It took me a couple of seconds to untangle the squeaking syllables and get any sense out of them. What I had already said to it were stock phrases that Yurt had taught me; I knew still more, but I couldn't speak Zennacai fluently by any means. Keep this in mind, by the way: I barely knew the language, and the Zen could barely remember it. To save space, the following dialogue is reproduced without bumblings, blank stares and _What-did-you-says_? In reality, our talk lasted over an hour. "I am an Earthman," I said. Through my earphones, when I spoke, I could faintly hear my own voice as the Zen must have heard it in Vesta's all but nonexistent atmosphere: tiny, metallic, cricket-like. "Eert ... mn?" I pointed at the sky, the incredible sky. "From out there. From another world." It thought about that for a while. I waited. We already knew that the Zens had been better astronomers at their peak than we were right now, even though they'd never mastered space travel; so I didn't expect this one to boggle at the notion of creatures from another world. It didn't. Finally it nodded, and I thought, as I had often before, how curious it was that this gesture should be common to Earthmen and Zen. "So. Eert-mn," it said. "And you know what I am?" When I understood, I nodded, too. Then I said, "Yes," 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. 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.)