realizing that the nod wasn't visible through the one-way glass of my helmet.

"I am—last of Zen," it said.

I said nothing. I was studying it closely, looking for the features which Yurt had described to us: the lighter red fur of arms and neck, the peculiar formation of flesh and horn on the lower abdomen. They were there. From the coloring, I knew this Zen was a female.

The mouth worked again—not with emotion, I knew, but with the unfamiliar act of speaking. "I have been here for—for—" she hesitated—"I don't know. For five hundred of my years."

"For about three thousand of mine," I told her.

And then blank astonishment sank home in me—astonishment at the last two words of her remark. I was already familiar with the Zens' enormous intelligence, knowing Yurt as I did ... but imagine thinking to qualify years with my when just out of nowhere a visitor from another planetary orbit pops up! And there had been no special stress given the distinction, just clear, precise thinking, like Yurt's.

And

I added, still a little awed: "We know how long ago your world died."

"I was child then," she said, "I don't know—what happened. I have wondered." She looked up at my steel-and-glass face; I must have seemed like a giant. Well, I suppose I was. "This—what we are on—was part of Sorn, I know. Was it—" She fumbled for a word—"was it atom explosion?"

I told her how Sorn had gotten careless with its hydrogen atoms and had blown itself over half of creation. (This the E.T.I. Teams had surmised from scientific records found on Eros, as well as from geophysical evidence scattered throughout the other bodies.)

"I was child," she said again after a moment. "But I remember—I remember things different from this. Air ... heat ... light ... how do I live here?"

Again I felt amazement at its intelligence; (and it suddenly occurred to me that astronomy and nuclear physics must have been taught in Sorn's "elementary schools"—else that my years and atom explosion would have been all but impossible). And now this old, old creature, remembering back three thousand years to childhood—probably to those "elementary schools"—remembering, and defining the differences in environment between then and now; and more, wondering at its existence in the different now—

And then I got my own 

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