He was wrong about that. It turned out that you couldn't.
When the woman opened the cockpit hatch for him, Krake pulled back in sudden wrath. The controls! There wasn't any joystick, no rudder pedals, no throttles. All there was was a keyboard, like an adding machine. That was it.
"Of course," said the woman from just behind him, her voice as warm as her gaze had been, "you'll need the piloting memo disk. We'll be happy to supply it at no extra charge, so if you'll just—oh," said her voice, its tone now completely different. Krake turned to stare at her. She was looking wide-eyed at the back of his head. "But you aren't a memmie, are you?"
"No," he said tightly.
"Oh," she said, trying to adjust to the surprising new information. "Well, I'm afraid that all our planes are adapted for memo disk operation only, sir—"
"Then what do you have that isn't?" he snapped. "A jeep? A bicycle? A pogo stick?"
"What's a 'pogo stick'?" she asked curiously. "But we don't have one, anyway. We do, however, have some surface cars— though not very fast or large ones, of course. But these do have pure manual controls. ..."
So a few hours later, Krake was driving his rented car along the narrow New Mexican road. It wasn't a plane. But it was taking him where he wanted to go, and Francis Krake began to feel at peace again.
He marveled at the things he saw out of the car window. Could this really be the land he was born in? He had been prepared for changes, because they said the climate was all different these days. They said that every year the monsoon rains spiraling up from Baja grew heavier now, transforming the arid plains he had known—but he was not prepared for this. It was just as hot as he remembered, but everything else was different. Alders and willows instead of a few isolated cot-tonwoods, groves of redfruit and fields of corn and soybeans instead of the dry, flat, empty lands of his boyhood, with nothing but sagebrush and mesquite as far as the eye could see.
Francis Krake was not a man given to self-doubt. All the same, he wondered if he should have come on this trip. It could be a complete waste of time—almost certaindy would be. Things changed in a few hundred years. There wouldn't be anything left of his childhood home. Certainly there would be no one he knew still alive. There wouldn't even be anything he could recognize.
Still, until his crew members were out of the Turtle hospital, Francis Krake had nothing but time to waste.
He still wished he had an airplane instead of this strange, hot, flimsy three-wheeler. Any kind of airplane—well, no, he thought. Not any kind of airplane. He didn't want anything as fast and tricky as the crippled P-38 he'd been flying when the engine died and he ditched over the Coral Sea long ago. Say, one of those slow, easy UC-78s he had flown at the transition school, or even a Piper Cub. Any kind of plane at all would do-
Except the only kind that had been available at the airport at Clovis, New Mexico. The kind that you needed a memo disk to operate.
Francis Krake had no intention of, ever, becoming a memmie.
It was a good thing, he thought, that when the Turtle scout ship fished him out of the drink in 1945, they hadn't developed memo disks for humans yet. They couldn't have, of course, since Francis Krake himself had been their first human —captive? Might as well use that word, he reflected, because it was the only one that fit. They had saved his life and, as far as they could, treated him very well. But they hadn't let him go home.
The woods began to open up as he drove. Now and then he passed cornfields, and one or two plots of what he recognized as sugar beets. That was all new since his time. It wasn't catde country any more. Krake supposed that there probably wasn't any such thing as cattle country any more, anywhere in the world, not since the Turtles had brought the first herds of that new and better kind of livestock, the Taurs, to Earth. He did see an occasional cluster of Taurs, placidly munching away at their graze in the late evening sun, but none of the four-legged, forty-acre cattle he remembered from his youth. Curiously, there weren't even any human beings in sight. He had driven for most of an hour without passing a soul on the road, and hardly a building.
New Mexico had always been thinly populated—but this was something else entirely.
In all the subjective years of Francis Krake's star traveling in the service of the Turtles he had thought about Earth often. Nevertheless, he had not, he realized, really understood what it had become with the benevolent partnership of the Turdes. He certainly had not expected to find the human race so sparse on the ground. Had humanity just frozen in its development, like aborigines when Europeans arrived, overwhelmed by Turtle technological superiority?
He knew, of course, that all military activities had been terminated. The Turtles did not believe in war, or armed conquest, or violence of any kind. But what else had happened on Earth? He knew there were still big cities—even old Kansas City had been largely rebuilt, outside the Turtle compound. But how many people, actually, were still left?
On impulse, Krake slowed down. More or less at random he stopped the car by a field planted with soybeans, not because he was particularly interested in them but because he was tired of driving. A small herd of Taurs was methodically cropping the weeds between the rows of beans, careful not to harm the crop.
The great heads were turning placidly toward him. "Hello, babe," he said, reaching out to stroke the head of the nearest. It did not respond, merely gazed at him as it placidly munched away at its fistfuls of growing things.
They were ranch stock—each one had a brand on its broad, hairy face, just under the massive cheekbone. He saw with regret that they were all females. If only there had been a nearly mature male with them! The males, up until the point where they were turned into steers at least, were much more alert and intelligent. Some of them made good house servants, or manual workers, before they were sent off for slaughter. But the females had only the most limited intelligence.
Yet they faced the same fate. They were so gentle, he thought. Did they know they were about to be slaughtered?
Surely they did, if what was said about the Taurs was true. Krake had not spent much time with Taurs; there hadn't been any on the scout ship that rescued him from the Coral Sea, and he'd only seen a handful of them in his contacts with the Turtles since then. He wasn't sure what to make of Taurs. Turtles said they were more or less intelligent. (But then why did the Turtles treat them like beef catde or slaves?) Turtles also didn't like to talk about some things connected with the
Taurs, and so Krake hadn't pushed his questioning too far. Something about adult male Taurs being—what? Dangerous? Crazy? Or merely just, for some Turtle reason that only Tur-des could understand, offensive to them?
That wasn't the biggest puzzle. The great wonder was why, if the Taurs were as intelligent as people said, they so meekly allowed themselves to be enslaved, herded, castrated and finally butchered for food.
Krake retreated to the shade of a redfruit grove across the road to think about what to do next. In the shelter of the broad, leathery crimson leaves he pulled out the map the young woman had given him in Clovis and frowned over it. "Of course," she had apologized, "this doesn't show every little place in New Mexico. But I think the one you're looking for was about—here." And she'd penciled a cross along a road.