solutely nothing."

"Except yourself," Morgan said.

"Ah, yes. I thought that over carefully. I looked for differences,
obvious ones. I couldn't find any. You can see that, just looking at me.
So I searched for more subtle things. Skin texture, fingerprints, bone
structure, body proportion. I still couldn't find anything. Then I went
to a doctor."

Morgan's eyebrows lifted. "Good," he said.

Parks shrugged tiredly. "Not really. He examined me. He practically took
me apart. I carefully refrained from saying anything about who I was or
where I came from; just said I wanted a complete physical examination,
and let him go to it. He was thorough, and when he finished he patted me
on the back and said, 'Parks, you've got nothing to worry about. You're
as fine, strapping a specimen of a healthy human being as I've ever
seen.' And that was that." Parks laughed bitterly. "I guess I was
supposed to be happy with the verdict, and instead I was ready to knock
him down. It was idiotic, it defied reason, it was infuriating."

Morgan nodded sourly. "Because you're not a human being," he said.

"That's right. I'm not a human being at all."

* * * * *

"How did you happen to pick this planet, or this sun?" Morgan asked
curiously. "There must have been a million others to choose from."

Parks unbuttoned his collar and rubbed his stubbled chin unhappily. "I
didn't make the choice. Neither did anyone else. Travel by warp is a
little different from travel by the rocket you fiction writers make so
much of. With a rocket vehicle you pick your destination, make your
calculations, and off you go. The warp is blind flying, strictly blind.
We send an unmanned scanner ahead. It probes around more or less
hit-or-miss until it locates something, somewhere, that looks habitable.
When it spots a likely looking place, we keep a tight beam on it and
send through a manned scout." He grinned sourly. "Like me. If it looks
good to the scout, he signals back, and they leave the warp anchored for
a sort of permanent gateway until we can get a transport beam built. But
we can't control the directional and dimensional scope of the warp.
There are an infinity of ways it can go, until we have a guide beam
transmitting from the other side. Then we can just scan a segment of
space with the warp, and the scanner picks up the beam."

He shook his head wearily. "We're new at it, Morgan. We've only tried a
few dozen runs. We're