made of an alloy unfamiliar to him, ports brighter, weapon pods protruding. He moved the runabout, seeing from all angles. On the bow, near the large port, the words, in English—Plank's Pride. He directed the return of the small vehicle and left it to tuck itself away as he traced circuits. His interest was caught by the weapons. Deadly. Power beamed to incredible distances and capable of cutting through a hull with one touch. And hidden away inside the pods the sleek and fatal missiles, planet killers. Compacted nuclear heads with the potential to
split an Earth-sized planet at the equator, shatter it into fragmented, torn pieces. He investigated the navigational equipment. The 16-meter eyes were part of it, along with the integrated and complicated star charts and a system of detection gear that could spot space debris the size of a pebble at incredible distances. The memory bank of the computer contained familiar material, the
library of the old Pride intact, film, books, records. He seized upon it and traced the history of the Pride from its log. The first trip complete. The second trip outward bound. Names and distances. Earth to Centauri. Times and speeds and fuel consumption. His mind raced. He had records of Earth, the solar system, the nearby stars whose planets were being colonized and mined by people from Earth ships. He had a ship so capable of travel that the travels of the Earth starships seemed like local traffic. Finding home, then, should be simple. Except that all references to exact location of the Sol-Centauri neighborhood were missing. Except that, assuming Sol and Centauri to be located in the Orion Arm, there were millions of stars in that arm alone. The why of it puzzled him as much as the how. He knew, could accept it now, that he was no longer John Plank, man of Earth. He was Plank, starship. He contained advances that could not have been of Earth. How? He did not know. Why? Why could he not remember how to go home?
Why was his brain, a tiny, soft, living entity buried behind shielding at the
center of his metallic body, so devoid of any clue as to the location of his home planet? He searched his brain for signs of alteration. As far as he could tell he was complete, all his memories intact. He searched himself for clues; then she hit him with a force that moved him inward, lost him in pain. Laughing, dressed in white swimwear, skin golden, hair long, tousled and light as the sands of the deserts of Earth. «Sahara,» he said. She was younger than he was, but mature. He had met her at the academy. «Call me Hara,» she had said at their first meeting. He called her Hara, and later, he called her love. He considered giving
up his private enterprise plans to join her in the Service. He begged her to join him aboard the Pride, dreaming of the long, lovely months with her.
But, by then she was first navigation officer on a fleet colonizer, proud of her achievement, impossibly lovely in uniform and utterly dedicated to her job. «Soon,» she'd told him when he'd last seen her, after his first successful venture into space. «We have time, John. We have lots of time.» Now she was light-years away in an unknown direction, lost to him
forever, for he himself was lost, altered, no longer a man, merely a mass of gray, spongy cells nestled in the bulk of a fantastic starship. He felt a vast and white-hot anger. He luxuriated in it, growling into the ship's sound system with it, yelling his hate for whoever or whatever had done this thing to him. The sensors brought him away from his lovely hate and anger and showed him the planet, blue with life-giving water that was green underneath, a belt of clouds over a wide ocean. There, perhaps, lay the answer. He unshipped the small runabout and powered it down toward the surface of the planet. He used the hours of approach to make distant readings: he found Earth- type atmosphere, a stable system of weather, gravity just under Earth-normal, size just smaller than Earth, all the favorable conditions of a life-zone planet. Although the ship's atomic clocks kept Earth time, time had no meaning to him. He used it to best advantage without being aware of its passing. When the scout entered atmosphere and its sensitive sensors confirmed his readings regarding oxygen content and minor element makeup, he merely went ahead with the task at hand, seeing through the eyes of the scout. There were four major land masses, balanced against the planet's spin atop the fluid core. A relatively quick fly-around showed temperate, tropical and arctic zones, the usual makeup of a life-zone planet. Vegetation followed the usual pattern formed by the spin-induced weather systems. There were no artificial emanations from the surface. Subsurface masses of radioactive ores made their presence known, deposits typical of Earth-type planets. There was no sign of intelligent life. At slower speeds and lower altitudes, the scout made calibrated grids of the landmasses. Plank saw huge, green forests and open grasslands, mountains and streams, lakes and seas. There was life on each of the landmasses, confined largely to tropical and subtropical areas. That was normal. Armstrong, the one Earth-type planet of the Centauri system, had several species of rodentlike animals, varied vegetation, marine life of a more complex nature. Satisfied that no advanced life was present. Plank dipped the scout to land, examined the predominant life form close up. In the inhabited areas,
the animals were plentiful. They were somewhat like large, shell-less slugs, moving by body convolutions to feed on the abundant vegetation. They
seemed to be unselective in their choice of foodstuff, eating any plant that came within reach of their blunt- toothed maws. The runabout had a hatch, but efforts to entice one of the animals into the vehicle were fruitless. Plank considered his resources. He discovered his mobile form in a storage area inside the cargo hold, called back the runabout and sent the armored, bipedal machine down. He stood on good earth, the grass thick under metallic feet, eye-sensors mounted atop the body in a manlike head. Ears heard the grinding, monotonous sound of the eating animals, the call of a dull, primitive bird thing from the high trees, the sigh of the wind. He was there, on the
planet, hearing, smelling, seeing. The feeling of being alive distracted him from his purpose. He wandered, exploring, admiring the variety of finely formed vegetation. He stood on the overgrown margin of a forest stream and watched fish swim, extended a hand to feel the water, cool and clear. It was a perfect planet for man. He would record its location, present his claim. Such thinking sobered him, reminded him that he was a mass of brain cells encased in a remarkable starship; that he was not actually standing on the surface, but encased, confined, far above this manlike extension, which was sending him his impressions of the planet. He captured one of the animals easily. The feel of it was fleshy, warm, soft. A thick skin protected the boneless body. It had low-grade eyes and rudimentary hearing organs. There were no protective mechanisms, the creature apparently having no natural enemies. It was not necessary to kill the animal. Probing and checking, shipboard instruments found surprisingly human cells, blood close enough to Earth-type to be an astounding coincidence, a primitive brain, a simple digestive system and an enlarged heart. It was as if a great blob of humanoid cells had been grown, as cells were being grown in test tubes back on Earth, and had formed into the simplest functioning animal imaginable. Examination of other specimens provided no surprises. There were few variations from animal to animal. The only unusual discovery was the method of reproduction: asexual, by division, like some huge and bloated one cell animal. The creature simply divided its small brain, sliced itself down the middle, with cells spontaneously forming into heart and digestive organs in the new creature. Aside from some rather primitive insect forms, the slug was the only ground life on the planet. The bird things were few, living on fruits and berries. The highest form of the primitive marine life was about as far advanced as Cambrian forms in Earth history. Plank recalled his extensions, mulled over his information and recorded it. He had been directed toward that planet for a reason, and he could not understand the reason. In the months ahead, he found that planets seemed to hold a vast attraction for him. He could not resist checking out an Earth-type world. Not that there were many of them. Many stars had planets, but the predominant form was the gas giant. Only one in 20 suns had life-bearing planets and many of those life forms were non-terran in type, living in poisoned atmospheres unsuitable for human existence. Still, in the timeless months, he checked and recorded and searched, working his way outward through the stars, crossing the vast distances instantly with the aid of his heart—his drive that blinked the Pride in and out of existence with an ease that ceased to amaze him after he had read, pointed and blinked from star to star 100, 200 times. There were moments when he had the urge to skip the near stars, to leap far, far away, and continue leaping until he found the small yellow glow of Sol. But when he looked through his outer eyes and saw, only
light-years away, a likely sun, he blinked to it, saw its family, orbited the likely planets and went through his routine. Nowhere did he find
intelligent life. Nowhere did he find life like the slugs of the first planet, which he had come to think of as Plank's World, since it was his first. And he did not know why he worked his way carefully down the stars, searching. He knew only that someday he would blink close to a grouping of stars and recognize the characteristics of Sol or Centauri. Then he would be home and there would be answers. He was alone, but he did not mind. He had the library. He had new sources of information that kept his mind active. He knew secrets about the universe that man had only guessed about; he logged them, sorted them and stored them in the bottomless bank of the computer. He was a creature of space, alive in it, loving it, cataloguing the Orion Arm as he looked for the familiar
