'I think between one and two billion years. Your years or mine, they aren't that much different.'
'Then your race is probably dead.'
'Yes.' Kzanol looked at his hands, unbelievingly. 'How in-' he gurgled, recovered, 'how under the Power did I get into this body? Greenberg thought that was only a telepathy machine!'
Garner nodded. 'Right. And you've been in that body, so to speak, all along. The alien's memories were superimposed on your brain, Greenberg. You've been doing the same thing with dolphins for years, but it never affected you this way. What's the matter with you, Greenberg? Snap out of it!'
The slave in the travel chair made no move to kill himself. 'You,' Kzanol/Greenberg paused to translate, 'whitefood. You despicable, decaying, crippled whitefood with defective sex organs. Stop telling me who I am! I know who I am!' He looked down at his hands. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes and ran itching down his cheeks, but his face remained as expressionless as a moron's. Garner blinked at him. 'You think you are what's- his-name, the alien terror from Outer Space? Nuts. The alien terror is down on the first floor of this building, and he's perfectly harmless. If we could get him back to normal time he would be the first to call you an impostor. Later I'll take you down and show him to you.
'Part of what you said is true. I am, of course, an old man. But what is a, er, whitefood?' He made the word a separate question.
Kzanol had calmed down. 'I translated. The whitefood is an artificial animal, created by the tnuctipun as a meat animal. A whitefood is as big as a dinosaur and as smooth and white as a shmoo. They're a lot like shmoos. We can use all of their bodies, except the skeleton, and they eat free food, which is almost as cheap as air. Their shape is like a caterpillar reaching for a leaf. The mouth is at the front of the belly foot.'
'Free food?'
Kzanol/Greenberg didn't hear him. 'That's funny. Garner, do you remember the pictures of bandersnatchi that the second Jinx expedition sent back? Greenberg was going to read a bandersnatch mind someday.'
'Sure. Hey!'
'Bandersnatchi are whitefoods,' said Kzanol/Greenberg. 'They don't have minds.'
'I guessed that. But, son, you've got to remember that they've had two billion years to develop minds.'
'It wouldn't help them. They can't mutate. They were designed that way. A whitefood is one big cell, with a chromosome as long as your arm and as thick as your little finger. Radiation could never affect them, and the first thing that would be harmed by any injury would be the budding apparatus.' Kzanol/Greenberg was bewildered. What price another coincidence? 'Why would anyone think they were intelligent?'
'Well, for one thing,' Garner said mildly, 'the report said the brain was tremendous. Weighed as much as a three-year-old boy.'
Kzanol/Greenberg laughed. 'They were designed for that, too. The brain of a whitefood has a wonderful flavor, so the tnuctip engineers increased its size. So?'
'So it's convoluted like a human brain.'
Why, so it was. Like a human brain, and a tnuctip brain, and a thrint brain, for that matter. Now why-
Kzanol/Greenberg cracked his knuckles, then hurriedly separated his hands so that he couldn't do it again. The mystery of the intelligent «bandersnatch» bothered him, but he had other things to worry about. Why, for example, hadn't he been rescued? Three hundred years after he pushed the panic button, he must have struck the Earth like the destroying wrath of the Powergiver. Someone on the moon must have seen it.
Could the lunar observation post have been abandoned?
Why?
Garner crashed into his thoughts. 'Maybe something bigger than a cosmic ray made the mutations. Something like a machine-gun volley or a meteor storm.'
Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head. 'Any other evidence?'
'Oh, hell yes. Greenberg, what do you know about Jinx?'
'A good deal,' said Kzanol/Greenberg. Larry's knowledge of Jinx had been as thorough as any colonist's. The memories clicked into place, unbidden, at the sound of the word. Jinx…
Moon of Binary, third planet out from Sirius A. Binary was a banded orange giant, bigger than Jupiter, and much warmer. Jinx was six times as big as Earth, with a gravity of one point seven eight, and with a period of rotation more than four days long. Of all the factors which had shaped Jinx, the most important had been its lack of radioactive materials. For Jinx was solid all through its rocky lithosphere and halfway to the center of its nickel- iron core.
Long ago- before even his time, Kzanol's time- Jinx had been much closer to Binary. So close that the tides had stopped her spin and pulled her into an egg shape. Later, those same tides had pushed her outward. Not unusual. But, though the atmosphere and ocean assumed a more spherical shape, Jinx did not. The body of the moon was still egg shaped.
Jinx was an Easter egg, banded in different colors by the varying surface pressures.
The ocean was a broad ring of what must be extremely salty water running through the poles of rotation. The regions which the colonists called the Ends, marked by the points nearest to and furthest from Binary, were six hundred miles «higher» than the ocean: six hundred miles further from the moon's center of mass. They stuck right out of the atmosphere. In the photographs masered in from the first expedition, the Ends had shown bone white, with a tracery of sharp black shadows. Further from the Ends the shadows disappeared beneath the atmosphere, and clouds began to appear. The clouds became thicker and thicker, with brown-and-gray earth showing more and more rarely, until suddenly the clouds were in full control. The ocean was forever hidden beneath a band of permanent fleecy cloud thousands of miles wide. At sea level the air was terrifically dense, with a constant temperature of two hundred and seventy degrees Fahrenheit.
The colony of Sirius Mater was on the Eastern continent, three thousand miles east of the ocean, a triangle of cultivated land and inflatable buildings at the fork of two rivers. The first colonists had picked a landing place with a high surface pressure, knowing that the denser atmosphere would help protect them from the temperature changes during the long days and nights, and from the ultraviolet scourge of blue-white Sirius A. Sirius Mater now boasted a population of almost two hundred punsters of all ages…
'Good,' said Garner. 'Then I won't have to explain anything. Can I borrow the phone, Lloyd?'
'Sure.' Lloyd hooked a thumb at one wall.
The phone screen was a big one; it covered half the wall. Luke dialed thirteen quick motions of the forefinger. In a moment the screen cleared to reveal a slender young woman with wavy brunette hair.
'Technological Police, Records Office.'
'This is Lucas Garner, operative-at-large. Here's my ident.' He held a plastic card up to the camera. 'I'd like the bandersnatchi sections from the Jinx report of 2106.'
'Yes sir.' The woman rose and walked off camera.
Kzanol/Greenberg leaned forward to watch. The last report from Jinx had arrived only two months ago, and most of it had not been made public. He remembered seeing stills of the bandersnatchi, but no more. Now, with new eyes eager to compare, he would see whether a bandersnatch was really a whitefood.
It should not have mattered. By all rights he should have felt as he had when Masney's sonic sleeping pill first wore off. Friendless, homeless, disembodied, defeated past all hope. But a prisoner's first duty is always to escape; by collaboration, by treachery, by theft and murder, by any means at all. If he could lull these arrogant slaves into thinking he would cooperate; would give information freely. And he had to know. Later he would decide why the question seemed so important. Now he only knew that it was. The suggestion that a whitefood might be intelligent had hit him with the force of a deadly insult.
Why? But never mind why. Was it true?
The girl was back, smiling. 'Mr. Garner, I'll now turn you over to Mayor Herkimer.' She touched something below the edge of her desk.
The picture dissolved and reformed, but now it was ragged, shot with random dots of colored light. A maser beam had crossed nine light years to bring this picture and had been somewhat torn up on the way, by dust and gee fields and crossing light waves.
Mayor Herkimer had brown hair and a bushy brown beard over a square jaw. His voice was ragged with interference, but his enunciation was clear and careful and twisted by an unknown accent.
'Since everything that wasn't welded down had long since been removed from the Lazy Eight II, and since the fusion plant in the Lazy Eight I was not damaged in the original landing and will give us power for a god-dam
