World Of Ptavvs   ::   Нивен Ларри

With a growl that somehow got stuck in his throat, he turned the digging instrument on the aliens. When they were all cowering on the floor or against the walls he whirled and ran, smashed into the wire, backed off and disintegrated a hole for himself and ran for the door. He had to let Greenberg through to open the door for him.

For a long time he thought only of running.

There were green lights below, spaced sparsely over the land between the cities. You had to fly high to see two at a time. Between cities most cars did fly that high, especially if the driver ivas the cautious type. The lights were service stations. Usually a car didn't need servicing more than twice a year, but it was nice to be able to see help when you were in open country. The loneliness could get fierce for a city man, and most men were city men.

It was also nice to know you could land near a green light without finding yourself on top of a tree or halfway over a cliff.

Kzanol steered very wide of the cities, and avoided the green lights too. He couldn't have faced a slave in his present state. When he left the physics level he had gone straight to the roof parking levels, to the haven of his Volkswagen, and taken it straight up. Then he had faced the problem of destination. He didn't really want to go anywhere. When he reached altitude he set the car for New York, knowing that he could change back to California before he got there. Henceforth he let the car drive itself, except when he had to steer around a city.

He did a lot of steering. The green country was more nearly islands in a sea of city than vice versa. Time and again he found narrow isthmuses of city, lines of buildings half a mile across following old superhighways. He crossed these at top speed and went on.

At one hour he had to bring the car down. The drive had been grueling. Only his mad urge to flee had kept him going; and he was beginning to know that he had nowhere to flee to. He felt aches and pains that were sheer torture to him, although Greenberg would have ignored them from habit. His fingers were cramped and sore; they seemed more delicate than ever. He was not mistaken in this. The Greenberg memory told him why the little finger of his left hand ached constantly: a baseball accident that had healed wrong. And Greenberg had taken this crippling disaster for granted! Kzanol was almost afraid to use his hands for anything. There were other pains. His cramped muscles ached from sitting in one position for five hours. His right leg was in agony from its constant pressure on the throttle during override maneuvers. He itched everywhere that clothing pressed against his body.

He brought the car down in the middle of a stunted wood in Arizona. Hurriedly lie got out and stripped off his clothes. Much better! He tossed them into the right-hand seat- he might need them again sometime- got back in and turned on the heater. Now he itched where he touched the seat, but he could stand it.

He had been letting Greenberg's reflexes drive the car, and in the process had gotten used to the presence of Greenberg in his mind. He could draw on the memory set with little discomfort and without fear. But he had not become used to the alien body he now wore, and he had no slightest intention of adjusting to the loss of the Power. Kzanol wanted his body back.

He knew where it was: he'd seen it when he got the disintegrator. The Greenberg memories filled in the details for him. Obviously he had thrown the disintegrator when he put his arms out to protect himself. The body would keep until he found some way of getting back to it.

To do that he would need a way to operate the men who operated the contact machine. He would need a great deal of technological help to break the Kzanol body out of stasis; he'd seen, as Greenberg, the rusted spot on his back. But to get all this help he needed the Power. How? His human brain didn't have the Power in it.

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.