"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."