'Have you any idea where he is now?' She couldn't restrain herself.
'Sure,' Masney said unexpectedly. 'He just crossed the Kansas-Colorado border at a height of nine thousand feet. I guess he doesn't know how to short out his license sender. But then, maybe he just didn't bother.'
'Maybe he just doesn't like cities,' said the old man in the corner. Judy had thought he was asleep. He had been introduced as Lucas Garner, an Arm of the UN. Judy waited for him to go on, but he seemed to think he had explained himself. Masney explained for him.
'You see, we don't advertise the fact that all our override beamers are in the cities. I figure that if he knows enough to go around the cities, which he's been doing, he must know enough to short out his license so that we can't follow him. Luke, have you got some reason to think he doesn't like cities?'
Luke nodded. Judy thought he looked like the oldest man in the world. His face was as wrinkled as Satan's. He rode a ground-effect travel chair as powerful as a personal tank. 'I've been expecting something like this for years,' he said. 'Lloyd, do you remember when the Fertility Laws went into force, and I told you that a lot of homicidal nuts would start killing bachelors who had gotten permits to have children? And it happened. This is like that. I thought it might happen on Jinx, but it happened here instead.
'Larry Greenberg thinks he's an alien.'
Judy was stunned. 'But he's done this before,' she protested.
'No.' Garner drew a lit cigarette from the arm of his chair. 'He hasn't. He's worked with men and dolphins. Now he's run into something he can't take. I've got a hunch what it is, and I'd give my wheel chair' — Judy looked, but it didn't have wheels- 'to know if I'm right.
'Mrs. Greenberg. Has your husband ever been asked to read the mind of a telepath?'
Mutely Judy shook her head.
'So,' said Garner. Again he looked like he'd gone to sleep, this time with a cigarette burning between his fingers. His hands were huge, with muscles showing beneath the loose, mottled skin, and his shoulders belonged on a blacksmith. The contrast between Garner's massive torso and his helpless, almost fleshless legs made him look a little like a bald ape. He came to life, sucked in a massive dose of smoke, and went on talking.
'Lloyd's men got here about fifteen minutes after Larry Greenberg left. Trimonti called the cops, of course; nobody else could move. Lloyd himself was here in another ten. When he saw the wounds on the men Greenberg shot, he called me in Brussels.
'I'm an Arm, a member of the UN Technological Police. There was a chance the weapon that made those wounds would have to be suppressed. Certainly it needed investigation. So my first interest was the weapon.
'I don't suppose either of you ever heard of Buck Rogers? No? Too bad. Then I'll just say that nothing in our present technology could have led to a weapon like this.
'It does not destroy matter, which is reassuring. Rewriting one law of physics is worse than trying to eat one peanut. The weapon scatters matter. Lloyd's men found traces of blood and flesh and bone forming a greasy layer all over the room. Not merely microscopic traces, but clumps too small to see at all.
'Trimonti's testimony was a godsend. Obviously the Sea Statue dropped the weapon, and Greenberg used it.
Why?'
Masney rumbled, 'Get to the point, Luke.'
'Okay, here it comes. The contact helmet is a very complicated psionics device. One question the psychologists have wondered about is this. Why don't the contact men get more confused when extraneous memories pour in? Usually there's a few minutes of confusion, and then everything straightens out. They say it's because the incoming memories are weak and fuzzy, but that's only half an answer. It may even be a result, not a cause.
'Picture it. Two men sit down under crystal-iron helmets, and when one of them gets up he has two complete sets of memories. Which one is him?
'Well, one set remembers a different body from the one he finds himself in. More important, one set remembers being a telepath and the other doesn't! One set remembers sitting down under a contact helmet with the foreknowledge that when her gets up he will have two sets of memories. Naturally the contact man will behave as if that set were his own. Even with eight or ten different memory sets, the contact man will automatically use his own.
'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
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.
