It was two hours later, and Foster and I stood silent before a ten-foot
screen that had glowed into life when I touched a silver button beside
it. It showed us a vast emptiness of bottomless black, set thick with
corruscating points of polychrome brilliance that hurt to look at. And
against that backdrop: a ship, vast beyond imagining, blotting out half
the titanic vista with its bulk--
But dead.
Even from the distance of miles, I could sense it. The great black
torpedo shape, dull moonlight glinting along the unbelievable length of
its sleek flank, drifted: a derelict. I wondered for how many centuries
it had waited here--and for what?
"I feel," said Foster, "somehow--I'm coming home."
I tried to say something, croaked, cleared my throat.
"If this is your jitney," I said, "I hope they didn't leave the meter
ticking on you. We're broke."
"We're closing rapidly," said Foster. "Another ten minutes, I'd
guess...."
"How do we go about heaving to, alongside? You didn't come across a
book of instructions, did you?"
"I think I can predict that the approach will be automatic."
"This is your big moment, isn't it?" I said. "I've got to hand it to
you, pal; you've won out by pluck."
The ship appeared to move smoothly closer, looming over us, fine golden
lines of decorative filigree work visible now against the black. A tiny
square of pale light appeared, grew into a huge bay door that swallowed
us.
The screen went dark, there was a gentle jar, then motionlessness. The
port opened, silently.
"We've arrived," Foster said. "Shall we step out and have a look?"
"I wouldn't think of going back without one," I said. I followed him
out and stopped dead, gaping. I had expected an empty hold, bare metal
walls. Instead. I found a vaulted cavern, shadowed, mysterious, rich
with a thousand colors. There was a hint of strange perfume in the air,
and I heard low music that muttered among stalagmite-like buttresses.
There were pools, playing fountains, waterfalls, dim vistas stretching
away, lit by slanting rays of muted sunlight.
"What kind of place is it?" I asked. "It's like a fairyland, or a
dream."
"It's not an earthly scheme of decoration," Foster said, "but I find it
strangely pleasing."
* * * * *
"Hey, look over there," I yelped suddenly, pointing. An empty-eyed
skull stared past me from the shadows at the base of a column.
Foster went over to the skull, stood looking down at it.
"There was a disaster here," he said. "That much is plain."
"It's creepy," I said. "Let's go back; I forgot to get film for my
Brownie."
"The long-dead pose no threat," said Foster. He was kneeling, looking
at the white bones. He picked up something, stared at it. "Look,
Legion."
I went over. Foster held up a ring.
"We're onto something hot, pal," I said. "It's the twin to yours."
"I wonder ... who he was."
I shook my head. "If we knew that--and who killed him--or what--"
"Let's go on. The answers must be here somewhere." Foster moved off
toward a corridor that reminded me of a sunny avenue lined with
chestnut trees--though there were no trees, and no sun. I followed,
gaping.
For hours we wandered, looking, touching, not saying much but saturated
in wonder, like kids in a toy factory. We came across another skeleton,
lying among towering engines. Finally we paused in a giant storeroom
stacked high with supplies.
"Have you stopped to think, Foster," I said, fingering a length
of rose-violet cloth as thin as woven spider webs. "This boat's a
treasure-house of marketable items. Talk about the wealth of the
Indies--"
"I seek only one thing here, my friend," Foster said; "my past."
"Sure," I said. "But just in case you don't find it, you might consider
the business angle. We can set up a regular shuttle run, hauling stuff
down--"
"You Earthmen," sighed Foster. "For you, every new experience is
immediately assessed in terms of its merchandising possibilities. Well,
I leave that to you."
"Okay okay," I said. "You go on ahead and scout around down that way,
if you want--where the technical-looking stuff is. I want to browse
around here for a while."
"As you wish."
"We'll meet at this end of the big hall we passed back there. Okay?"
Foster nodded and went on. I turned to a bin filled with what looked
like unset emeralds the size of walnuts. I picked up a handful, juggled
them lovingly.
"Anyone for marbles?" I murmured to myself.
* * * * *
Hours later I came along a corridor that was like a path through a
garden that was a forest, crossed a ballroom like a meadow floored
in fine-grained rust-red wood and shaded by giant ferns, and went
under an arch into the hall where Foster sat at a long table cut from
yellow marble. A light the color of sunrise gleamed through tall
pseudo-windows.
I dumped an armful of books on the table. "Look at these," I said. "All
made from the same stuff as the Journal. And the pictures...."
I flipped open one of the books, a heavy folio-sized volume, to a
double-page spread in color showing a group of bearded Arabs in dingy
white djellabas staring toward the camera, a flock of thin goats in the
background. It looked like the kind of picture the National Geographic
runs, except that the quality of the color and detail was equal to the
best color transparencies.
"I can't read the print," I said, "but I'm a whiz at looking at
pictures. Most of the books show scenes like I hope I never see in the
flesh, but I found a few that were made on Earth--God knows how long
ago."
"Travel books, perhaps," Foster said.
"Travel books that you could sell to any university on Earth for their
next year's budget. Take a look at this one."
Foster looked across at the panoramic shot of a procession of
shaven-headed men in white sarongs, carrying a miniature golden boat on
their shoulders, descending a long flight of white stone steps leading
from a colonnade of heroic human figures with folded arms and painted
faces. In the background, brick-red cliffs loomed up, baked in desert
heat.
"That's the temple of Hat-Shepsut in its prime," I said. "Which
makes this print close to four thousand years old. Here's another I
recognize." I turned to a smaller, aerial view, showing a gigantic
pyramid, its polished stone facing chipped in places and with a few
panels missing from the lower levels, revealing the cruder structure of
massive blocks beneath.
"That's one of the major pyramids, maybe Khufu's," I said. "It was
already a couple thousand years old, and falling into disrepair.
And look at this--" I opened another volume, showed Foster a vivid
photograph of a great shaggy elephant with a pinkish trunk upraised
between wide-curving yellow tusks.
"A mastodon," I said. "And there's a woolly rhino, and an ugly-looking
critter that must be a sabre-tooth. This book is old...."
"A lifetime of rummaging wouldn't exhaust the treasures aboard this
ship," said Foster.
"How about bones? Did you find any more?"
Foster nodded. "There was a disaster of some sort. Perhaps disease.
None of the bones was broken."
* * * * *
"I can't figure the one in the lifeboat," I said. "Why was he wearing
a necklace of bear's teeth?" I sat down across from Foster. "We've got
plenty of mysteries to solve, all right, but there are some other items
we'd better talk about. For instance: where's the kitchen? I'm getting
hungry."
Foster handed me a black rod from among several that lay on the table.
"I think this may be important," he said.
"What is it? a chop stick?"
"Touch it to your head, above the ear."
"What does it do--give you a massage?" I pressed it to my temple....
_I was in a grey-walled room, facing a towering surface of ribbed
metal. I reached out, placed my hands over the proper perforations.
The housings opened. For apparent malfunction in the quaternary field
amplifiers, I knew, auto-inspection circuit override was necessary
before activation--_
I blinked, looked around at the rod in my hand.
"I was in some kind of power-house," I said. "There was something wrong
with--with...."
"The Quaternary field amplifiers," Foster said.
"I seemed to be right there," I said. "I understood exactly what it was
all about."
"These are technical manuals," Foster said. "They'll tell us everything
we need to know about the ship."
"I was thinking about what I was getting ready to do," I said, "the
way you do when you're starting into a job; I was trouble-shooting the
Quaternary whatzits--and I knew how...."
Foster got to his feet and moved toward the doorway. "We'll have to
start at one end of the library and work our way through," he said. "It
will take us awhile, but we'll get the facts we need. Then we can plan."
* * * * *
Foster picked a handful of briefing rods from the racks in the
comfortably furnished library and started in. The first thing we needed
was a clue as to where to look for food and beds, or for operating
instructions for the ship itself. I hoped we might find the equivalent
of a library card-catalog; then we could put our hands on what we
wanted in a hurry.
I went to the far end of the first rack and spotted a short row of red
rods that stood out vividly among the black ones. I took one out,
thought it over, decided it was unlikely that it was any more dangerous
than the others, and put it against my temple....
_As the bells rang, I applied neuro-vascular tension, suppressed
cortical areas upsilon, zeta and iota, and stood by for--_
I jerked the rod from my head, my ears still ringing with the shrill
alarm. The effect of the rods was like reality itself, but intensified,
all attention focussed single-mindedly on the experience at hand. I
thought of the entertainment potentialities of the idea. You could
kill a tiger, ride an airplane down in flames, face the heavyweight
champion--I wondered about the stronger sensations, like pain and fear.
Would they seem as real as the impulse to check the whatchamacallits or
tighten up your cortical thingamajigs?
I tried another rod.
_At the sound of the apex-tone, I racked instruments, walked, not
ran, to the nearest transfer-channel--_
Another:
_Having assumed duty as Alert Officer, I reported first to
coordination Control via short-line, and confirmed rapport--_
These were routine SOP's covering simple situations aboard ship. I
skipped a few, tried again:
_Needing a xivometer, I keyed instruction-complex One, followed with
the code--_
* * * * *
Three rods further along, I got this:
_The situation falling outside my area of primary conditioning, I
reported in corpo to Technical Briefing, Level Nine, Section Four,
Sub-section Twelve, Preliminary. I recalled that it was now necessary
to supply my activity code ... my activity code ... my activity
code.... (A sensation of disorientation grew; confused images
flickered like vague background-noise; then a clear voice cut in:)_
_YOU HAVE SUFFERED PARTIAL PERSONALITY-FADE. DO NOT BE ALARMED.
SELECT A GENERAL BACKGROUND ORIENTATION ROD FROM THE NEAREST EMERGENCY
RACK. ITS LOCATION IS ..._
_I was moving along the stacks, to pause in front of a niche where a
U-shaped plastic strip was clamped to the wall. I removed it, fitted it
to my head--_
_(Then:) I was moving along the stacks, to pause in front of a
niche--_
I was leaning against the wall, my head humming. The red stick lay on
the floor at my feet. That last bit had been potent: something about a
general background briefing--
"Hey, Foster!" I called, "I think I've got something...."
"As I see it," I said, "this background briefing should tell us all
we need to know about the ship; then we can plan our next move more
intelligently. We'll know what we're doing." I took the thing from the
wall, just as I had seemed to do in the phantom scene the red rod had
projected for me.
"These things make me dizzy," I said, handing it to Foster. "Anyway,
you're the logical one to try it."
He took the plastic shape, went to the reclining seat at the near end
of the library hall, and settled himself. "I have an idea this one will
hit harder than the others," he said.
He fitted the clamp to his head and ... instantly his eyes glazed; he
slumped back, limp.
"Foster!" I yelled. I jumped forward, started to pull the plastic piece
from his head, then hesitated. Maybe Foster's abrupt reaction was
standard procedure. In any case whatever harm this gadget could do to
Foster's brain had already been done. I might as well let the process
take its course. But I didn't like it much.
I went on reasoning with myself. After all, this was what the red rod
had indicated as normal procedure in a given emergency. Foster was
merely having his faded personality touched up. And his full-blown,
three-dimensional personality was what we needed to give us the answers
to a lot of the questions we'd been asking. Though the ship and
everything in it had lain unused and silent for forgotten millennia,
still the library should be good. The librarian was gone from his post
these thirty centuries, and Foster was lying unconscious, and I was
thirty thousand miles from home--but I shouldn't let trifles like that
worry me....
* * * * *
I got up and prowled the room. There wasn't much to look at except
stacks and more stacks. The knowledge stored here was fantastic, both
in magnitude and character. If I ever got home with a load of these
rods....
I strolled through a door leading to another room. It was small,
functional, dimly lit. The middle of the room was occupied by a large
and elaborate divan with a cap-shaped fitting at one end. Other curious
accoutrements were ranked along the walls. There wasn't much in them to
thrill me. But bone-wise I had hit the jackpot.
Two skeletons lay near the door, in the final slump of death. Another
lay beside the fancy couch. There was a long-bladed dagger beside it.
I squatted beside the two near the door and examined them closely. As
far as I could tell, they were as human as I was. I wondered what kind
of men they had been, what kind of world they had come from, that could
build a ship like this and stock it as it was stocked.
The dagger that lay near the other bones was interesting: it seemed
to be made of a transparent orange metal, and its hilt was stamped in
a repeated pattern of the Two Worlds motif. It was the first clue as
to what had taken place among these men when they last lived: not a
complete clue, but a start.
I took a closer look at an apparatus like a dentist's chair parked
against the wall. There were spidery-looking metal arms mounted
above it, and a series of colored glass lenses. A row of dull silver
cylinders was racked against the wall. Another projected from a socket
at the side of the machine. I took it out and looked at it. It was of
plain pewter-colored plastic, heavy and smooth. I felt pretty sure it
was a close cousin to the chop sticks stored in the library. I wondered
what brand of information was recorded in it as I dropped it in my
pocket.
I lit a cigarette and went back out to where Foster lay. He was still
in the same position as when I had left him. I sat down on the floor
beside the couch to wait.
* * * * *
It was an hour before he stirred. He reached up, pulled off the plastic
head-piece, dropped it on the floor.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
Foster looked at me, his eyes travelling up to my uncombed hair and
down to my scuffed shoes. His eyes narrowed in a faint frown. Then he
said something--in a language that seemed to be all Z's and Q's.
"Enough surprises, Foster," I said hoarsely. "Talk American."
He stared into my eyes, then glanced around the room.
"This is a ship's library," he said.
I heaved a sigh of relief. Foster was watching my face. "What was it
all about?" I said. "What have you found out?"
"I know you," said Foster slowly. "Your name is Legion."
I nodded. I could feel myself getting tense again. "Sure, you know me."
I put a hand on his shoulder. "You remember: we were--"
He shook my hand off. "That is not the custom in Vallon," he said
coldly.
"Vallon?" I echoed. "What kind of routine is this, Foster?"
"Where are the others?"
"There's a couple of 'others' in the next room," I snapped. "But
they've lost a lot of weight. Outside of them there's only me--"
Foster looked at me as if I wasn't there. "I remember Vallon," he
said. He put a hand to his head. "But I remember too a barbaric world,
brutal and primitive. You were there. We travelled in a crude rail-car,
and then in a barge that wallowed in the sea. There were narrow, ugly
rooms, evil odors, harsh noises ... and The Hunters! We fled from
them, Legion, you and I. And I remember a landing-ring...." He paused.
"Strange, it had lost its cap-stones and fallen into ruin."
"Us natives call it Stonehenge."
"The Hunters burst out of the earth. We fought them. But why should
the Hunters seek me?"
"I was hoping you'd tell me," I said. "Do you know where this ship came
from? And why?"
"This is a ship of the Two Worlds," he replied. "But I know nothing of
how it came to be here."
"How about all that stuff in the journal? Maybe now you--"
"The journal!" Foster broke in. "Where is it!"
"In your coat pocket, I guess."
Foster felt through his jacket awkwardly, brought out the journal.
He opened it and looked at the part written in the curious alien
characters that nobody had been able to decipher.
But he was reading it.
* * * * *
For hours I had waited while Foster read. At last he leaned back in his
chair and sighed.
"My name," he said, "was Qulqlan. And this," he laid his hand upon the
book, "is my story. This is one part of the past I was seeking. And I
remember none of it...."
"Tell me what the journal says."
Foster picked it up. "It seems that I awoke once before, in a small
room aboard this vessel. I was lying on a memo-couch, by which
circumstance I knew that I had suffered a Change--"
"You mean you'd lost your memory?"
"And regained it--on the couch. My memory-trace had been re-impressed
on my mind. I awoke knowing my identity, but not how I came to be
aboard this vessel. The journal says that my last memory was of a
building beside the Shallow Sea."
"Where's that?"
"On a far world--called Vallon."
"Yeah? And what next?"
"I looked around me and saw four men lying on the floor, slashed and
bloody. One was alive. I gave him what emergency treatment I could,
then searched the ship. I found three more men, dead; none living. Then
the Hunters attacked, swarming to me. They would have sucked the life
from me--and I had no shield of light. I fled to the lifeboat, carrying
the wounded man. I descended to the planet below: your Earth. The man
died there. He had been my friend, a man named Ammaerln. I buried him
in a shallow depression in the earth and marked the place with a stone."
"The Ancient Sinner," I said.
"Yes ... I suppose it was his bones the lay brother found."
"And we found out last night that the depression was the result of dirt
sifting down into the ventilator shaft. But I guess you didn't know
anything about the underground installation, way back then. Doesn't the
journal say anything...?"
"No, there is no mention made of it here."
"How about the Hunters? How did they get to Earth?"
"They are insubstantial creatures," said Foster, "yet they can endure
the vacuum of space. I can only surmise that they followed the life
boat down."
"They were tailing you?"
"Yes; but I have no idea why they pursued me. They're harmless
creatures in the natural state, used to seek out the rare fugitive from
justice on Vallon. They can be attuned to the individual; thereafter,
they follow him and mark him out for capture."
"Say, what were you: a big-time racketeer on Vallon?"
* * * * *
"The journal is frustratingly silent as to my Vallonian career," said
Foster. "But this whole matter of the unexplained inter-galactic voyage
and the evidence of violence aboard the ship make me wonder whether I
was being exiled for crimes done in the Two Worlds."
"So they sicked the Hunters on you?" I said. "But why did they hang
around at Stonehenge all this time?"
"There was a trickle of power feeding the screens," said Foster. "They
need a source of electrical energy to live; until a hundred years ago
it was the only one on the planet."
"How did they get down into the shaft without opening it up?"
"Given time, they pass easily through porous substances. But, of
course, last night, when I came on them after their long fast, they
simply burst through in their haste."
"Okay. What happened next?--after you buried the man."
"The journal tells that I was set upon by natives, men who wore the
hides of animals. One of their number entered the ship. He must have
moved the drive lever. It lifted, leaving me marooned."
"So those were his bones we found in the boat," I mused: "the ones with
the bear's-tooth necklace. I wonder why he didn't come into the ship."
"Undoubtedly he did. But remember the skeleton we found just inside the
landing port? That must have been a fairly fresh and rather gory corpse
at the time the savage stepped aboard. It probably seemed to him all
too clear an indication of what lay in store for himself if he ventured
further. In his terror he must have retreated to the boat to wait, and
there starved to death."
"He was stranded in your world, and you were stranded in his."
"Yes," said Foster. "And then, it seems, I lived among the brutemen
and came to be their king. I waited there by the landing-ring through
many years in the hope of rescue. Because I did not age as the natives
did, I was worshipped as a god. I would have built a signalling device,
but there were no pure metals, nothing I could use. I tried to teach
them, but it was a work of centuries."
"But how could one go on living--for hundreds of years? Are you people
supermen that live forever?"
"Not forever. But the natural span of a human life is very great. Among
your people, there is a wasting disease from which you all die young."
"That's no disease," I said. "You just naturally get old and die."
"The human mind is a magnificent instrument," Foster said; "not meant
to wither quickly."
"Why didn't you catch this 'disease'?"
"All Vallonians are innoculated against it."
* * * * *
Foster turned back to the Journal. "I ruled many peoples under many
names," he said. "I travelled in many lands, seeking for skilled
metal-workers, glass-blowers, wise men. But always I returned to the
landing-ring."
"It must have been tough," I said, "exiled on a strange world, living
out your life in a wilderness, century after century...."
"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 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 Ringboard 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."
"Didn't your signaller 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," I said, "you were young again,
overnight. How could it happen?"
"When the mind renews itself, erasing the scars of the years, the body,
too, regenerates."
* * * * *
"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, sometime, I lost the vital link, forgot my quest; when the
Hunters came again, I fled, not understanding."
There was a silence, then Foster spoke in a faraway voice.
"What came to pass aboard this ship all those centuries ago?" he said.
"Why was I here? And what killed the others? Someday, somehow I must
learn the truth of this matter."
"What I can't figure out is why somebody didn't come after this ship.
It was right here in orbit."
"Consider the immensity of space, Legion. This is one tiny world, among
the stars."
"But there was a station here, fitted out for handling your ships.
That sounds like it was a regular port of call. And the books with
the pictures: they prove your people have been here off and on for
thousands of years. Why would they stop coming?"
"There are such beacons on a thousand worlds," said Foster. "Think
of it as a buoy marking a reef, a trailblaze in the wilderness. Ages
could pass before a wanderer chanced this way again. The fact that the
ventilator shaft at Stonehenge was choked with the debris of centuries
when I first landed there shows how seldom this world was visited."
I thought about it. Trying to piece together Foster's past would be a
slow process. I had an idea:
"Say, you said you were in the memory machine. You woke up there--and
you'd just had your memory restored. Why not do the same thing again,
now? That is, if your brain can take another pounding this soon."
"Yes," he said. He stood up abruptly. "There's just a chance. Come on!"
* * * * *
I followed him out of the library into the room with the bones.
Foster walked across to the fancy couch, leaned down, then shook his
head. "No," he said. "Of course it wouldn't be here...."
"What?"
"My memory-trace: the one that was used to restore my memory--that
other time."
Suddenly I recalled the cylinder I had pocketed hours before. With a
surprising flutter at my heart I held it up. "This it?"
Foster glanced at it briefly. "No, that's an empty--like those you see
filed over there." He pointed to the rack of pewter-colored cylinders
on the opposite wall. "They would be used for emergency recordings.
Regular multi-life memory-traces would be key-coded with a pattern of
colored lines."
"It figures," I said. "That would have been too easy."
"It doesn't matter, really. When I return to Vallon, I'll recover my
past. There are vaults in Okk-Hamiloth where every citizen's trace is
stored."
"I guess you'll be eager to get back there," I said. "Have you been
able to figure out how long you were marooned down on Earth?"
"Since I descended from this ship, Legion," he said, "three thousand
years have passed."
"I'm going to miss you, Foster," I said. "You know, I was kind of
getting used to being an apprentice nut."
"Come with me to Vallon, Legion," he said.
"Thanks anyway, buddy," I said. "I'd like to see those other worlds
of yours but in the end I'd regret it. I'd just sit around on Vallon
pining for home: beat-up people, and all."
* * * * *
"Then what can I do for you, Legion, to reward your loyalty and express
my gratitude?"
"Let me take the lifeboat, and stock it with a few goodies from the
library, and some of those marbles from the storeroom, and a couple of
the smaller mechanical gadgets. I think I know how to merchandise them
in a way that'll leave the economy on an even keel--and incidentally
set me up for life. As you said, I'm a materialist."
"Take whatever you desire."
"One thing I'll have to do when I get back," I said, "is open the
tunnel at Stonehenge enough to sneak a thermite bomb down it--if they
haven't already found the beacon station."
"As I judge the temper of the local people," Foster said, "the secret
is safe for at least three generations."
"I'll bring the boat down in a blind spot where radar won't pick it
up," I said. "Our timing was good; in another few years, it wouldn't
have been possible."
"And this ship would soon have been discovered."
I looked at the great smooth sphere hanging, haloed, against utter
black. The Pacific Ocean threw back a brilliant image of the sun.
I turned to Foster. "We're in a ten-hour orbit," I said. "We'd better
get moving. I want to put the boat down in southern South America.
I know a place there where I can unload without answering too many
questions."
"You have several hours before the most favorable launch time," Foster
said. "There's no hurry."
"Maybe not, but I've got a lot to do--and I'm eager to start."