"Well, let's say the Sea Statue is a telepath. Not a telepathy-prone, like Larry Greenberg, but a full telepath, able to read any mind whenever be chooses. Suddenly all bets are off. Greenberg wakes with two sets of memories, and one set remembers reading hundreds of other minds, or thousands! Got it?"

"Yes. Oh, yes," said Judy. "I warned him something was going to happen. But what can we do?"

"If he doesn't pass over a city soon we'll have to send up interceptors. We'd better wait 'til Snyder gets out of the 'doc."

Kzanol dropped the car again half an hour later. He had been wondering about the peculiar gritty feeling in his eyes, and when he felt he was about to lose consciousness he became frightened. Then his Greenberg memories told him what was wrong. 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 in 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 woolly 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 asymmetrical 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 and different.

After two hours it began to pall. The problem of where in space he 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 with this one, he would find it listed there. The Belt 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 yet been found, it was beyond the reach of terran ships, and he might as well decently commit suicide.

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 of 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 sorcery. 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, 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 terror. 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, covering the oceans a foot deep, 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 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 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 that 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 damn 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 had no experience in stealing spacecraft. 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 some 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?"