“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 Garner’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 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 wo
uld 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 build
ing, 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?”