled and ran, smashed into the wire, backed off and disintegrated a hole for himself and ran for the door. He had to let Greenberg through to open the door for him.

For a long time he thought only of running.

There were green lights below, spaced sparsely over the land between the cities. You had to fly high to see two at a time. Between cities most cars did fly that high, especially if the driver ivas the cautious type. The lights were service stations. Usually a car didn't need servicing more than twice a year, but it was nice to be able to see help when you were in open country. The loneliness could get fierce for a city man, and most men were city men.

It was also nice to know you could land near a green light without finding yourself on top of a tree or halfway over a cliff.

Kzanol steered very wide of the cities, and avoided the green lights too. He couldn't have faced a slave in his present state. When he left the physics level he had gone straight to the roof parking levels, to the haven of his Volkswagen, and taken it straight up. Then he had faced the problem of destination. He didn't really want to go anywhere. When he reached altitude he set the car for New York, knowing that he could change back to California before he got there. Henceforth he let the car drive itself, except when he had to steer around a city.

He did a lot of steering. The green country was more nearly islands in a sea of city than vice versa. Time and again he found narrow isthmuses of city, lines of buildings half a mile across following old superhighways. He crossed these at top speed and went on.

At one hour he had to bring the car down. The drive had been grueling. Only his mad urge to flee had kept him going; and he was beginning to know that he had nowhere to flee to. He felt aches and pains that were sheer torture to him, although Greenberg would have ignored them from habit. His fingers were cramped and sore; they seemed more delicate than ever. He was not mistaken in this. The Greenberg memory told him why the little finger of his left hand ached constantly: a baseball accident that had healed wrong. And Greenberg had taken this crippling disaster for granted! Kzanol was almost afraid to use his hands for anything. There were other pains. His cramped muscles ached from sitting in one position for five hours. His right leg was in agony from its constant pressure on the throttle during override maneuvers. He itched everywhere that clothing pressed against his body.

He brought the car down in the middle of a stunted wood in Arizona. Hurriedly lie got out and stripped off his clothes. Much better! He tossed them into the right-hand seat- he might need them again sometime- got back in and turned on the heater. Now he itched where he touched the seat, but he could stand it.

He had been letting Greenberg's reflexes drive the car, and in the process had gotten used to the presence of Greenberg in his mind. He could draw on the memory set with little discomfort and without fear. But he had not become used to the alien body he now wore, and he had no slightest intention of adjusting to the loss of the Power. Kzanol wanted his body back.

He knew where it was: he'd seen it when he got the disintegrator. The Greenberg memories filled in the details for him. Obviously he had thrown the disintegrator when he put his arms out to protect himself. The body would keep until he found some way of getting back to it.

To do that he would need a way to operate the men who operated the contact machine. He would need a great deal of technological help to break the Kzanol body out of stasis; he'd seen, as Greenberg, the rusted spot on his back. But to get all this help he needed the Power. How? His human brain didn't have the Power in it.

But there was one chance. Humans had space travel, remembered Kzanol/Greenberg. Pitiful space travel: ships that took decades to cross between the inhabited worlds, and days even to cruise the planets of the "solar system." But space travel it was. If he could find the F124 system, and if it were close enough to reach, he could get the amplifier helmet. And Greenberg had had rudimentary telepathy.

The helmet could boost his tiny talent into a semblance of Thrintun Power.

Where was he now? He must have missed F124, Kzanol decided, and gone on to a haphazard collision with this planet Earth. Where and when had he landed? Could he reach the lost planet within Greenburg's lifetime?

Greenberg's body wanted dinner (it was 1:20 hours), water, and a cigarette. Kzanol had no trouble ignoring the hunger and thirst, for a thrint would kill himself if he ate enough to satisfy his hunger, and rupture his storage sac if he drank until he wasn't thirsty. The battle for food had been very fierce among the thrint's dumb ancestors. But he had cigarettes. He smoked and found that he liked it, although he had to fight an urge to chew the filter.

Where was he? He let Larry Greenberg's memory come to the surface. High school. History class, with lousy grades. The race for space; Moon bases; Mars bases. The Belt. Colonization of the Belt. The economics behind the Belt. Confinement Asteroid. Overpopulation on Earth. Fertility Laws; Fertility Board; Superman Insurrection. Sanction against the Belt, during an argument over the use of the Jovian moons. There was a lot of extraneous material coming through, but Kzanol was getting a good picture of the solar system. He was on the third planet, and it was binary. He had been extremely lucky to hit it.

The UN power sender on Mercury. Failure of the economic sanction. Limits of Belt autonomicity. Industrial warfare. Why was the Belt being treated as a villain? Forget it. Belt mining of Saturn's rings for water. Saturn's rings. Rings!

"Youch!" Kzanol hurled the cigarette butt away and stuffed his burnt fingers in his mouth.

F124. So this is F124, he thought. It doesn't look like F124. He started to shiver, so he turned up the heater.

At one-thirty Judy got up and went out. The nightmare feeling had become too much to bear, alone in the dark. And Larry hadn't called.

A cab dropped to the corner in answer to her ring. She didn't know the address of the UCLA Physics Level, but there was a phone in the cab. She had Information type the address on the cab destination board. The cab whirred and rose.

Judy leaned back in the soft seat. She was tired, even though she couldn't sleep.

The enormous pillar that was UCLA blazed with light; but these were night lights, to protect the structure from aircraft. Yet- a level halfway up was three times as bright as the rest. Judy guessed which level this was, even before the cab started down. As they swooped toward the landing balcony she noticed other details.

The big square vehicle was an ambulance, one with large capacity. Those little cars with the extended motor housings were police. There were tiny figures moving around.

Automatically Kzanol lit his last cigarette. His mouth and throat were raw; was that normal? He remembered that it wasn't, except when he had been smoking far too much.

… And then the Time of Ripening would come. Suddenly everyone would be in a hurry; Dad and Grandpa would return to the house very late and bone-tired, and the slaves never rested at all. All day and night there was the sound of trees being. felled, and the low whirr of the stripping plant.

Before he was old enough to help, he used to sit beneath the guardian sunflowers and watch the trees go into the stripping plant. They would go in looking like any other mpul tree: perfectly straight, with the giant green flower at the top, and the dark blue stalk ending in a tapering tap root. In the stripping plant the flower and the soft bark and the tap root would be removed. The logs would come out shining in the sun, with nothing left but the solid fuel rocket core and the thin iron-crystal skin beneath the bark. Then the logs would be shipped to all the nearby civilized worlds, in ships which lifted on other stage tree logs.

But first there was the testing. A log was selected at random and fitted into the testing block. Grandfather and Dad would be standing by, each looking like he had sucked a sour gnal. They watched with single-minded concentration as the log was fired, ready to disapprove a whole crop at the slightest sign of misfire. Kzanol used to try to imitate their expressions. The little tnuctip technicians would be running around setting instruments and looking harried and important. They seemed too small to be intelligent animals, but they were. Their quaint biological science had mutated the stage trees out of worthless mpul trees. They had created the sunflowers which guarded the house: a hedge of twelve-foot trunks, each bearing a flexible silver mirror to focus sunlight on the green photosynthetic node, or to shift that focus onto an attacking enemy. Tnuctipun had built the gigantic, mindless yeast-eating whitefoods which fed the family and the carnivorous tnuctipun themselves. They had been given more freedom than any other slave race, because they had proven the worth of their freethinking brains.

A tnuctip would set off the log. The flame would shoot out over the valley, blue-white and very straight, darkening at the end to red smoke, while instruments measured the log's precise thrust and Grandfather smiled in satisfaction. The flame shook the world with its sound, so that little Kzanol used to fear that the thrust was in-creasing the planet's spin…

Kzanol/Greenberg reached to knock the ash off his last cigarette and saw his second-to-last burning in the ash tray, two-thirds smoked. He hadn't done that since high school! He cursed a Thrintun curse and almost strangled on it; his throat positively wasn't built for overtalk.

He wasn't gaining anything with his reminiscing, either.

Wherever in the universe he was, he still had to reach a spaceport. He needed the amplifier. Later he could figure out why there were aliens on F124, and why they thought they had been here longer than was possible. He started the motor and punched for Topeka, Kansas.

He'd have to steal a ship anyway. It might as well be an armed ship (since this region of space was lawless by definition, having no Thrintun), and there was a military spaceport near Topeka.

Wait a moment, he thought. This couldn't be F124. There were too many planets! F124 had only eight, and here there were nine.

Now that he was started he noticed other discrepancies. The asteroid belt of F124 had been far thicker, and her moon had had a slight rotation, he remembered. He was in the wrong system!

Merely a coincidence! Kzanol grinned. And what a coincidence! The habitable planet, the ringed planet, the ordered sizes of the worlds… come to think of it, he was the only thrint ever to have found two slave planets. He would be the richest being in the galaxy! He didn't care, now, if he never found the map. But, of course, he still needed the amplifier.

Judy felt that she was on the verge of a tantrum. "But can't they talk at all?" she begged, knowing she was being unreasonable.

Los Angeles Police Chief Lloyd Masney's patience was wearing thin. "Mrs. Greenberg," he said heavily. "You know that Doctor Jansky is having his eyes and face replaced at this moment. Also a wide patch of skin on his back, which was taken off almost down to the spinal cord. The others are almost as badly off. Dr. Snyder has no eye damage, but the part of his face that he didn't cover with his hands is being replaced, and the palms of his hands, and some skin from his back. Knudsen did have his spinal cord opened, and some ribs too. The autodoc won't let us wake any of them up, even under police priority, except for Mr. Trimonti. He is being questioned while the 'doc replaces skull and scalp from the back of his head. He has had a bad shock, and he is under local anesthetic, and you may not disturb him! You may hear the transcription of our interview when we have it. Meanwhile, may I offer you some coffee?"

"Yes, thank you," said Judy. She thought he was giving her a chance to get a grip on herself, and was grateful. When he came back with the coffee she sipped it for a few moments, covertly studying the police chief.

He was a burly man who walked like he had bad feet. No wonder if he did; his hands and feet were both tiny in proportion to the rest of his body. He had straight white hair and a dark complexion. His bushy mustache was also white. He seemed almost as impatient as she. She had not yet seen him sit in normal fashion; now his legs were draped over one arm of his swivel chair while his shoulders rested against the other.

"Have you any idea where he is now?" She couldn't restrain herself.

"Sure," Masney said unexpectedly. "He just crossed the Kansas-Colorado border at a height of nine thousand feet. I guess he doesn't know how to short out his license sender. But then, maybe he just didn't bother."

"Maybe he just doesn't like cities," said the old man in the corner. Judy had thought he was asleep. He had been introduced as Lucas Garner, an Arm of the UN. Judy waited for him to go on, but he seemed to think he had explained himself. Masney explained for him.

"You see, we don't advertise the fact that all our override beamers are in the cities. I figure that if he knows enough to go around the cities, which he's been doing, he must know enough to short out his license so that we can't follow him. Luke, have you got some reason to think he doesn't like cities?"

Luke nodded. Judy thought he looked like the oldest man in the world. His face was as wrinkled as Satan's. He rode a ground-effect travel chair as powerful as a personal tank. "I've been expecting something like this for years," he said. "Lloyd, do you remember when the Fertility Laws went into force, and I told you that a lot of homicidal nuts would start killing bachelors who had gotten permits to have children? And it happened. This is like that. I thought it might happen on Jinx, but it happened here instead.

"Larry Greenberg thinks he's an alien."

Judy was stunned. "But he's done this before," she protested.

"No." Garner drew a lit cigarette from the arm of his chair. "He hasn't. He's worked with men and dolphins. Now he's run into something he can't take. I've got a hunch what it is, and I'd give my wheel chair" — Judy looked, but it didn't have wheels- "to know if I'm right.

"Mrs. Greenberg. Has your husband ever been asked to read the mind of a telepath?"

Mutely Judy shook her head.

"So," said Garner. Again he looked like he'd gone to sleep, this time with a cigarette burning between his fingers. His hands were huge, with muscles showing beneath the loose, mottled skin, and his shoulders belonged on a blacksmith. The contrast between Gamer's massive torso and his helpless, almost fleshless legs made him look a little like a bald ape. He came to life, sucked in a massive dose of smoke, and went on talking.

"Lloyd's men got here about fifteen minutes after Larry Greenberg left. Trimonti called the cops, of course; nobody else could move. Lloyd himself was here in another ten. When he saw the wounds on the men Greenberg shot, he called me in Brussels.

"I'm an Arm, a member of the UN Technological Police. There was a chance the weapon that made those wounds would have to be suppressed. Certainly it needed investigation. So my first interest was the weapon.

"I don't suppose either of you ever heard of Buck Rogers? No? Too bad. Then I'll just say that nothing in our present technology could have led to a weapon like this.

"It does not destroy matter, which is reassuring. Rewriting one law of physics is worse than trying to eat one peanut. The weapon scatters matter. Lloyd's men found traces of blood and flesh and bone forming a greasy layer all over the room. Not merely microscopic traces, but clumps too small to see at all.

"Trimonti's testimony was a godsend. Obviously the Sea Statue dropped the weapon, and Greenberg used it.

Why?"

Masney rumbled, "Get to the point, Luke."

"Okay, here it comes. The contact helmet is a very complicated psionics device. One question the psychologists have wondered about is this. Why don't the contact men get more confused when extraneous memories pour in? Usually there's a few minutes of confusion, and then everything straightens out. They say it's because the incoming memories are weak and fuzzy, but that's only half an answer. It may even be a result, not a cause.

"Picture it. Two men sit down under crystal-iron helmets, and when one of them gets up he has two complete sets of memories. Which one is him?

"Well, one set remembers a different body from the one he finds himself in. More important, one set remembers being a telepath and the other doesn't! One set remembers sitting down under a contact helmet with the foreknowledge that when her gets up he will have two sets of memories. Naturally the contact man will behave as if that set were his own. Even with eight or ten different memory sets, the contact man will automatically use his own.

"Well, let's say the Sea Statue is a telepath. Not a telepathy-prone, like Larry Greenberg, but a full telepath, able to read any mind whenever be chooses. Suddenly all bets are off. Greenberg wakes with two sets of memories, and one set remembers reading hundreds of other minds, or thousands! Got it?"

"Yes. Oh, yes," said Judy. "I warned him something was going to happen. But what can we do?"

"If he doesn't pass over a city soon we'll have to send up interceptors. We'd better wait 'til Snyder gets out of the 'doc."

Kzanol dropped the car again half an hour later. He had been wondering about the peculiar gritty feeling in his eyes, and when he felt he was about to lose consciousness he became frightened. Then his Greenberg memories told him what was wrong. He was sleepy.

He didn't even waste time worrying about it. Kzanol was getting used to the humiliations that came with Greenberg's body. He put the car down in a plowed field and slept.

He woke at first light and took the car up at once. And then, incredibly, he began to enjoy himself. Towns and cities appeared before the speeding car, and he circled them cautiously; but the countryside began to attract his attention. The fields of grain and alfalfa were strange in their small size and checkerboard design. There was other vegetation, and he dropped low to examine the trees. Trees with shapeless woolly green heads instead of flowers. Trees that sometimes hugged the ground as if fearing the sky. Perhaps the winds were dangerous on this world. Trees that almost never grew completely straight; they were weird and asymmetrical and beautiful, and the Greenberg memory could tell him little about them; Greenberg was a city man. He curved out of his way to see them. He dipped low over quaint houses with peaked roofs, delighted by their novel architecture, and he wondered again about Earth's weather. Greenberg, jogged this time, remembered a Kansas tornado. Kzanol was impressed.

Kzanol was as happy as a tourist. True, he was even more uncomfortable, for he was hungry and thirsty and in need of nicotine or gnals. But he could ignore these minor discomforts; he was a thrint, he knew that a gnal would be deadly poison, and it had been Greenberg's fixed belief that he could stop smoking whenever he pleased. Kzanol believed him and ignored the craving. Normally he would trust anything he found in the Greenberg memory.

So he gawked at the scenery like any tourist doing something new and different.

After two hours it began to pall. The problem of where in space he was worrying him again. But he saw the solution already. The Topeka Public Library was the place to go. If a nearby solar system had been found which was nearly identical with this one, he would find it listed there. The Belt telescopes, unhampered by atmospheric distortion, were able to see planets circling other suns; and the interstellar ramscoop robots had been searching out man-habitable systems for nearly a century. If the F124 system had not yet been found, it was beyond the reach of terran ships, and he might as well decently commit suicide.

Amazing, how nearly alike were the F124 system and the solar system. There were the two habitable binary thirds, the giant fifths, the asteroid belts, similar in position if not in density, the correspondence of size and position of the first eight planets of each system, the ringed sixth it was almost too much to believe.

Oh, Powerloss. Kzanol/Greenberg sighed and cracked his knuckles, badly frightening himself. It was too much to believe. He didn't believe it.

Suddenly he was very tired. Thrintun was very far away in an unknown direction. The amplifier helmet, and everything else he owned, were probably equally unreachable in a completely different direction. His Power was gone, and even his body had been stolen by some terrifying slave sorcery. But worst of all, he had no idea what to do next!

A city rose in the distance. His car was making straight for it. He was about to steer around it when he realized it must be Topeka. So he put his head in his arms and wished he could lose consciousness again. The strength seemed to have leaked out of him.

This had to be F124.

But it couldn't be. The system had an extra world and not enough asteroids.

But, he remembered, Pluto was supposed to be a stowaway in the solar system. There was its queer orbit, and some mathematical discrepancy in its size. Perhaps it was captured by Sol before he awakened.

But in three hundred years? Highly unlikely.

Kzanol raised his face, and his face showed terror. He knew perfectly well that three hundred years was his lower limit; the brain board had given him a three-hundred-year journey using half the ship's power. He might have been buried much longer than that.

Suppose he accepted Pluto. What about the slave race, happily living where there should have been only yeast, covering the oceans a foot deep, or at most whitefoods, big as brontosaurs and twice as pretty, wandering along the shorelines feeding on mutated scum?

He couldn't explain it, so he dropped it.

But the asteroid belt was certainly thinner than it had been. True, it would have thinned out anyway in time, what with photon pressure and solar wind pushing dust and the smaller particles outward into deep space, and collisions with the bigger planets removing a few rocks, and even some of the most eccentric asteroids being slowed and killed by friction with the solar atmosphere which must extend well past Earth. But that was not a matter for a few hundred years. Or even thousands. Or hundreds of-

And he knew.

Not hundreds of years, or hundreds of thousands. He had been at the bottom of the sea while the solar system captured a new planet, and lost a good third of its asteroid belt, while oceans of food yeast mutated and went bad, and mutated again, and again… At the bottom of the sea he had waited while yeast became grass and fish and now walked on two legs like a thrint.

A billion years wouldn't be long enough. Two billion might do it.

He was hugging his knees with both arms, almost as if he were trying to bury his head between them. A thrint couldn't have done that. It was not the pure passage of time that frightened him so. It was the loss of everything he knew and loved, even his own race. Not only Thrintun the world, but also Thrint the species, must be lost in the past. If there had been Thrintun in the galaxy they would have colonized Earth long ages ago.

He was the last thrint.

Slowly he raised his head, to stare, expressionless, at the wide city beneath him.

He could damn well behave like a thrint.

The car had stopped. He must be over the center of Topeka. But which way was the spaceport? And how would he get in? Greenberg, worse luck, had had no experience in stealing spacecraft. Well, first find out where it was, and then…

The ship was vibrating. He could feel it with those ridiculously delicate fingertips. There was sound too, too high to hear, but he could feel it jangling in his nerves. What was going on?

He went to sleep. The car hung for a moment longer, then started down.

"They always stack me in the rear of the plane," Garner grumbled.

Lloyd Masney was unsympathetic. "You're lucky they don't make you ride in the baggage compartment- seeing as you refuse to leave that hot rod there alone."

"Well, why not? I'm a cripple!"

"Uh huh. Aren't the Ch'ien treatments working?"

"Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. My spinal cord is carrying some messages again. But walking ten paces around a room twice a day just about kills me. It'll be another year before I can walk downtown and back. Meanwhile my chair rides with me, not in the luggage compartment. I'm used to it."

"You'll never miss that year," Masney told him. "How old are you now, Luke?"

"Hundred and seventy next April. But the years aren't getting any shorter, Lloyd, contrary to public opinion. Why do they have to stack me in the rear? I get nervous when I see the wings turn red hot." He shifted uncomfortably.

Judy Greenberg came back from the rest room and sat down next to Lloyd. Luke was across the aisle, in the space made by removing two chairs before takeoff. Judy seemed to have recovered nicely; she looked and moved as if she had just left a beauty parlor. From a distance her face was calm. Garner could see the slight tension in the muscles around the eyes, in the cheeks, through the neck. But Garner was very old. He had his own, non-psychic way of reading minds. He said, as if to empty air, "We'll be landing in half an hour. Greenberg will be sleeping peacefully until we get there."

"Good," said Judy. She leaned forward and turned on the tridee screen in the seat ahead.

Kzanol felt a brand new and horribly unpleasant sensation, and woke up sputtering. It was the scent of ammonia in his nostrils. He woke up sputtering and gagging and bent on mass murder. The first slave he saw, he ordered to kill itself in a horrible manner.

The slave smiled tremulously at him. "Darling, are you all right?" Her voice was terribly strained and her smile was a lie.

Everything came back in a rush. That was Judy… "Sure, beautiful, I'm fine. Would you step outside while these good people ask me some questions?"

"Yes, Larry." She stood up and left, hurrying. Kzanol waited until the door was closed before he turned on the others.

"You." He faced the man in the travel chair. He must be in charge; he was obviously the oldest. "Why did you subject Judy to this?"

"I was hoping it would jog your memory. Did it?"

"My memory is perfect. I even remember that Judy is a sentient female, and that the idea of my not being Larry Greenberg would be a considerable shock to her. That's why I sent her away."

"Good for you. Your females aren't sentient?"

"No. It must be strange to have a sentient mate." Kzanol dug momentarily into Greenberg's memories, smiled a dirty smile, then got back to the business at hand. "How did you bring me down?"

The old one shrugged. "Easy enough. We put you to sleep with a sonic, then took over your car's autopilot. The only risk was that you might be on manual. By the way, I'm Garner. That's Masney."

Kzanol took the information without comment. He saw that Masney was a stocky man, so wide that he seemed much shorter than his six feet two inches, and his hair and eating tendrils or whatever were dead white.

Masney was staring thoughtfully at Kzanol. It was the kind of look a new biology student gives a preserved sheep's heart before he goes to work with the scalpel.

"Greenberg," he said, "why'd you do it?"

Kzanol didn't answer.

"Jansky's lost both his eyes and most of his face. Knudsen will be a cripple for nearly a year; you cut his spinal cord. With this." He pulled the disintegrator out of a drawer. "Why? Did you think it would make you king of the world? That's stupid. It's only a hand weapon."

"It's not even that," said Kzanol. He found it easy to speak English. All he had to do was relax. "It's a digging or cutting tool, or a shaping instrument. Nothing more."

Masney stared. "Greenberg," he whispered, as if he were afraid of the answer, "who do you think you are?"

Kzanol tried to tell him. He almost strangled doing it. Overtalk didn't fit human vocal cords. "Not Greenberg," he managed. "Not a… slave. Not human."

"Then what?"

He shook his head, rubbing his throat.

"Okay. How does this innocuous tool work?"

"You push that little button and the beam starts removing surface material."

"That's not what I meant."

"Oh. Well, it suppresses the… charge on the electron. I think that's right. Then whatever is in the beam starts to tear itself apart. We use the big ones to sculpture mountains." His voice dropped to a whisper. "We did." He started to choke, caught himself. Masney frowned.

Garner asked, "How long were you underwater?"

"I think between one and two billion years. Your years or mine, they aren't that much different."

"Then your race is probably dead."

"Yes." Kzanol looked at his hands, unbelievingly. "How in-" he gurgled, recovered, "how under the Power did I get into this body? Greenberg thought that was only a telepathy machine!"

Garner nodded. "Right. And you've been in that body, so to speak, all along. The alien's memories were superimposed on your brain, Greenberg. You've been doing the same thing with dolphins for years, but it never affected you this way. What's the matter with you, Greenberg? Snap out of it!"

The slave in the travel chair made no move to kill himself. "You," Kzanol/Greenberg paused to translate, "whitefood. You despicable, decaying, crippled whitefood with defective sex organs. Stop telling me who I am! I know who I am!" He looked down at his hands. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes and ran itching down his cheeks, but his face remained as expressionless as a moron's. Garner blinked at him. "You think you are what's-his-name, the alien terror from Outer Space? Nuts. The alien terror is down on the first floor of this building, and he's perfectly harmless. If we could get him back to normal time he would be the first to call you an impostor. Later I'll take you down and show him to you.

"Part of what you said is true. I am, of course, an old man. But what is a, er, whitefood?" He made the word a separate question.

Kzanol had calmed down. "I translated. The whitefood is an artificial animal, created by the tnuctipun as a meat animal. A whitefood is as big as a dinosaur and as smooth and white as a shmoo. They're a lot like shmoos. We can use all of their bodies, except the skeleton, and they eat free food, which is almost as cheap as air. Their shape is like a caterpillar reaching for a leaf. The mouth is at the front of the belly foot."

"Free food?"

Kzanol/Greenberg didn't hear him. "That's funny. Garner, do you remember the pictures of bandersnatchi that the second Jinx expedition sent back? Greenberg was going to read a bandersnatch mind someday."

"Sure. Hey!"

"Bandersnatchi are whitefoods," said Kzanol/Greenberg. "They don't have minds."

"I guessed that. But, son, you've got to remember that they've had two billion years to develop minds."

"It wouldn't help them. They can't mutate. They were designed that way. A whitefood is one big cell, with a chromosome as long as your arm and as thick as your little finger. Radiation could never affect them, and the first thing that would be harmed by any injury would be the budding apparatus." Kzanol/Greenberg was bewildered. What price another coincidence? "Why would anyone think they were intelligent?"

"Well, for one thing," Garner said mildly, "the report said the brain was tremendous. Weighed as much as a three-year-old boy."

Kzanol/Greenberg laughed. "They were designed for that, too. The brain of a whitefood has a wonderful flavor, so the tnuctip engineers increased its size. So?"

"So it's convoluted like a human brain."

Why, so it was. Like a human brain, and a tnuctip brain, and a thrint brain, for that matter. Now why-

Kzanol/Greenberg cracked his knuckles, then hurriedly separated his hands so that he couldn't do it again. The mystery of the intelligent «bandersnatch» bothered him, but he had other things to worry about. Why, for example, hadn't he been rescued? Three hundred years after he pushed the panic button, he must have struck the Earth like the destroying wrath of the Powergiver. Someone on the moon must have seen it.

Could the lunar observation post have been abandoned?

Why?

Garner crashed into his thoughts. "Maybe something bigger than a cosmic ray made the mutations. Something like a machine-gun volley or a meteor storm."

Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head. "Any other evidence?"

"Oh, hell yes. Greenberg, what do you know about Jinx?"

"A good deal," said Kzanol/Greenberg. Larry's knowledge of Jinx had been as thorough as any colonist's. The memories clicked into place, unbidden, at the sound of the word. Jinx…

Moon of Binary, third planet out from Sirius A. Binary was a banded orange giant, bigger than Jupiter, and much warmer. Jinx was six times as big as Earth, with a gravity of one point seven eight, and with a period of rotation more than four days long. Of all the factors which had shaped Jinx, the most important had been its lack of radioactive materials. For Jinx was solid all through its rocky lithosphere and halfway to the center of its nickel-iron core.

Long ago- before even his time, Kzanol's time- Jinx had been much closer to Binary. So close that the tides had stopped her spin and pulled her into an egg shape. Later, those same tides had pushed her outward. Not unusual. But, though the atmosphere and ocean assumed a more spherical shape, Jinx did not. The body of the moon was still egg shaped.

Jinx was an Easter egg, banded in different colors by the varying surface pressures.

The ocean was a broad ring of what must be extremely salty water running through the poles of rotation. The regions which the colonists called the Ends, marked by the points nearest to and furthest from Binary, were six hundred miles «higher» than the ocean: six hundred miles further from the moon's center of mass. They stuck right out of the atmosphere. In the photographs masered in from the first expedition, the Ends had shown bone white, with a tracery of sharp black shadows. Further from the Ends the shadows disappeared beneath the atmosphere, and clouds began to appear. The clouds became thicker and thicker, with brown-and-gray earth showing more and more rarely, until suddenly the clouds were in full control. The ocean was forever hidden beneath a band of permanent fleecy cloud thousands of miles wide. At sea level the air was terrifically dense, with a constant temperature of two hundred and seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

The colony of Sirius Mater was on the Eastern continent, three thousand miles east of the ocean, a triangle of cultivated land and inflatable buildings at the fork of two rivers. The first colonists had picked a landing place with a high surface pressure, knowing that the denser atmosphere would help protect them from the temperature changes during the long days and nights, and from the ultraviolet scourge of blue-white Sirius A. Sirius Mater now boasted a population of almost two hundred punsters of all ages…

"Good," said Garner. "Then I won't have to explain anything. Can I borrow the phone, Lloyd?"

"Sure." Lloyd hooked a thumb at one wall.

The phone screen was a big one; it covered half the wall. Luke dialed thirteen quick motions of the forefinger. In a moment the screen cleared to reveal a slender young woman with wavy brunette hair.

"Technological Police, Records Office."

"This is Lucas Garner, operative-at-large. Here's my ident." He held a plastic card up to the camera. "I'd like the bandersnatchi sections from the Jinx report of 2106."

"Yes sir." The woman rose and walked off camera.

Kzanol/Greenberg leaned forward to watch. The last report from Jinx had arrived only two months ago, and most of it had not been made public. He remembered seeing stills of the bandersnatchi, but no more. Now, with new eyes eager to compare, he would see whether a bandersnatch was really a whitefood.

It should not have mattered. By all rights he should have felt as he had when Masney's sonic sleeping pill first wore off. Friendless, homeless, disembodied, defeated past all hope. But a prisoner's first duty is always to escape; by collaboration, by treachery, by theft and murder, by any means at all. If he could lull these arrogant slaves into thinking he would cooperate; would give information freely And he had to know. Later he would decide why the question seemed so important. Now he only knew that it was. The suggestion that a whitefood might be intelligent had hit him with the force of a deadly insult.

Why? But never mind why. Was it true?

The girl was back, smiling. "Mr. Garner, I'll now turn you over to Mayor Herkimer." She touched something below the edge of her desk.

The picture dissolved and reformed, but now it was ragged, shot with random dots of colored light. A maser beam had crossed nine light years to bring this picture and had been somewhat torn up on the way, by dust and gee fields and crossing light waves.

Mayor Herkimer had brown hair and a bushy brown beard over a square jaw. His voice was ragged with interference, but his enunciation was clear and careful and twisted by an unknown accent.

"Since everything that wasn't welded down had long since been removed from the Lazy Eight II, and since the fusion plant in the Lazy Eight I was not damaged in the original landing and will give us power for a god-dam century, and since there was little work to be done until spring in any case, the Authority voted to risk the Lazy Eight II in exploring Jinx's oceanic regions. Accordingly six of us red-hot explorers, namely-" Herkimer named names, "took the ship up and went west. A circular flying wing isn't exactly a goddam airplane, but the ship was lighter than during first landing, and we had enough power to stay up forever or to make a straight-up landing anywhere we could find flat land.

"One problem was that the goddam visibility kept dropping-"

Garner whispered, "Their slang seems to have changed somewhat since they moved to Jinx."

"Oh, you noticed that?"

Kzanol/Greenberg twitched in annoyance at the interruption. That would have marked him for an alien anywhere! In 2106 you learned not to hear extraneous noises before you went insane.

"— Couldn't see at all. The light from the fusion drive didn't show us the ground until we were two hundred feet up. We landed on the solid jets, near the shoreline, and started the cameras. Right away we were surrounded by these."

Mayor Herkimer had a sense of drama. As he stopped talking, the scene jumped to a sandy, sloping beach. The sand in the foreground was blackened and blown into a curving wall. Beyond, the ocean. There were no waves on that ocean. The water seemed thick. Thick and gray and living.

Something moved into view. Something white; something like an enormously magnified slug, but with a smooth, slick skin. From the front of the beast reared a brontosaur neck with no head at all. At its base the neck was as wide as the animal's shoulders. It rose in a conical slope. The tip was thick and rounded, featureless but for two tufts of black bristles.

The camera watched as the beast approached; saw it stop at the scorched sand. Others of its kind came out of the mist. The camera swept a full circle, and everywhere there were enormous white bulks like albino sperm whales swimming through sand.

Their rounded tips swung back and forth; the tufted bristles blew without wind. Of course the bristles were sense organs; and of course the mouths were invisible because the mouths were all closed. Unusual in a whitefood. But they were whitefoods, and no mistake.

Mayor Herkimer spoke. "These pictures were taken in visible light, but with a long exposure, which accounts for the damn blurring. To us it was like night. Winston Doheny, our biologist, took one look at these monsters and dubbed them Frumious bandersnatch. This species name is now in the goddam log. Harlow went out in a segmented armor suit and shot a bandersnatch for dissection, and the rest ran off. Fortunately the suit stood up to the heat and pressure."

Films showed the action. Tracer bullets stitching six lines from off-camera through the bulky front of a bandersnatch. The silent death, evidenced only by a suddenly drooping tip. White shapes fading ghostlike into the mist. Herkimer continued, "They run on a rippling belly foot, and as you can see, they move goddam fast.

"According to Doheny this animal is one big cell. Nerves are similar to human nerves in structure, but have no cell body, no nuclei, nothing to separate them from other specialized protoplasm. The brain is long and narrow, and is packed into a bone shell at the elevated tapering tip. This skull is one end of a jointless, flexible, very strong internal cage of bone. Apparently God never intended the beast to shift position." Garner winced at the unconscious blasphemy. "The mouth, which was closed in the film, is just ahead of the belly foot, and is good for nothing but scooping up yeast from the ocean."

The film showed details from the dissection of the bandersnatch. Evidently the two cops at the door had decided not to look; but Masney and Garner watched in keen interest. Autopsies were nothing new to them. The beast was turned on its side to expose the belly foot, and its jaws were opened with a pulley. Slides were shown of tissue sections. There was a circulatory system, with six hearts weighing eleven pounds apiece; there were strange organs in the left side, which only Kzanol/Greenberg recognized as budding apparatus. He watched with manic concentration as the brain case was opened to show the long, narrow brain, gray and deeply convoluted, in its canoe of a skull. The form was familiar in detail, though he'd never seen one raw. Then it was over, and Mayor Herkimer was back.

"The ocean is a uniform foot thick in some unknown breed of yeast. Herds of bandersnatchi move along the shoreline, feeding continuously. The shore is no goddam tourist trap. It's always dark, the waves are smothered by the yeast and the gravity, and the banderanatchi wander along the shore like the lost souls of worn-away mountains. We'd have liked to leave right then, but Doheny couldn't find the sex organs, and he wanted to make a few more dissections.

"So we sent out the copters to find another specimen. But no bandersnatch ever came close enough to be shot from a copter. The banderanatchi had been curious and unafraid. Now they ran whenever a copter got close. All of them. They couldn't possibly have all known about us, unless they were either telepathic or had a language.

"Yet at least one goddam bandersnatch was always within sight of each copter. They seemed to know the range of our guns.

"On the third day of the hunt Doheny got impatient. He assumed that It was the copters that the bandersnatchi were afraid of, and he landed his goddam copter and went hunting on foot. The moment he was out of shooting range of the copter, a bandersnatch charged in and flattened it like a goddam freight truck running down a pedestrian. Doheny had to walk back.

"Several hundred miles east of the shore, we found other forms of native-"

Mayor Herkimer was cut off in mideentence. The slender brunette's voice came from a blank screen: "Mr. Garner, there is another section of the report listed under 'bandersnatchi. Do you want it?"

"Yes, but just a minute." Garner turned to face Kzanol/Greenberg. "Greenberg, were those whitefoods?"

"Yes."

"Are they telepathic?"

"No. And I've never heard of them avoiding a meat packer's ship. They just go on eating until they're dead."

"Okay, miss, we're ready."

Again there was the square, bearded face of the mayor. "We returned to Sirius Mater five Jinx days after our departure. We found that Frumious bandersnatch had preceded us. A single specimen. It must have traveled three thousand miles without yeast, and without any other food source that it could use, just to visit our settlement. To do this it must have gorged itself for months, maybe years, in order to build up enough fat for the trip.

"The colonists let it alone, which was goddam sensible of them, and the bandersnatch didn't come too close. By this time its skin, or its cell wall, was light blue, possibly for protection from sunlight. It went straight to Northwest Cultivation Area, spent two hours running tracks across it in what Vicemayor Tays claims was the damnedest dance he ever saw, then moved off toward the ocean.

"Since we. had both copters, we were the first to see the tracks from above. These are films of the tracks. I am convinced that this is a form of writing. Doheny says it can't be. He believes that a bandersnatch could have no use for intelligence, hence would not develop it. I have to admit the sonofabitch has a good argument. The bandersnatch makes a beached dolphin look like a miracle of dexterity. Would you please analyze this and let us know whether we share this world with an intelligent species?"

"The machines couldn't make anything out of this," Garner put in. "Concepts were too alien, maybe."

From the phone screen came kaleidoscopic color static, then a fuzzy picture. Curved lines, like snail tracks, on brown earth. The earth was piowed in mathematically straight furrows, but the lines were broader and deeper. Hillocks and tree stumps distorted them. A helicopter had landed among the wavy tracks; it looked like a fly on a printed page.

Kzanol/Greenberg choked, gurgled, and said, "'Leave our planet at once or be obliterated, in accordance with the treaty of- I can't read the rest. But it's tnuctip science language. Could I have some water?"

"Sure," Masney said kindly. He jerked a thumb at the cooler. After a moment Kzanol/Greenberg got up and poured his own water.

Lloyd went over to Gamer's chair and began talking in a low voice. "Luke, what was that all about? What are you doing?"

"Just satisfying curiosity. Relax, Lloyd. Dr. Snyder will be here in an hour, then he can take over. Meanwhile there are a lot of things Greenberg can tell us. This isn't just a man with hallucinations, Lloyd.

"Why would the ET's race have thought that the bandersnatch was just a dumb animal? Why does he react so violently when we suggest that the thing might be sentient? Greenberg thinks he's the prisoner of aliens, he thinks his race is billions of years dead and his home lost forever, yet what is it that really interests him? Frumious bandersnatch. Did you see the way he looked when the dissection was going on?"

"No. I was too interested myself."

"I get almost scared when I think of what's in Greenberg's brain the information he's carrying. Do you realize that Dr. Snyder may have to permanently repress those memories to cure him?

"Why would a race as sophisticated as the tnuctipun must have been" he pronounced the word as Kzanol/Greenberg had, badly- "have worked for Greenberg's adapted race? Was it because of the telepathy? I'm just-"

"I can tell you that," Kzanol/Greenberg said bitterly. He had drunk five cups of water, practically without a breath. Now he was panting a little.

"You've got good ears," said Masney.

"No. I'm a little telepathic; just enough to get by on. It's Greenberg's talent, but he didn't really believe in it so he couldn't use it. I can. Much good may it do me."

"So why did the tnuctipun work for you?" Masney messed up the word even worse than Garner had.

The question answered itself.

Everyone in the room jerked like hooked fish.

There was no fall. An instant after he put out his arms, Kzanol was resting on his six fingertips like a man doing pushups. He stayed there a moment, then got to his feet. The gravity was a little heavy.

Where was everybody? Where was the thrint or slave who had released him?

He was in an empty, hideously alien building, the kind that happen only on free slave worlds, before the caretakers move in. But… how had he gotten here, when he was aimed at a deserted food planet? The next sight he had expected was the inside of a caretaker's palace. And where was everybody? He badly needed someone to tell him what was going on.

He Listened.

For some reason, neither human nor Thrintun beings have flaps over their ears resembling the flaps over their eyes. The Thrintun Power faculty is better protected. Kzanol was not forced to lower his mental shield all at once. He chose to do so, and he paid for it. It was like looking into an arc lamp from a foot away. Nowhere in the Thrintun universe would the telepathic noise have been that intense. The slave worlds never held this heavy an overpopulation; and the teeming masses of the Thrintun worlds kept their mind shields up in public.

Kzanol reeled from the pain. His reaction was immediate and automatic.

STOP TRINKING AT ME! he roared at the bellowing minds of Topeka Kansas.

In the complex of mental hospitals still called Menninger's, thousands of doctors and nurses and patients heard the command. Hundreds of patients eagerly took it as literal and permanent. Some became stupid and cured. Others went catatonic. A few who had been harmlessly irresponsible became dangerously so. A handful of doctors became patients, a mere handful, but the loss of their services compounded the emergency when the casualties began pouring in from downtown. Menninger's was miles from Topeka Police Headquarters.

In the little room, everyone jerked like hooked fish.

Then, all but Kzanol/Greenberg, they stopped moving.

Their faces were empty. They were idiots.

In the first instant of the mental blast, Kzanol/Greenberg's mental shield went up with an almost auilible clang. A roaring noise reverberated through his mind for minutes. When, he could think again, he still didn't dare drop the mind shield.

There was a thrint on Earth.

The guards at the door now squatted or sat like rag dolls. Kzanol/Greenberg pulled cigarettes from a dark blue shirt pocket and lit one, from the burning butt between Masney's lips, incidentally saving Masney a nasty burn. He sat and smoked while he thought about the other thrint.

Item: That thrint would see him as a slave.

Item: He, Kzanol, had a working mind shield. That might convince the thrint, whoever he was, that he, Kzanol, was a thrint in a human body. Or it might not. If it did, would the other thrint help? Or would he regard Kzanol/Greenberg as a mere ptavv, a Powerless thrint?

In ugly fact, Kzanol/Greenberg was a ptavv. He had to get his body back before the other found him.

And with that, incredibly, he stopped thinking about the other thrint. There was every reason to wonder about him. What was he doing on Earth? Would he claim Earth as his property? Would he help Kzanol/Greenberg reach Thrintun (or whatever new planet passed for Thrintun these days)? Did he still look Thrintish, or had two billion years of evolution turned Thrintun into monsters? But Kzanol/Greenberg dropped the subject and began to think about reaching Neptune.

Perhaps he knew who the other thrint was, but wasn't ready to face the fact.

Cautiously he Listened. The thrint had left the building. He could find out nothing more, for the other's mind shield was up. He turned his Attention, such as it was, to the men in the room.

They were recovering, but very slowly. He had to Listen with excruciating concentration because of the limitations of Greenberg's brain, but he could feel their personalities reintegrating. The most advanced seemed to be Garner. Next was Masney.

Another part of the Greenberg memory was about to become useful. Greenberg had not lied about his dolphin-like sense of the practical joke. To implement it he had spent weeks learning a technique for what we shall charitably call a party trick.

Kzanol/Greenberg bent over Lloyd Masney. "Lloyd," he said, in a distinct, calm, authoritative voice. "Concentrate on the sound of my voice. You will hear only the sound of my voice. Your eyelids are getting heavy. So heavy. Your fingers are becoming tired. So tired. Let them go limp. Your eyes wish to close; you can hardly keep them open…"

He could feel the Masney personality responding beautifully. It gave no resistance at all.

The gravity was irritating. It was barely enough to notice at first, but after a few minutes it was exhausting. Kzanol gave up the idea of walking after he had gone less than a block, though he didn't like the idea of riding in a slave cart.

I'm not proud, he told himself. He climbed into a parked Cadillac and ordered the slack-lipped driver to take him to the nearest spaceport. There was a fang-jarring vibration, and the car took off with a wholly unnecessary jerk.

These slaves were much larger than the average land-bound sentient being. Kzanol had plenty of head room. After a moment he cautiously took off his helmet. The air was a little thin, which was puzzling considering the heavy gravity. Otherwise it was good enough. He dropped the helmet on the seat and swung his legs over beside it; the seat was too wide for comfort.

The city was amazing. Huge and grotesque! The eye was faced with nothing but rectangular prisms, with here and there a yellow rectangular field or a flattish building with a strangely curved roof. The streets couldn't decide whether to be crooked or straight. Cars zipped by, buzzing like flying pests. The drone from the fans of his own car rasped on his nerves, until he learned to ignore it.

But where was he? He must have missed F124 somehow, and hit here. The driver knew that his planet- Earth? had space travel, and therefore might know how to find F124. And the eighth planet of its system.

For it was already obvious that he would need the second suit. These slaves outnumbered him seventeen billion to one. They could destroy him at any time. And would, when they knew what he was. He had to get the control helmet to make himself safe. Then he would have to find a Thrintun planet; and he might need a better spaceship than the humans had produced so far. They must be made to produce better ships.

The buildings were getting lower, and there were even gaps between them. Had poor transportation made these slaves crowd together in clumps? Someday he must spend the time to find out more about them. After all, they were his now.

But what a story this would make someday! How his grandchildren would listen and admire! When the time came he must buy balladeer; pruntaquilun balladeers, for only these had the proper gift of language…

The spaceport was drawing near.

There was no apparent need to be subtle. Once Kzanol/Greenberg had Masney fully under, he simply ordered Masney to take him to the spaceport. It took about fifteen minutes to reach the gate.

At first he couldn't guess why Masney was landing. Shouldn't he simply fly over the fence? Masney wasn't giving away information. His mind would have been nearly normal by now, and it was normal for a hypnotized person. Masney «knew» that he wasn't really hypnotized; he was only going along with it for a joke. Any time now he would snap out of it and surprise Greenberg. Meanwhile he was calm and happy and free from the necessity for making decisions. He had been told to go to the spaceport. Here he was at the spaceport. His passenger let him lead.

Not until they were down did Kzancl/Greenberg realize that Masney was waiting to be passed through by the guards. He asked, "Will the guards let us through?"

"No," said Masney.

Coosth, another setback. "Would they have let me through with-" he thought, "Garner?"

"Yes. Garner's an Arm."

"Well, turn around and go back for Garner."

The car whirred. "Wait a minute," said Kzanol/Greenberg. "Sleep." Where were the guards?

Across a tremendous flat expanse of concrete, painted with large red targets in a hexagonal array, he could see the spaceships. There were twenty or thirty ramjet rocket orbital craft, some fitted out to lift other spacecraft to orbit. A linear accelerator ran down the entire south side of the field: a quarter mile of wide, closely set metal hoops. Fusion-drive military rockets lay on their sides in docks, ready to be loaded onto the flat triangular ramjet-rockets. They all looked like motor scooters beside two truly gigantic craft.

One thing like a monstrous tin of tuna, a circular flying wing resting on its blunt trailing edge, was the reentry, cargo, and lifesupport system of the Lazy Eight III. Anyone would have recognized her, even without the blue human's sign of infinity on her flank. She was 320 feet in diameter, 360 in height. The other, far to the right, was a passenger ship as big as the ancient “Queen Mary”, one of the twin luxury transports which served the Titan Hotel. And even at this distance it was apparent that everybody, everybody was clustered around her entrance port.

Listening as hard as he could, Kzanol/Greenberg still couldn't find out what they were doing there; but he recognized the flavor of those far-too-calm thoughts. Those were tame slaves, slaves under orders.

The other thrint was here. But why wasn't he taking his own ship? Or had he landed here? Or- was the spawn of a ptavv making a leisurely inspection of his new property?

He told Masney, "The guard has told us to go ahead. Take the car over to that honeymoon special."

The car skimmed across the concrete.

Garner shook his head, let it fall back into place. His mind was as the mind of a sleeping child. Across that mind flitted thoughts as ephemeral as dreams. They could not stay. Gamer had been ordered not to think. I must look terribly senile, he thought once. The idea slipped away… and returned. Senile. I'm old but not senile. No? There is drool on my chin.

He shook his head, hard. He slapped his face with one hand. Garner was beginning to think again, but not fast enough to suit him. He fumbled at the controls of his chair, and it lurched over to the coffee faucet. When he poured a cup his hand shook so that hot coffee spilled on his hand and wrist. Enraged, he hurled the cup at the wall.

His mind went back to white dullness.

A few minutes later Judy Greenberg wobbled through the door. She looked dazed, but her mind was functioning again. She saw Garner slumped in his travel chair wearing the face of a decrepit moron, and she poured cold water over his head until he came to life.

"Where is he?" Garner demanded.

"I don't know," Judy told him. "I saw him walk out, but it didn't seem to matter to me. Chief Masney was with him. What happened to us?"

"Something I should have expected." Garner was no longer a decrepit old man, but an angry Jehovah. "It means things have gone from worse to terrible. That alien statue- I knew there was something wrong with it the moment I saw it, but I couldn't see what it was. Oh, nuts.

"It had both arms out, like it was turning chicken halfway through a swan dive. I saw a little projection on his chest, too. Look. The alien put himself into a freeze field to avoid some disaster. After that the button that turned on the field was in the field, and so was the alien's finger pushing it in. So the button wouldn't need a catch to hold it in. It wouldn't have one.

"But the alien had both arms out when I saw it. When Jansky put his own field around the statue, the alien dropped Greenberg's 'digging instrument' and the button too. The button must have popped out. Why he didn't come to life right then I don't know, unless the freeze field has inertia like hysteresis in an electric current. But he's alive now, and that was him we heard."

"Well, it's quite a monster," said Judy. "Is that what Larry thinks he is?"

"Right." Garner's chair rose and made a wind in the room.. The chair slid out the door, picking up speed. Judy stared after it.

"Then if he sees that he isn't who he thinks he is…" she began hopefully. Then she gave it up.

One of the policemen got to his feet, moving like a sleepwalker.

Kzanol took the guards with him on his tour of the spaceport. He also took all the repairmen, dispatchers, spacemen, and even passengers he happened to meet while moving around. The man who owned the Cadillac seemed to regard even a trip to Mars as a hazardous journey! If that was the state of Earth's space technology, Kzanol wanted a bundleful of expert opinions.

A couple of dispatchers were sent back to the office to try to find F124 on the star maps. The rest of the group came with Kzanol, growing as it moved. Just two men had the sense to hide when they saw the mob coming. By the time he reached the passenger liner Kzanol was towing everyone at the spaceport but Masney, Kzanol/Greenberg, and those two cautious men.

He had already chosen the Lazy Eight III, the only interstellar ship on the field. While he was getting the rescue switch on his back repaired, slaves could finish building and orbiting the ship's drive and fuel tanks. It would be at least a year before he was ready to leave Earth.

Then he would take a large crew and pass the journey in stasis, with his slaves to wake him whenever a new child became old enough to take orders. Their descendants would wake him at journey's end.

Kzanol had stood beneath the blunt ring which ship's trailing edge and looked up into the gaping mouth of a solid fuel landing motor. He had probed an engineer's mind to find how the spin of a ship could substitute for artificial gravity. He had walked on the after wall of the central corridor and peered through doors above his head and beneath his feet, into the Garden whose rows of hydroponic tanks served in place of his own tnuctip-bred air plant, and into the huge control room with three walls covered in nightmare profusion with dials and screens and switchboards. His own ship had needed only a screen and a brain board. Everywhere he saw ingenuity replacing true knowledge, complex makeshifts replacing the compact, simple machines Kzanol had known. Dared he trust his life to this jury-rigged monster?

He had no choice. The remarkable thing was that humans would do so; that they would scheme and fight to do so. The space urge was a madness upon them- a madness which should be cured quickly, lest they waste this world's resources.

This prospecting trip, Kzanol thought wryly, is taking longer than I dreamed. And then, not at all wryly: Will I ever see Thrintun again?

Well, at least he had time to burn. As long as he was here, he might as well see what a human called a luxury liner.

He was impressed despite himself.

There were Thrintun liners bigger than the Golden Circle, and a few which were far bigger; but not many carried a greater air of luxury. Those that did carried the owners of planets. The ramjets under the triangular wing were almost as big as some of the military ships on the field. The builders of the Golden Circle had cut corners only where they wouldn't show. The lounge looked huge, much bigger than it actually was. It was paneled in gold and navy blue. Crash couches folded into the wall to give way to a bar, a small dance floor, a compact casino. Dining tables rose neatly and automatically from the carpeted floor, inverting themselves to show dark-grained plastic-oak. The front wall was a giant tridee screen. When the water level in the fuel tanks became low enough, an entrance from the lounge turned the tank into a swimming pool. Kzanol was puzzled by the layout until he realized that the fusion drive was in the belly. Ramjets would lift the ship to a safe altitude, but from then on the fusion drive would send thrust up instead of forward. The ship used water instead of liquid hydrogen, not because the passengers needed a pool, but because water was safer to carry and provided a reserve oxygen supply. The staterooms were miracles of miniaturization.

There were, thought Kzanol, ideas here that he could use when he got back to civilization. He sat down in one of the lounge crash couches and began leafing through some of the literature stuffed into the backs. One of the first things he found, of course, was a beautifully colored picture of Saturn as seen from the main dance bubble of the Titan Hotel.

Of course he recognized it. He began to ask eager questions of the men around him.

The truth hit him all at once.

Kzanol/Greenberg gasped, and his shield went up with a clang. Masney wasn't so fortunate. He shrieked and clutched his head, and shrieked again. In Topeka, thirty miles away, unusually sensitive people heard the scream of rage and grief and desolation.

At Menninger's, a girl who had been catatonic for four years forced doughy leg muscles to hold her erect while she looked around her. Someone needed help; someone needed her.

Lucas Garner gasped and stopped his chair with a jerk. Alone among the pedestrians around him, who were behaving as if they had very bad headaches, Garner listened. There must be information buried in all that emotion! But Garner learned nothing. He felt the sense loss becoming his own, sapping his will to live until he felt he was drowning in a black tide.

"It doesn't hurt," said Kzanol/Greenberg in a calm, reassuring, very loud voice. The loudness, hopefully, would carry over Masney's screaming. "You can feel it but it doesn't hurt. Anyway, you have enormous courage, more than you have ever had in your whole life." Masney stopped screaming, but his face was a mask of suffering. "All right," said Kzanol/Greenberg. "Sleep." He brushed Masney's face with his fingertips. Masney collapsed. The car continued weightlessly across the concrete, riding its cushion of air, aiming itself at the cylindrical shell that was the Lazy Eight III. Kzanol/Greenberg let it go. He couldn't operate the controls from the back seat, and Masney was in no shape to help. He could have cut the air cushion, by stretching, but only if he wanted to die.

The mental scream ended. He put his hand on Masney's shoulder and said, "Stop the car, Lloyd." Masney took over with no sign, physical or mental, of panic. The car dropped gently to the ground two yards from the outer hull of the giant colony ship.

"Sleep," said Kzanol/Greenberg, and Masney slept. It would probably do him good. He was still under hypnosis, and would be deeper when he awakened. As for Kzanol/Greenberg, he didn't know what he wanted. To rest and think perhaps. Food wouldn't hurt him either, he decided. He had recognized the mind that screamed its pain over hail of Kansas, and he needed time to know that he was not Kzanol, thrint, lord of creation.

By and by there was a roar like a fusor exploding. Kzanol/Greenberg saw a wave of flaming smoke pour across the concrete, then gradually diminish. He couldn't imagine what it was. Cautiously he lowered his mind shield and found out.

Jato units. Kzanol was going after the second suit.

Ships and scopes and Confinement Asteroid- by these you may measure the Belt.

A century ago, when the Belt was first being settled, the ships used ion drives and fission batteries and restarting chemical attitude jets. Now they use fusion tubes, based on a method of forcing the inner surface of a crystal-zinc tube to reflect most forms of energy and matter. The compact air converter has replaced tanked air and hydroponics, at least for months-long hops, though the interstellar colony ships must grow plants for food. Ships have become smaller, more dependable, more versatile, cheaper, far faster, and infinitely more numerous. There are tens of thousands of ships in the Belt.

But there are millions of telescopes. Every ship carries at least one. Telescopes in the Trojan asteroids watch the stars, and Earth buys the films with seeds and water and manufactured products, since Earth's telescopes are too near the Sun to avoid distortion by gravity bend and solar wind. Telescopes watch Earth and Moon, and these films are secret. Telescopes watch each other, recomputing the orbit of each important asteroid as the planets pull it from its course.

Confinement Asteroid is unique.

Early explorers had run across a roughly cylindrical block of solid nickel-iron two miles long by a mile thick, orbiting not far from Ceres. They had marked its path and dubbed it 5-2376.

Those who came sixty years ago were workmen with a plan. They drilled a hole down the asteroid's axis, filled it with plastic bags of water, and closed both ends. Solid fuel jets spun S-2376 on its axis. As it spun, solar mirrors bathed it in light, slowly melted it from the surface to the center. When the water finished exploding, and the rock had cooled, the workmen had a cylindrical nickel-iron bubble twelve miles long by six in diameter.

It had been expensive already. Now it was more so. They rotated the bubble to provide half a gee of gravity, filled it with air and with tons of expensive water covered the interior with a mixture of pulverized stony meteorite material and garbage seeded with select bacteria. A fusion tube was run down the axis, three miles up from everywhere: a very special fusion tube, made permeable to certain wavelengths of light. A gentle bulge in the middle created the wedding-ring lake which now girdles the little inside-out world. Sunshades a mile across were set to guard the poles from light, so that snow could condense there, fall of its own weight, melt, and run in rivers to the lake.

The project took a quarter of a century to complete.

Thirty-five years ago Confinement freed the Belt of its most important tie to Earth. Women cannot have children in free fall. Confinement, with two hundred square miles of usable land, could house one hundred thousand in comfort; and one day it will. But the population of the Belt is only eight hundred thousand; Confinement's score hovers around twenty thousand, mostly women, mostly transient, mostly pregnant.

Lars held a raw carrot in one hand and the knob of a film scanner in the other. He was running six hours of film through the machine at a rate which would have finished the roll in fifteen minutes. The film had been taken through one of the Eros cameras, all of which now pointed at Earth.

For most of the next week, Eros would be the closest asteroid to Earth. The films would be running constantly.

Suddenly Lars stopped chewing. His hand moved. The film ran back a little. Stopped.

There it was. One frame was whited out almost to the corners.

Lars moved the film to a larger scanner and began running it through, slowly, starting several frames back. Twice he used the magnifying adjustment. Finally he muttered, "Idiots."

He crossed the room and began trying to find Ceres with a maser.

The duty man picked up the earphones with his usual air of weary patience. He listened silently, knowing that the source was light-minutes away. When the message began to repeat he thumbed a button and said, "Jerry, find Eros and send the following. Recording. Thank you, Eros, your message received in full. Well get right on it, Lars. Now I've got news for you." The man's colorless voice took on a note of relish. "From Tanya. The 'doc says in seven months you'll be the father of healthy twin girls. Repeat, twin girls…"

Carefully, with a constant tapping of fingers on at-thuds jet buttons, Lit Shaeffer brought his ship into dock at Confinement's pole. A constant thirty miles below, Ceres was a pitted boulder spotted with glassy-looking bubbles of flexible transparent plastic. He rested for a little- docking was always tricky, and Confinement's rotation was unsettling even at the axis- then climbed out the lock and jumped. He landed in the net above the nearest of the ten personnel airlocks. Like a spider on a web, he climbed down to the steel door and crawled in. Ten minutes later, after passing through twelve more doors, he reached the locker room.

A mark piece rented him a locker and he stowed his suit and jet pack inside, revealing himself as a scrawny giant with dark, curly hair and a mahogany tan confined strictly to his face and hands. He bought a paper coverall from a dispenser. Lit and Marda were among the several hundred Belters who did not become nudists in a shirtsleeve environment. It marked them as kooks, which was not a bad thing in the Belt.

The last door let him out behind the heat shield, still in free fall. A spring lift took him four miles down to where he could get a tricycle motor scooter. Even Belter couldn't keep a twowheeler upright against Confinement's shifting Coriolis force. The scooter took him down a steep gradient which leveled off into plowed fields, greenhouses, toiling farm machinery, woods streams and scattered cottages. In ten minutes he was home.

No, not really home. The cottage was rented from what there was of a Belt government. A Belter's home is the interior of his suit. But with Marda waiting in-side, dark and big-boned and just beginning to show her pregnancy, it felt like homecoming.

Then Lit remembered the coming fight. He hesitated a moment, consciously relaxing, before he rang.

The door disappeared, zzzip. They stood facing each other.

"Lit," said Marda, flatly, as if there was no surprise at all. Then, "There's a call for you."

"I'll take care of that first."

In the Belt as on Earth, privacy was rare and precious. The phone booth was a transparent prism, soundproof. Lit sneaked a last look at Marda before he answered the call. She looked both worried and determined.

"Hello, Cutter. What's new?"

"Hello, Lit. That's why I'm calling," said the duty man at Ceres. Cutter's voice was colorless as always. So was his appearance. Cutter would have looked appropriate dispensing tickets or stamps from behind a barred window. "Lars Stiller just called. One of the honeymoon specials to Titan just took off without calling us. Any comments?"

"Comments? Those stupid, bubbleheaded-" The traffic problem in space was far more than a matter of colliding spacecraft. No two spacecraft had ever collided, but men had died when their ships went through the exhaust of a fusion motor. Telescopic traffic checks, radio transmissions, rescue missions, star and asteroid observations could all be thrown out of whack by a jaywalker.

"That's what I said, Lit. What'll we do, turn 'em back?"

"Oh, Cutter, why don't you go to Earth and start your own government?" Lit rubbed his temples hard with both hands, rubbing away the tension. "Sorry. I shouldn't have said that. Marda's having trouble, and it's bugging me. But how can we turn back thirty honeymooning flatlanders, each a multimillionaire? Things are tense enough now. Want to start the Last War?"

"I guess not. Sorry to hear about Marda. What's wrong?"

"She didn't get here in time. The baby's growing too fast."

"That's a damn shame."

"Yeah."

"What about the honeymooner?"

Lit turned his thoughts away from the coming storm. "Assign somebody to watch her and broadcast her course. Then write up a healthy bill for the service and send it to Titan Enterprises, Earth. If it isn't paid in two weeks we send a copy to the UN and demand action."

"Figures. 'Bye, Lit."

Conceived in free fall, gestated in free-fall for almost three months, the child was growing too fast. The question could smash a marriage: Let the 'doc abort now? Or wait, slow the child's growth with the appropriate hormone injections, and hope that it wouldn't be born a monster?

But there was no such hope.

Lit felt like he was drowning. With a terrible effort he kept his voice gentle. "There'll be other children, Marda."

"But will there? It's so risky, hoping I can get to Confinement before it's too late. Oh, Lit, let's wait until we're sure."

She'd waited three months between 'doc checks! But Lit couldn't say so now, or ever. Instead he said, "Marda, the autodoc is sure, and Dr. Siropopolous is sure. I'll tell you what I've been thinking, We could take a house right here in Confinement until you're pregnant again. It's been done before. Granted it's expensive-" The phone rang.

"Yes?" he barked. "Cutter, what's wrong now-"

"Two things. Brace yourself."

"Go ahead."

"One. The honeymooner is not going to Titan. It seems to be headed in the direction of Neptune."

"But- Better give me the rest of it."

"A military ship just took off from Topeka Base. It's chasing the honeymooner, and they didn't call us this time either!"

"That's more than peculiar. How long is the honeymooner on its way?"

"An hour and a half. No turnover yet, but of course it could be headed for any number of asteroids."

"Oh, that's just great." Lit closed his eyes for a moment. "It almost sounds like something's wrong with the honeymooner, and the other ship's trying a rescue mission. Could something have blown in the lifesupport system?"

"I'd guess not, not in the Golden Circle. Honeymooners have fail-safe on their fail-safe. But you'd better hear the punch line."

"Fire."

"The military ship took off from the field on its fusion drive."

"Then-" There was only one conceivable answer. Lit began to laugh. "Somebody stole it!"

Cutter smiled thinly. "Exactly. Once again, shall we turn either of them back?"

"Certainly not. For one thing, if we threaten to shoot we may have to do it. For another, Earth is very touchy about what rights they have in space. For a third, this is their problem, and their ships. For a fourth, I want to see what happens. Don't you get it yet, Cutter?"

"My guess is that both ships have been stolen." Cutter was still smiling.

"No, no. Too improbable. The military ship was stolen, but the honeymooner must have been sabotaged. We're about to witness the first case of space piracy!"

"O-o-oh. Fifteen couples, and all their jewels, plus, uh,

ransom you know, I believe you're right!" And Lit Shaeffer was the first man in years to hear Cutter laugh in public.

In the dead of August the Kansas countryside was a steam bath with sunlamps. Under the city's temperature umbrella it was a cool, somewhat breezy autumn, but the air hit Luke Gamer like the breath of Hell as his chair shot through the intangible barrier between Cool and Hot. From there he traveled at top speed, not much caring if his chair broke down as long as he could get into an air conditioned hospital.

He stopped at the spaceport checkpoint, was cleared immediately, and crossed the concrete like a ram on a catapult. The hospital stood like a wedge of Swiss cheese at the edge of the vast landing field, its sharp corner pointed inward. He got inside before heat stroke could claim him.

The line before the elevator was discouragingly long. His chair was rather bulky; he would need an elevator almost to himself. And people were no longer over-polite to their elders. There were too many elders around these days. Gamer inhaled deeply of cool air, then went back out.

Outside the doors he fumbled in the ashtray on the left arm of his chair. The motor's purr rose to a howl, and suddenly it wasn't a ground-effect motor any more.

If Masney could see him now! Six years ago Masney had profanely ordered him to get rid of the illegal power booster or be run in for using a manually operated flying vehicle. Anything for a friend, Luke had reasoned, and bad hidden the control in the ashtray.

The ground dwindled. The edge of the building shot downward past him: sixty stories of it. Now he could see the scars left by Greenberg and Masney. The wavering fusion flame had splashed molten concrete in all directions, had left large craters and intricate earthworm-track runnels, had crossed the entrance to a passenger tunnel and left molten metal pouring down the stairs. Men and machines were at work cleaning up the mess.

The sun deck was below him. Luke brought the travel chair down on the roof and scooted past startled sunbathing patients and into the elevator.

Going down it was dead empty. He got out on the fifty-second floor and showed his credentials to a nurse.

They were all in one ward. Miday, Sandier, Buzin, Katz- there were twenty-eight of them, the men who had been closest to Kzanol when he threw his tantrum. Seven were buried in plastic cocoons. The alien had forgotten to order them to cover, and they had been in the way of the blast when the Golden Circle took off. The others were under sleep-inducers. Their faces twisted sometimes with the violence of their dreams.

"I'm Jim Skarwold," said a blond, chubby man in an intern's uniform. "I've heard of you, Mr. Garner. Is there anything I can do for you?"

"There better be." Garner sent his glance down the line of treatment tanks. "Can any of these men stand a dose of scopolamine? They may have information I need."

"Scop? I don't think so. Mr. Garner, what happened to them? I took some psychiatry in college, but I never heard of anything like this. It isn't- withdrawal from reality, it isn't straight or crooked fear… They're in despair, but not like other people.

"I was told they got this way from contact with an ET. If you could tell me more about it, I'd have a better chance of treating them."

"Right. Here's what I know," said Garner. He told the doctor everything that had happened since the statue was retrieved from the ocean. The doctor listened in silence.

"Then it isn't just a telepath," he said when Garner finished. "It can control minds. But what could, it have ordered them to do that would produce this?" He gestured at the row of sleeping patients.

"Nothing. I don't think he was giving orders at the time. He just got a helluva shock and started feeling out loud." Luke dropped a huge hand on the doctor's shoulder, and Skarwold twitched his surprise at the weight. "Now, if I were planning to treat them, I'd find out first who they think they are. Themselves? Or the alien? The ET may have superimposed his own emotional pattern on theirs, or even his memory pattern.

"Being me, and an Arm, I want to know why both Greenberg and the ET separately stole spaceships and went rocketing off. They must know they've got interplanetary ships, not interstellar colony craft. Is there an alien base somewhere in the solar system? What are they after?

"Perhaps we can scratch both problems at the same time, Dr. Skarwold."

"Yes," said Skarwold slowly. "Perhaps you're right. Give me an hour to find the man with the strongest heart."

That was why Luke always carried paperbacks in the glove compartment of his chair. His career involved a lot of waiting.

Arthur T. Katz, qualified ramjet-rocket booster pilot (types C, D, and H-1), thrashed violently. His arms flailed without purpose. He began to make noises.

"It'll be a few minutes," said Skarwold. "He's out of the sleep-inducer, but he has to wake up naturally."

Garner nodded. He was studying the man intently, with his eyes narrowed and his lips tightened slightly. He might have been watching a strange dog, wondering whether it wanted to lick his face or tear his throat out.

Katz opened his eyes. They became very round, then closed desperately tight. Cautiously Katz opened them again. He screamed and waved his arms meaninglessly in the air. Then he started to choke. It was horrible to watch. Whenever he somehow managed to catch his breath he would gasp for air for a few seconds, open his mouth, and begin to choke again. He was terrified, and, thought Garner, not merely because he might suffocate.

Skarwold pushed a switch and Katz's autodoc sprayed sedative into his lungs. Katz flopped back and began to breathe deeply. Skarwold turned on Katz's sleep-inducer.

Abruptly Garner asked, "Are any of these people the least bit psychic?"

Arnold Diller, fusion drive inspector (all conventional types), took a deep breath and began turning his head back and forth. Not gently. It seemed he was trying to break his own neck.

"I wish we could have found someone with a high telepathic aptitude," said Garner. Between the palms of his hands he rolled the sawdust fragments of a cigarette. "He would have stood a better chance. Look at the poor guy!"

Skarwold said, "I think he's got a good chance." Garner shook his head. "He's only a poor man's prescient. If he were any good at that he'd have been running instead of hiding when the ET blew up. How could it protect him against telepathy anyway? He-" Skarwold joggled his arm for silence.

"Diller!" said Skarwold, with authority. Diller stopped tossing his head and looked up. "Can you understand me, Diller?"

Diller opened his mouth and started to strangle. He closed it again, and nodded, breathing through his nose.

"My name is Skarwold, and I'm your doctor." He paused as if in doubt. "You are Arnold Diller, aren't you?"

"Yes." The voice was rusty, hesitant, as if from long disuse. Something inside Garner relaxed, and he noticed his handful of sawdust and dropped it.

"How do you feel?"

"Terrible. I keep wanting to breathe wrong, talk wrong. Could I have a cigarette?" Garner handed him a lighted one. Diller's voice began to sound better, more proficient. "That was strange. I tried to make you give me a cigarette. When you just sat there I wanted to get mad." He frowned. "Say, how do I rate a human doctor, anyway?"

"What happened to you isn't programmed into the 'docs," Skarwold said lightly. "It's a good thing you had the sense to hide when you did. The others were closer. They're in much worse shape. Is your prescient sense working?"

"It's not telling me anything. I can never count on it anyway. Why?"

"Well, that's why I picked you. I thought if you missed it you could get over the notion that you were a certain alien."

"A certain-" Diller started strangling. He stopped breathing entirely for a moment, then resumed slowly, through distended nostrils. "I remember," he said. "I saw this thing coming across the field, with a bunch of people trailing after it, and I wondered what it was. Then something went wrong in my head. I didn't wait any more. I just ran like hell and got behind a building. Something going on in my head kept bugging me, and I wanted to get closer to it but I knew that was wrong, and I wondered if I was going crazy, and then, aarrrghgh-" Puller stopped and swallowed; his eyes were mad with fear until he could breathe again.

"All right, Diller, it's all right," Skarwold kept repeating. Diller's breathing went back to normal, but he didn't talk. Skarwold said, "I'd like to introduce Mr. Garner of the United Nations Technological Police."

Diller gave a polite nod. His curiosity was plain. Garner said, "We'd like to catch this alien before he does any more damage. If you don't mind, I think you may have some information that we don't."

Diller nodded.

"About five minutes after that telepathic blast hit you, the alien took off for outer space. An hour later he was followed by a man who has reason to believe that he is the alien. He has false memories. They're both headed in the same general direction. They're after something. Can you tell me what it is?"

"No," said Diller.

"You may have gotten something in that mental blast. Please try to remember, Diller."

"I don't remember anything, Gamer."

"But»

"You old fool! Do you think I want to choke to death? Every time I start to think about what happened I start strangling! I start thinking funny too; everything looks strange. I feel surrounded by enemies. But worst of all, I get so depressed! No. I don't remember anything. Get out."

Gamer sighed and ostentatiously put his hands on the chair controls. "If you change your mind-"

"I won't. So there's no need to come back."

"I won't be able to. I'm going after them."

"In a spaceship? You?"

"I've got to," said Garner. Nevertheless he glanced involuntarily at his crossed legs crossed this morning, by hand. "I've got to," he repeated. "There's no telling what they want, but it must be something worthwhile. They're going to too much trouble to get it. It could be a weapon, or a signal device to call their planet."

The travel chair whirred.

"Half a minute," said Diller.

Gamer turned off the motor and waited. Diller leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. His face began to change. It was no longer an expression he wore, a mirror of his personality, but a random dispersal of muscle tension. His breathing was ragged.

Finally he looked up. He started to speak and failed. He cleared his throat and tried again. "An amplifier. The- the bastard has an amplifier buried on the eighth planet."

"Fine! What does it amplify?"

Diller started to choke.

"Never mind," said Gamer. "I think I know." His chair left the room, going much too fast.

"They're both ruunin' scared," said Luke. "Headed for Neptune at one gee, with your husband an hour and a half behind."

"But aren't you sending someone after him?" Judy begged. "He isn't responsible, he doesn't know what he's doing!"

"Sure. We're sending me. He's got my partner, you know." Seeing Mrs. Greenberg's reaction, he quickly added, "They're in one ship. We can't protect Lloyd without protecting your husband."

They sat in Judy's hotel room sipping Tom Collinses. It was eleven hundred of a blazing August morning.

"Do you know how he got away?" Judy asked.

"Yah. The ET knocked everybody crosseyed when he threw that tantrum at the port. Everybody but Greenberg. Your husband simply picked out a ship that was on standby and had Lloyd take it up. Lloyd knows how to fly a Navy ship, worse luck."

"Why would Mr. Masney be taking Larry's orders?"

"Because Larry hypnotized him. I remember the whole performance."

Judy looked down at her lap. The corners of her mouth began to twitch. She began to giggle, and then to laugh. Just as the laughter threatened to become sobs, she clenched her teeth hard, held the pose for a moment, then sagged back in her chair.

"I'm all right now," she said. Her face held no laughter, only exhaustion.

"What was that all about?"

"It doesn't matter. Why would they be going to Neptune?"

"I don't know. We're not even sure that's where they're going. Don't you have some sort of telepathic link with your husband?"

"Not any more. Since he went into Dr. Jansky's time field I can't feel anything any more."

"Well, it wouldn't feel like him anyway. Do you remember how you felt at twenty hours night before last?"

"At twenty? Let me see." She closed her eyes. "Wasn't I asleep…? Oh. Something woke me up and I couldn't go back to sleep. I had the feeling that something was terribly wrong. Monsters in the shadows. I was right, wasn't I?"

"Yes. Especially if it was Larry's mind you felt." He gave that a moment to sink in. "And since then?"

"Nothing." Her small hand tapped rhythmically on the chair arm. "Nothing! Except that I want to find him. Find him! That's all I've wanted since he took the ship! Find him before he…"

Find it! But there was no question of finding it, he told himself for the hundredth time. He had to find it first! He had to find it before Kzanol, the real Kzanol, did. And for the hundredth time he wondered if he could.

The Earth had been invisible for hours. Kzanol/Greenberg and Masney sat speechless in the control bubble, speechless and motionless. The control bubble was three quarters of the ship's living space. One could stand upright only in the airlock.

There weren't many distractions for Kzanol/Greenberg. True, he had to keep an eye on Masney. He had to do more than that. He had to know when Masney was uncomfortable, and he had to know it before Masney knew it. If Masney ever came out of hypnosis it might be difficult to get him back. So Kzanol/Greenberg had to send Masney to the lavatory; had to give him water before he was thirsty; had to exercise him before his muscles could cramp from sitting. Masney was not like the usual slave, who could take care of himself when not needed.

Other than that, the self-styled ptavv was dead weight. He spent hours at a time just sitting and thinking. Not planning, for there was nothing to plan. He either reached the eighth planet first, or he didn't. Either he put on the amplifier helmet, or the real Kzanol did, and then there would be no more planning, ever. No mind shield could face an amplifier helmet. On the other hand, the helmet would make him Kzanol's master. Using an amplifier on a thrint was illegal, but he was hardly in danger of Thrintun law.

(Would an amplifier boost the Power of a slave brain? He pushed the thought aside again.)

The far future was bleak at best. He was the last thrint; he couldn't even breed the real Kzanol to get more. Yes, he would be master of an asteroid belt and a heavily populated slave world; yes, he would be richer than even Grandfather Racarliw. But Grandfather had had hundreds of wives, a thousand children!

Kzanol/Greenberg's hundreds of wives would be human slaves, as would his thousand children. Lower-than-ptavvs, every one.

Would he find «women» beautiful? Could he mate with them? Probably. He would have to try it; but his glands were emphatically not Kzanol's glands. In any case he would choose his women by Larry Greenberg's standards of beauty- yes, Greenberg's, regardless of how he felt, for much of the glory in being rich is showing it off, and he would have nobody to impress but slaves.

A dismal prospect.

He would have liked to lose himself in memories, but something held him back. One barrier was that he knew he would nevermore see Thrintun the homeworld, nor Kzathit where he was born, nor Racarliwun, the world he had found and named. He would never look at the world through his own eye; he would see himself only from outside, if ever. This was his own body, his fleshly tomb, now and forever.

There was another barrier, a seemingly trivial matter. Several times Kzanol/Greenberg had closed his eyes and deliberately tried to visualize the happy past; and always what came to mind were whitefoods.

He believed Garner, believed him implicitly. Those films could not have been faked. Copying an ancient tnuctip inscription would not have been enough to perpetrate such a fraud. Garner would have had to compose in tnuctip!

Then the bandersnatchi were intelligent; and the bandersnatchi were undeniably whitefoods. Whitefoods were intelligent, and always had been.

It was as if some basic belief had been shattered. The whitefoods were in all his memories. Whitefoods drifting like sixty-ton white clouds over the estates of Kzathit Stage Logs, and over the green-and-silver fields of other estates when little Kzanol was taken visiting. Whitefood meat in a dozen different forms, on the family table and in every restaurant waiter's memorized menu. A whitefood skeleton over every landowner's guest gate, a great archway of clean polished white bone. Why, the thrint hadn't been born who didn't dream of his own whitefood herd! The whitefood gate meant «landowner» as surely as the sunflower border.

Kzanol/Greenberg cocked his head; his lips pursed slightly, and the skin puckered between his eyebrows. Judy would have recognized the gesture. He had suddenly realized what made the intelligent whitefood so terrible.

A thiint was master over every intelligent beast. This was the Powergiver's primal decree, made before he made the stars. So said all of the twelve Thrintun religions, though they fought insanely over other matters. But if the whitefood was intelligent, then it was immune to the Power. The tnuctipun had done what the Power-giver had forbade!

If the tnuctipun were stronger than the Powergiver, and the Thrintun were stronger than the tnuctipun, and the Powergiver were stronger than the Thrintun-

Then all priests were charlatans, and the Powergiver was a folk myth.

A sentient whitefood was blasphemy.

It was also very damned peculiar.

Why would the tnuctipun have made an intelligent food animal? The phrase had an innocuous sound, like «overkill» or "euthanasia," but if you thought about it-

Thrintun were not a squeamish race. Power, no! But-

An intelligent food animal! Hitler would have fled, retching.

The tnuctipun had never been squeamish, either. The lovely simplicity of their mutated racing viprin was typical of the way they worked. Already the natural animal had been the fastest alive; there was little the tnuctipun could do in the way of redesigning. They had narrowed the animal's head and brought the nose to a point, leaving the nostril like a single jet nacelle, and they had made the skin almost microscopically smooth against wind resistance, but this had not satisfied them. So they had removed several pounds of excess weight and replaced it with extra muscle and extra lung tissue. The weight removed had been all of the digestive organs. A mutated racing viprin had a streamlined sucker of a mouth which opened directly into the bloodstream to admit predigested pap.

The tnuctipun were always efficient, but never cruel.

Why make the whitefood intelligent? To increase the size of the brain, as ordered? But why make it immune to the Power?

And he had eaten whitefood meat.

Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head hard. Masney needed attention, and he had planning to do. Didn't he?

Planning, or mere worrying?

Would the amplifier work on a human brain? Could he find the suit in time?

"'Find him, " Garner quoted. "That could fit. He's looking for something he believes he needs badly."

"But you already knew that. It doesn't help."

"Mrs. Greenberg, what I really came for is to find out everything you can tell me about your husband."

"Then you'd better talk to Dale Snyder. He got here this morning. Want his number?"

"Thanks, I've got it. He called me too. You know him well?"

"Very."

"I'll also want a chance to talk to Charley, the dolphin anthropologist. But let's start with you."

Judy looked unhappy. "I don't know where to start."

"Anywhere."

"Okay. He's got three testicles."

"I'll be damned. That's fairly rare, isn't it?"

"And sometimes troublesome, medically, but Larry never had any problems. We used to call it 'that little extra something about him. Is this the kind of thing you're after?"

"Sure." Luke didn't know. He remembered that the better he knew the man he was chasing, the more likely he was to catch him. It had worked when he was a cop, decades ago. It ought to work now. He let her talk, interrupting very rarely.

"I never noticed what a practical joker he was until after he began working with dolphins, but he's told me some of the things he pulled at college. He must have been a real terror. He was terrible at team athletics, but he plays fair squash and demon tennis…" She needed no prompting now. Her life came out in a stream of words. Her life with Larry Greenberg.

"… must have known a lot of women before he met me. And vice versa, I might add. Neither of us has ever tried adultery. I mean, we have an arrangement that we can, but we've never used it."

"You're sure?"

"Absolutely." Luke saw that she was. She was amused that he should have to ask.

"… It shocks him when I can make a prediction that accurate. I don't think he really believes in prescience, so it scares him when I get a flash. He thinks it's some sort of magic. I remember one day, we'd been married less than a year, and I'd gone out on a shopping spree. He saw me come in with a load of packages, and when I dumped them and went out and came back with the second load he said, 'Honest to God, beautiful, you're spending blue chips like the Last War was starting tomorrow! I didn't say anything. I just gave him this brave little smile. He went absolutely white…"

Relevant or irrelevant, it was all coming out. Judy talked faster and faster. She was doing just what he'd told her to, but with an urgency that was puzzling.

"… Most of the couples we know never got married until someone was pregnant. When you pass the Fertility Board you hate to risk throwing it away by marrying a sterile partner, right? It's too big a thing. But we decided to take the chance." Judy rubbed her throat. She went on hoarsely. "Besides, the 'doc had okayed us both for parenthood. Then there was Jinx. We had to be sure neither of us got left behind."

"By me that was good thinking, Mrs. Greenberg. I'll quit now, while you've still got a voice. Thanks for the help."

"I hope it did help."

The speed at which she'd talked the detail. Luke sent the elevator straight to the top. He knew now why she'd painted so complete a portrait of Larry Greenberg. Whether she knew it or not, she didn't expect to see him again. She'd been trying to make him immortal in her memory.

The Jayhawk Hotel was the third tallest building in Topeka, and the rooftop bar had a magnificent view. As he left the elevator Luke met the usual continuous roar. He waited ten seconds while his ears «learned» to ignore it: an essential defense mechanism, learned by most children before they were three. The hostess was a tall redhead, nude but for double-spike shoes, her hair piled into a swirling, swooping confection which brought her height to an even eight feet. She led him to a tiny table against a window.

The occupant rose to meet him. "Mr. Garner."

"Nice of you to do this for me, Dr. Snyder."

"Call me Dale."

Garner saw a dumpy man with an inch-wide strip of curly blond hair down the center of his scalp. Temporary skin substitute covered his forehead, cheeks and chin, leaving an X of unharmed skin across his eyes, nose, and the corners of his mouth. His hands were also bandaged.

"Then I'm Luke. What's your latest word on the Sea Statue?"

"When the Arms woke me up yesterday afternoon to tell me Larry had turned alien. How is he?"

Avoiding details, Luke filled the psychologist in on the past twenty-four hours. "So now I'm doing what I can on the ground while they get me a ship that will beat Greenberg and the ET to Neptune."

"Brother, that's a mess. I never saw the statue, and if

I had I'd never have noticed that button. What are you drinking?"

"I'd better grab a milk shake; I haven't had lunch. Dale, why did you want us to bring the statue here?"

"I thought it would help if Larry saw it. There was a case once, long before I was born, where two patients who both thought they were Mary, Mother of God, showed up at the same institution. So the doctors put them both in the same room."

"Wow. What happened?"

"There was a godawful argument. Finally one of the women gave up and decided she must be Mary's mother. She was the one they eventually cured."

"You thought Greenberg would decide he was Greenberg if you showed him he wasn't the Sea Statue."

"Right. I gather it didn't work. You say they can use my help at Menninger's?"

"Probably, but I need it first. I told you what I think

Greenberg and the Sea Statue are after. I've got to chase them down before they get to it."

"How can I help?"

"Tell me everything you can about Larry Greenberg. The man on his way to Neptune has an extraterrestrial's memories, but his reflexes are Greenberg's. He proved that by driving a car. I want to know what I can count on from the Greenberg side of him."

"Very little, I'd say. Count on something from the Greenberg side of him and you'd likely wind up naked on the Moon. But I see your point. Let's suppose the, uh, Sea Statue civilization had a law against picking pockets. Most countries had such laws, you know, before we got so crowded the cops couldn't enforce them."

"I remember."

Snyder's eyes widened. "You do? Yes, I suppose you do. Well, suppose Larry in his present state found someone picking his pocket. His impulse would be to stop him, but not to yell for a policeman. He'd have to make a conscious decision to do that. This would be unlikely until after the fight was over and he'd had time to think."

"If I caught him by surprise I could count on his human reflexes."

"Yes, but don't confuse reflexes with motivations. You don't know what his motivations are now."

"Go on."

Snyder leaned back and folded his hands behind his head. A waiter glided up and produced drinks from a well in its torso. Garner paid it and shooed it away.

Abruptly Snyder was talking. "You know what he looks like: five feet seven inches tall, dark and fairly, handsome. His parents were Orthodox, but they weren't millionaires, they couldn't afford a fully kosher diet. He's very well adjusted, and he has enormous resilience, which is why he was able to take up contact telepathy.

"He does have some feelings about his height, but nothing we need bother about. They are partly compensated by what he calls 'that little extra something about me. "

"Mrs. Greenberg told me."

"Partly he means his telepathy. Partly it's the medical anomaly I assume Judy mentioned. But he's in dead earnest in regarding himself as something special.

"You might also remember that he's been reading minds for years, human and dolphin minds. This gives him an accumulation of useful data. I doubt if the dolphins are important, but there were physics professors, math students, and psychologists among the volunteers who let Larry read their minds by contact. You could call him superbly educated." Snyder straightened. "Remember this, when you go out after him. You don't know the Sea Statue's intelligence, but Larry has his own intelligence and nobody else's. He's clever, and adaptable, and unusually sure of himself. He's suspicious of superstition, but genuinely religious. His reflexes are excellent. I know. I've played tennis with him: Judy and I against him alone, with Larry guarding the singles court."

"Then I'd better stay alert."

"Absolutely."

"Suppose his religion was threatened. How would he react?"

"You mean Orthodox Judaism?"

"No, I mean any religion he now happens to hold. Wait, I'll expand that. How would he react to a threat against something he's believed in all his life?"

"It would make him angry, of course. But he's not a fanatic. Challenge him and he'd be willing to argue. But to make him change his mind about something basic, you'd have to offer real proof. You couldn't just cast doubts. If you see what I mean."

On the great white screen in the Space Traffic Control Center, two dark blobs hung almost motionless. Halley Johnson swung his phone camera around so Garner could see it.

"The military ship is going just a teeny bit faster than the honeymooner. If they're really going all the way to Neptune they'll pass each other."

"Where else could they be going?"

"A number of asteroids. I have a list."

"Let's hear it."

Johnson read off the names of fourteen minor Greek deities. "A lot more have been crossed off," he added. "When the ship passes turnover point and keeps accelerating, we mark it out."

"Okay. Keep me posted. How 'bout my ship?"

"Be here at twenty. You'll be in orbit by twenty-one."

The Struldbrugs' Club is not the only club with a lower age limit on its members. (Consider the Senate.) It is the only club whose age limit rises one year for every two that passes. In 2106 every member was at least one hundred and forty-nine years old. Naturally the Struldbrugs' autodocs were the best in the world.

But the treatment tanks still looked like oversized coffins.

Luke pulled himself out of the tank and read the itemized bill. It was a long one. The 'doc had hooked by induction into his spine and done deep knee bends to build up muscle tone; recharged the tiny battery in his heart; and added hormones and more esoteric substances to his bloodstream. Localized ultrasonic pulses had applied the Ch'ien treatment; Luke could feel the ache from the base of his skull all the way down his spine, to where sensation almost disappeared in the small of his back. A manicure and pedicure had finished the checkup.

Luke used his Arm ident to punch for a six months' supply of the hormones, antiallergens, selective pest killers, and general rejuvenators which kept him alive and healthy. What came out of the slot was a hypodermic the size of a beer can, with instructions all down the sides in fine print. Luke tightened his lips at the sight of the needle; but you can't use a spray hypo when you've got to hit the vein. He told the 'doc where to send the bill.

One more chore and he could take a cat nap.

Because of the decrepit state of many Struldbrugs, the club phone booths had been made large enough for travel chairs barely. Already Luke had the air translucent with cigarette smoke. "How do you talk to a dolphin?" he asked, feeling unaccountably diffident.

Fred Torrance said, "Just the way you would have talked to Larry. But Charley will answer in dolphinese, and I'll translate. You couldn't make out his English over the phone."

"Okay. Charley, my name's Lucas Garner. I'm with the Arms. Do you know what's happened to Larry?"

Grunts, chortles, whistles, squeals, and squeaks! Only once had Luke heard the like of it. Eighteen years ago he had been a witness at a murder trial. Three other witnesses- and the victim, who of course was not present- had been dolphins.

Torrance translated: "He knows Larry's lost his sense of identity. Dr. Jansky called and told us all about it."

"Well, yesterday Larry got away from us and took off in a stolen ship. I'm going after him. I want to know everything Charley can tell us about him."

Dolphin language. Torrance said, "Charley wants a favor in return."

"Oh, really? What?" Luke braced himself. Since the cracking of the swimmer-dolphin language barrier, the dolphins had proved very able bargainers. Fortunately or not, the dolphins' rigid, complex moral code had adapted easily to the walker concept of trade.

"He wants to talk to you about the possibility of dolphins taking part in the seeding of the stars."

Of the three present, Torrance the seadoc had the clearest understanding of what was being said. Charley was speaking slowly and clearly, staying well below the ultrasonic range, but even so Torrance often had trouble translating. To him the bilingual conversation went like this:

"I'll be damned in writing," said Garner. "Charley, is this a new idea? I've never heard of a dolphin wanting to go starhopping."

"Not… brand new. The question has been discussed on the abstract level, and many are in favor of it, if only from the fear that swimmers will be left out of something. But I, myself, never felt the urge until three days ago."

"Greenberg. He had the space bug bad, did he?"

"Please use the present tense. Yes, he has the bug all right. I've had a couple of days to get used to Larry in my head. I won't say I quite understand this urge to reach Jinx, but I can explain a little of it.

"I dislike using an outmoded term, but part of it is"- Charley used the English words- "'anifesst desstinee. Part is the fact that on Jinx he could have as many children as he wants, four or five even, and nobody would complain. Partly it is the same urge I sometimes get in this tank. No room to swim. Larrry wants to walk down a street without the slightest fear of stepping on someone's toes, having his pocket picked, or getting caught in a pedestrian traffic jam and being carried six blocks the wrong way. Notice that I've put considerably more thought into analyzing this than Larrry ever did."

"And how do you feel about it? You're a dolphin. You probably never looked at the stars»

"Missterr 'Arrnerr, I assure you that we swimmers know what the stars look like. There are many astronomy and astrophysics tapes in the illustrated texts your agents sold us. And, after all, we do have to come up for air sometimes!"

"Sorry. But the point remains: you've got plenty of elbow room, you've never had your toes stepped on, and nothing but a killer whale could possibly be interested in picking your pocket. So what's in it for you?"

"Perhaps adventure. Perhaps the forming of a new civilization. You know that there has been only one swimmer civilization for many thousands of years. The seas are not isolated, as are the continents. If there is a better way of doing things, the way for us to find out is to build many communities on many worlds. Is this logical?"

"Yes!" There was no mistaking the emphasis in Garner's voice. "But it may not be as easy as you think. We'd certainly have to design you an entirely new ship, because we'd have to include swimming water. And water is heavy, dammit. I'll bet shipping a dolphin would cost ten times as much as shipping a man."

"You use water for reaction mass for the landing motors. Could you put lights in the water tanks?"

"Yes, and we could fill them only two-thirds full, and we could install filters to remove the fish and the algae and so on before the water reaches the motors. We could even install small tanks somewhere that you could ride in while the tanks were being emptied during landing. Charley, are you beginning to get some picture of the cost of all this?"

"Beginning to, yes. Money is complex."

"You know it. But you couldn't possibly buy your way on, not with what the dolphins produce. Oh, you could get a pair to Wonderland, but how could two dolphins stay sane alone? What would they live on? Seeding an ocean isn't like planting a wheat field, even when you have to make the topsoil yourself. Fish swim away! Seeding an ocean has to be done all at once!

"Hmm. You can't even claim it's your right to be on a starship. Dolphins don't pay UN taxes… hmm," said Luke, and scratched his scalp. "Charley, just how many dolphins could be persuaded to leave their oceans forever?"

"As many as we need. Selected by lot, if necessary. The Law permits such selection in cases of extreme need. Of the hundreds of swimmers who took part in early walker experiments to prove us intelligent, and of the twenty or thirty who died as a result, nearly all had been so selected."

"Oh… really? And nobody ever guessed." Torrance wondered at Garner's peculiar expression. Almost a look of horror. It had been so long ago; why should he be so shocked? Garner said, "Let it pass. How many genuine volunteers?"

"They would all be genuine. But you want to know how many would volunteer without the lots? No more than fifty to a hundred, I would think, out of all the oceans."

"All right. Now what we'll have to start with is a massive advertising campaign. The dolphins will have to contribute a share of the cost of a dolphin spaceship. Just a gesture. It would be nominal compared to the final cost, but to you it will be expensive. Then we'll have to convince most of the walker world that a planet without dolphins isn't worth living on. Needless to say, I already believe this."

"Thank you. Thank you for all of us. Would swimmers be taking part in this advertising?"

"Not directly. We'd want pronouncements, statements from prominent swimmers like the one the newspapers call the Lawyer. You know who I mean?"

"Yes."

"Understand that I'm just guessing. We'll have to hire a 'public opinions consultant, a publicity agent, and let him do the work. And it might be all for nothing."

"Could we lower the cost by shipping swimmers in Doctor Jansskee's time retarder field?"

Garner looked utterly astonished. Torrance grinned, recognizing the reaction: Is This A Dolphin Talking? "Yes," said Garner, nodding to himself. "Right. We won't even need tanks. Let the humans do the crew work, and keep you frozen until they can find and seed a small sea, like the Mediterranean…"

It went on and on.

"So it's settled," said Garner, a long time later. "Talk it over with the dolphins, especially the ones with power, but don't make a move until I get back. I want to pick a publicity agent. The right publicity agent."

"I hate to remind you, but isn't there a chance you won't come back?"

"Holy Hannah! I completely forgot." Garner glanced down at his wrist. "There goes my cat nap. Quick, Charley, start talking about Greenberg. What's your opinion of him?"

"Prejudiced, I'm afraid. I like him and envy him his hands. He is very alien to me. And yet, perhaps not." Charley let himself sink to the bottom of the tank. Torrance took the opportunity to clear his throat, which felt like he'd been eating used razor blades.

Charley surfaced and blew steam. "He is not alien. Negative! He thinks a lot like me, because he took contact from me several times before we chanced it the other way around. He is a practical joker- no, that is very far from the true concept. Well, it will have to do. Larrry Is a dolphin type of practical joker. Years ago he selected a few of our most famous jokes, old japes which we consider classics, translated them into something he could use as a walker, and then decided not to use them because he might go to prison for it. If he is no longer afraid of prison he might be tempted to play his jokes."

"Uh huh."

"Such as something I have not tried yet with a swimmer. I must use the English word: hypnotism."

Torrance said, "I didn't get that."

"Defined as an induced state of monomania."

"Oh, hypnotism."

"Larrry has studied it thoroughly, and even tried it out, and for him it works. On a swimmer it might be ineffective."

"He's already tried it," said Garner. "Anything else?"

"Garrnnrr, you must understand that the dolphin gurgle-buzz-SQUEEEE is not truly a practical joke. It is a way of looking at things. Putting a monkey wrench in machinery is often the only way to force somebody to repair, replace, or redesign the machinery. Especially legal or social machinery. Biting off somebody's fin at exactly the right time can change his whole attitude toward life, often for the better. Larrry understands this."

"I wish I did. Thanks for your time, Charley."

"Negative! Negative! Thank you for yours!"

An hour to the long jump. Luke's throat felt well used. He might still have time for a fifteen-minute cat nap, but he'd wake up feeling worse than ever.

He sat in the Struldbrugs' reading room and thought about Greenberg.

Why had he become an alien? Well, that was easy. With two sets of memories to choose from, he'd naturally chosen the identity most used to sorting itself out from other identities. But why cling to it? He must know by now that he was not the Sea Statue. And he'd had a happy life as Larry Greenberg.

His wife was something to envy and she loved him. According to Dr. Snyder, he was stable, well adjusted. He liked his work. He thought of himself as something special.

But the Sea Statue was all alone in the universe, the last of its race, marooned among hostiles. The Greenberg Sea Statue had also lost his ability of- well, telepathic hypnosis was close enough.

Any sane person would rather be Greenberg.

Garner thought, I'll have to assume that Greenberg as Greenberg literally cannot think with the Sea Statue memories in his mind. He must remain the Sea Statue to function at all. Otherwise he'd have at least tried to change back.

But that peculiar arrogance he'd displayed under interrogation. Not- a slave. Not human.

A robot bonged softly next to his ear. Garner turned and read in flowing light on the waiter's chest: "You are requested to call Mr. Charles Watson at once."

Chick Watson was fat, with thick lips and a shapeless putty nose. He wore crew-cut, bristly black hair and, at the moment, a gray seventeen-hundred shadow over cheeks and jaw. He had a harmless look. Centered on his desk was a large screen viewer running film at abnormal speed. Not one in a thousand could read that fast.

A buzzer sounded. Chick snapped off the reader and turned on the phone. For a fat man he moved quickly and accurately.

"Here."

"Lucas Garner calling, sir. Do you want to see him?"

"Desperately." Chick Watson's voice belied his appearance. It was a voice of command, a deep, ringing bass.

Luke looked tired. "You wanted me, Chick?"

"Yeah, Garner. I thought you could help me with some questions."

"Fine, but I'm pressed for time."

"I'll make it quick. First, this message from Ceres to Titan Enterprises. The Golden Circle made a takeoff under radio silence yesterday, from Topeka Base, and the Belt intends to submit a bill for tracking. Titan sent the notice here. They say their ship must have been stolen."

"That's right. Kansas City has the details. It's a very complicated story."

"An hour later the Navy ship Iwo Jima-"

"Also stolen."

"Any connection with the Sea Statue incident at UCLA?"

"Every connection. Look, Chick-»

"I know, get it from Kansas City. Finally…" Chick fumbled among the spools of film on his desk. His voice was suspiciously mild as he said, "Here it is. Your notification that you'll be leaving Topeka on a commandeered Navy ship, the Heinlein; departure: Topeka Base at twenty-one hundred; destination: unknown, probably Neptune; purpose: official business. Garner, I always said it would happen, but I never really believed it."

"I haven't gone senile, Chick. This is urgent."

"Fastest attack of senility I ever heard of. What could possibly be urgent enough to get you into space at your age?"

"It's that urgent."

"You can't explain?"

"No time."

"Suppose I order you not to go."

"I think that would cost lives. Lots of lives. It could also end human civilization."

"Melodramatic."

"It's the literal truth."

"Garner, you're asking me to assume my own ignorance and let you go ahead on your own because you're the only expert on the situation. Right?"

Hesitation. "I guess that's right."

"Fine. I hate making my own decisions. That's why they put me behind a desk. But, Garner, you must know things Kansas City doesn't. Why don't you call me after takeoff? I'll be studying in the meantime."

"In case I kick off? Good idea."

"Don't let it slip your mind, now."

"Sure not."

"And take your vitamins."

Like a feathered arrow the Golden Circle fell away from the sun. The comparison was hackneyed but accurate, for the glant triangular wing was right at the rear of the ship, with the slender shaft of the fusilage projecting deep into the forward apex. The small forward wings had folded into the sides shortly after takeoff. The big fin was a maze of piping. Live steam, heated by the drive, circled through a generator and through the cooling pipes before returning to start the journey again. Most of the power was fed into the fusion shield of the drive tube. The rest fed the life support system.

In one respect the «arrow» simile was inexact. The arrow flew sideways, riding the sun-hot torch which burned its belly.

Kzanol roared his displeasure. The cards had failed again! He swept the neat little array between his clublike hands, tapped them into deck formation, and ripped the deck across. Then, carefully, he got to his feet. The drive developed one terran gravity, and he hadn't quite had time to get used to the extra weight. He sat down at the casino table and dug into the locker underneath. He came out with a new deck, opened it, let the automatic shuffler play with it for a while, then took it out and began to lay it out solitaire style. The floor around him was littered with little pieces of magnetized plastic card. Perhaps he could think up some fitting punishment for the pilot, who had taught him this game.

The pilot and copilot sat motionless in the control room. From time to time the pilot used his hands to change course a trifle. Every fourteen hours or so the copilot would bring Kzanol a bowl of water and then return to her seat. Actinic gas streamed from the belly of the ship, pushing it to ever higher velocities.

It was a beautiful night. Years had passed since Garner last saw the stars; in the — cities they couldn't shine through the smog and the neon glare, and even the American continents were mostly city. Soon he would see them more clearly than he had in half a century. The air was like the breath of Satan. Garner was damp with sweat, and so were Anderson and Neumuth.

"I still say we could do this by ourselves," said Anderson.

"You wouldn't know what to look for," Gamer countered. "I've trained myself for this. I've been reading science fiction for decades. Centuries! Neumuth, where are you going?"

Neumuth, the short dark one, had turned and was walking away. "Time to get strapped down," he called back. "Bon voyage!"

"He's going forward, to the cockpit of the booster," said Anderson. "We go up that escalator to the ship itself."

"Oh. I wish I could see it better. It's just one big shadow."

The shadow was a humped shadow, like a paper dart with a big lizard clinging to its back. The paper glider was a ramjet-rocketplane, hydrogen fueled in the ramjet and using the cold liquid hydrogen to make its own liquid oxygen in flight. The slim cylinder clinging to its upper surface was a fusion drive cruiser with some attachments for rescue work. It carried two men.

Using its fusion motor in Earth's atmosphere would have been a capital offense. In taking off from ground eighteen hours earlier, Masney and Kzanol/Greenberg had broken twelve separate local laws, five supranational regulations and a treaty with the Belt.

Another ship roared a god's anger as it took off. Garner blinked at the light.: "That was our rendezvous ship,"

Anderson said matter-of-factly.

Luke was tired of having to ask silly-seeming questions. He wasn't going to like Anderson, he decided. If the kid wanted to tell him why they needed a rendezvous ship, he would.

They had reached the bottom of the escalator. "Meet you at the top," said Garner, reaching into his ashtray. Anderson stared, jolted, as an invalid's travel chair became a flying saucer. An Arm using an illegal flying machine? An Arm?

Anderson rode up the stairs, whistling. This trip might be fun after all.

"Just leave the chair on the escalator platform," he said at the top. "We've made arrangements to have it delivered to the local Struldbrugs' Club. They'll take good care of it. I'll carry you in, sir."

"You get my medikit. I'll walk," said Garner. And he did, wobbling and using his arms freely. He barely reached his gee chair. Anderson found the medikit and followed. He checked Gamer's crash web before he used his own.

"Neumuth? Ready," said Anderson, as if into empty air. He continued, "The other ramjet-rocket carried a bundle of solid fuel rockets as big as this ship. They're strap-ons. We don't have any more power than the Golden Circle, and we're a day and a hail behind them, so we use the strap-ons to give us an initial boost. Inefficient, but if it works-"

"— It's good," Gamer finished for him. His voice was thickened by the pull of the linear accelerator. For five seconds the soundless pressure lasted, two gravities of pull. Then the rams fired and they were off.

It would take two days of uncomfortable two-gee acceleration to get there first, thought Garner, compressed in his chair. His old bones would take a beating. Already he was missing the gadgets in his own chair. This trip wasn't going to be fun.

Lars was eating a very messy sardine-and-egg sandwich when the buzzer buzzed. He put it down gently, using both hands, so that it wouldn't bounce in the nearly nonexistent gravity. He wiped his hands on his coverall, which he washed frequently, and went to the transceiver.

The maser beam had crossed the void in one instantaneous beep. The radio translated it into sound, then thoughtfully scaled it down against the minute Doppler shift. What came out was the colorless voice of Cutter, duty man at Cures.

"Thank you, Eros, your message received in full. No more emergencies this time, Lam. Topeka Base called us eight hours ago, giving us the time of takeoff and predicted course. According to your report the takeoff was four minutes late, but that's typical. Keep us posted.

"Thank you, Eros, your-"

Lars switched it off and went back to his sandwich. Briefly he wondered if Cutter had noticed that the Navy ship was following the two he had tracked eighteen hours ago. No doubt he had.

"You're taking it too hard," said Dale Snyder.

Judy shrugged.

Again Dale took in the puffy eyelids showing beneath the makeup, the unfamiliar lines in Judy's pretty twenty-eight-year-old face, the death-grip on her coffee glass, her rigid position in what should have been an easy chair. "Look here," he said. "You've got far too many things working on you. Have you considered- I mean, have you given any thought to invoking your agreement with Larry concerning adultery? At least you could eliminate one of your tensions. And you're not helping him by worrying."

"I know. I've thought about it. But- " she smiled, "not with a friend, Dale."

"Oh, I didn't mean that," Dale Snyder said hastily. And blushed. Fortunately the bandages covered most of it. "What about going to Vegas? The town's full of divorcees of both sexes, most of them temporarily terrified of getting married again. Great for a short-term affair. You could cut it short when Larry comes back."

He may have put too much assurance into the last sentence, because Judy's grip tightened on her glass and relaxed immediately. "I don't think so," she said listlessly.

"Think about it some more. You could even do some gambling."

Two gravities! Twelve hours ago he would have sneered at himself. Two gravities, lying on his back? Luke could have done it on his head. But that was twelve hours ago, twelve hours of double weight and throbbing metal and noise and no sleep. The strap-on fission/fusion motors roared in pairs outside the hull. Two had been dropped already. Ten remained, burning two at a time. It would be a day and a half before ship's weight returned to normal.

The stars were hard, emphatic points. Never had the sky been so black; never had the stars been so bright. Luke felt that they would have burned tiny holes in his retinae if he could have held his eyes fixed on one point. Tiny multicolored blindnesses to add to his enviable collection of scars. The Milky Way was a foggy river of light, with sharp actinic laser points glaring through.

So here he was.

He'd been seventy-two the day they launched the first passenger ship: an orbital craft, clumsy and spavined and oversized by today's standards, nothing more than a skip-glider. They'd told him he was too old to buy a ticket. What was he now? He wanted to laugh, but there was pressure on his chest.

With an effort he turned his head. Anderson was locking a sheet of transparent plastic over part of the complex wraparound control panel. Most of the panel was already under the plastic sheets. He saw Luke looking at him, and he said, "Nothing to do from now on but watch for rocks. I've put us above the plane of the Belt."

"Can we afford the extra time?"

"Sure. If they're going to Neptune." Anderson's voice came cheerful and energetic, though slurred by the extra weight on his cheeks. "Otherwise they'll beat us anyway, to wherever they're going. And we won't know it until they make turnover."

"We'll have to risk that."

The extra weight wasn't bothering Anderson at all.

One gravity is standard for manned spacecraft. Some rescue ships; and a few expresses in the Belt, have attachments for clusters of fusion/fission strap-on engines to cut their transit time. Often it makes sense. More often it doesn't. Given continuous acceleration, the decrease in trip time varies as the square root of the increase in power. Greenberg and the ET should have expected their pursuers, had they known of them, to stay a day and a half behind all the way to Neptune.

A strap-on can only be used once. The smooth cylindrical shell contains only hydrogen gas under pressure and a core of uranium alloy. The fusion shield generator is external; it stays with the ship when the strap-on falls away. The moment the shield forms on the inside of the shell, neutrons from the core begin to reflect back into the uranium mass, and everything dissolves in the chain reaction. As time decreases the pressure inside the trapped star, the tiny exhaust aperture is designed to wear away, keeping the acceleration constant.

This time the strap-ons were vital. The Heinlein would beat the others to Neptune by six hours-

If they were headed for Neptune! But if Diller were wrong, or if Diller had lied- if Diller, like Greenberg, thought he was an alien- if the fleeing ships were en route to some asteroid- then the Heinlein would overshoot. When the others made turnover it would be too late. The Heinlein would be going too fast.

Of course, there were always the missiles. And the Belt would consider it a violation of treaty if the Golden Circle or the Iwo Jima landed in the Belt. They might be persuaded to attack.

But there was Lloyd Masney.

With a full minute's delay in transmission, his discussion with Chick Watson had been both tiring and unproductive. Now Chick knew everything he knew, except for the exhaustive details he'd collected on Greenberg's life.

They'd reached some obvious decisions. They would not send any more ships from Earth, ships which would obviously arrive far too late to help. Earth would fire at sight if either of the target ships reached anywhere and started back. Chick would keep his communications open for Garner, ready to search out any information he might need. And one other decision-

"No, we can't call on the Belt for help." Chick's expression dismissed the idea with the contempt he felt it deserved. "Not with Belt relations the way they are now. They know what they'd do to us with an embargo on uranium, and we know what we'd do to them by holding off their vitamins, and both sides are just itching to see who'd collapse first. You think they'd believe a story like ours? All the proof we can offer is second hand, from their point of view. They'd think we were setting up our own mining operation, or trying to claim a moon. They'd think anything at all, because all they can tell for sure is that three ships from Earth are on their way to Neptune.

"Worse yet, they might just assume that this telepathy amplifier won't reach beyond Earth. In which case they could make a better deal with Greenberg, king of the world, than they can with us."

"I'll never buy that," Garner had answered. "But you're right, there's no point in crying for help. There may be a better answer."

And so they waited. If they were right, if the stolen ships were going to the eighth planet, they would be turning in six days. Luke and Anderson had nothing to do until the ET's gave them their orders.

Luke went to sleep, finally, smiling. He smiled because the gees were pulling on his cheeks. Anderson was sleeping too, letting the autopilot do the work.

At twenty-one hundred the next day the last pair of strap-ons burned out, and were dropped. Now six tumbling pairs of thick-walled metal cylinders followed the Heinlein in a line millions of miles long. In a century all would reach interstellar space. Some would eventually pass between the galaxies.

The ship went on at a comfortable one gee. Luke scowled ferociously to exercise his facial muscles, and Anderson stepped into the airlock to do isometric exercises.

The rocks of the Belt slipped by below, faster every second.

He was a clerkish-looking man with a droning voice, and he called himself Ceres Base. From his appearance he might never have had a name of his own. He wanted to know what an Earth Navy ship was doing in the Belt.

"We have passage," Anderson told him curtly.

Yes, said Ceres, but what is the Heinlein's purpose?

Garner whispered, "Let me have the mike."

"Just talk. He can hear you."

"Ceres, this is Lucas Garner, Arm of the UN. Why the sudden shift?"

"Mr. Garner, your authority does not exist here in-"

"That's not what I asked."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You just now realized we're following the Golden Circle. Didn't you?"

"Are you really? To what purpose?"

"None of your business. But I may tell one of your superiors, if you pick the right superior. Get him on fast, were getting further away every minute."

"The Belt will not allow you passage unless you explain your purpose here."

"The Belt won't touch us. Good-by."

At the sound of the bell Marda rolled off the couch and walked smoothly into the phone booth. Already there was only a slight pull in her abdomen from the surgical cement, though the operation was just twelve hours old. A slight pull when she moved, to remind her of what she had lost.

"Lit!" she called. "Ceres. It's for you."

Lit trotted in from the garden.

Cutter looked apprehensive for once. "Remember the two bandit ships from Topeka Base? Someone's joined the procession."

"Took them long enough. We warned them days ago. When did it take off?"

"Two days ago."

"Two days, Cutter?"

"Lit, the Heinlein gave us plenty of warning and an accurate course projection. She also used strap-on boosters. The time/position curve looks completely different from the curves for the bandits. It took me this long to see that everybody's going in the same direction."

"Damn it, Cutter never mind. Anything else?"

"The Heinlein's passing Ceres now. Do you want to talk to Lucas Garner, Arm of the UN?"

"An Arm? No. What's an Arm doing out here?"

"He won't say. He might tell you."

"What makes you so sure the Belt won't stop us?"

"Well, they can't catch us and board us. All they could do is throw missiles at us, right?"

"You make me so happy."

"Belters aren't stupid, Anderson. Uh, oh."

A space-tanned Caucasian with black hair and wrinkled eyes looked out of the screen at them and said, "Do I have the honor of addressing Lucas Garner aboard the Heinlein?"

"Right. Who's this?"

"Charles Martin Shaeffer. First Speaker, Belt Political section. May I ask-"

"'Little' Shaeffer?"

The mahogany man's face froze for an instant, then barely smiled. "They call me Lit. What are you up to, Garner?"

"You I'll tell, Shaeffer. Now don't interrupt, because a long story…"

It took fifteen minutes to tell. Shaeffer listened without comment. Then there were questions. Shaeffer wanted details, clarification. Then some of the questions were repeated. There were veiled accusations, which became less veiled. Anderson kept the beam fixed and sensibly let Luke do the talking. After an hour of question-and-answer, Luke shut it off.

"That's as much cross examination as I'm taking today, Shaeffer."

"What did you expect me to do, swallow your tale whole? Your opinion of Belters needs revision."

"No, Shaeffer, it doesn't. I never expected to be believed. You can't afford to believe me; the propaganda value would be enormous if Earth took you in on such a wild story."

"Naturally. On the other hand, what you're trying to tell me is that an alien monster is threatening all of human civilization. In view of this it seems odd that you object to answering a few questions."

"Nuts. Shaeffer, do this. Send a few armed-"

"I'm not taking orders-"

"Don't interrupt me, Shaeffer. Send a few armed ships to follow me to Neptune. I'm sure that's where they're going; they've already passed turnover for most of the asteroids. It'll take your ships a while to catch us. They may get there in time to help us out, and they may not. If you think I'm a liar, then send your ships along only to make sure I don't do any poaching. Regardless of what you suspect me of, you'll need ships to stop me, right? But arm them, Shaeffer. Arm them good.

"Your only other choice is to start a war, right? Right. If you want my story confirmed call the Arms office in Los Angeles, then call the UN Comparative Cultures Exhibit in Brasilia Ciudad and ask if they've still got the Sea Statue. That's all you can do. So call me back and tell me how many ships you're sending." Luke gestured to Anderson, who turned him off.

"Jerk," said Anderson, with feeling.

"Not at all. He did the right thing. He'll keep on doing it. First he'll send ships after us, including one with anti-radar which will have to get there later than the others because of the extra weight. He'll call Earth and get my story confirmed as well as he can. The worst he can think of me then is that I'm thorough. Finally he'll call us and tell us he's sending one less ship than he is, leaving out the antiradar. That ship gives the Belt every chance to catch me red-handed, doing whatever illegal treaty-breaking thing they think I'm doing, especially since I don't know the Belt's discovered antiradar-"

"Uh huh."

"But if they don't catch me at anything then they cooperate with me."

"Uh huh. It's perfect. But will they be able to handle it when we turn out to be telling the truth?"

"Sure. They'll be armed for us, and a weapon is a weapon. Besides which, some of them will believe me. Belters, they're always waiting for the first alien contact. They'll be armed for bear, regardless." Garner rubbed his scalp. "I wonder what the Sea Statue is armed for?"

A dry tooth socket is not extremely painful. The pain is mild. What drives the unfortunate victim to thoughts of suicide is, the pain never lets up. There is no escape.

Marda felt the gentle, reminding pull in her abdomen every time she moved.

Many Belt women were childless. Some had been spayed by solar storms. Some were frigid, and their frigidity let them endure the loneliness of a singleship. Some had undesirable recessive genes; and, contrary to popular terran belief; the Belt had fertility laws. Some could not conceive in free or nearly free fall. They were a special class, the exiles from Confinement.

What was Lit doing in that phone booth? It had been over an hour.

He was furious, she could see that. She'd never seen him so mad. Even after the screen went dark, he just sat there glaring at the screen.

Something made Marda get up and push open the soundproof door. Lit looked around. "That Arm. That flatlander. Marda, can you imagine an Arm getting huffy with me?"

"He really pushed all your buttons, didn't he? What happened, Lit?"

"Oh…" Lit banged the heels of his hands together. "You remember those two ships that took off from Topeka Base without-"

"I never heard about it."

"Right. I forgot." She'd hardly been in a mood to listen then. "Well, two days ago…"

By the time he finished he was almost calm. Marda felt safe in saying, "But, Lit, you cross-examined him for a full hour. What else could he do but cut you off or admit he was lying?"

"Good point. What I'm really mad about is that tale he told me."

"You're sure he was lying? It sounds almost too fantastic."

"Aw, honey. It is too fantastic."

"Then forget it."

"That's not the point. What's he want with Neptune? Why's he need three ships? And why, in the name of Reason, does he commandeer the Golden Circle from Titan Enterprises?"

"To back up his story?"

"No. I think it's the other way around. His story was tailored to fit the facts."

Slowly he turned back to face the blank screen. He sat for a while, with Marda watching him, and then he said, "I'm going to have to do just as he told me. That burns me. Remind me to tell you someday why I hate Arms."

"Okay. Later today, then."

"Good girl." But he'd already forgotten her. Still he stared at the blank screen, not willing to give Ceres its orders until he'd thought them out completely. Finally he muttered, "I can get the jump on him. I'll send the ships from the lead Trojans; he'll be passing right over them. We'll be after him faster than he thinks." His hand darted out. "And- mph. I can send a radar proof. Operator? Get me a maser to Achilles, fast."

Of course, the whole ploy could be a red herring, he thought, waiting for the operator to call back. A distraction for something going on right here in the Belt. Well, they won't get away with that either. Every ship that leaves Earth or the Moon is going to be questioned. We'll board some of them, and follow the ones that won't allow it. Earth will get its share too. I'll make our espionage system think the end of the world is coming.

Four and a half days later neither Kzanol nor Kzanol/Greenberg had turned ship. It seemed they really were going to Neptune. If so they would be turning in eighteen hours.

It was already time for Anderson to turn ship. He did.

"We'll get there six hours ahead of them," he told Garner.

"Good."

"Of course, they could be headed for outer space. It could be a coincidence that they're going in that direction. Then we'll lose them."

"In those ships? Besides, I never doubted they were going to Neptune. I just didn't want to take chances."