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. Itwastoo 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.