Kzanol stood watching him, a blurred mass at the edge of sight. Larry knew what he wanted. He wouldn't do it; he wouldn't ask.

What did Kzanol look like? he wondered.

He looked like a thrint, of course. Larry could remember being Kzanol/Greenberg, and all he had seen was a smallish, handsome, somewhat undergroomed thrint. But when he'd walked past Kzanol on his way to the pilot room, his fleeting glimpse had found something terrifying, something one-eyed and scaly and iridescent green, with gray giant earthworms writhing at the corners of a mouth like a slash in a child's rubber ball, with sharply pointed metallic teeth, with oversized arms and huge three-fingered hands like mechanical grabs.

The Thrintun voice was chilly, by its own standards. "Are you wondering about my oath?"

"Oaths. Yes, now that you mention it."

"You can no longer claim to be a thrint in a human body. You are not the being I gave my oath to."

"Oaths."

"I still want you to help me manage Earth."

Larry had no trouble understanding even the inflections in overspeak, and Kzanol, of course, could now read his mind.

"But you'll manage me," said Larry.

"Yes, of course."

Larry raised his cigarette and tapped it with a forefinger. The ash fell slower than mist past his gaze and disappeared from sight. "There's something I should tell you," he said.

"Condense it. My time is short; I have to find something."

"I don't think you should own the Earth any more. I'll stop you if I can."

Kzanol's eating tendrils were doing something strange. Larry couldn't see what it was. "You think like a slave. Not a ptavv, a slave. You have no conceivable reason to warn me."

"That's my problem."

"Quite. DON'T MOVE UNTIL I RETURN." The command carried overtones of disgust. A dark blur that was Kzanol moved and vanished.

Alone in the pilot room, Larry listened to the clanking, squeaking, and mental cursing that meant Kzanol was searching for something. He heard when the thrint sharply ordered the pilot to return to life and show him AT ONCE where he'd hidden the contaminated portable radar… The command, a mere explosion of frustration, stopped suddenly. So did the sounds of search.

Presently Larry heard the airlock chugging to itself.

The clerk was a middleman. It was his job to set priorities on messages sent into and received from deep space. At three in the morning he answered the ring of the outside phone.

"Hello, Arms Maser Transceiving Station," he said a little sleepily. It had been a dull night.

It was no longer dull. The small brunette who looked out of his screen was startlingly beautiful, especially to the man who saw her unexpectedly in the dead hours.

"Hello. I have a message for Lucas Garner. He's on the way to Neptune, I think."

"Lucas Garner? What I mean, what's the message?"

"Tell him that my husband is back to normal, and he should take it into consideration. It's very important."

"And who is your husband?"

"Larry Greenberg. That's G-r-e"

"Yes, I know. But he's beyond Neptune by now. Wouldn't Garner already know anything you know about Greenberg?"

"Not unless he's telepathic."

It was a tricky decision for a clerk. Maser messages cost like uranium, less because of the power needed and the wear and tear on the delicate machines than because of the difficulty of finding the.target. But only Garner could decide whether an undependable «hunch» was important to him. The clerk risked his job and sent the message.

The fire had slowed now. Most of the unburned hydrogen had been blown before the fire, until it was congested into a cloud mass opposite on Pluto from the resting place of the Golden Circle. Around that cloud bank raged a hurricane of awesome proportions. Frozen rain poured out of the heavens in huge lens-shaped drops, hissing into the nitrogen snow. The layers above nitrogen were gone, vaporized, gas diluting the hydrogen which still poured in. On the borderline hydrogen burned fitfully with halogens, and even with nitrogen to form ammonia, but around most of the great circle the fires had gone out. Relatively small, isolated conflagrations ate their way toward the new center. The «hot» water ice continued to fall. When it had boiled the nitrogen away it would begin on the oxygen. And then there would be a fire.

At the center of the hurricane the ice stood like a tremendous Arizona butte. Even the halogens were still frozen across its flat top, thousands of square miles of fluorine ice with near-vacuum above. Coriolis effects held back the burning wind for a time.

On the other side of the world, Kzanol stepped out of the Golden Circle.

He turned once to look back. The honeymoon ship was flat on her belly. Her landing gear was retracted, and a wide, smooth crater was centered under the drive exhaust cone. Star-hot hydrogen had leaked from the fusion tube for some time after its fuel was cut off. The fuselage was twisted, though not broken. Her forward wings had been jarred open, and now hung broken from their sockets. One tip of the triangular major wing curled up where it had stabbed against rock-hard ice.

She was doomed, she was useless. Kzanol walked on. The Thrintun space suit was a marvelous assemblage of tools. No changes had been made in it for centuries before Kzanol's time, for the design had long been perfect, but for an unsuspected flaw in the emergency systems, and the naive Thrintun had never reached that level of sophistication which produces planned obsolescence. The temperature inside the suit was perfect, even a little warmer than in the ship.

But the suit could not compensate for the wearer's imagination. Kzanol felt the outer chill as his ship fell behind. Miles-thick blankets of nitrogen and oxygen snow had boiled away here, leaving bubbly permafrost which showed dark and deep green in the light of his helmet lamp. There was fog, too, not dense but very deep, a single bank that stretched halfway around the world. The fog narrowed his universe to a circular patch of bubbly ice.

Moving in great, easy flying hops, he reached the first rise of the crescent in forty minutes. It was six miles from the ship. The crescent was now a slightly higher rise of permafrost, scarred and pitted from the fire that had crossed it. Kzanol's portable radar, borrowed from the Circle's lockers, showed his goal straight ahead at the limit of its range. About a mile ahead, and almost a thousand feet deep in permafrost.

Kzanol began to climb the slope.

"We're out of arrows," the man in Number Two ship said gloomily. He meant missiles. "How do we protect ourselves?"

Lew said, "We'll be on our way home before Garner comes within sniffing distance of Pluto. The best he can do is shoot at us as we pass. His arrows aren't good enough to hit us when we're moving that fast, except by accident. He knows it. He won't even try, because it might start the Last War."

"He may decide the stakes are high enough."

"Dammit, Tartov, what choice have we got? Garner must not be allowed to leave here with that amplifier! If he does, we'll see a period of slavery such as nobody has even dreamed of up to now," Lew exhaled noisily through his nostrils. "We've got to go down and destroy the thing by hand. Land on the dawn side and mount an expedition. Hexter, can you dismount a ship's radar so it'll still work?"

"Sure, Lew. But it'll take two men to carry it."

Tartov said, "You miss my point. Of course we've got to wreck the damn amplifier. But how can we prove to Garner that we did wreck it? Why should he trust us?"

Lew ran spatulate fingers through tangled cotton hair. "My apologies, Tartov. That's a damn good question. Comments?"