zing 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.

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 thinking straightened out. I recalled some of the
things we had learned about the Zen.