A tnuctip would set off the log. The flame would shoot out over the valley, blue-white and very straight, darkening at the end to red smoke, while instruments measured the log's precise thrust and Grandfather smiled in satisfaction. The flame shook the world with its sound, so that little Kzanol used to fear that the thrust was increasing the planet's spin…

Kzanol/Greenberg reached to knock the ash off his last cigarette and saw his second-to-last burning in the ash tray, two-thirds smoked. He hadn't done that since high school! He cursed a Thrintun curse and almost strangled on it; his throat positively wasn't built for overtalk.

He wasn't gaining anything with his reminiscing, either.

Wherever in the universe he was, he still had to reach a spaceport. He needed the amplifier. Later he could figure out why there were aliens on F124, and why they thought they had been here longer than was possible. He started the motor and punched for Topeka, Kansas.

He'd have to steal a ship anyway. It might as well be an armed ship (since this region of space was lawless by definition, having no Thrintun), and there was a military spaceport near Topeka.

Wait a moment, he thought. This couldn't be F124. There were too many planets! F124 had only eight, and here there were nine.

Now that he was started he noticed other discrepancies. The asteroid belt of F124 had been far thicker, and her moon had had a slight rotation, he remembered. He was in the wrong system!

Merely a coincidence! Kzanol grinned. And what a coincidence! The habitable planet, the ringed planet, the ordered sizes of the worlds… come to think of it, he was the only thrint ever to have found two slave planets. He would be the richest being in the galaxy! He didn't care, now, if he never found the map. But, of course, he still needed the amplifier.

Judy felt that she was on the verge of a tantrum. "But can't they talk at all?" she begged, knowing she was being unreasonable.

Los Angeles Police Chief Lloyd Masney's patience was wearing thin. "Mrs. Greenberg," he said heavily. "You know that Doctor Jansky is having his eyes and face replaced at this moment. Also a wide patch of skin on his back, which was taken off almost down to the spinal cord. The others are almost as badly off. Dr. Snyder has no eye damage, but the part of his face that he didn't cover with his hands is being replaced, and the palms of his hands, and some skin from his back. Knudsen did have his spinal cord opened, and some ribs too. The autodoc won't let us wake any of them up, even under police priority, except for Mr. Trimonti. He is being questioned while the 'doc replaces skull and scalp from the back of his head. He has had a bad shock, and he is under local anesthetic, and you may not disturb him! You may hear the transcription of our interview when we have it. Meanwhile, may I offer you some coffee?"

"Yes, thank you," said Judy. She thought he was giving her a chance to get a grip on herself, and was grateful. When he came back with the coffee she sipped it for a few moments, covertly studying the police chief.

He was a burly man who walked like he had bad feet. No wonder if he did; his hands and feet were both tiny in proportion to the rest of his body. He had straight white hair and a dark complexion. His bushy mustache was also white. He seemed almost as impatient as she. She had not yet seen him sit in normal fashion; now his legs were draped over one arm of his swivel chair while his shoulders rested against the other.

"Have you any idea where he is now?" She couldn't restrain herself.

"Sure," Masney said unexpectedly. "He just crossed the Kansas-Colorado border at a height of nine thousand feet. I guess he doesn't know how to short out his license sender. But then, maybe he just didn't bother."

"Maybe he just doesn't like cities," said the old man in the corner. Judy had thought he was asleep. He had been introduced as Lucas Garner, an Arm of the UN. Judy waited for him to go on, but he seemed to think he had explained himself. Masney explained for him.

"You see, we don't advertise the fact that all our override beamers are in the cities. I figure that if he knows enough to go around the cities, which he's been doing, he must know enough to short out his license so that we can't follow him. Luke, have you got some reason to think he doesn't like cities?"

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," he said. "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 had gotten permits to have children? And it happened. This is like that. I thought it might happen on Jinx, but it happened here instead.

"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.