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. Garner 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.