came he must buy balladeer; pruntaquilun balladeers, for only these had the proper gift of language…
The spaceport was drawing near.
There was no apparent need to be subtle. Once Kzanol/Greenberg had Masney fully under, he simply ordered Masney to take him to the spaceport. It took about fifteen minutes to reach the gate.
At first he couldn't guess why Masney was landing. Shouldn't he simply fly over the fence? Masney wasn't giving away information. His mind would have been nearly normal by now, and it was normal for a hypnotized person. Masney «knew» that he wasn't really hypnotized; he was only going along with it for a joke. Any time now he would snap out of it and surprise Greenberg. Meanwhile he was calm and happy and free from the necessity for making decisions. He had been told to go to the spaceport. Here he was at the spaceport. His passenger let him lead.
Not until they were down did Kzancl/Greenberg realize that Masney was waiting to be passed through by the guards. He asked, 'Will the guards let us through?'
'No,' said Masney.
Coosth, another setback. 'Would they have let me through with-' he thought, 'Garner?'
'Yes. Garner's an Arm.'
'Well, turn around and go back for Garner.'
The car whirred. 'Wait a minute,' said Kzanol/Greenberg. 'Sleep.' Where were the guards?
Across a tremendous flat expanse of concrete, painted with large red targets in a hexagonal array, he could see the spaceships. There were twenty or thirty ramjet rocket orbital craft, some fitted out to lift other spacecraft to orbit. A linear accelerator ran down the entire south side of the field: a quarter mile of wide, closely set metal hoops. Fusion-drive military rockets lay on their sides in docks, ready to be loaded onto the flat triangular ramjet- rockets. They all looked like motor scooters beside two truly gigantic craft.
One thing like a monstrous tin of tuna, a circular flying wing resting on its blunt trailing edge, was the reentry, cargo, and lifesupport system of the Lazy Eight III. Anyone would have recognized her, even without the blue human's sign of infinity on her flank. She was 320 feet in diameter, 360 in height. The other, far to the right, was a passenger ship as big as the ancient “Queen Mary”, one of the twin luxury transports which served the Titan Hotel. And even at this distance it was apparent that everybody, everybody was clustered around her entrance port.
Listening as hard as he could, Kzanol/Greenberg still couldn't find out what they were doing there; but he recognized the flavor of those far-too-calm thoughts. Those were tame slaves, slaves under orders.
The other thrint was here. But why wasn't he taking his own ship? Or had he landed here? Or- was the spawn of a ptavv making a leisurely inspection of his new property?
He told Masney, 'The guard has told us to go ahead. Take the car over to that honeymoon special.'
The car skimmed across the concrete.
Garner shook his head, let it fall back into place. His mind was as the mind of a sleeping child. Across that mind flitted thoughts as ephemeral as dreams. They could not stay. Garner had been ordered not to think. I must look terribly senile, he thought once. The idea slipped away… and returned. Senile. I'm old but not senile. No? There is drool on my chin.
He shook his head, hard. He slapped his face with one hand. Garner was beginning to think again, but not fast enough to suit him. He fumbled at the controls of his chair, and it lurched over to the coffee faucet. When he poured a cup his hand shook so that hot coffee spilled on his hand and wrist. Enraged, he hurled the cup at the wall.
His mind went back to white dullness.
A few minutes later Judy Greenberg wobbled through the door. She looked dazed, but her mind was functioning again. She saw Garner slumped in his travel chair wearing the face of a decrepit moron, and she poured cold water over his head until he came to life.
'Where is he?' Garner demanded.
'I don't know,' Judy told him. 'I saw him walk out, but it didn't seem to matter to me. Chief Masney was with him. What happened to us?'
'Something I should have expected.' Garner was no longer a decrepit old man, but an angry Jehovah. 'It means things have gone from worse to terrible. That alien statue- I knew there was something wrong with it the moment I saw it, but I couldn't see what it was. Oh, nuts.
'It had both arms out, like it was turning chicken halfway through a swan dive. I saw a little projection on his chest, too. Look. The alien put himself into a freeze field to avoid some disaster. After that the button that turned on the field was in the field, and so was the alien's finger pushing it in. So the button wouldn't need a catch to hold it in. It wouldn't have one.
'But the alien had both arms out when I saw it. When Jansky put his own field around the statue, the alien dropped Greenberg's 'digging instrument' and the button too. The button must have popped out. Why he didn't come to life right then I don't know, unless the freeze field has inertia like hysteresis in an electric current. But he's alive now, and that was him we heard.'
'Well, it's quite a monster,' said Judy. 'Is that what Larry thinks he is?'
'Right.' Garner's chair rose and made a wind in the room.. The chair slid out the door, picking up speed. Judy stared after it.
'Then if he sees that he isn't who he thinks he is…' she began hopefully. Then she gave it up.
One of the policemen got to his feet, moving like a sleepwalker.
Kzanol took the guards with him on his tour of the spaceport. He also took all the repairmen, dispatchers, spacemen, and even passengers he happened to meet while moving around. The man who owned the Cadillac seemed to regard even a trip to Mars as a hazardous journey! If that was the state of Earth's space technology, Kzanol wanted a bundleful of expert opinions.
A couple of dispatchers were sent back to the office to try to find F124 on the star maps. The rest of the group came with Kzanol, growing as it moved. Just two men had the sense to hide when they saw the mob coming. By the time he reached the passenger liner Kzanol was towing everyone at the spaceport but Masney, Kzanol/Greenberg, and those two cautious men.
He had already chosen the Lazy Eight III, the only interstellar ship on the field. While he was getting the rescue switch on his back repaired, slaves could finish building and orbiting the ship's drive and fuel tanks. It would be at least a year before he was ready to leave Earth.
Then he would take a large crew and pass the journey in stasis, with his slaves to wake him whenever a new child became old enough to take orders. Their descendants would wake him at journey's end.
Kzanol had stood beneath the blunt ring which ship's trailing edge and looked up into the gaping mouth of a solid fuel landing motor. He had probed an engineer's mind to find how the spin of a ship could substitute for artificial gravity. He had walked on the after wall of the central corridor and peered through doors above his head and beneath his feet, into the Garden whose rows of hydroponic tanks served in place of his own tnuctip-bred air plant, and into the huge control room with three walls covered in nightmare profusion with dials and screens and switchboards. His own ship had needed only a screen and a brain board. Everywhere he saw ingenuity replacing true knowledge, complex makeshifts replacing the compact, simple machines Kzanol had known. Dared he trust his life to this jury-rigged monster?
He had no choice. The remarkable thing was that humans would do so; that they would scheme and fight to do so. The space urge was a madness upon them- a madness which should be cured quickly, lest they waste this world's resources.
This prospecting trip, Kzanol thought wryly, is taking longer than I dreamed. And then, not at all wryly: Will I ever see Thrintun again?
Well, at least he had time to burn. As long as he was here, he might as well see what a human called a luxury liner.
He was impressed despite himself.
There were Thrintun liners bigger than the Golden Circle, and a few which were far bigger; but not many carried a greater air of luxury. Those that did carried the owners of planets. The ramjets under the triangular wing
