by Larry Niven
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. 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 passed the Fertility Board? And it happened. This is like that. I thought it might happen on Jinx, but it happened here.
“Larry Greenberg thinks he’s an alien.”
“But he’s done this before,” Judy protested.
“No.” Garner drew a lit cigarette out of 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 good guess 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 another professional telepath?”
VI
Kzanol dropped the car again half an hour later. He had been wondering about the peculiar feeling in his eyes, and when he felt he was about to lose consciousness he became frightened. Then his Greenberg memories told him what it was. 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 on 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 wooly 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 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.
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 to this one, he would find it listed there. The space 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 been found, it was beyond the reach of terran ships, and he might as well give up.
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 in 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 magic. 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 from the captive Greenberg mind, 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 fright. 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, 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 then 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 Fl24’s moon moved outward and stopped rotating altogether; 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 which 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 dam’ 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 never had experience stealing spaceships. 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 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.”
Judy Greenberg came back from the rest room and sat down next to Lloyd. Lucas 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 threevee screen in the seat ahead.
VII
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 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 back. 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 have been 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 six feet two inches. His hair and eating tendrils were dead white. Masney was staring thoughtfully back 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 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 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 under water?”
“I think between one and two billion years. Your years or mine. They aren’t much different.”
“Then your race is probably dead.”
“Yes.” He 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 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 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…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, and they eat free food, which is almost as cheap as air. Their shape is like a caterpillar reaching up for a leaf. The mouth is at the front of the belly foot.”
“Free food?”
Kzanol didn’t hear him. “That’s funny,” he said thoughtfully. “Garner, do you remember the pictures of bandersnatchi that the Jinx colony sent back? Greenberg was going to read a bandersnatch mind some day.”
“Sure. Hey!”
“Bandersnatchi are whitefoods,” said Kzanol. “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 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 the Jinxians think they were intelligent?”
“Well, for one thing,” Garner said mildly, “the report said the brain was tremendous. Weighed as much as a ten-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.”
Kzanol/Greenberg cracked his knuckles, then hurriedly separated his hands so that he couldn’t do it again. The mystery of the intelligent ‘bandersnatchi’ 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.
Had the moon observation post been abandoned?
Garner crashed into his thoughts.
“Maybe something bigger than a cosmic ray made the mutations. Something like a machine-gun volley, or a meteorite storm.”
Kzanol shook his head. “Any other evidence?”
“Oh, hell yes. Right from the seco
nd landing. According to the report the Lazy Eight II landed near a herd of bandersnatchi. The oldsters were still alive, the ship hadn’t been in space more than fifty years, and they insisted that the youngers, who still could move around, should kill and dissect a bandersnatch. The youngers went out and shot one immediately all the bandersnatchi in the area, who had been tame and curious up to that point, disappeared.
“Well, the biologists got their thrills. They found out that the bandersnatch was one big cell, just like you said, with a convoluted organ like an intelligent mammal’s brain. They wanted another. They took the ship up and flew, oh, thirty miles west before they sighted another group.
“The bandersnatchi ran off while the ship was landing. From then on they never appeared within sight of the ship.”
“Could these have been the same bandersnatchi?”
“Sure, Greenberg, but so what? To get behavior that uniform they must have had a language. Or so said most of the youngers. The oldsters knew better, of course. What use could a browsing vegetarian who can eat anything, with no appendages and no defenses and no natural enemies, have for intelligence? How would he possibly develop it?
“On the other hand—now get this—the bandersnatch was the only animal on the planet.
“Well, a few one-man helicopters went out with hunters. The bandersnatchi move awfully fast for something the size of a young mountain. They found that one bandersnatch was always within sight of a copter. And out of bullet range. Trouble came when copters tried to land. As soon as the pilot got too far away from the copter, a bandersnatch would charge in and flatten it.
“Then the bandersnatch started writing messages in the dirt.”
“Nonsense,” said Kzanol/Greenberg.
“The last report from Jinx included photographs.” Garner hesitated in apparent indecision, then said, “Just a second.” He spoke a few words into something, probably a peanut-sized mike, attached to his chair. “Come around in back of me,” he told Greenberg.