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overflow from Pip and me, all receive and no amplify.”
    What did minidrags do in the wild? he wondered. Could they feed empathically off each other? Certainly they could not act as a telepathic lens the way Pip did for him. He wondered sometimes what the flying snakes derived from their select relationships with certain humans besides physical companionship.
    Just what I need, he thought, though not unkindly. Another oddball in the fold. Yet what better company for a self-declared outcast than another self-anointed outcast like himself? He was feeling much better.
    What he would do was take his marvelous ship and explore the Commonwealth for as long as time and health allowed. Legends would grow up around him, the wanderer with the flying snake who touched briefly at this world and then that, only to move on quietly, leaving behind neither name nor place of origin nor knowledge of purpose. The Hermit of the Commonwealth. That had a solid ring to it. Stoic and aesthetic. There was only one problem with the noble life he had set out for himself.
    It was a terrible way to meet girls.
    Whoever messed with my brain, he thought glumly, and stirred up my genetic code the way a bartender would stir ice with a swizzle stick, left my hormones untouched. Determination of purpose and a burgeoning sex drive, he decided, did not go well together. It was a problem that had been, at the core of many of man’s troubles since the beginning of time.
    With time and patience and study maybe he could one day locate a sympathetic surgeon skilled enough to rid him of his headaches, if not his inheritance. Maybe he could find a way to exert some control over his life. He had seen and done enough of the extraordinary. All he wanted for himself from now on was peace and quiet and a chance to learn.
    Even as he was concluding the thought, he felt the familiar, damnable prickling in his mind. No headache this time, merely a mental tickle. But in its own way, because he could not shut it out, it was equally unsettling. It was a sensation easy to identify because he had encountered it too many times previously. Somewhere, someone was in trouble.
    Pip and Scrap felt it also, Scrap darting in front of his face to batter at the plexalloy like a berserk bumblebee. The minidrag blocked his view.
    “Beat it, get out of the way!” He swept the flying snake aside with the back of a hand, not pausing to think that were it so inclined, the yearling minidrag could have killed him in an instant.
    Leaning forward, he tried to see between the trees. Cooled air circulating between the double layer of plexalloy kept condensation from forming on the inside. Nothing ahead but green jungle, and moments later, not even that.
    There was the beach fronting the river. A hundred meters of clean, packed gray sand. In the rainy season it disappeared. Now it lay as exposed as the finest bathing beach on New Riviera.
    No one on Alaspin would think of relaxing on such a beach, however. There were thousands of similar retreats lining the banks of dozens of major rivers, and a hundred could be bought for a pittance—the bloodsuckers and the insects would drain a body like a sponge set out for their amusement if anyone tried to sunbathe on any jungle beach without complete body protection.
    The beach was spotless; empty. There was no cover except what a man could bring with him. The crawler chewed up sand as Flinx retraced the tracks he had laid down earlier. His thoughts had eased considerably, and he was already planning the hop from Mimmisompo back to Alaspinport, where his shuttle waited to carry him back to the
Teacher,
high in synchronous orbit.
    Pip’s wings ruffled his hair from behind. The flying snake was up and anxious.
    “Now what?”
    Then he was wrenching viciously on the crawler’s control bar, the front treads spitting sand to the left as he turned it sharply.

 
    Chapter Three
     
     
     
    The figure lying in front of the crawler was as motionless as the huge