"Big of you." Kzanol/Greenberg waved the disintegrator negligently. "I'll tell you something you can't use first, to prove I know my stuff. Did you know whitefoods were intelligent?"

"Whitefood droppings."

"Humans have found them on Sirius A-III-1. They're definitely whitefoods. They're also definitely sentient. Can you think of any way they could have developed intelligence?"

"No."

"Of course not. If any form of life has ever been mutation-proof, it's the whitefoods. Besides, what does a herbivore with no manipulatory appendages, and no natural defenses except sentient herders to kill off natural enemies, want with intelligence? No, the tnuctipun must have made them sentient in the first place. Making the brains a delicacy was just an excuse for making them large."

Kzanol sat down. His mouth tendrils stood straight out, as if he were smelling with them. "Why should they do that?"

He was hooked.

"Let me give it to you all in one bundle," said Kzanol/Greenberg. He took off his helmet and sat, found and lighted a cigarette, taking his time, while Kzanol grew silently but visibly enraged. There was no reason why the thrint shouldn't get angry, Kzanol/Greenberg thought, as long as he didn't get too angry.

"All right," he began. "First point is that the whitefoods are sentient. Second point, you remember that there was a depression when Plorn's tnuctipun came up with antigravity."

"Powerloss, yes," Kzanol said fervently and untactfully. "He should have been assassinated right away."

"Not him. His tnuctipun. Don't you see? They were fighting an undeclared war even then. The free tnuctipun must have been behind it all the time: the tnuctip fleet that escaped into space when Thrintun found the tnuctip system. They didn't try to reach Andromeda. They must have stayed between the stars, where nobody ever goes… went. A few civilized tnuctip must have taken their orders. The whitefoods were their spies; every noble in the galaxy, everyone who could afford to, used to keep whitefoods on his land."

"You're a ptavv fool. You're basing all these suppositions on the idiotic idea that whitefoods are intelligent. That's nonsense. We'd have sensed it."

"No. Check with Masney if you don't believe me. Somehow the tnuctipun must have developed a whitefood brain that was immune to the Power. And that one fact makes it certain that the whole ploy was deliberate. The whitefood spies. The antigravity, released to cause a depression. There may have been other ideas, too. Mutated racing viprin were introduced a few years before antigravity. Thea put all the legitimate viprin ranches out of business. That started the depression, and antigravity sped it along. The sunflowers were usually the only defense for a plantation; and everyone who had land had a sunflower border. It got the landowners used to isolation and independence, so that they might not cooperate in wartime. I'd give odds the tnuctipun had a spray to kill sunflowers. When the depression was in full swing they struck."

Kzanol didn't speak. His expression was hard to read. "This isn't all supposition. I've got solid facts. First, the bandersnatchi, whitefoods to us, are sentient. Humans aren't stupid. They wouldn't make a mistake like that. Second, it's a fact that you weren't picked up when you hit F124. Why?"

"That is an ingesting good question. Why?"

This was the starting point, the hurt that had rankled in Kzanol/Greenberg's breast for sixteen days of retrospection and introspection, sixteen days during which he had had nothing to do but supervise Masney and brood on his bad luck. His mind had followed a path that started with a brooding, silent bandersnatch and ended in a war fought aeons ago. But he could have missed it all, he might have been spared all this torment and danger, if only that fool of a caretaker had seen the Dash. He had not, and there could be only one reason.

"Because there wasn't anyone on the Moon. Either the caretaker was killed in the revolt, or he was off fighting somewhere. Probably he was dead. The tnuctipun would have moved at once to cut off our food supply."

"To what?" Kzanol was clearly lost. Thrintun had never fought anything but other Thrintun, and the last war had been fought before star travel. Kzanol knew nothing of war.

The thrint tried to get back to basics. "You said you could tell me where the Thrintun are now."

"With the tnuctipun. They're dead, extinct. If they weren't dead they would have reached Earth by now. That goes for the tnuctipun too, and nearly every other species that served us. They must have all died in the war."

"But that's insane. Somebody has to win a war!"

He sounded so sincere that Kzanol/Greenberg laughed. "Not so. Ask any human. Ask a Russian or a Chinese. They'll think you're a fool for needing to ask, but they'll tell you all about Pyrrhic victory. Shall I tell you what may have happened?"

He didn't wait for an answer. "This is pure conjecture, but it makes sense to me, and I've had two weeks to think about it. We must have been losing the war. If we were, some thraargh- excuse me. Some members of our race must have decided to take all the slaves with them. Like Grandfather's funeral ceremony, but bigger. They made an amplifier helmet strong enough to blanket the entire galaxy. Then they ordered everything within reach to commit suicide."

"But that's a horrible attitude!" Kzanol bristled with moral outrage. "Why would a thrint do a thing like that?"

"Ask a human. He knows what sentients are capable of when someone threatens them with death. First they declaim that the whole thing is horribly immoral, and that it's unthinkable that such a threat would ever be carried out. Then they reveal that they have similar plans, better in every respect, and have had them for years, decades, centuries. You admit the Big Amplifier would have been technically feasible?"

"Of course."

"Do you doubt that a slave race in revolt would settle for nothing less than our total extinction?"

Tendrils writhed in battle at the corners of Kzanol's mouth. When he finally spoke, he said, "I don't doubt it."

"Then-"

"Certainly we'd take them with us into extinction! The sneaky, dishonorable lower-than-whitefoods, using our concessions of freedom to destroy us! I only desire that we got them all."

Kzanol/Greenberg grinned. "We must have. How else can we explain that none of our slaves are in evidence except whitefoods? Remember whitefoods are immune to the Power.

"Now, that other information. Have you looked for your second suit?"

Kzanol returned to the present. "Yes, on the moons. And you searched Neptune. I'd have known if Masney found it. Still, there's one more place I'd like to search."

"Go ahead. Let me know when you're finished." Gyros hummed faintly as the Golden Circle swung around. Kzanol looked straight ahead, his Attention in the control room.

Kzanol/Greenberg lit a cigarette and got ready for a wait.

If Kzanol had learned patience, so had his poor man's imitation. Otherwise he would have done something foolish when the thrint blithely took over Masney, his own personal slave. He could have killed the thrint merely for using his own body- Kzanol/Greenberg's own stolen body, by every test of memory. And the effort of dealing with Kzanol, face to his own personal face!

But he had no choice.

The remarkable thing was that he was succeeding. He faced a full-grown thrint on the thrint's own territory. He had gone a long way toward making Kzanol accept him as another thrint mind, a ptavv at least. Kzanol still might kill him; he wished that the thrint would pay more attention to the disintegrator! But he had done well so far. And was proud of it, which was all to the good. Kzanol/Greenberg's self-respect had been very low.

There was no more to be done now. He had better stay out of Kzanol's way for a while.