"My life was not without interest," Foster said. "I watched my savage people put aside their animal hides and learn the ways of civilization. I taught them how to build, and keep herds, and till the land. I built a great city, and I tried--foolishly--to teach their noble caste the code of chivalry of the Two Worlds. But although they sat at a round table like the great Ring-board at Okk-Hamiloth, they never really understood. And then they grew too wise, and wondered at their king, who never aged. I left them, and tried again to build a long-signaller. The Hunters sensed it, and swarmed to me. I drove them off with fires, and then I grew curious, and followed them back to their nest----" "I know," I said. "'----and it was a place you knew of old: no hive but a Pit built by men.'" "They overwhelmed me; I barely escaped with my life. Starvation had made the Hunters vicious. They would have drained my body of its life-energy." "And if you'd known the transmitter was there--but you didn't. So you put an ocean between you and them." "They found me even there. Each time I destroyed many of them, and fled. But always a few lived to breed and seek me out again." "But your signaller--didn't it work?" "No. It was a hopeless attempt. Only a highly developed technology could supply the raw materials. I could only teach what I knew, encourage the development of the sciences, and wait. And then I began to forget." "Why?" "A mind grows weary," Foster said. "It is the price of longevity. It must renew itself. Shock and privation hasten the Change. I had held it off for many centuries. Now I felt it coming on me. "At home, on Vallon, a man would record his memory at such a time, store it electronically in a recording device, and, after the Change, use the memory-trace to restore, in his renewed body, his old recollections in toto. But, marooned as I was, my memories, once lost, were gone forever. "I did what I could; I prepared a safe place, and wrote messages that I would find when I awoke----" "When you woke up in the hotel, you were young again, overnight. How could it happen?" "When the mind renews itself, erasing the scars of the years, the body, too, regenerates. The skin forgets its wrinkles, and the muscles their fatigue. They become again as they once were." "When I first met you," I said, "you told me about waking up back in 1918, with no memory." "Yours is a harsh world, Legion. I must have forgotten many times. Somewhere, some time, I lost the vital link, forgot my quest. When the Hunters came again, I fled, not understanding." "You had a machine gun set up in the house at Mayport. What good was that against the Hunters?" "None, I suppose," Foster replied. "But I didn't know. I only knew that I was--pursued." "And by then you could have made a signaller," I said. "But you'd forgotten how--or even that you needed one."