The Bryd

had been fooled within the last year, for Dale certainly was getting ready to cause a lot of trouble in Paris. He could actuate the controls to expand or contract the rim of the station and thus vary the focal length of the sodium lens, and if he should actually concentrate the sun’s rays in a small area, he could draw a flaming path of ruin through the center of Paris.

Reluctantly the Bryd checked again, and found that that was exactly what Dale Stevenson was about to do. The Bryd wondered why. It groaned. Humans were always up to something. Why couldn’t they relax so the Bryd could rest?

The Bryd had been so happy back in 2250⁠—or let’s see, was it up in 2250? (This was 2045.) That was when Bob What’s-his-name and that cute girl had landed on Pluto and given him a chance to get away. The long, lonely eons in Pluto’s absolute zero had been quite monotonous to the Bryd, which was nothing but pure energy but which certainly had its feelings. After almost a third of a billion years marooned on Pluto it had sometimes almost wished it had not been so adventurous in its youth and hopped that stray comet as it had swept by its home on Arcturus.

For it had tired of the comet and jumped off on Pluto, and then had discovered it didn’t have enough range of its own to get from Pluto to another planet. Then it was that Bob and Alys had come along on their ’round-the-system honeymoon, and the Bryd had hitched a ride to Earth (unknown to them), for it was pretty darned lonesome by that time.

It lived very happily with them until they got old, and then it decided to go back in time to 1950. There it found a nice friendly mind in Joe Talbott, and after it saved Joe from blowing up the Lithium Mountain and half the earth with it, it had settled down to snooze in Joe’s mind and hadn’t awakened until Joe died of old age. Then the Bryd had hunted a nice, stable mind and had finally picked Dale Stevenson, who