But there was one chance. Humans had space travel, remembered Kzanol/Greenberg. Pitiful space travel: ships that took decades to cross between the inhabited worlds, and days even to cruise the planets of the 'solar system.' But space travel it was. If he could find the F124 system, and if it were close enough to reach, he could get the amplifier helmet. And Greenberg had had rudimentary telepathy.
The helmet could boost his tiny talent into a semblance of Thrintun Power.
Where was he now? He must have missed F124, Kzanol decided, and gone on to a haphazard collision with this planet Earth. Where and when had he landed? Could he reach the lost planet within Greenburg's lifetime?
Greenberg's body wanted dinner (it was 1:20 hours), water, and a cigarette. Kzanol had no trouble ignoring the hunger and thirst, for a thrint would kill himself if he ate enough to satisfy his hunger, and rupture his storage sac if he drank until he wasn't thirsty. The battle for food had been very fierce among the thrint's dumb ancestors. But he had cigarettes. He smoked and found that he liked it, although he had to fight an urge to chew the filter.
Where was he? He let Larry Greenberg's memory come to the surface. High school. History class, with lousy grades. The race for space; Moon bases; Mars bases. The Belt. Colonization of the Belt. The economics behind the Belt. Confinement Asteroid. Overpopulation on Earth. Fertility Laws; Fertility Board; Superman Insurrection. Sanction against the Belt, during an argument over the use of the Jovian moons. There was a lot of extraneous material coming through, but Kzanol was getting a good picture of the solar system. He was on the third planet, and it was binary. He had been extremely lucky to hit it.
The UN power sender on Mercury. Failure of the economic sanction. Limits of Belt autonomicity. Industrial warfare. Why was the Belt being treated as a villain? Forget it. Belt mining of Saturn's rings for water. Saturn's rings. Rings!
'Youch!' Kzanol hurled the cigarette butt away and stuffed his burnt fingers in his mouth.
F124. So this is F124, he thought. It doesn't look like F124. He started to shiver, so he turned up the heater.
At one-thirty Judy got up and went out. The nightmare feeling had become too much to bear, alone in the dark. And Larry hadn't called.
A cab dropped to the corner in answer to her ring. She didn't know the address of the UCLA Physics Level, but there was a phone in the cab. She had Information type the address on the cab destination board. The cab whirred and rose.
Judy leaned back in the soft seat. She was tired, even though she couldn't sleep.
The enormous pillar that was UCLA blazed with light; but these were night lights, to protect the structure from aircraft. Yet- a level halfway up was three times as bright as the rest. Judy guessed which level this was, even before the cab started down. As they swooped toward the landing balcony she noticed other details.
The big square vehicle was an ambulance, one with large capacity. Those little cars with the extended motor housings were police. There were tiny figures moving around.
Automatically Kzanol lit his last cigarette. His mouth and throat were raw; was that normal? He remembered that it wasn't, except when he had been smoking far too much.
… And then the Time of Ripening would come. Suddenly everyone would be in a hurry; Dad and Grandpa would return to the house very late and bone-tired, and the slaves never rested at all. All day and night there was the sound of trees being felled, and the low whirr of the stripping plant.
Before he was old enough to help, he used to sit beneath the guardian sunflowers and watch the trees go into the stripping plant. They would go in looking like any other mpul tree: perfectly straight, with the giant green flower at the top, and the dark blue stalk ending in a tapering tap root. In the stripping plant the flower and the soft bark and the tap root would be removed. The logs would come out shining in the sun, with nothing left but the solid fuel rocket core and the thin iron-crystal skin beneath the bark. Then the logs would be shipped to all the nearby civilized worlds, in ships which lifted on other stage tree logs.
But first there was the testing. A log was selected at random and fitted into the testing block. Grandfather and Dad would be standing by, each looking like he had sucked a sour gnal. They watched with single-minded concentration as the log was fired, ready to disapprove a whole crop at the slightest sign of misfire. Kzanol used to try to imitate their expressions. The little tnuctip technicians would be running around setting instruments and looking harried and important. They seemed too small to be intelligent animals, but they were. Their quaint biological science had mutated the stage trees out of worthless mpul trees. They had created the sunflowers which guarded the house: a hedge of twelve-foot trunks, each bearing a flexible silver mirror to focus sunlight on the green photosynthetic node, or to shift that focus onto an attacking enemy. Tnuctipun had built the gigantic, mindless yeast-eating whitefoods which fed the family and the carnivorous tnuctipun themselves. They had been given more freedom than any other slave race, because they had proven the worth of their freethinking brains.
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.
