Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Three Book of Known Space - Larry Niven
Three Book of Known Space - Larry Niven
P U B L I S H E D B Y B A L L A N T I N E B O O K S : The Known
OceanofPDF.com
OceanofPDF.com
Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher
as “unsold or destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.
A Del Rey® Book Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright© 1966, 1968, 1975, 1990, 1996 by Larry Niven Copyright renewed 1994, 1996 by Larry Niven
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine
Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto.
http://www.randomhouse.com
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Niven, Larry.
Three books of Known Space / by Larry Niven
p. cm.
Includes the author’s two novels, World of Ptavvs and A gift from earth, and short stories.
ISBN 0-345-40448-3
1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.
PS3564.I9T48 1996
813'.54—dc20 96-23217CIP
Text design by Fritz Metsch
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: November 1996
10 9 8 7 6
“Madness Has Its Place” was originally published in 1990 in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and in The Man-Kzin Wars
IV (Baen Books) and N-Space (Tor Books). The other stories in this volume were previously published by Ballantine Books in the
following collections: A Gift from Earth, Tales of Known Space, and World of Ptavvs.
“The Color of Sunfire” was originally published in 1993 in Bridging the Galaxies by Larry Niven, published by San Francisco
Science Fiction Conventions, Septembre 1993.
OceanofPDF.com
CONTENTS
OceanofPDF.com
Timeline for KNOWN SPACE by
Larry Niven
DATE: 1975
ACCOUNT: The Coldest Place
Becalmed in Hell
Wait It Out
Eye of an Octopus
EVENTS: Beginnings of organ bank technology.
Indian government officials began robbing
criminals of their organs for transplants in the
1960s. This practice continues in India, South
America, and China. I seem to have predicted
the past.
Cetacean civil rights. These have emerged,
but I didn’t predict that snail dorters and spotted
owls would be accorded the same rights.
Some manned exploration of the solar
system. Some serious delays here. The
bottleneck seems to be cheap ground-to-orbit
transport.
First organ bank laws passed.
DATE: 2000
ACCOUNT: (2040)
How the Heroes Die
(2099)
The Jigsaw Man
EVENTS: Colonization of the Belt.
Third Mars expedition.
Belt becomes independent government.
Interstellar ramrobots launched; UN-Belt
cooperation.
Colony slowboats launched.
DATE: 2100
ACCOUNT: (2106)
World of Ptavvs
At the Bottom of a Hole
Intent to Deceive
The Adults (Protector, 1st half)
Death by Ecstasy
The Defenseless Dead
ARM
The Patchwork Girl
The Woman in Del Rey Crater
Cloak of Anarchy
(2135)
EVENTS: Sea Statue unearthed and revived; first alien
on Earth.
Organ bank problem at its worst.
Organlegging common. Execution for
transplant makes jails obsolete. Freezer Bills
passed.
Phssthpok the Pak arrives in Sol system.
Cetaceans in United Nations.
Golden Age on Earth.
Colonies expanding on Jinx, Mt. Lookitthat,
We Made It, Wonderland.
DATE: 2300
ACCOUNT: (2340)
Vandervecken (Protector, 2nd half)
(2360)
The Warriors
Madness Has Its Place
EVENTS: Home colonized.
Brennan in Sol cometary halo.
War with Pak scout ships.
First flyby of a “cold” neutron star, BVS-1.
y y
First contact with kzinti.
First Man-Kzin War.
Institute of Knowledge on Jinx tailors
boosterspice.
Home colony fails.
DATE: 2400
ACCOUNT: (2410)
A Gift from Earth
(2425)
The Ethics of Madness
EVENTS: Revolution on Mt. Lookitthat.
Safe ramscoop invented.
We Made It buys hyperdrive shunt from
Outsider merchants.
End of First Man-Kzin War.
DATE: 2500
ACCOUNT:
EVENTS: Manned ramscoop obsolete.
Subsequent Man-Kzin Wars.
Contract with Pierson’s Puppeteers and other
aliens, some as parts of Kzinti Empire.
DATE: 2600
ACCOUNT: (2640)
Neutron Star
A Relic of Empire
At the Core
Flatlander
The Handicapped
Grendel
The Borderland of Sol
Procrustes
Framing story for Crashlander
The Soft Weapon
p
EVENTS: Second flyby of BVS-1.
Puppeteer development of Quantum II
hyperdrive.
Discovery of galactic core explosion.
Puppeteer exodus and stock market crash in
human space.
Contact with Grogs.
Louis Gridley Wu born.
Fertility Laws amended by Birthright
Lotteries.
DATE: 2700
ACCOUNT:
EVENTS: Expansion, consolidation, relative peace.
Thruster drive replaces fusion drives (but not
entirely).
DATE: 2800
ACCOUNT: (2830)
There is a Tide
(2850)
Ringworld
(2870)
The Ringworld Engineers
The Ringworld Throne
EVENTS: Contact with Trinocs.
Scout flight to Ringworld.
Puppeteer exodus in progress.
Invading fleets to Ringworld.
DATE: 2900
3000
3100
ACCOUNT: Safe at Any Speed
EVENTS: Expansion. Known space becomes the
Thousand Worlds.
Longevity strongly affects society.
OceanofPDF.com
*Lucas Launcelot Garner born 1939.
OceanofPDF.com
INTRODUCTION: MY UNIVERSE
AND WELCOME BACK!
OceanofPDF.com
THE COLDEST PLACE
In the coldest place in the solar system, I hesitated outside the ship for
a moment. It was too dark out there. I fought an urge to stay close by the
ship, by the comfortable ungainly bulk of warm metal which held the
warm bright Earth inside it.
“See anything?” asked Eric.
“No, of course not. It’s too hot here anyway, what with heat radiation
from the ship. You remember the way they scattered away from the probe.”
“Yeah. Look, you want me to hold your hand or something? Go.”
I sighed and started off, with the heavy collector bouncing gently on
my shoulder. I bounced too. The spikes on my boots kept me from sliding.
I walked up the side of the wide, shallow crater the ship had created by
vaporizing the layered air all the way down to the water ice level. Crags
rose about me, masses of frozen gas with smooth, rounded edges. They
gleamed soft white where the light from my headlamp touched them.
Elsewhere all was as black as eternity. Brilliant stars shone above the soft
crags; but the light made no impression on the black land. The ship got
smaller and darker and disappeared.
There was supposed to be life here. Nobody had even tried to guess
what it might be like. Two years ago the Messenger VI probe had moved
into close orbit about the planet and then landed about here, partly to find
out if the cap of frozen gasses might be inflammable. In the field of view of
the camera during the landing, things like shadows had wriggled across the
snow and out of the light thrown by the probe. The films had shown it
beautifully. Naturally some wise ones had suggested that they were only
shadows.
I’d seen the films. I knew better. There was life.
Something alive, that hated light. Something out there in the dark.
Something huge…“Eric, you there?”
“Where would I go?” he mocked me.
“Well,” said I, “if I watched every word I spoke I’d never get anything
said.” All the same, I had been tactless. Eric had had a bad accident once,
very bad. He wouldn’t be going anywhere unless the ship went along.
“Touché,” said Eric. “Are you getting much heat leakage from your
suit?”
“Very little.” In fact, the frozen air didn’t even melt under the pressure
of my boots.
“They might be avoiding even that little. Or they might be afraid of
your light.” He knew I hadn’t seen anything; he was looking through a
peeper in the top of my helmet.
“Okay, I’ll climb that mountain and turn it off for a while.”
I swung my head so he could see the mound I meant, then started up
it. It was good exercise, and no strain in the low gravity. I could jump
almost as high as on the moon, without fear of a rock’s edge tearing my
suit. It was all packed snow, with vacuum between the flakes.
My imagination started working again when I reached the top. There
was black all around; the world was black with cold. I turned off the light
and the world disappeared.
I pushed a trigger on the side of my helmet and my helmet put the
stem of a pipe in my mouth. The air renewer sucked air and smoke down
past my chin. They make wonderful suits nowadays. I sat and smoked,
waiting, shivering with the knowledge of the cold. Finally I realized I was
sweating. The suit was almost too well insulated.
Our ion-drive section came over the horizon, a brilliant star moving
very fast, and disappeared as it hit the planet’s shadow. Time was passing.
The charge in my pipe burned out and I dumped it.
“Try the light,” said Eric.
I got up and turned the headlamp on high. The light spread for a mile
around; a white fairy landscape sprang to life, a winter wonderland
doubled in spades. I did a slow pirouette, looking, looking…and saw it.
Even this close it looked like a shadow. It also looked like a very flat,
monstrously large amoeba, or like a pool of oil running across the ice.
Uphill it ran, flowing slowly and painfully up the side of a nitrogen
mountain, trying desperately to escape the searing light of my lamp. “The
collector!” Eric demanded. I lifted the collector above my head and aimed
it like a telescope at the fleeing enigma, so that Eric could find it in the
collector’s peeper. The collector spat fire at both ends and jumped up and
away. Eric was controlling it now.
After a moment I asked, “Should I come back?”
“Certainly not. Stay there. I can’t bring the collector back to the ship!
You’ll have to wait and carry it back with you.”
The pool-shadow slid over the edge of the hill. The flame of the
collector’s rocket went after it, flying high, growing smaller. It dipped below
the ridge. A moment later I heard Eric mutter, “Got it.” The bright flame
reappeared, rising fast, then curved toward me.
When the thing was hovering near me on two lateral rockets I picked it
up by the tail and carried it home.
“No, no trouble,” said Eric. “I just used the scoop to nip a piece out of
his flank, if so I may speak. I got about ten cubic centimeters of strange
flesh.”
“Good,” said I. Carrying the collector carefully in one hand, I went up
the landing leg to the airlock. Eric let me in.
I peeled off my frosting suit in the blessed artificial light of ship’s day.
“Okay,” said Eric. “Take it up to the lab. And don’t touch it.”
Eric can be a hell of an annoying character. “I’ve got a brain,” I
snarled, “even if you can’t see it.” So can I.
There was a ringing silence while we each tried to dream up an
apology. Eric got there first. “Sorry,” he said.
“Me too.” I hauled the collector off to the lab on a cart.
He guided me when I got there. “Put the whole package in that
opening. Jaws first. No, don’t close it yet. Turn the thing until these lines
match the lines on the collector. Okay. Push it in a little. Now close the
door. Okay, Howie, I’ll take it from there…” There were chugging sounds
from behind the little door. “Have to wait till the lab’s cool enough. Go get
some coffee,” said Eric.
“I’d better check your maintenance.”
“Okay, good. Go oil my prosthetic aids.”
“Prosthetic aids”—that was a hot one. I’d thought it up myself. I pushed
the coffee button so it would be ready when I was through, then opened
the big door in the forward wall of the cabin. Eric looked much like an
electrical network, except for the gray mass at the top which was his brain.
In all directions from his spinal cord and brain, connected at the walls of
the intricately shaped glass-and-soft-plastic vessel which housed him, Eric’s
nerves reached out to master the ship. The instruments which mastered
Eric—but he was sensitive about having it put that way—were banked
along both sides of the closet. The blood pump pumped rhythmically,
seventy beats a minute.
“How do I look?” Eric asked.
“Beautiful. Are you looking for flattery?”
“Jackass! Am I still alive?”
“The instruments think so. But I’d better lower your fluid temperature
a fraction.” I did. Ever since we’d landed I’d had a tendency to keep
temperatures too high. “Everything else looks okay. Except your food tank
is getting low.”
“Well, it’ll last the trip.”
“Yeah. ’Scuse me. Eric, coffee’s ready.” I went and got it. The only
thing I really worry about is his “liver.” It’s too complicated. It could break
down too easily. If it stopped making blood sugar Eric would be dead.
If Eric dies I die, because Eric is the ship. If I die Eric dies, insane,
because he can’t sleep unless I set his prosthetic aids.
I was finishing my coffee when Eric yelled. “Hey!”
“What’s wrong?” I was ready to run in any direction.
“It’s only helium!”
He was astonished and indignant. I relaxed.
“I get it now, Howie. Helium II. That’s all our monsters are. Nuts.”
Helium II, the superfluid that flows uphill. “Nuts doubled. Hold
everything, Eric. Don’t throw away your samples. Check them for
contaminants.”
“For what?”
“Contaminants. My body is hydrogen oxide with contaminants. If the
contaminants in the helium are complex enough it might be alive.”
“There are plenty of other substances,” said Eric, “but I can’t analyze
them well enough. We’ll have to rush this stuff back to Earth while our
freezers can keep it cool.”
I got up. “Take off right now?”
“Yes, I guess so. We could use another sample, but we’re just as likely to
wait here while this one deteriorates.”
“Okay, I’m strapping down now. Eric?”
“Yeah? Takeoff in fifteen minutes, we have to wait for the ion-drive
section. You can get up.”
“No, I’ll wait. Eric, I hope it isn’t alive. I’d rather it was just helium II
acting like it’s supposed to act.”
“Why? Don’t you want to be famous, like me?”
“Oh, sure, but I hate to think of life out there. It’s just too alien. Too
cold. Even on Pluto you could not make life out of helium II.”
“It could be migrant, moving to stay on the night side of the predawn
crescent. Pluto’s day is long enough for that. You’re right, though; it doesn’t
get colder than this even between the stars. Luckily I don’t have much
imagination.”
Twenty minutes later we took off. Beneath us all was darkness and only
Eric, hooked into the radar, could see the ice dome contracting until all of
it was visible: the vast layered ice cap that covers the coldest spot in the
solar system, where midnight crosses the equator on the black back of
Mercury.
OceanofPDF.com
This, my first story, became obsolete before it was printed.
Mercury does have an atmosphere, and rotates once for every two of
its years.
The sequel which follows fared somewhat better.
LN
OceanofPDF.com
BECALMED IN HELL
I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright and
dry and cool, almost too cool, like a modern office building in the dead of
summer. Beyond the two small windows it was as black as it ever gets in the
solar system, and hot enough to melt lead, at a pressure equivalent to three
hundred feet beneath the ocean.
“There goes a fish,” I said, just to break the monotony.
“So how’s it cooked?”
“Can’t tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Fried?
Imagine that, Eric! A fried jellyfish.”
Eric sighed noisily. “Do I have to?”
“You have to. Only way you’ll see anything worthwhile in this—this—”
Soup? Fog? Boiling maple syrup?
“Searing black calm.”
“Right.”
“Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just after the news
of the Mariner II probe. An eternal searing black calm, hot as a kiln, under
an atmosphere thick enough to keep any light or any breath of wind from
ever reaching the surface.”
I shivered. “What’s the outside temperature now?”
“You’d rather not know. You’ve always had too much imagination,
Howie.”
“I can take it, Doc.”
“Six hundred and twelve degrees.”
“I can’t take it, Doc!”
This was Venus, planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction writers of
three decades ago. Our ship hung below the Earth-to-Venus hydrogen fuel
tank, twenty miles up and all but motionless in the syrupy air. The tank,
nearly empty now, made an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft as long
as the internal pressure matched the external. That was Eric’s job, to
regulate the tank’s pressure by regulating the temperature of the hydrogen
gas. We had collected air samples after each ten-mile drop from three
hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter intervals,
and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had gotten from the
surface merely confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest
world in the solar system.
“Temperature just went up to six-thirteen,” said Eric. “Look, are you
through bitching?”
“For the moment.”
“Good. Strap down. We’re taking off.”
“Oh, frabjous day!” I started untangling the crash webbing over my
couch.
“We’ve done everything we came to do. Haven’t we?”
“Am I arguing? Look, I’m strapped down.”
“Yeah.”
I knew why he was reluctant to leave. I felt a touch of it myself. We’d
spent four months getting to Venus in order to spend a week circling her
and less than two days in her upper atmosphere, and it seemed a terrible
waste of time.
But he was taking too long. “What’s the trouble, Eric?”
“You’d rather not know.”
He meant it. His voice was a mechanical, inhuman monotone; he
wasn’t making the extra effort to get human expression out of his
“prosthetic” vocal apparatus. Only a severe shock would affect him that
way.
“I can take it,” I said.
“Okay. I can’t feel anything in the ramjet controls. Feels like I’ve just
had a spinal anesthetic.”
The cold in the cabin drained into me, all of it. “See if you can send
motor impulses the other way. You could run the rams by guess-and-hope
even if you can’t feel them.”
“Okay.” One split second later, “They don’t. Nothing happens. Good
thinking though.”
I tried to think of something to say while I untied myself from the
couch. What came out was, “It’s been a pleasure knowing you, Eric. I’ve
liked being half of this team, and I still do.”
“Get maudlin later. Right now, start checking my attachments.
Carefully.”
I swallowed my comments and went to open the access door in the
cabin’s forward wall. The floor swayed ever so gently beneath my feet.
Beyond the four-foot-square access door was Eric. Eric’s central nervous
system, with the brain perched at the top and the spinal cord coiled in a
loose spiral to fit more compactly into the transparent glass-and-sponge-
plastic housing. Hundreds of wires from all over the ship led to the glass
walls, where they were joined to selected nerves which spread like an
electrical network from the central coil of nervous tissue and fatty
protective membrane.
Space leaves no cripples; and don’t call Eric a cripple, because he
doesn’t like it. In a way he’s the ideal spaceman. His life support system
weighs only half what mine does, and takes up a twelfth as much room.
But his other prosthetic aids take up most of the ship. The ramjets were
hooked into the last pair of nerve trunks, the nerves which once moved his
legs, and dozens of finer nerves in those trunks sensed and regulated fuel
feed, ram temperature, differential acceleration, intake aperture dilation,
and spark pulse.
These connections were intact. I checked them four different ways
without finding the slightest reason why they shouldn’t be working.
“Test the others,” said Eric.
It took a good two hours to check every trunk nerve connection. They
were all solid. The blood pump was chugging along, and the fluid was rich
enough, which killed the idea that the ram nerves might have “gone to
sleep” from lack of nutrients or oxygen. Since the lab is one of his
prosthetic aids, I let Eric analyze his own blood sugar, hoping that the
“liver” had goofed and was producing some other sugar compound. The
conclusions were appalling. There was nothing wrong with Eric—inside
the cabin.
“Eric, you’re healthier than I am.”
“I could tell. You look worried, and I don’t blame you. Now you’ll have
to go outside.”
“I know. Let’s dig out the suit.”
It was in the emergency tools locker, the Venus suit that was never
supposed to be used. NASA had designed it for use at Venusian ground
level. Then they had refused to okay the ship below twenty miles until they
knew more about the planet. The suit was a segmented armor job. I had
watched it being tested in the heat-and-pressure box at Cal Tech, and I
knew that the joints stopped moving after five hours, and wouldn’t start
again until they had been cooled. Now I opened the locker and pulled the
suit out by the shoulders and held it in front of me. It seemed to be staring
back.
“You still can’t feel anything in the ramjets?”
“Not a twinge.”
I started to put on the suit, piece by piece like medieval armor. Then I
thought of something else. “We’re twenty miles up. Are you going to ask
me to do a balancing act on the hull?”
“No! Wouldn’t think of it. We’ll just have to go down.”
The lift from the blimp tank was supposed to be constant until takeoff.
When the time came Eric could get extra lift by heating the hydrogen to
higher pressure, then cracking a valve to let the excess out. Of course he’d
have to be very careful that the pressure was higher in the tank, or we’d get
Venusian air coming in, and the ship would fall instead of rising. Naturally
that would be disastrous.
So Eric lowered the tank temperature and cracked the valve, and down
we went.
“Of course there’s a catch,” said Eric.
“I know.”
“The ship stood the pressure twenty miles up. At ground level it’ll be six
times that.”
“I know.”
We fell fast, with the cabin tilted forward by the drag on our tailfins.
The temperature rose gradually. The pressure went up fast. I sat at the
window and saw nothing, nothing but black, but I sat there anyway and
waited for the window to crack. NASA had refused to okay the ship below
twenty miles…
Eric said, “The blimp tank’s okay, and so’s the ship, I think. But will the
cabin stand up to it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Ten miles.”
Five hundred miles above us, unreachable, was the atomic ion engine
that was to take us home. We couldn’t get to it on the chemical rocket
alone. The rocket was for use after the air became too thin for the ramjets.
“Four miles. Have to crack the valve again.”
The ship dropped.
“I can see ground,” said Eric.
I couldn’t. Eric caught me straining my eyes and said, “Forget it. I’m
using deep infrared, and getting no detail.”
“No vast, misty swamps with weird, terrifying monsters and man-eating
plants?”
“All I see is hot, bare dirt.”
But we were almost down, and there were no cracks in the cabin wall.
My neck and shoulder muscles loosened. I turned away from the window.
Hours had passed while we dropped through the poisoned, thickening air. I
already had most of my suit on. Now I screwed on my helmet and three-
finger gauntlets.
“Strap down,” said Eric. I did.
We bumped gently. The ship tilted a little, swayed back, bumped again.
And again, with my teeth rattling and my armor-plated body rolling against
the crash webbing. “Damn,” Eric muttered. I heard the hiss from above.
Eric said, “I don’t know how we’ll get back up.”
Neither did I. The ship bumped hard and stayed down, and I got up
and went to the airlock.
“Good luck,” said Eric. “Don’t stay out too long.” I waved at his cabin
camera. The outside temperature was seven hundred and thirty.
The outer door opened. My suit refrigerating unit set up a complaining
whine. With an empty bucket in each hand, and with my headlamp
blazing a way through the black murk, I stepped out onto the right wing.
My suit creaked and settled under the pressure, and I stood on the wing
and waited for it to stop. It was almost like being under water. My
headlamp beam went out thick enough to be solid, penetrating no more
than a hundred feet. The air couldn’t have been that opaque, no matter
how dense. It must have been full of dust, or tiny droplets of some fluid.
The wing ran back like a knife-edged running board, widening toward
the tail to where it spread into a tailfin. The two tailfins met back of the
fuselage. At each tailfin tip was the ram, a big sculptured cylinder with an
atomic engine inside. It wouldn’t be hot because it hadn’t been used yet,
but I had my counter anyway.
I fastened a line to the wing and slid to the ground. As long as we were
here…The ground turned out to be a dry, reddish dirt, crumbly, and so
porous that it was almost spongy. Lava etched by chemicals? Almost
anything would be corrosive at this pressure and temperature. I scooped
one pailful from the surface and another from underneath the first, then
climbed up the line and left the buckets on the wing.
The wing was terribly slippery. I had to wear magnetic sandals to stay
on. I walked up and hack along the two-hundred-foot length of the ship,
making a casual inspection. Neither wing nor fuselage showed damage.
Why not? If a meteor or something had cut Eric’s contact with his sensors
in the rams, there should have been evidence of a break in the surface.
Then, almost suddenly, I realized that there was an alternative.
It was too vague a suspicion to put into words yet, and I still had to
finish the inspection. Telling Eric would be very difficult if I was right.
Four inspection panels were set into the wing, well protected from the
reentry heat. One was halfway back on the fuselage, below the lower edge
of the blimp tank, which was molded to the fuselage in such a way that
from the front the ship looked like a dolphin. Two more were in the
trailing edge of the tailfin and the fourth was in the ram itself. All opened,
with powered screwdriver on recessed screws, on junctions of the ship’s
electrical system.
There was nothing out of place under any of the panels. By making and
breaking contacts and getting Eric’s reactions, I found that his sensation
ended somewhere between the second and third inspection panels. It was
the same story on the left wing. No external damage, nothing wrong at the
junctions. I climbed back to ground and walked slowly beneath the length
of each wing, my headlamp tilted up. No damage underneath.
I collected my buckets and went back inside.
“A bone to pick?” Eric was puzzled. “Isn’t this a strange time to start an
argument? Save it for space. We’ll have four months with nothing else to
do.”
“This can’t wait. First of all, did you notice anything I didn’t?” He’d
been watching everything I saw and did through the peeper in my helmet.
“No. I’d have yelled.”
“Okay. Now get this.
“The break in your circuits isn’t inside, because you get sensation up to
the second wing inspection panels. It isn’t outside because there’s no
evidence of damage, not even corrosion spots. That leaves only one place
for the flaw.”
“Go on.”
“We also have the puzzle of why you’re paralyzed in both rams. Why
should they both go wrong at the same time? There’s only one place in the
ship where the circuits join.”
“What? Oh, yes, I see. They’re joined through me.”
“Now let’s assume for the moment that you’re the piece of equipment
with the flaw in it. You’re not a piece of machinery, Eric. If something’s
wrong with you it isn’t medical. That was the first thing we covered. But it
could be psychological.”
“It’s nice to know you think I’m human. So I’ve slipped a cam, have I?”
“Slightly. I think you’ve got a case of what used to be called trigger
anesthesia. A soldier who kills too often sometimes finds that his right index
finger or even his whole hand has gone numb, as if it were no longer a part
of him. Your comment about not being a machine is important, Eric. I
think that’s the whole problem. You’ve never really believed that any part of
the ship is a part of you. That’s intelligent, because it’s true. Every time the
ship is redesigned you get a new set of parts, and it’s right to avoid thinking
of a change of model as a series of amputations.” I’d been rehearsing this
speech, trying to put it so that Eric would have no choice but to believe
me. Now I know that it must have sounded phoney. “But now you’ve gone
too far. Subconsciously you’ve stopped believing that the rams can feel like
a part of you, which they were designed to do. So you’ve persuaded
yourself that you don’t feel anything.”
With my prepared speech done, and nothing left to say, I stopped
talking and waited for the explosion.
“You make good sense,” said Eric.
I was staggered. “You agree?”
“I didn’t say that. You spin an elegant theory, but I want time to think
about it. What do we do if it’s true?”
“Why…I don’t know. You’ll just have to cure yourself.”
“Okay. Now here’s my idea. I propose that you thought up this theory to
relieve yourself of a responsibility for getting us home alive. It puts the
whole problem in my lap, metaphorically speaking.”
“Oh, for—”
“Shut up. I haven’t said you’re wrong. That would be an ad hominem
argument. We need time to think about this.”
It was lights-out, four hours later, before Eric would return to the
subject.
“Howie, do me a favor. Assume for a while that something mechanical
is causing all our trouble. I’ll assume it’s psychosomatic.”
“Seems reasonable.”
“It is reasonable. What can you do if I’ve gone psychosomatic? What
can I do if it’s mechanical? I can’t go around inspecting myself. We’d each
better stick to what we know.”
“It’s a deal.” I turned him off for the night and went to bed.
But not to sleep.
With the lights off it was just like outside. I turned them back on. It
wouldn’t wake Eric. Eric never sleeps normally, since his blood doesn’t
accumulate fatigue poisons, and he’d go mad from being awake all the
time if he didn’t have a Russian sleep inducer plate near his cortex. The
ship could implode without waking Eric when his sleep inducer’s on. But I
felt foolish being afraid of the dark.
While the dark stayed outside it was all right.
But it wouldn’t stay there. It had invaded my partner’s mind. Because
his chemical checks guard him against chemical insanities like
schizophrenia, we’d assumed he was permanently sane. But how could any
prosthetic device protect him from his own imagination, his own
misplaced common sense?
I couldn’t keep my bargain. I knew I was right. But what could I do
about it?
Hindsight is wonderful. I could see exactly what our mistake had been,
Eric’s and mine and the hundreds of men who had built his life support
after the crash. There was nothing left of Eric then except the intact
central nervous system, and no glands except the pituitary. “We’ll regulate
his blood composition,” they said, “and he’ll always be cool, calm and
collected. No panic reactions from Eric!”
I know a girl whose father had an accident when he was forty-five or so.
He was out with his brother, the girl’s uncle, on a fishing trip. They were
blind drunk when they started home, and the guy was riding on the hood
while the brother drove. Then the brother made a sudden stop. Our hero
left two important glands on the hood ornament.
The only change in his sex life was that his wife stopped worrying about
late pregnancy. His habits were developed.
Eric doesn’t need adrenal glands to be afraid of death. His emotional
patterns were fixed long before the day he tried to land a moonship without
radar. He’d grab any excuse to believe that I’d fixed whatever was wrong
with the ram connections.
But he was counting on me to do it.
The atmosphere leaned on the windows. Not wanting to, I reached out
to touch the quartz with my fingertips. I couldn’t feel the pressure. But it
was there, inexorable as the tide smashing a rock into sand grains. How
long would the cabin hold it back?
If some broken part were holding us here, how could I have missed
finding it? Perhaps it had left no break in the surface of either wing. But
how?
That was an angle.
Two cigarettes later I got up to get the sample buckets. They were
empty, the alien dirt safely stored away. I filled them with water and put
them in the cooler, set the cooler for 40° absolute, then turned off the
lights and went to bed.
The morning was blacker than the inside of a smoker’s lungs. What
Venus really needs, I decided, philosophizing on my back, is to lose ninety-
nine percent of her air. That would give her a bit more than half as much
air as Earth, which would lower the greenhouse effect enough to make the
temperature livable. Drop Venus’s gravity to near zero for a few weeks and
the work would do itself.
The whole damn universe is waiting for us to discover antigravity.
“Morning,” said Eric. “Thought of anything?”
“Yes.” I rolled out of bed. “Now don’t bug me with questions. I’ll
explain everything as I go.”
“No breakfast?”
“Not yet.”
Piece by piece I put my suit on, just like one of King Arthur’s
gentlemen, and went for the buckets only after the gauntlets were on. The
ice, in the cold section, was in the chilly neighborhood of absolute zero.
“This is two buckets of ordinary ice,” I said, holding them up. “Now let me
out.”
“I should keep you here till you talk,” Eric groused. But the doors
opened and I went out onto the wing. I started talking while I unscrewed
the number two right panel.
“Eric, think a moment about the tests they run on a manned ship
before they’ll let a man walk into the life-system. They test every part
separately and in conjunction with other parts. Yet if something isn’t
working, either it’s damaged or it wasn’t tested right. Right?”
“Reasonable.” He wasn’t giving away anything.
“Well, nothing caused any damage. Not only is there no break in the
ship’s skin, but no coincidence could have made both rams go haywire at
the same time. So something wasn’t tested right.”
I had the panel off. In the buckets the ice boiled gently where it
touched the surfaces of the glass buckets. The blue ice cakes had cracked
under their own internal pressure. I dumped one bucket into the maze of
wiring and contacts and relays, and the ice shattered, giving me room to
close the panel.
“So I thought of something last night, something that wasn’t tested.
Every part of the ship must have been in the heat-and-pressure box,
exposed to artificial Venus conditions, but the ship as a whole, a unit,
couldn’t have been. It’s too big.” I’d circled around to the left wing and was
opening the number three panel in the trailing edge. My remaining ice
was half water and half small chips; I sloshed these in and fastened the
panel. “What cut your circuits must have been the heat or the pressure or
both. I can’t help the pressure, but I’m cooling these relays with ice. Let
me know which ram gets its sensation back first, and we’ll know which
inspection panel is the right one.”
“Howie. Has it occurred to you what the cold water might do to those
hot metals?”
“It could crack them. Then you’d lose all control over the ramjets,
which is what’s wrong right now.”
“Uh. Your point, partner. But I still can’t feel anything.”
I went back to the airlock with my empty buckets swinging, wondering
if they’d get hot enough to melt. They might have, but I wasn’t out that
long. I had my suit off and was refilling the buckets when Eric said, “I can
feel the right ram.”
“How extensive? Full control?”
“No, I can’t feel the temperature. Oh, here it comes. We’re all set,
Howie.”
My sigh of relief was sincere.
I put the buckets in the freezer again. We’d certainly want to take off
with the relays cold. The water had been chilling for perhaps twenty
minutes when Eric reported, “Sensation’s going.”
“What?”
“Sensation’s going. No temperature, and I’m losing fuel feed control. It
doesn’t stay cold long enough.”
“Ouch! Now what?”
“I hate to tell you. I’d almost rather let you figure it out for yourself.”
I had. “We go as high as we can on the blimp tank, then I go out on the
wing with a bucket of ice in each hand—”
We had to raise the blimp tank temperature to almost eight hundred
degrees to get pressure, but from then on we went up in good shape. To
sixteen miles. It took three hours.
“That’s as high as we go,” said Eric. “You ready?”
I went to get the ice. Eric could see me, he didn’t need an answer. He
opened the airlock for me.
Fear I might have felt, or panic, or determination or self-sacrifice—but
there was nothing. I went out feeling like a used zombie.
My magnets were on full. It felt like I was walking through shallow tar.
The air was thick, though not as heavy as it had been down there. I
followed my headlamp to the number two panel, opened it, poured ice in
and threw the bucket high and far. The ice was in one cake. I couldn’t
close the panel. I left it open and hurried around to the other wing. The
second bucket was filled with exploded chips; I sloshed them in and locked
the number two left panel and came back with both hands free. It still
looked like limbo in all directions, except where the headlamp cut a
tunnel through the darkness, and—my feet were getting hot. I closed the
right panel on boiling water and sidled back along the hull into the airlock.
“Come in and strap down,” said Eric. “Hurry!”
“Gotta get my suit off.” My hands had started to shake from reaction. I
couldn’t work the clamps.
“No you don’t. If you start right now we may get home. Leave the suit
on and come in.”
I did. As I pulled my webbing shut, the rams roared. The ship
shuddered a little, then pushed forward as we dropped from under the
blimp tank. Pressure mounted as the rams reached operating speed. Eric
was giving it all he had. It would have been uncomfortable even without
the metal suit around me. With the suit on it was torture. My couch was
afire from the suit, but I couldn’t get breath to say so. We were going
almost straight up.
We had gone twenty minutes when the ship jerked like a galvanized
frog. “Ram’s out,” Eric said calmly. “I’ll use the other.” Another lurch as we
dropped the dead one. The ship flew on like a wounded penguin, but still
accelerating.
One minute…two…
The other ram quit. It was as if we’d run into molasses. Eric blew off
the ram and the pressure eased. I could talk.
“Eric.”
“What?”
“Got any marshmallows?”
“What? Oh, I see. Is your suit tight?”
“Sure.”
“Live with it. We’ll flush the smoke out later. I’m going to coast above
some of this stuff, but when I use the rocket it’ll be savage. No mercy.”
“Will we make it?”
“I think so. It’ll be close.”
The relief came first, icy cold. Then the anger. “No more inexplicable
numbnesses?” I asked.
“No. Why?”
“If any come up you’ll be sure and tell me, won’t you?”
“Are you getting at something?”
“Skip it” I wasn’t angry any more.
“I’ll be damned if I do. You know perfectly well it was mechanical
trouble. You fixed it yourself!”
“No. I convinced you I must have fixed it. You needed to believe the
rams should be working again. I gave you a miracle cure, Eric. I just hope I
don’t have to keep dreaming up new placebos for you all the way home.”
“You thought that, but you went out on the wing sixteen miles up?”
Eric’s machinery snorted. “You’ve got guts where you need brains, Shorty.”
I didn’t answer.
“Five thousand says the trouble was mechanical. We let the mechanics
decide after we land.”
“You’re on.”
“Here comes the rocket. Two, one—”
It came, pushing me down into my metal suit. Sooty flames licked past
my ears, writing black on the green metal ceiling, but the rosy mist before
my eyes was not fire.
The man with the thick glasses spread a diagram of the Venus ship and
jabbed a stubby finger at the trailing edge of the wing. “Right around here,”
he said. “The pressure from the outside compressed the wiring channel a
little, just enough so there was no room for the wire to bend. It had to act
as if it were rigid, see? Then when the heat expanded the metal these
contacts pushed past each other.”
“I suppose it’s the same design on both wings?”
He gave me a queer look. “Well, naturally.”
I left my check for $5000 in a pile of Eric’s mail and hopped a plane for
Brasilia. How he found me I’ll never know, but the telegram arrived this
morning.
HOWIE COME HOME ALL IS FORGIVEN
DONOVAN’S BRAIN
I guess I’ll have to.
OceanofPDF.com
WAIT IT OUT
Night on Pluto. Sharp and distinct, the horizon line cuts across my
field of vision. Below that broken line is the dim gray-white of snow seen by
starlight. Above, space-blackness and space-bright stars. From behind a
jagged row of frozen mountains the stars pour up in singletons and clusters
and streamers of cold white dots. Slowly they move, but visibly, just fast
enough for a steady eye to capture their motion.
Something wrong there. Pluto’s rotation period is long: 6.39 days. Time
must have slowed for me.
It should have stopped.
I wonder if I may have made a mistake.
The planet’s small size brings the horizon close. It seems even closer
without a haze of atmosphere to fog the distances. Two sharp peaks
protrude into the star swarm like the filed front teeth of a cannibal warrior.
In the cleft between those peaks shines a sudden bright point.
I recognize the Sun, though it shows no more disk than any other,
dimmer star. The Sun shines as a cold point between the frozen peaks; it
pulls free of the rocks and shines in my eyes…
The Sun is gone, the starfield has shifted. I must have passed out.
It figures.
Have I made a mistake? It won’t kill me if I have. It could drive me
mad, though…
I don’t feel mad. I don’t feel anything, not pain, not loss, not regret, not
fear. Not even pity. Just: what a situation.
Gray-white against gray-white: the landing craft, short and wide and
conical, stands half-submerged in an icy plain below the level of my eyes.
Here I stand, looking east, waiting.
Take a lesson: this is what comes of not wanting to die.
Pluto was not the most distant planet. It had stopped being that in
1979, ten years ago. Now Pluto was at perihelion, as close to the Sun—and
to Earth—as it would ever get. To ignore such an opportunity would have
been sheer waste.
And so we came, Jerome and Sammy and I, in an inflated plastic
bubble poised on an ion jet. We’d spent a year and a half in that bubble.
After so long together, with so little privacy, perhaps we should have hated
each other. We didn’t. The UN psycho team must have chosen well.
But—just to be out of sight of the others, even for a few minutes. Just to
have something to do, something that was not predictable. A new world
could hold infinite surprises. As a matter of fact, so could our laboratory-
tested hardware. I don’t think any of us really trusted the Nerva-K under
our landing craft.
Think it through. For long trips in space, you use an ion jet giving low
thrust over long periods of time. The ion motor on our own craft had been
decades in use. Where gravity is materially lower than Earth’s, you land on
dependable chemical rockets. For landings on Earth and Venus, you use
heat shields and the braking power of the atmosphere. For landing on the
gas giants—but who would want to?
The Nerva-class fission rockets are used only for takeoff from Earth,
where thrust and efficiency count. Responsiveness and maneuverability
count for too much during a powered landing. And a heavy planet will
always have an atmosphere for braking.
Pluto didn’t.
For Pluto, the chemical jets to take us down and bring us back up were
too heavy to carry all that way. We needed a highly maneuverable Nerva-
type atomic rocket motor using hydrogen for reaction mass.
And we had it. But we didn’t trust it.
Jerome Glass and I went down, leaving Sammy Cross in orbit. He
griped about that, of course. He’d started that back at the Cape and kept it
up for a year and a half. But someone had to stay. Someone had to be
aboard the Earth-return vehicle, to fix anything that went wrong, to relay
communications to Earth, and to fire the bombs that would solve Pluto’s
one genuine mystery.
We never did solve that one. Where does Pluto get all that mass? The
planet’s a dozen times as dense as it has any right to be. We could have
solved that with the bombs, the same way they solved the mystery of the
makeup of the Earth, sometime in the last century. They mapped the
patterns of earthquake ripples moving through the Earth’s bulk. But those
ripples were from natural causes, like the Krakatoa eruption. On Pluto the
bombs would have done it better.
A bright star-sun blazes suddenly between two fangs of mountain. I
wonder if they’ll know the answers, when my vigil ends.
The sky jumps and steadies, and—
I’m looking east, out over the plain where we landed the ship. The
plain and the mountains behind seem to be sinking like Atlantis: an
illusion created by the flowing stars. We slide endlessly down the black sky,
Jerome and I and the mired ship.
The Nerva-K behaved perfectly. We hovered for several minutes to melt
our way through various layers of frozen gases and get ourselves something
solid to land on. Condensing volatiles steamed around us and boiled
below, so that we settled in a soft white glow of fog lit by the hydrogen
flame.
Black wet ground appeared below the curve of the landing skirt. I let
the ship drop carefully, carefully…and we touched.
It took us an hour to check the ship and get ready to go outside. But
who would be first? This was no idle matter. Pluto would be the solar
system’s last outpost for most of future history, and the statue to the first
man on Pluto would probably remain untarnished forever.
Jerome won the toss. All for the sake of a turning coin, Jerome’s would
be the first name in the history books. I remember the grin I forced! I wish
I could force one now. He was laughing and talking of marble statues as he
went through the lock.
There’s irony in that, if you like that sort of thing.
I was screwing down my helmet when Jerome started shouting
obscenities into the helmet mike. I cut the checklist short and followed
him out.
One look told it all.
The black wet dirt beneath our landing skirt had been dirty ice, water
ice mixed haphazardly with lighter gases and ordinary rock. The heat
draining out of the Nerva jet had melted that ice. The rocks within the ice
had sunk, and so had the landing vehicle, so that when the water froze
again it was halfway up the hull. Our landing craft was sunk solid in the
ice.
We could have done some exploring before we tried to move the ship.
When we called Sammy he suggested doing just that. But Sammy was up
there in the Earth-return vehicle, and we were down here with our landing
vehicle mired in the ice of another world.
We were terrified. Until we got clear we would be good for nothing,
and we both knew it.
I wonder why I can’t remember the fear.
We did have one chance. The landing vehicle was designed to move
about on Pluto’s surface; and so she had a skirt instead of landing jacks.
Half a gravity of thrust would have given us a ground effect, safer and
cheaper than using the ship like a ballistic missile. The landing skirt must
have trapped gas underneath when the ship sank, leaving the Nerva-K
engine in a bubble cavity.
We could melt our way out.
I know we were as careful as two terrified men could be. The heat rose
in the Nerva-K, agonizingly slow. In flight there would have been a coolant
effect as cold hydrogen fuel ran through the pile. We couldn’t use that. But
the environment of the motor was terribly cold. The two factors might
compensate, or—
Suddenly dials went wild. Something had cracked from the savage
temperature differential. Jerome used the damper rods without effect.
Maybe they’d melted. Maybe wiring had cracked, or resistors had become
superconductors in the cold. Maybe the pile—but it doesn’t matter now.
I wonder why I can’t remember the fear.
Sunlight—
And a logy, dreamy feeling. I’m conscious again. The same stars rise in
formation over the same dark mountains.
Something heavy is nosing up against me. I feel its weight against my
back and the backs of my legs. What is it? Why am I not terrified?
It slides around in front of me, questing. It looks like a huge amoeba,
shapeless and translucent, with darker bodies showing within it. I’d guess
it’s about my own weight.
Life on Pluto! But how? Superfluids? Helium II contaminated by
complex molecules? In that case the beast had best get moving; it will need
shade come sunrise. Sunside temperature on Pluto is all of 50° Absolute.
No, come back! It’s leaving, flowing down toward the splash crater. Did
my thoughts send it away? Nonsense. It probably didn’t like the taste of me.
It must be terribly slow, that I can watch it move. The beast is still visible,
blurred because I can’t look directly at it, moving downhill toward the
landing vehicle and the tiny statue to the first man to die on Pluto.
After the fiasco with the Nerva-K, one of us had to go down and see
how much damage had been done. That meant tunneling down with the
flame of a jet backpack, then crawling under the landing skirt. We didn’t
talk about the implications. We were probably dead. The man who went
down into the bubble cavity was even more probably dead; but what of it?
Dead is dead.
I feel no guilt. I’d have gone myself if I’d lost the toss.
The Nerva-K had spewed fused bits of the fission pile all over the
bubble cavity. We were trapped for good. Rather, I was trapped, and
Jerome was dead. The bubble cavity was a hell of radiation.
Jerome had been swearing softly as he went in. He came out perfectly
silent. He’d used up all the good words on lighter matters, I think.
I remember I was crying, partly from grief and partly from fear. I
remember that I kept my voice steady in spite of it. Jerome never knew.
What he guessed is his own affair. He told me the situation, he told me
goodbye, and then he strode out onto the ice and took off his helmet. A
fuzzy white ball engulfed his head, exploded outward, then settled to the
ground in microscopic snowflakes.
But all that seems infinitely remote. Jerome stands out there with his
helmet clutched in his hands: a statue to himself, the first man on Pluto. A
frost of recondensed moisture conceals his expression.
Sunrise. I hope the amoeba—
That was wild. The sun stood poised for an instant, a white point-
source between twin peaks. Then it streaked upward—and the spinning sky
jolted to a stop. No wonder I didn’t catch it before. It happened so fast.
A horrible thought. What has happened to me could have happened to
Jerome! I wonder—
There was Sammy in the Earth-return vehicle, but he couldn’t get
down to me. I couldn’t get up. The life system was in good order, but
sooner or later I would freeze to death or run out of air.
I stayed with the landing vehicle about thirty hours, taking ice and soil
samples, analyzing them, delivering the data to Sammy via laser beam;
delivering also high-minded last messages, and feeling sorry for myself. On
my trips outside I kept passing Jerome’s statue. For a corpse, and one which
has not been prettified by the post-surgical skills of an embalmer, he looks
damn good. His frost-dusted skin is indistinguishable from marble, and his
eyes are lifted toward the stars in poignant yearning. Each time I passed
him I wondered how I would look when my turn came.
“You’ve got to find an oxygen layer,” Sammy kept saying.
“Why?”
“To keep you alive! Sooner or later they’ll send a rescue ship. You can’t
give up now!”
I’d already given up. There was oxygen, but there was no such layer as
Sammy kept hoping for. There were veins of oxygen mixed with other
things, like veins of gold ore in rock. Too little, too finely distributed.
“Then use the water ice! That’s only poetic justice, isn’t it? You can get
the oxygen out by electrolysis!”
But a rescue ship would take years. They’d have to build it from
scratch, and redesign the landing vehicle too. Electrolysis takes power, and
heat takes power. I had only the batteries.
Sooner or later I’d run out of power. Sammy couldn’t see this. He was
more desperate than I was. I didn’t run out of last messages; I stopped
sending them because they were driving Sammy crazy.
I passed Jerome’s statue one time too many, and an idea came.
This is what comes of not wanting to die.
In Nevada, three billion miles from here, half a million corpses lie
frozen in vaults surrounded by liquid nitrogen. Half a million dead men
wait for an earthy resurrection, on the day medical science discovers how to
unfreeze them safely, how to cure what was killing each one of them, how
to cure the additional damage done by ice crystals breaking cell walls all
through their brains and bodies.
Half a million fools? But what choice did they have? They were dying.
I was dying.
A man can stay conscious for tens of seconds in vacuum. If I moved
fast, I could get out of my suit in that time. Without that insulation to
protect me, Pluto’s black night would suck warmth from my body in
seconds. At 50° Absolute, I’d stay in frozen storage until one version or
another of the Day of Resurrection.
Sunlight—
—And stars. No sign of the big blob that found me so singularly
tasteless yesterday. But I could be looking in the wrong direction.
I hope it got to cover.
I’m looking east, out over the splash plain. In my peripheral vision the
ship looks unchanged and undamaged.
My suit lies beside me on the ice. I stand on a peak of black rock,
poised in my silvered underwear, looking eternally out at the horizon.
Before the cold touched my brain I found a last moment in which to
assume a heroic stance. Go east, young man. Wouldn’t you know I’d get
my directions mixed? But the fog of my breathing-air hid everything, and I
was moving in terrible haste.
Sammy Cross must be on his way home now. He’ll tell them where I
am.
Stars pour up from behind the mountains. The mountains and the
splash plain and Jerome and I sink endlessly beneath the sky.
My corpse must be the coldest in history. Even the hopeful dead of
Earth are only stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Pluto’s night makes
that look torrid, after the 50° Absolute heat of day seeps away into space.
A superconductor is what I am. Sunlight raises the temperature too
high, switching me off like a damned machine at every dawn. But at night
my nervous system becomes a superconductor. Currents flow; thoughts
flow; sensations flow. Sluggishly. The one hundred and fifty-three hours of
Pluto’s rotation flash by in what feels like fifteen minutes. At that rate I can
wait it out.
I stand as a statue and a viewpoint. No wonder I can’t get emotional
about anything. Water is a rock here, and my glands are contoured ice
within me. But I feel sensations: the pull of gravity, the pain in my ears, the
tug of vacuum over every square inch of my body. The vacuum will not
boil my blood. But the tensions are frozen into the ice of me, and my
nerves tell me so. I feel the wind whistling from my lips, like an exhalation
of cigarette smoke.
This is what comes of not wanting to die. What a joke if I got my wish!
Do you suppose they’ll find me? Pluto’s small for a planet. For a place
to get lost in, a small planet is all too large. But there’s the ship.
Though it seems to be covered with frost. Vaporized gases recondensed
on the hull. Gray-white on gray-white, a lump on a dish of refrozen ice. I
could stand here forever waiting for them to pick my ship from its
surroundings.
Stop that.
Sunlight—
Stars rolling up the sky. The same patterns, endlessly rolling up from
the same points. Does Jerome’s corpse live the same half-life I live now? He
should have stripped, as I did. My God! I wish I’d thought to wipe the ice
from his eyes!
I wish that superfluid blob would come back.
Damn. It’s cold.
OceanofPDF.com
EYE OF AN OCTOPUS
It was a well.
Henry Bedrosian and Christopher Luden bent over the lip, peering
down into the jet darkness. Their balloon-tired motorcycle lay forgotten on
the talcum sand, fine pink sand that stretched endlessly away to the flat
horizon, borrowing its color from the sky. The sky was the color of blood. It
might have been a flaming Kansas sunset, but the tiny sun was still at the
zenith. The translucent hewn stone of the well-mouth stood like a
blasphemy in the poisonous wilderness that was Mars.
It stood four feet above the sand, roughly circular, perhaps three yards
across. The weathered stones were upright blocks, a foot tall by five inches
wide by perhaps a foot thick. Whatever the material of those stones, they
seemed to glow with a faintly blue inner light.
“It’s so human!” said Henry Bedrosian. His voice held a touch of
bewildered frustration, echoed by his dark, chisel-nosed face.
Chris Luden knew what he meant. “It’s natural. A well’s like a lever or
a wheel. There aren’t many changes you can make, because it’s too simple.
Did you notice the shape of the bricks?”
“Yes. Odd. But they could still be man made.”
“In this air? Breathing nitric oxide, drinking red fuming nitric acid? But
—” Chris drew a deep breath. “Why complain? It’s life, Harry! We’ve
discovered intelligent life!”
“We’ve got to tell Abe.”
“Right.”
But it was a long moment before either moved. They stood leaning
over the well, vivid green pressure suits against pink sand and dark red
horizon, peering down into the blur of darkness at the bottom. Then they
turned and mounted the Marsmobile.
The landing vehicle stood like an upright steel ballpoint pen. Its
bottom half was three spreading legs, a restarting solid rocket, and a
spacious cargo hold, two-thirds empty now. The upper half was the return-
to-orbit stage. Far away across the crescent dunes was a white patch, the
jettisoned drag chute.
The Marsmobile, a glorified two-seater motorcycle with big round tires
and a number of special modifications, putt-putted up to a landing leg and
stopped. Henry got off and climbed to the cabin to call Abe Cooper in the
orbiter. Chris Luden mounted to the cargo hold and rummaged through a
disorganized hash of necessities until he had a long coil of thin line, a
metal bucket, and a heavy rock hammer, all treated to resist the corrosive
atmosphere. He dropped the objects next to the Marsmobile and climbed
down. “Now we’ll see,” he told himself.
Henry descended the ladder. “Abe’s having kittens,” he reported. “He
says if we don’t call him every five minutes he’ll come down after us. He
wants to know, how old is the well?”
“So do I.” Chris brandished the hammer. “We’ll knock a chip off and
analyze it. Let’s go.”
The well was a mile and a half from the ship, and not of a conspicuous
color. Probably they would have lost it if they hadn’t left a flag to mark it.
“Let’s see how deep it is first,” said Luden. He put the hammer in the
bucket for a weight, tied a line to the handle and let it fall. In the eery
silence of the Martian desert they waited, listening…The rope was nearly
gone when the bucket struck something. In a moment the ghost of a splash
came floating up from the depths. Henry marked the line so they could
measure how deep it had gone. It looked about three hundred feet. They
hauled it up.
The bucket was half full of a cloudy, slightly oily fluid.
Chris handed it to his partner. “Harry, you want to take this back and
analyze it?”
Henry’s dark face grinned around the pointed beard. “I’ll match you for
it. We both know what it’s gonna be.”
“Sure, but it has to be done. Even.” They matched fingers. Henry lost.
He rode back to the ship, the bucket dangling from one hand, fluid
slopping over the edge.
The stone which formed the well might have been quartz, or even
some kind of unveined marble. It had been too badly weathered, too finely
scored and polished and etched by the patient sand grains, to tell what it
was. Chris Luden picked a likely looking block and brought the hammer
down hard on what seemed to be a crack. He did it three times.
The hammer was ruined.
Luden shifted the hammer this way and that to examine the uneven,
dulled edge and flattened corners. His blue eyes held a puzzled look. He
knew the government might have quibbled about the weight of a tool for
the Mars Project, but never the cost or quality. Here on Mars that hammer
was worth tens of thousands of dollars. It must be made of some hard,
durable steel alloy. Then—
He cocked his head in his helmet, tasting a strange idea…
“Harry!”
“Yeah?”
“How you doing?”
“I’m just coming in the airlock. Give me five minutes to find out that
this stuff is nitric acid.”
“Okay, but do me a favor. Have you got your ring?”
“The diamond horseshoe? Sure.”
“Bring it back with you, outside your suit. Outside, that is.”
“Now wait a minute, Chris. That’s a valuable ring. Why not use your
own?”
“I should have thought of that! I’ll just take off my pressure suit and—
Uh! Can’t seem to get my helmet unfastened—”
“Stop! Stop! I get the point.” There was a click as Henry’s radio went
off.
Luden sat down to wait.
The sun was sliding toward the horizon. They had landed shortly
before sunset yesterday, so they knew how suddenly the desert could turn
from pink to midnight black, and how little light the insignificant moons
gave. But sundown was four hours away.
The dunes all faced the same way, perfect crescents, as regular as if
hand-made. Something must shape the winds here, causing them to blow
always in one direction, like Earth’s trade winds. And the dunes would
crawl across the sands, slower than snails, following the winds.
How old were the stones against his back? If they were really—a strange
and silly thought, but Chris wouldn’t have volunteered for the Mars
Project if he were not half a romantic—if they were really diamond, they
must be terribly old, to be so worn by mere sand. Far older than the
pyramids, and revered ancestor to the Sphinx. Maybe the race that carved
those stones had since perished. Science-fiction writers often assumed an
extinct Martian race. Why, perhaps the well had originally held water—
“Hello, Chris?”
“Here.”
“It’s dirty nitric acid, not too strong. Next time you’ll believe me.”
“Harry, they didn’t send us here to make astute guesses. They did all the
guessing when they built the ship. We came to find out for sure, right?
Right.”
“See you in ten minutes.” Click.
Luden let his eyes drift back across the desert. It was a moment before
he realized what had caught his eye. One of the dunes was irregular. The
curves were wrong, asymmetrical. The normal crescent had left one
sprawling, trailing arm. It stood out like a pear in a line of apples.
He had ten minutes, and the dune wasn’t far. Luden got up and started
walking.
He stood under the dune and looked back. The well was clearly visible.
The distance was even shorter than he had thought. He had been deceived
by the nearness of the horizon.
The lip of the dune was some fourteen feet high.
What had distorted it? An upthrusting spire of rock, perhaps, not quite
high enough to show through the sand. They could find it with the sonar
later.
It had to be under the one sprawling, twisted arm of sand.
“Chris! Where the hell are you? Chris?”
Chris jumped. He’d forgotten Henry. “Look due south of the well and
you’ll see me.”
“Why don’t you stay where you’re put, you idiot? I thought you’d been
buried by a sandstorm.”
“Sorry, Harry. I got interested in something.” Chris Luden was now
standing on the twisted arm of sand. He sounded preoccupied. “Try
scratching the blocks of the well with your ring.”
“That’s an odd thought,” Henry laughed.
“Do it.”
Silence. Luden felt the wind, looked down at the sand, tried to imagine
what obstruction had dropped it here. Something not necessarily very
large. It would not be beneath the dune; it would be on the windward
side…at the beginning of the arch…there.
“I scratched it, Chris. There’s a scratch all right. So that effectively
takes—Ooops. Aaargh! Chris, you’re doomed! Only death can save you
from my wrath!”
“Why are you irritated with—”
“My diamond! It’s ruined!”
“Relax. You could replace it a million times over with just one block
from the well.”
“Say, that’s true. But we’ll need the laser to cut it loose. They must have
used diamond dust for the cement, too. And the fuel to get it back—”
“Harry, do me a favor. Bring—”
“That last favor cost me a three-thousand-dollar ring.”
“Bring the Marsmobile out here. I want to do some digging.”
“Be right there.”
A minute later Henry stopped the machine alongside Chris’s green suit.
His smile showed that the scratches on his ring had not permanently
scarred his psyche. “Where do we dig?”
“Right where I’m standing.”
The Marsmobile was equipped with two down-thrusting compressed-air
jets for getting over steep obstructions. A large tank under the vehicle’s
belly held the heavily compressed air, compressed directly from the thin
Martian atmosphere by the motor. Henry turned on the jets and hovered
over the spot where Chris had been standing, shifting his weight to keep
the machine in place. Sand sprayed out in sheets. Chris ran to get out from
under, and Henry grinned and doubled the thrust to send the fine grains
showering over him. In half a minute the pressure became too low. Henry
had to land. The Marsmobile shuddered and vibrated as its motor
struggled to refill the pressure chamber.
“I hate to ask,” said Henry, “but what’s the point of all this?”
“There’s something solid down there. I want to expose it.”
“Okay, if you’re sure we’re in the right place. We’ve got six months of
time to waste.”
They wasted a few minutes silently watching the Marsmobile fill its
pressure tank.
“Hey,” said Henry. “You think we could stake a claim on this diamond
mine?”
Chris Luden, sitting on the steep side of the dune, thoughtfully
scratched the side of his helmet. “Why not? We haven’t seen any live
Martians, and it’s for sure that nobody else has a claim. Sure, we’ll file our
claim; the worst they can do is disallow it.”
“One thing. I didn’t mention it before because I wanted you to see for
yourself, but the heck with it. One of those blocks is covered solid with
deep scratches.”
“They all are.”
“Not like these. These are deep, and they’re all at forty-five degree
angles, unless my imagination is fooling me. They’re too fine to be sure,
but I think it’s some kind of writing.”
And without waiting for an answer, Henry took off on the air jets. He
was good at it. He was like a ballet dancer. You could see Henry shifting
weight, but the scooter never seemed to move.
Something was emerging from the sand. Something not a rock.
Something like a piece of modern metal sculpture, with no use and no
meaning but with a weird beauty nonetheless. Something that had been a
machine and was now—nothing.
Henry Bedrosian balanced above the conical pit his jets had dug. The
artifact was almost clear now. Something else showed beside it.
A mummy.
The Marsmobile settled on the last of its air. Chris plunged down the
side of the pit as Henry climbed off.
The mummy was humanoid, about four feet long, with long arms,
enormous fragile tapered fingers, and a traditionally oversized skull. No
fine detail was visible; it had all been worn away. Chris couldn’t even be
sure how many fingers the—hominid—had had. One hand still held two;
the other only one, plus a flattened opposable thumb. No toes showed on
the feet. The thing lay face down.
The artifact, now uncovered, showed more detail. Yet the detail had no
meaning. Thick bent metal bars, thin twisted wires, two enormous
crumpled circles with something rotted clinging to what had been their
rims—and then Henry’s imagination clicked, the same visual knack that
had gotten him A’s in topology, and he said, “It’s a bicycle.”
“You’ve lost your mind.”
“No, look. The wheels are too big, and—”
It was a fantastically distorted bicycle, with wheels eight feet across, a
low, dwarf-sized saddle, and a system of gears to replace the chain. The
gear ratio was very low. The saddle was almost against the rear wheel, and a
tiller bar, now bent to scrap, had been fixed to the hub of the front wheel.
Something had crumpled the bicycle like a crush-proof cigarette pack in a
strong man’s hand, and then nitric acid rust had done its worst to the
metal.
“Okay, it’s a bicycle,” said Chris. “It’s a Salvador Dali bicycle, but still a
bicycle. They must have been a lot like us, hmmm? Bicycles, stone wells,
writing—”
“Clothing.”
“Where?”
“It must have been there. He’s less worn around the torso, see? You can
see the wrinkles in his skin. He must have been protected until his clothes
rotted away.”
“Maybe. He kind of ruins our lost race theory, doesn’t he? He couldn’t
possibly be more than a couple of thousand years old. Hundreds would be
more like it.”
“Then he drank nitric acid after all. Well, that blows our diamond
mine, partner. He’s got to have living relatives.”
“We can’t count on their being too much like us. These things we’ve
found—clothing, writing, wells—they’re all things any intelligent being
might be forced to invent. And parallel evolution might explain the biped
shape.”
“Parallel evolution?” Henry repeated.
“Like the eye of an octopus. It’s nearly identical in structure to a
human eye. Yet an octopus isn’t remotely human. Most marsupials, you
can’t tell them from their mammal counterparts. Well, let’s try to pick him
up.”
Any archaeologist would have shot them down in cold blood.
The mummy was as light and dry as cork, and showed no tendency to
come apart in their hands. They strapped him gently over the luggage box
and climbed on themselves. Chris drove back slowly and carefully.
Chris stood on the first rung of the ladder, adjusting the mummy’s
balance on his left shoulder. “We’ll have to spray him with plastic before
takeoff,” he said. “Do we have any plastic spray?”
“I don’t remember any. We’d better take lots of pictures in case it does
come apart.”
“Right. There’s a camera in the cabin.” Chris started up, and Henry
followed. They got the relic to the airlock without mishap.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Henry. “That nitric acid wasn’t dilute, exactly,
but there was water in it. Maybe this guy’s chemistry can extract the water
from nitric acid.”
“Good thought.”
They put the mummy gently on a pile of blankets and began searching
for the camera. After five frustrating minutes Chris deliberately banged his
head against a wall. “I took it out to catch the sunset last night. It’s in the
cargo hold.”
“Go get it.”
Henry stood in the airlock, watching as Chris went down the ladder.
After a moment in the cargo space Chris started up with the camera strap
over his shoulder.
“I’ve been thinking too,” said Chris, his voice seemingly dissociated
from his climbing figure. “Diamond can’t be that plentiful here, and
carving it into blocks must have been real hard labor. Why diamond? And
why write on a well?”
“Religious reasons? Maybe they worship water.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Of course you were. That plot’s as old as Lowell.”
Chris had reached the top. They squeezed into the airlock and waited
for it to cycle.
The door opened. Both men had their helmets off by this time, and
they both smelled it at once. Something chemical, something strong—
Thick, greasy smoke was pouring up from the ancient corpse.
Henry reacted first. He sprang for the double boiler in the small
kitchen corner. The bottom half was still full of water; he snatched it up
and threw the water over the smoldering Martian mummy while with his
other hand he turned on the water faucet to get more.
The mummy went off like a napalm bomb.
Henry leaped away from the exploding flames and his head rammed
something flat and very hard. He went down with his eyes full of leaping
light. Immediately he sat up, knowing that something urgently needed
doing but unable to remember what. He saw Chris, still in vacuum suit
except for the helmet, run through the multi-colored flames, pick the
mummy up by the ankles and throw it into the airlock. Chris hit the
“Cycle” button. The inner door swung shut.
Then Chris was bending over him. “Where does it hurt, Harry? Can
you talk? Can you move?”
Henry sat up again. “I’m okay.”
Chris expelled a gusty breath. Then he began to laugh.
Henry stood up a little shakily. His head ached. The fumes in the cabin
weren’t intolerable, and already the air plant was whining its eagerness to
make the air pure and scentless. Red smoke from the open outer airlock
door blew past a porthole, dying away. “What made him explode?” he
wondered.
“The water,” said Chris Luden. “What a wild chemistry he must have! I
want to be there when we meet a live one.”
“But what about the well? We know he used water.”
“Yes he did. He sure as hell did. And did you know that an octopus eye
is identical to a human eye?”
“Sure. But a well is a well, isn’t it?”
“Not when it’s a crematorium, Harry. What else could it be? There’s no
fire on Mars, but water must dissolve a body completely. And wouldn’t I
like to know what the morticians charge their customers for those cut
diamond building blocks! The hardest substance known to Man or
Martian! An everlasting monument to the dear departed!”
OceanofPDF.com
HOW THE HEROES DIE
Only sheer ruthlessness could have taken him out of town alive. The
mob behind Carter hadn’t tried to guard the Marsbuggies, since Carter
would have needed too much time to take a buggy through the vehicular
airlock. They could have caught him there, and they knew it. Some were
guarding the personnel lock, hoping he’d try for that. He might have; for if
he could have closed the one door in their faces and opened the next, the
safeties would have protected him while he went through the third and
fourth and outside. On the Marsbuggy he was trapped in the bubble.
There was room to drive around in. Less than half the prefab houses
had been erected so far. The rest of the bubbletown’s floor was flat fused
sand, empty but for scattered piles of foam-plastic walls and ceilings and
floors. But they’d get him eventually. Already they were starting up another
buggy.
They never expected him to run his vehicle through the bubble wall.
The Marsbuggy tilted, then righted itself. A blast of breathing-air roared
out around him, picked up a cloud of fine sand, and hurled it explosively
away into the thin, poisoned atmosphere. Carter grinned as he looked
behind him. They would die now, all of them. He was the only one
wearing a pressure suit. In an hour he could come back and repair the rip
in the bubble. He’d have to dream up a fancy story to tell when the next
ship came…
Carter frowned. What were they—
At least ten wind-harried men were wrestling with the wall of a prefab
house. As Carter watched, they picked the wall up off the fused sand,
balanced it almost upright, and let go. The foam-plastic wall rose into the
wind and slapped hard against the bubble, over the ten-foot rip.
Carter stopped his buggy to see what would happen.
Nobody was dead. The air was not shrieking away but leaking away.
Slowly, methodically, a line of men climbed into their suits and filed
through the personnel lock to repair the bubble.
A buggy entered the vehicular lock. The third and last was starting to
life. Carter turned his buggy and was off.
Top speed for a Marsbuggy is about twenty-five miles per hour. The
buggy rides on three wide balloon-tired wheels, each mounted at the end
of a five-foot arm. What those wheels can’t go over, the buggy can generally
hop over on the compressed-air jet mounted underneath. The motor and
the compressor are both powered by a Litton battery holding a tenth as
much energy as the original Hiroshima bomb.
Carter had been careful, as careful as he had had time for. He was
carrying a full load of oxygen, twelve four-hour tanks in the air bin behind
him, and an extra tank rested against his knees. His batteries were nearly
full; he would be out of air long before his power ran low. When the other
buggies gave up he could circle round and return to the bubble in the time
his extra tank would give him.
His own buggy and the two behind him were the only such vehicles on
Mars. At twenty-five miles per hour he fled, and at twenty-five miles per
hour they followed. The closest was half a mile behind.
Carter turned on his radio.
He found the middle of a conversation. “—Can’t afford it. One of you
will have to come back. We could lose two of the buggies, but not all
three.”
That was Shute, the bubbletown’s research director and sole military
man. The next voice, deep and sarcastic, belonged to Rufus Doolittle, the
biochemist. “What’ll we do, flip a coin?”
“Let me go,” the third voice said tightly. “I’ve got a stake in this.”
Carter felt apprehension touch the nape of his neck.
“Okay, Alf. Good luck,” said Rufus. “Good hunting,” he added
maliciously, as if he knew Carter were listening.
“You concentrate on getting the bubble fixed. I’ll see that Carter
doesn’t come back.”
Behind Carter, the rearmost buggy swung in a wide loop toward town.
The other came on. And it was driven by the linguist, Alf Harness.
Most of the bubble’s dozen men were busy repairing the ten-foot rip
with heaters and plastic sheeting. It would be a long job but an easy one,
for by Shute’s orders the bubble had been deflated. The transparent plastic
had fallen in folds across the prefab houses, forming a series of
interconnected tents. One could move about underneath with little
difficulty.
Lieutenant-Major Michael Shute watched the men at work and
decided they had things under control. He walked away like a soldier on
parade, stooping as little as possible as he moved beneath the dropping
folds.
He stopped and watched Gondot operating the airmaker. Gondot
noticed him and spoke without looking up.
“Mayor, why’d you let Alf chase Carter alone?”
Shute accepted his nickname. “We couldn’t lose both tractors.”
“Why not just post them on guard duty for two days?”
“And what if Carter got through the guard? He must be determined to
wreck the dome. He’d catch us with our pants down. Even if some of us got
into suits, could we stand another rip in the bubble?”
Gondot reached to scratch his short beard. His fingertips rapped
helmet plastic and he looked annoyed. “Maybe not. I can fill the bubble
anytime you’re ready, but then the airmaker’ll be empty. We’ll be almost
out of tanked air by the time they finish mending that rip. Another’d finish
us.”
Shute nodded and turned away. All the air anyone could use—tons of
nitrogen and oxygen—was right outside; but it was in the form of nitrogen
dioxide gas. The airmaker could convert it three times as fast as men could
use it. But if Carter tore the dome again, that would be too slow.
But Carter wouldn’t. Alf would see to that. The emergency was over—
this time.
And so Lieutenant-Major Shute could go back to worrying about the
emergency’s underlying causes.
His report on those causes had been finished a month ago. He had
reread it several times since, and always it had seemed complete and to the
point. Yet he had the feeling it could be written better. He ought to make it
as effective as possible. What he had to say could only be said once, and
then his career would be over and his voice silenced.
Cousins had sold some fiction once, writing as a hobby. Perhaps he
would help. But Shute was reluctant to involve anyone else in what
amounted to his own rebellion.
Yet—he’d have to rewrite that report now, or at least add to it. Lew
Harness was dead, murdered. John Carter would be dead within two days.
All Shute’s responsibility. All pertinent.
The decision wasn’t urgent. It would be a month before Earth was in
reach of the bubbletown’s sending station.
Most of the asteroids spend most of their time between Mars and
Jupiter, and it often happens that one of them crosses a planet where
theretofore it had crossed only an orbit. There are asteroid craters all over
Mars. Old eroded ones, sharp new ones, big ones, little ones, ragged and
smooth ones. The bubbletown was at the center of a large, fairly recent
crater four miles across: an enormous, poorly cast ashtray discarded on the
reddish sand.
The buggies ran over cracked glass, avoiding the occasional tilted
blocks, running uphill toward the broken rim. A sky the color of blood
surrounded a tiny, brilliant sun set precisely at the zenith.
Inevitably Alf was getting closer. When they crossed the rim and started
downhill they would pull apart. It was going to be a long chase.
Now was the time for regrets, if there ever was such a time. But Carter
wasn’t the type, and he had nothing to be ashamed of anyway. Lew Harness
had needed to die; had as much as asked to die. Carter was only puzzled
that his death should have provoked so violent a reaction. Could they all
be—the way Lew had been? Unlikely. If he’d stayed and explained—
They’d have torn him apart. Those vulpine faces, with the distended
nostrils and the bared teeth!
And now he was being chased by one man. But that man was Lew’s
brother.
Here was the rim, and Alf was still well behind. Carter slowed as he
went over, knowing that the way down would be rougher. He was just
going over the edge when a rock ten yards away exploded in white fire.
Alf had a flare pistol.
Carter just stopped himself from scrambling out of the buggy to hide in
the rocks. The buggy lurched downward and, like it or not, Carter had to
forget his terror to keep the vehicle upright.
The rubble around the crater’s rim slowed him still further. Carter
angled the buggy for the nearest rise of sloping sand. As he reached it, Alf
came over the rim, a quarter-mile behind. His silhouette hesitated there
against the bloody sky, and another flare exploded, blinding bright and
terrifyingly close.
Then Carter was on the straightaway, rolling down sloping sand to a
perfectly flat horizon.
The radio said, “Gonna be a long one, Jack.”
Carter pushed to transmit. “Right. How many flares do you have left?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I won’t. Not the way you’re throwing them away.”
Alf didn’t answer. Carter left the radio band open, knowing that
ultimately Alf must talk to the man he needed to kill.
The crater which was home dropped behind and was gone. Endless flat
desert rose before the buggies, flowed under the oversized wheels and
dropped behind. Gentle crescent dunes patterned the sand, but they were
no barrier to a buggy. Once there was a Martian well. It stood all alone on
the sand, a weathered cylindrical wall seven feet high and ten in
circumference, made of cut diamond blocks. The wells, and the slanting
script written deep into their “dedication blocks,” were responsible for the
town’s presence on Mars. Since the only Martian ever found—a mummy
centuries dead, at least—had exploded at the first contact with water, it was
generally assumed that the wells were crematoriums. But it wasn’t certain.
Nothing was certain about Mars.
The radio maintained an eerie silence. Hours rolled past; the sun slid
toward the deep red horizon, and still Alf did not speak. It was as if Alf had
said everything there was to say to Jack Carter. And that was wrong! Alf
should have needed to justify himself!
It was Carter who sighed and gave up. “You can’t catch me, Alf.”
“No, but I can stay behind you as long as I need to.”
“You can stay behind me just twenty-four hours. You’ve got forty-eight
hours of air. I don’t believe you’ll kill yourself just to kill me.”
“Don’t count on it. But I won’t need to. Noon tomorrow, you’ll be
chasing me. You need to breathe, just like I do.”
“Watch this,” said Carter. The O-tank resting against his knee was
empty. He tipped it over the side and watched it roll away.
“I had an extra tank,” he said. He smiled in relief at his release from
that damning weight. “I can live four hours longer than you can. Want to
turn back, Alf?”
“No.”
“He’s not worth it, Alf. He was nothing but a queer.”
“Does that mean he’s got to die?”
“It does if the son of a bitch propositions me. Maybe you’re a little that
way yourself?”
“No. And Lew wasn’t queer till he came here. They should have sent
half men, half women.”
“Amen.”
“You know, lots of people get a little sick to their stomachs about
homosexuals. I do myself, and it hurt to see it happening to Lew. But
there’s only one type who goes looking for ’em so he can beat up on ’em.”
Carter frowned.
“Latents. Guys who think they might turn queer themselves if you gave
’em the opportunity. They can’t stand queers around because queers are
temptation.”
“You’re just returning the compliment.”
“Maybe.”
“Anyway, the town has enough problems without—things like that
going on. This whole project could have been wrecked by someone like
your brother.”
“How bad do we need killers?”
“Pretty badly, this time.” Suddenly Carter knew that he was now his
own defense attorney. If he could convince Alf that he shouldn’t be
executed, he could convince the rest of them. If he couldn’t—then he
must destroy the bubble, or die. He went on talking as persuasively as he
knew how.
“You see, Alf, the town has two purposes. One is to find out if we can
live in an environment as hostile as this one. The other is to contact the
Martians. Now there are just fifteen of us in town—”
“Twelve. Thirteen when I get back.”
“Fourteen if we both do. Okay. Each of us is more or less necessary to
the functioning of the town. But I’m needed in both fields. I’m the
ecologist, Alf. I not only have to keep the town from dying from some sort
of imbalance, I also have to figure out how the Martians live, what they live
on, how Martian life forms depend on each other. You see?”
“Sure. How ’bout Lew? Was he necessary?”
“We can get along without him. He was the radio man. At least a
couple of us have training enough to take over communications.”
“You make me so happy. Doesn’t the same go for you?”
Carter thought hard and fast. Yes, Gondot in particular could keep the
town’s life-support system going with little help. But—“Not with the
Martian ecology. There isn’t—”
“There isn’t any Martian ecology. Jack, has anyone ever found any life
on Mars besides that man-shaped mummy? You can’t be an ecologist
without something to make deductions from. You’ve got nothing to
investigate. So what good are you?”
Carter kept talking. He was still arguing as the sun dropped into the sea
of sand and darkness closed down with a snap. But he knew now it was no
use. Alf’s mind was closed.
By sunset the bubble was taut, and the tortured scream of incoming
breathing-air had dropped to a tired sigh. Lieutenant-Major Shute
unfastened the clamps at his shoulders and lifted his helmet, ready to jam
it down fast if the air was too thin. It wasn’t. He set the helmet down and
signaled thumbs-up to the men watching him.
Ritual. Those dozen men had known the air would be safe. But rituals
had grown fast where men worked in space, and the most rigid was that the
man in charge fastened his helmet last and unfastened it first. Now suits
were being removed. Men moved about their duties. Some moved toward
the kitchen to clean up the vacuum-induced havoc so Hurley could get
dinner.
Shute stopped Lee Cousins as he went by. “Lee, could I see you a
minute?”
“Sure, Mayor.” Shute was “the Mayor” to all bubbletown.
“I want your help as a writer,” said Shute. “I’m going to send in a quite
controversial report when we get within range of Earth, and I’d like you to
help me make it convincing.”
“Fine. Let’s see it.”
The ten streetlamps came on, dispelling the darkness which had fallen
so suddenly. Shute led the way to his prefab bungalow, unlocked the safe,
and handed Cousins the manuscript. Cousins hefted it. “Big,” he said.
“Might pay to cut it.”
“By all means, if you can find anything unnecessary.”
“I’ll bet I can,” Cousins grinned. He dropped on the bed and began to
read.
Ten minutes later he asked, “Just what is the incidence of
homosexuality in the Navy?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Then it’s not powerful evidence. You might quote a limerick to show
that the problem’s proverbial. I know a few.”
“Good.”
A little later Cousins said, “A lot of schools in England are
coeducational. More every year.”
“I know. But the present problem is among men who graduated from
boys’ schools when they were much younger.”
“Make that clearer. Incidentally, was your high-school coeducational?”
“No.”
“Any queers?”
“A few. At least one in every class. The seniors used to use paddles on
the ones they suspected.”
“Did it help?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Okay. You’ve got two sets of circumstances under which a high rate of
homosexuality occurs. In both cases you’ve got three conditions: a
reasonable amount of leisure, no women, and a disciplinary pecking order.
You need a third example.”
“I couldn’t think of one.”
“The Nazi organization.”
“Oh?”
“I’ll give you details.” Cousins went on reading. He finished the report
and put it aside. “This’ll cause merry hell,” he said.
“I know.”
“The worst thing about it is your threat to give the whole thing to the
newspapers. If I were you I’d leave that out.”
“If you were me you wouldn’t,” said Shute. “Everyone who had
anything to do with WARGOD knew they were risking everything that’s
happened. They preferred to let us take that risk rather than risk public
opinion themselves. There are hundreds of Decency Leagues in the
United States. Maybe thousands, I don’t know. But they’ll all come down
on the government like harpies if anyone tried to send a mixed crew to
Mars or anywhere else in space. The only way I can make the government
act is to give them a greater threat.”
“You win. This is a greater threat.”
“Did you find anything else to cut out?”
“Oh, hell yes. I’ll go through this again with a red pencil. You talk too
much, and use too many words that are too long, and you generalize. You’ll
have to give details or you’ll lose impact.”
“I’ll be ruining some reputations.”
“Can’t be helped. We’ve got to have women on Mars, and right now.
Rufe and Timmy are building up to a real spitting fight. Rufe thinks he
caused Lew’s death by leaving him. Timmy keeps taunting him with it.”
“All right,” said Shute. He stood up. He had been sitting erect
throughout the discussion, as if sitting at attention. “Are the buggies still in
radio range?”
“They can’t hear us, but we can hear them. Timmy’s working the
radio.”
“Good. I’ll keep him on it until they go out of range. Shall we get
dinner?”
Phobos rose where the sun had set, a scattering of moving dots of light,
like a crescent of dim stars. It grew brighter as it rose: a new moon
becoming a half-moon in hours. Then it was too high to look at. Carter
had to keep his eyes on the triangle of desert lit by his headlights. The
headlight beams were the color of earthly sunlight, but to Carter’s Mars-
adapted eyes they turned everything blue.
He had chosen his course well. The desert ahead was flat for more than
seven hundred miles. There would be no low hills rising suddenly before
him to trap him into jet-jumping in faint moonlight or waiting for Alf to
come down on him. Alf’s turnover point would come at high noon
tomorrow, and then Carter would have won.
For Alf would turn back toward the bubble, and Carter would go on
into the desert. When Alf was safely over the horizon, Carter would turn
left or right, go on for an hour, and then follow a course parallel to Alf s.
He would be in sight of the bubble an hour later than Alf, with three hours
in which to plan.
Then would come the hardest part. Certainly there would be someone
on guard. Carter would have to charge past the guard—who might be
armed with a flare pistol—tear the bubble open, and somehow confiscate
the supply of O-tanks. Ripping the bubble open would probably kill
everyone inside, but there would be men in suits outside. He would have
to load some of the O-tanks on his buggy and open the stopcocks of the
rest, all before anyone reached him.
What bothered him was the idea of charging a flare pistol…But
perhaps he could just aim the buggy and jump out. He would have to see.
His eyelids were getting heavy, and his hands were cramped. But he
dare not slow down, and he dared not sleep.
Several times he had thought of smashing the come-hither in his suit
radio. With that thing constantly beeping, Alf could find him anytime he
pleased. But Alf could find him anyway. His headlights were always
behind, never catching up, never dropping away. If he ever got out of Alf’s
sight, that come-hither would have to go. But there was no point in letting
Alf know that. Not yet.
Stars dropped into the black western horizon. Phobos rose again,
brighter this time, and again became too high to watch. Deimos now
showed above the steady shine of Alf’s headlights.
Suddenly it was day, and there were thin black shadows pointing to a
yellow horizon. Stars still glowed in a red-black sky. There was a crater
ahead, a glass dish set in the desert, not too big to circle around. Carter
angled left. The buggy behind him also angled. If he kept turning like this,
Alf couldn’t help but gain on him. Carter sucked water and nutrient
solution from the nipples in his helmet, and concentrated on steering. His
eyes felt gritty, and his mouth belonged to a Martian mummy.
“Morning,” said Alf.
“Morning. Get plenty of sleep?”
“Not enough. I only slept about six hours, in snatches. I kept worrying
you’d turn off and lose me.”
For a moment Carter went hot and cold. Then he knew that Alf was
needling him. He’d no more slept than Carter had.
“Look to your right,” said Alf.
To their right was the crater wall. And—Carter looked again to be sure
—there was a silhouette on the rim, a man-shaped shadow against the red
sky. With one hand it balanced something tall and thin.
“A Martian,” Carter said softly. Without thinking he turned his buggy
to climb the wall. Two flares exploded in front of him, a second apart, and
he frantically jammed the tiller bar hard left.
“God damn it, Alf! That was a Martian! We’ve got to go after it!”
The silhouette was gone. No doubt the Martian had run for its life
when it saw the flares.
Alf said nothing. Nothing at all. And Carter rode on, past the crater,
with a murderous fury building in him.
It was eleven o’clock. The tips of a range of hills were pushing above
the western horizon.
“I’m just curious,” Alf said, “but what would you have said to that
Martian?”
Carter’s voice was tight and bitter. “Does it matter?”
“Yah. The best you could have done was scare him. When we get in
touch with the Martians, we’ll do it just the way we planned.”
Carter ground his teeth. Even without the accident of Lew Harness’s
death, there was no telling how long the translation plan would take. It
involved three steps: sending pictures of the writings on the crematory wells
and other artifacts to Earth, so that computers could translate the language;
writing messages in that language to leave near the wells where Martians
would find them; and then waiting for the Martians to make a move. But
there was no reason to believe that the script on the wells wasn’t from more
than one language, or from the same language as it had changed over
thousands of years. There was no reason to assume the Martians would be
interested in strange beings living in a glorified balloon, regardless of
whether the invaders knew how to write. And could the Martians read their
own ancestors’ script?
An idea…“You’re a linguist,” said Carter.
No answer.
“Alf, we’ve talked about whether the town needed Lew, and we’ve
talked about whether the town needs me. How about you? Without you
we’d never get the well-script translated.”
“I doubt that. The Cal Tech computers are doing most of the work, and
anyhow I left notes. But so what?”
“If you keep chasing me you’ll force me to kill you. Can the town
afford to lose you?”
“You can’t do it. But I’ll make you a deal if you want. It’s eleven now.
Give me two of your O-tanks, and we’ll go back to town. We’ll stop two
hours from town, leave your buggy, and you’ll ride the rest of the way tied
up in the air bin. Then you can stand trial.”
“You think they’ll let me off?”
“Not after the way you ripped the bubble open on your way out. That
was a blunder, Jack.”
“Why don’t you just take one tank?” If Alf did that, Carter would get
back with two hours to spare. He knew, now, that he would have to wreck
the bubble. He had no alternative. But Alf would be right behind him with
the flare gun…
“No deal. I wouldn’t feel safe if I didn’t know you’d run out of air two
hours before we got back. You want me to feel safe, don’t you?”
It was better the other way. Let Alf turn back in an hour. Let Alf be in
the bubble when Carter returned to tear it open.
“Carter turned him down,” said Timmy. He hunched over the radio,
holding his earphones with both hands, listening with every nerve for
voices which had almost died into the distance.
“He’s planning something,” Gondot said uneasily.
“Naturally,” said Shute. “He wants to lose Alf, return to the bubble, and
wreck it. What other hope has he?”
“But he’d die too,” said Timmy.
“Not necessarily. If he killed us all, he could mend the new rip while
he lived on the O-tanks we’ve got left. I think he could keep the bubble in
good enough repair to keep one man alive.”
“My Lord! What can we do?”
“Relax, Timmy. It’s simple math.” It was easy for Lieutenant-Major
Shute to keep his voice light, and he didn’t want Timmy to start a panic. “If
Alf turns back at noon, Carter can’t get here before noon tomorrow. At four
he’ll be out of air. We’ll just keep everyone in suits for four hours.”
Privately he wondered if twelve men could repair even a small rip before
they used up the bottled air. It would be one tank every twenty minutes…
but perhaps they wouldn’t be tested.
“Five minutes of twelve,” said Carter. “Turn back, Alf. You’ll only get
home with ten minutes to spare.”
The linguist chuckled. A quarter mile behind, the blue dot of his buggy
didn’t move.
“You can’t fight mathematics, Alf. Turn back.”
“Too late.”
“In five minutes it will be.”
“I started this trip short of an O-tank. I should have turned two hours
ago.”
Carter had to wet his lips from the water nipple before he answered.
“You’re lying. Will you stop bugging me? Stop it!”
Alf laughed. “Watch me turn back.”
His buggy came on.
It was noon, and the chase would not end. At twenty-five miles per, two
Marsbuggies a quarter of a mile apart moved serenely through an orange
desert. Chemical stains of green rose ahead and fell behind. Crescent
dunes drifted by, as regular as waves on an ocean. The ghostly path of a
meteorite touched the northern horizon in a momentary white flash. The
hills were higher now, humps of smooth rock like animals sleeping beyond
the horizon. The sun burned small and bright in a sky reddened by
nitrogen dioxide and, near the horizon, blackened by its thinness to the
color of bloody India ink.
Had the chase really started at noon? Exactly noon? But it was twelve-
thirty now, and he was sure that was too late.
Alf had doomed himself—to doom Carter.
But he wouldn’t.
“Great minds think alike,” he told the radio.
“Really?” Alf’s tone said he couldn’t have cared less.
“You took an extra tank. Just like me.”
“No I didn’t, Jack.”
“You must have. If there’s one thing I’m sure of in life, it’s that you are
not the type to kill yourself. All right, Alf, I quit. Let’s go back.”
“Let’s not.”
“We’d have three hours to chase that Martian.”
A flare exploded behind his buggy. Carter sighed raggedly. At two
o’clock both buggies would turn back to bubbletown, where Carter would
probably be executed.
But suppose I turn back now?
That’s easy. Alf will shoot me with the flare gun.
He might miss. If I let him choose my course, I’ll die for certain.
Carter sweated and cursed himself, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t
deliberately turn into Alf’s gun.
At two o’clock the base of the range came over the horizon. The hills
were incredibly clear, almost as clear as they would have been on the
moon. But they were horribly weathered, and the sea of sand lapped
around them as if eager to finish them off, to drag them down.
Carter rode with his eyes turned behind. His watch hands moved on,
minute to minute, and Carter watched in disbelief as Alf s vehicle
continued to follow. As the time approached and reached two-thirty,
Carter’s disbelief faded. It didn’t matter, now, how much oxygen Alf had.
They had passed Carter’s turnover point.
“You’ve killed me,” he said.
No answer.
“I killed Lew in a fistfight. What you’ve done to me is much worse.
You’re killing me by slow torture. You’re a demon, Alf.”
“Fistfight my aunt’s purple asterisk. You hit Lew in the throat and
watched him drown in his own blood. Don’t tell me you didn’t know what
you were doing. Everybody in town knows you know karate.”
“He died in minutes. I’ll need a whole day!”
“You don’t like that? Turn around and rush my gun. It’s right here
waiting.”
“We could get back to the crater in time to search for that Martian.
That’s why I came to Mars. To learn what’s here. So did you, Alf. Come on,
let’s turn back.”
“You first.”
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. Karate can defeat any hand-to-hand
weapon but a quarterstaff, and Carter had quarterstaff training too. But he
couldn’t charge a flare gun! Not even if Alf meant to turn back. And Alf
didn’t.
A faint whine vibrated through the bubble. The sandstorm was at the
height of its fury, which made it about as dangerous as an enraged
caterpillar. At worst it was an annoyance. The shrill, barely audible whine
could get on one’s nerves, and the darkness made streetlamps necessary.
Tomorrow the bubble would be covered a tenth of an inch deep in fine,
moon-dry silt. Inside the bubble it would be darker than night until
someone blew the silt away with an O-tank.
To Shute the storm was depressing. Here on Mars was Lieutenant-
Major Shute, Boy Hero, facing terrifying dangers on the frontiers of human
exploration! A sandstorm that wouldn’t have harmed an infant. Nobody
here faced a single danger that he had not brought with him.
Would it be like this forever? Men traveling enormous distances to face
themselves?
There had been little work done since noon today. Shute had given up
on that. On a stack of walls sat Timmy, practically surrounding the buggy-
pickup radio, surrounded in turn by the bubble’s population.
Timmy stood up as Shute approached the group. “They’re gone,” he
announced, sounding very tired. He turned off the radio. The men looked
at each other, and some got to their feet.
“Tim! How’d you lose them?”
Timmy noticed him. “They’re too far away, Mayor.”
“They never turned around?”
“They never did. They just kept going out into the desert. Alf must have
gone insane. Carter’s not worth dying for.”
Shute thought, But he was once. Carter had been one of the best:
tough, fearless, bright, enthusiastic. Shute had watched him deteriorate
under the boredom and the close quarters aboard ship. He had seemed to
recover when they reached Mars, when all of them suddenly had work to
do. Then, yesterday morning—murder.
Alf. It was hard to lose Alf. Lew had been little loss, but Alf—
Cousins dropped into step beside him. “I’ve got that red-pencil work
done.”
“Thanks, Lee. I’ll have to do it all over now.”
“Don’t do it over. Write an addendum. Show how and why three men
died. Then you can say, ‘I told you so.’”
“You think so?”
“My professional judgment. When’s the funeral?”
“Day after tomorrow. That’s Sunday. I thought it would be
appropriate.”
“You can say all three services at once. Good timing.”
To all bubbletown, Jack Carter and Alf Harness were dead. But they
still breathed—
The mountains came toward them: the only fixed points in an ocean of
sand. Alf was closer now, something less than four hundred yards behind.
At five o’clock Carter reached the base of the mountains.
They were too high to go over on the air jet. He could see spots where
he might have landed the buggy while the pump filled the jet tank for
another hop. But for what?
Better to wait for Alf.
Suddenly Carter knew that that was the one thing in the world Alf
wanted. To roll up alongside in his buggy. To watch Carter’s face until he
was sure Carter knew exactly what was to come. And then to blast Carter
down in flames from ten feet away, and watch while a bright magnesium-
oxidizer flare burned through his suit and skin and vitals.
The hills were low and shallow. Even from yards away he might have
been looking at the smooth flank of a sleeping beast—except that this beast
was not breathing. Carter took a deep breath, noticing how stale the air had
become despite the purifier unit, and turned on the compressed-air jet.
The air of Mars is terribly thin, but it can be compressed; and a rocket
will work anywhere, even a compressed-air rocket. Carter went up, leaning
as far back in the cabin as he could to compensate for the loss of weight in
the O-tanks behind him, to put as little work as possible on gyroscopes
meant to spin only in emergencies. He rose fast, and he tilted the buggy to
send it skating along the thirty-degree slope of the hill. There were flat
places along the slope, but not many. He should reach the first one
easily…
A flare exploded in his eyes. Carter clenched his teeth and fought the
urge to look behind. He tilted the buggy backward to slow him down. The
jet pressure was dropping.
He came down like a feather two hundred feet above the desert. When
he turned off the jet he could hear the gyros whining. He turned the
stabilizer off and let them run down. Now there was only the chugging of
the compressor, vibrating through his suit.
Alf was out of his buggy, standing at the base of the mountains, looking
up.
“Come on,” said Carter. “What are you waiting for?”
“Go on over if you want to.”
“What’s the matter? Are your gyros fouled?”
“Your brain is fouled, Carter. Go on over.” Alf raised one arm stiffly out.
The hand showed flame, and Carter ducked instinctively.
The compressor had almost stopped, which meant the tank was nearly
full. But Carter would be a fool to take off before it was completely full.
You got the greatest acceleration from an air jet during the first seconds of
flight. The rest of the flight you got just enough pressure to keep you going.
But—Alf was getting into his buggy. Now the buggy was rising.
Carter turned on his jet and went up.
He came down hard, three hundred feet high, and only then dared to
look down. He heard Alf s nasty laugh, and he saw that Alf was still at the
foot of the mountains. It had been a bluff!
But why wasn’t Alf coming after him?
The third hop took him to the top. The first downhill hop was the first
he’d ever made, and it almost killed him. He had to do his decelerating on
the last remnants of pressure in the jet tank! He waited until his hands
stopped shaking, then continued the rest of the way on the wheels. There
was no sign of Alf as he reached the foot of the range and started out into
the desert.
Already the sun was about to go. Faint bluish stars in a red-black sky
outlined the yellow hills behind him.
Still no sign of Alf.
Alf spoke in his ear, gently, almost kindly. “You’ll just have to come
back, Jack.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“I’d rather not have to. That’s why I’m telling you this. Look at your
watch.”
It was about six-thirty.
“Did you look? Now count it up. I started with forty-four hours of air.
You started with fifty-two. That gave us ninety-six breathing hours between
us. Together we’ve used up sixty-one hours. That leaves thirty-five between
us.
“Now, I stopped moving an hour ago. From where I am it’s almost
thirty hours back to base. Sometime in the next two and a half hours,
you’ve got to get my air and stop me from breathing. Or I’ve got to do the
same for you.”
It made sense. Finally, everything made sense. “Alf, are you listening?
Listen,” said Carter, and he opened his radio panel and, moving by touch,
found a wire he’d located long ago. He jerked it loose. His radio crackled
deafeningly, then stopped.
“Did you hear that, Alf? I just jerked my come-hither loose. Now you
couldn’t find me even if you wanted to.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Then Carter realized what he’d done. There was now no possibility of
Alf finding him. After all the miles and hours of the chase, now it was
Carter chasing Alf. All Alf had to do was wait.
The dark fell on the west like a heavy curtain.
Carter went south, and he went immediately. It would take him an
hour or more to cross the range. He would have to leapfrog to the top with
only his headlights to guide him. His motor would not take him uphill
over such a slope. He could use the wheels going down, with luck, but he
would have to do so in total darkness. Deimos would not have risen;
Phobos was not bright enough to help.
It had gone exactly as Alf had planned. Chase Carter to the range. If he
attacks there, take his tanks and go home. If he makes it, show him why he
has to come back. Time it so he has to come back in darkness. If by some
miracle he makes it this time—well, there’s always the flare gun.
Carter could give him only one surprise. He would cross six miles
south of where he was expected, and approach Alf s buggy from the
southeast.
Or was Alf expecting that too?
It didn’t matter. Carter was beyond free will.
The first jump was like jumping blindfolded from a ship’s airlock. He
pointed the headlights straight down, and as he went up he watched the
circle of light expand and dim. He angled east. First he wasn’t moving at
all. Then the slope slid toward him, far too fast. He back-angled. Nothing
seemed to happen. The pressure under him died slowly, but it was dying,
and the slope was a wavering blur surrounded by dark.
It came up, clarifying fast.
The landing jarred him from coccyx to cranium. He held himself rigid,
waiting for the buggy to tumble end-for-end down the hill. But though the
buggy was tilted at a horrifying angle, it stayed.
Carter sagged and buried his helmet in his arms. Two enormous
hanging tears, swollen to pinballs in the low gravity, dropped onto his
faceplate and spread. For the first time he regretted all of it. Killing Lew,
when a kick to the kneecap would have put him out of action and taught
him a permanent, memorable lesson. Snatching the buggy instead of
surrendering himself for trial. Driving through the bubble—and making
every man on Mars his mortal enemy. Hanging around to watch what
would happen—when, perhaps, he could have run beyond the horizon
before Alf came out the vehicular airlock. He clenched his fists and pressed
them against his faceplate, remembering his attitude of mild interest as he
sat watching Alf’s buggy roll into the lock.
Time to go. Carter readied himself for another jump. This one would
be horrible. He’d be taking off with the buggy canted thirty degrees
backward…
Wait a minute.
There was something wrong with that picture of Alf’s buggy as it rolled
toward the lock surrounded by trotting men. Definitely something wrong
there. But what?
It would come to him. He gripped the jet throttle and readied his other
hand to flip on the gyros the moment he was airborne.
—Alf had planned so carefully. How had he come away with one O-
tank too few?
And—if he really had everything planned, how did Alf expect to get
Carter’s tanks if Carter crashed?
Suppose Carter crashed his buggy against a hill, right now, on his
second jump. How would Alf know? He wouldn’t, not until nine o’clock
came and Carter hadn’t shown up. Then he’d know Carter had crashed
somewhere. But it would be too late!
Unless Alf had lied.
That was it, that was what was wrong with his picture of Alf in the
vehicular airlock. Put one O-tank in the air bin and it would stand out like
a sore thumb. Fill the air bin and then remove one tank, and the hole in
the hexagonal array would show like Sammy Davis III on the Berlin Nazis
football team! There had been no such hole.
Let Carter crash now, and Alf would know it with four hours in which
to search for his buggy.
Carter swung his headlights up to normal position, then moved the
buggy backward in a dead-slow half circle. The buggy swayed but didn’t
topple. Now he could move down behind his headlights…
Nine o’clock. If Carter was wrong then he was dead now. Even now Alf
might be unfastening his helmet, his eyes blank with the ultimate despair,
still wondering where Carter had got to. But if he was right…
Then Alf was nodding to himself, not smiling, merely confirming a
guess. Now he was deciding whether to wait five minutes on the chance
that Carter was late, or to start searching now. Carter sat in his dark cabin
at the foot of the black mountains, his left hand clutching a wrench, his
eyes riveted on the luminous needle of the direction finder.
The wrench had been the heaviest in his toolbox. He’d found nothing
sharper than a screwdriver, and that wouldn’t have penetrated suit fabric.
The needle pointed straight toward Alf.
And it wasn’t moving.
Alf had decided to wait.
How long would he wait?
Carter caught himself whispering, not loudly. Move, idiot. You’ve got to
search both sides of the range. Both sides and the top. Move. Move!
Ye gods! Had he shut off his radio? Yes, the switch was down.
Move.
The needle moved. It jerked once, infinitesimally, and was quiet.
It was quiet a long time—seven or eight minutes. Then it jerked in the
opposite direction. Alf was searching the wrong side of the hills!
And then Carter saw the flaw in his own plan. Alf must now assume he
was dead. And if he, Carter, was dead, then he wasn’t using air. Alf had two
hours extra, but he thought he had four!
The needle twitched and moved—a good distance. Carter sighed and
closed his eyes. Alf was coming over. He had sensibly decided to search this
side first; for if Carter was on this side, dead, then Alf would have to cross
the range again to reach home.
Twitch.
Twitch. He must be at the top.
Then the long, slow, steady movement down.
Headlights. Very faint, to the north. Would Alf turn north?
He turned south. Perfect. The headlights grew brighter…and Carter
waited, with his buggy buried to the windshield in the sand at the base of
the range.
Alf still had the flare gun. Despite all his certainty that Carter was dead,
he was probably riding with the gun in his hand. But he was using his
headlights, and he was going slowly, perhaps fifteen miles per hour.
He would pass…twenty yards west…
Carter gripped the wrench. Here he comes.
There was light in his eyes. Don’t see me. And then there wasn’t. Carter
swarmed out of the buggy and down the sloping sand. The headlights
moved away, and Carter was after them, leaping as a Moonie leaps, both
feet pushing at once into the sand, a second spent in flying, legs straddled
and feet reaching forward for the landing and another leap.
One last enormous kangaroo jump—and he was on the O-tanks, falling
on knees and forearms with feet lifted high so the metal wouldn’t clang.
One arm landed on nothing at all where empty O-tanks were missing. His
body tried to roll off onto the sand. He wouldn’t let it.
The transparent bubble of Alf’s helmet was before him. The head
inside swept back and forth, sweeping the triangle created by the
headlights.
Carter crept forward. He poised himself over Alf’s head, raised the
wrench high, and brought it down with all his strength.
Cracks starred out in the plastic. Alf looked up with his eyes and mouth
all wide open, his amazement unalloyed by rage or terror. Carter brought
the weight down again.
There were more cracks, longer cracks. Alf winced and—finally—
brought up the flare gun. Carter’s muscles froze for an instant as he looked
into its hellish mouth. Then he struck for what he knew must be the last
time.
The wrench smashed through transparent plastic and scalp and skull.
Carter knelt on the O-tanks for a moment, looking at the unpleasant thing
he’d done. Then he lifted the body out by the shoulders, tumbled it over
the side, and climbed into the cabin to stop the buggy.
It took him a few minutes to find his own buggy where he’d buried it in
the sand. It took longer to uncover it. That was all right. He had plenty of
time. If he crossed the range by twelve-thirty he would reach bubbletown
on the last of his air.
There would be little room for finesse. On the other hand, he would be
arriving an hour before dawn. They’d never see him. They would have
stopped expecting him, or Alf, at noon tomorrow—even assuming they
didn’t know Alf had refused to turn back.
The bubble would be empty of air before anyone could get into a suit.
Later he could repair and fill the bubble. In a month Earth would hear
of the disaster: how a meteorite had touched down at a corner of the dome,
how John Carter had been outside at the time, the only man in a suit.
They’d take him home and he could spend the rest of his life trying to
forget.
He knew which tanks were his empties. Like every man in town, he
had his own method of arranging them in the air bin. He dumped six and
stopped. It was a shame to throw away empties. The tanks were too hard to
replace.
He didn’t know Alf’s arrangement scheme. He’d have to test Alf’s
empties individually.
Already Alf had thrown some away. (To leave space for Carter’s tanks?)
One by one, Carter turned the valve of each tank. If it hissed, he put it in
his own air bin. If it didn’t, he dropped it.
One of them hissed. Just one.
Five O-tanks. He couldn’t possibly make a thirty-hour trip on five O-
tanks.
Somewhere, Alf had left three O-tanks where he could find them
again. Just on the off chance: just in case something went terribly wrong for
Alf, and Carter captured his buggy, Carter still wouldn’t go home alive.
Alf must have left the tanks where he could find them easily. He must
have left them near here; for he had never been out of Carter’s sight until
Carter crossed the range, and furthermore he’d kept just one tank to reach
them. The tanks were nearby, and Carter had just two hours to find them.
In fact, he realized, they must be on the other side of the range. Alf
hadn’t stopped anywhere on this side.
But he could have left them on the hillside during his jumps to the
top…
In a sudden frenzy of hurry, Carter jumped into his buggy and took it
up. The headlights showed his progress to the top and over.
The first red rays of sunlight found Lee Cousins and Rufe Doolittle
already outside the bubble. They were digging a grave. Cousins dug in
stoic silence. In a mixture of pity and disgust he endured Rufe’s constant
compulsive flow of words.
“…first man to be buried on another planet. Do you think Lew would
have liked that? No, he’d hate it. He’d say it wasn’t worth dying for. He
wanted to go home. He would have, too, on the next ship…”
The sand came up in loose, dry shovelfuls. Practice was needed to keep
it on the shovel. It tried to flow like a viscous liquid.
“I tried to tell the Mayor he’d have liked a well burial. The Mayor
wouldn’t listen. He said the Martians might not—hey!”
Cousins’s eyes jerked up, and the movement caught them—a steadily
moving fleck on the crater wall. Martian! was his first thought. What else
could be moving out there? And then he saw that it was a buggy.
To Lee Cousins it was like a corpse rising from its grave. The buggy
moved like a blind thing down the tilted blocks of old glass, touched the
drifted sand in the crater floor, all while he stood immobile. At the corner
of his eye he saw Doolittle’s shovel flying wide as Doolittle ran for the
bubble.
The buggy only grazed the sand, then began reclimbing the crater.
Cousins’s paralysis left him and he ran for the town’s remaining buggy.
The ghost was moving at half speed. He caught it a mile beyond the
crater rim. Carter was in the cockpit. His helmet was in his lap clutched in
a rigid death-grip.
Cousins reported. “He must have aimed the buggy along his direction
finder when he felt his air going. Give him credit,” he added, and lifted a
shovelful from the second grave. “He did that much. He sent back the
buggy.”
Just after dawn a small biped form came around a hill to the east. It
walked directly to the sprawled body of Alf Harness, picked up a foot in
both delicate-looking hands, and began to tug the corpse across the sand,
looking rather like an ant tugging a heavy bread crumb. In the twenty
minutes it needed to reach Alf’s buggy the figure never stopped to rest.
Dropping its prize, the Martian climbed the pile of empty O-tanks and
peered into the air bin, then down at the body. But there was no way such
a small, weak being could lift such a mass.
The Martian seemed to remember something. It scrambled down the
O-tanks and crawled under the buggy’s belly.
Minutes later it came out, dragging a length of nylon line. It tied each
end of the line to one of Alf’s ankles, then dropped the loop over the
buggy’s trailer-attachment knob.
For a time the figure stood motionless above Alf s broken helmet,
contemplating its work. Alf’s head might take a beating, riding that way;
but as a specimen Alf’s head was useless. Wherever nitrogen dioxide gas
had touched moisture, red fuming nitric acid had formed. By now the rest
of the body was dry and hard, fairly well preserved.
The figure climbed into the buggy. A little fumbling, surprisingly little,
and the buggy was rolling. Twenty yards away it stopped with a jerk. The
Martian climbed out and walked back. It knelt beside the three O-tanks
which had been tied beneath the buggy with the borrowed nylon line, and
it opened the stopcocks of each in turn. It leapt back in horrified haste
when the noxious gas began hissing out.
Minutes later the buggy was moving south. The O-tanks hissed for a
time, then were quiet.
OceanofPDF.com
THE JIGSAW MAN
OceanofPDF.com
WORLD OF PTAVVS
OceanofPDF.com
The Jayhawk Hotel was the third tallest building in Topeka, and the
rooftop bar had a magnificent view. As he left the elevator Luke met the
usual continuous roar. He waited ten seconds while his ears “learned” to
ignore it: an essential defense mechanism, learned by most children before
they were three. The hostess was a tall redhead, nude but for double-spike
shoes, her hair piled into a swirling, swooping confection which brought
her height to an even eight feet. She led him to a tiny table against a
window.
The occupant rose to meet him. “Mr. Garner.”
“Nice of you to do this for me, Dr. Snyder.”
“Call me Dale.”
Garner saw a dumpy man with an inch-wide strip of curly blond hair
down the center of his scalp. Temporary skin substitute covered his
forehead, cheeks and chin, leaving an X of unharmed skin across his eyes,
nose, and the corners of his mouth. His hands were also bandaged.
“Then I’m Luke. What’s your latest word on the Sea Statue?”
“When the Arms woke me up yesterday afternoon to tell me Larry had
turned alien. How is he?”
Avoiding details, Luke filled the psychologist in on the past twenty-four
hours. “So now I’m doing what I can on the ground while they get me a
ship that will beat Greenberg and the ET to Neptune.”
“Brother, that’s a mess. I never saw the statue, and if I had I’d never
have noticed that button. What are you drinking?”
“I’d better grab a milk shake; I haven’t had lunch. Dale, why did you
want us to bring the statue here?”
“I thought it would help if Larry saw it. There was a case once, long
before I was born, where two patients who both thought they were Mary,
Mother of God, showed up at the same institution. So the doctors put them
both in the same room.”
“Wow. What happened?”
“There was a godawful argument. Finally one of the women gave up
and decided she must be Mary’s mother. She was the one they eventually
cured.”
“You thought Greenberg would decide he was Greenberg if you
showed him he wasn’t the Sea Statue.”
“Right. I gather it didn’t work. You say they can use my help at
Menninger’s?”
“Probably, but I need it first. I told you what I think Greenberg and the
Sea Statue are after. I’ve got to chase them down before they get to it.”
“How can I help?”
“Tell me everything you can about Larry Greenberg. The man on his
way to Neptune has an extraterrestrial’s memories, but his reflexes are
Greenberg’s. He proved that by driving a car. I want to know what I can
count on from the Greenberg side of him.”
“Very little, I’d say. Count on something from the Greenberg side of
him and you’d likely wind up naked on the Moon. But I see your point.
Let’s suppose the, uh, Sea Statue civilization had a law against picking
pockets. Most countries had such laws, you know, before we got so crowded
the cops couldn’t enforce them.”
“I remember.”
Snyder’s eyes widened. “You do? Yes, I suppose you do. Well, suppose
Larry in his present state found someone picking his pocket. His impulse
would be to stop him, but not to yell for a policeman. He’d have to make a
conscious decision to do that. This would be unlikely until after the fight
was over and he’d had time to think.”
“If I caught him by surprise I could count on his human reflexes.”
“Yes, but don’t confuse reflexes with motivations. You don’t know what
his motivations are now.”
“Go on.”
Snyder leaned back and folded his hands behind his head. A waiter
glided up and produced drinks from a well in its torso. Garner paid it and
shooed it away.
Abruptly Snyder was talking. “You know what he looks like: five feet
seven inches tall, dark and fairly, handsome. His parents were Orthodox,
but they weren’t millionaires, they couldn’t afford a fully kosher diet. He’s
very well adjusted, and he has enormous resilience, which is why he was
able to take up contact telepathy.
“He does have some feelings about his height, but nothing we need
bother about. They are partly compensated by what he calls ‘that little extra
something about me.’”
“Mrs. Greenberg told me.”
“Partly he means his telepathy. Partly it’s the medical anomaly I assume
Judy mentioned. But he’s in dead earnest in regarding himself as
something special.
“You might also remember that he’s been reading minds for years,
human and dolphin minds. This gives him an accumulation of useful data.
I doubt if the dolphins are important, but there were physics professors,
math students, and psychologists among the volunteers who let Larry read
their minds by contact. You could call him superbly educated.” Snyder
straightened. “Remember this, when you go out after him. You don’t know
the Sea Statue’s intelligence, but Larry has his own intelligence and
nobody else’s. He’s clever, and adaptable, and unusually sure of himself.
He’s suspicious of superstition, but genuinely religious. His reflexes are
excellent. I know. I’ve played tennis with him: Judy and I against him
alone, with Larry guarding the singles court.”
“Then I’d better stay alert.”
“Absolutely.”
“Suppose his religion was threatened. How would he react?”
“You mean Orthodox Judaism?”
“No, I mean any religion he now happens to hold. Wait, I’ll expand
that. How would he react to a threat against something he’s believed in all
his life?”
“It would make him angry, of course. But he’s not a fanatic. Challenge
him and he’d be willing to argue. But to make him change his mind about
something basic, you’d have to offer real proof. You couldn’t just cast
doubts. If you see what I mean.”
On the great white screen in the Space Traffic Control Center, two
dark blobs hung almost motionless. Halley Johnson swung his phone
camera around so Garner could see it.
“The military ship is going just a teeny bit faster than the
honeymooner. If they’re really going all the way to Neptune they’ll pass
each other.”
“Where else could they be going?”
“A number of asteroids. I have a list.”
“Let’s hear it.”
Johnson read off the names of fourteen minor Greek deities. “A lot
more have been crossed off,” he added. “When the ship passes turnover
point and keeps accelerating, we mark it out.”
“Okay. Keep me posted. How ’bout my ship?”
“Be here at twenty. You’ll be in orbit by twenty-one.”
The Struldbrugs’ Club is not the only club with a lower age limit on its
members. (Consider the Senate.) It is the only club whose age limit rises
one year for every two that passes. In 2106 every member was at least one
hundred and forty-nine years old. Naturally the Struldbrugs’ autodocs were
the best in the world.
But the treatment tanks still looked like oversized coffins.
Luke pulled himself out of the tank and read the itemized bill. It was a
long one. The ’doc had hooked by induction into his spine and done deep
knee bends to build up muscle tone; recharged the tiny battery in his heart;
and added hormones and more esoteric substances to his bloodstream.
Localized ultrasonic pulses had applied the Ch’ien treatment; Luke could
feel the ache from the base of his skull all the way down his spine, to where
sensation almost disappeared in the small of his back. A manicure and
pedicure had finished the checkup.
Luke used his Arm ident to punch for a six months’ supply of the
hormones, antiallergens, selective pest killers, and general rejuvenators
which kept him alive and healthy. What came out of the slot was a
hypodermic the size of a beer can, with instructions all down the sides in
fine print. Luke tightened his lips at the sight of the needle; but you can’t
use a spray hypo when you’ve got to hit the vein. He told the ’doc where to
send the bill.
One more chore and he could take a cat nap.
Because of the decrepit state of many Struldbrugs, the club phone
booths had been made large enough for travel chairs—barely. Already
Luke had the air translucent with cigarette smoke. “How do you talk to a
dolphin?” he asked, feeling unaccountably diffident.
Fred Torrance said, “Just the way you would have talked to Larry. But
Charley will answer in dolphinese, and I’ll translate. You couldn’t make
out his English over the phone.”
“Okay. Charley, my name’s Lucas Garner. I’m with the Arms. Do you
know what’s happened to Larry?”
Grunts, chortles, whistles, squeals, and squeaks! Only once had Luke
heard the like of it. Eighteen years ago he had been a witness at a murder
trial. Three other witnesses—and the victim, who of course was not present
—had been dolphins.
Torrance translated: “He knows Larry’s lost his sense of identity. Dr.
Jansky called and told us all about it.”
“Well, yesterday Larry got away from us and took off in a stolen ship.
I’m going after him. I want to know everything Charley can tell us about
him.”
Dolphin language. Torrance said, “Charley wants a favor in return.”
“Oh, really? What?” Luke braced himself. Since the cracking of the
swimmer-dolphin language barrier, the dolphins had proved very able
bargainers. Fortunately or not, the dolphins’ rigid, complex moral code had
adapted easily to the walker concept of trade.
“He wants to talk to you about the possibility of dolphins taking part in
the seeding of the stars.”
Of the three present, Torrance the seadoc had the clearest
understanding of what was being said. Charley was speaking slowly and
clearly, staying well below the ultrasonic range, but even so Torrance often
had trouble translating. To him the bilingual conversation went like this:
“I’ll be damned in writing,” said Garner. “Charley, is this a new idea?
I’ve never heard of a dolphin wanting to go starhopping.”
“Not…brand new. The question has been discussed on the abstract
level, and many are in favor of it, if only from the fear that swimmers will
be left out of something. But I, myself, never felt the urge until three days
ago.”
“Greenberg. He had the space bug bad, did he?”
“Please use the present tense. Yes, he has the bug all right. I’ve had a
couple of days to get used to Larry in my head. I won’t say I quite
understand this urge to reach Jinx, but I can explain a little of it.
“I dislike using an outmoded term, but part of it is”—Charley used the
English words—“’anifesst desstinee. Part is the fact that on Jinx he could
have as many children as he wants, four or five even, and nobody would
complain. Partly it is the same urge I sometimes get in this tank. No room
to swim. Larrry wants to walk down a street without the slightest fear of
stepping on someone’s toes, having his pocket picked, or getting caught in
a pedestrian traffic jam and being carried six blocks the wrong way. Notice
that I’ve put considerably more thought into analyzing this than Larrry ever
did.”
“And how do you feel about it? You’re a dolphin. You probably never
looked at the stars—”
“Missterr ’Arrnerr, I assure you that we swimmers know what the stars
look like. There are many astronomy and astrophysics tapes in the
illustrated texts your agents sold us. And, after all, we do have to come up
for air sometimes!”
“Sorry. But the point remains: you’ve got plenty of elbow room, you’ve
never had your toes stepped on, and nothing but a killer whale could
possibly be interested in picking your pocket. So what’s in it for you?”
“Perhaps adventure. Perhaps the forming of a new civilization. You
know that there has been only one swimmer civilization for many
thousands of years. The seas are not isolated, as are the continents. If there
is a better way of doing things, the way for us to find out is to build many
communities on many worlds. Is this logical?”
“Yes!” There was no mistaking the emphasis in Garner’s voice. “But it
may not be as easy as you think. We’d certainly have to design you an
entirely new ship, because we’d have to include swimming water. And
water is heavy, dammit. I’ll bet shipping a dolphin would cost ten times as
much as shipping a man.”
“You use water for reaction mass for the landing motors. Could you put
lights in the water tanks?”
“Yes, and we could fill them only two-thirds full, and we could install
filters to remove the fish and the algae and so on before the water reaches
the motors. We could even install small tanks somewhere that you could
ride in while the tanks were being emptied during landing. Charley, are
you beginning to get some picture of the cost of all this?”
“Beginning to, yes. Money is complex.”
“You know it. But you couldn’t possibly buy your way on, not with what
the dolphins produce. Oh, you could get a pair to Wonderland, but how
could two dolphins stay sane alone? What would they live on? Seeding an
ocean isn’t like planting a wheat field, even when you have to make the
topsoil yourself. Fish swim away! Seeding an ocean has to be done all at
once!
“Hmm. You can’t even claim it’s your right to be on a starship.
Dolphins don’t pay UN taxes…hmm,” said Luke, and scratched his scalp.
“Charley, just how many dolphins could be persuaded to leave their oceans
forever?”
“As many as we need. Selected by lot, if necessary. The Law permits
such selection in cases of extreme need. Of the hundreds of swimmers who
took part in early walker experiments to prove us intelligent, and of the
twenty or thirty who died as a result, nearly all had been so selected.”
“Oh…really? And nobody ever guessed.” Torrance wondered at
Garner’s peculiar expression. Almost a look of horror. It had been so long
ago; why should he be so shocked? Garner said, “Let it pass. How many
genuine volunteers?”
“They would all be genuine. But you want to know how many would
volunteer without the lots? No more than fifty to a hundred, I would think,
out of all the oceans.”
“All right. Now what we’ll have to start with is a massive advertising
campaign. The dolphins will have to contribute a share of the cost of a
dolphin spaceship. Just a gesture. It would be nominal compared to the
final cost, but to you it will be expensive. Then we’ll have to convince most
of the walker world that a planet without dolphins isn’t worth living on.
Needless to say, I already believe this.”
“Thank you. Thank you for all of us. Would swimmers be taking part in
this advertising?”
“Not directly. We’d want pronouncements, statements from prominent
swimmers like the one the newspapers call the Lawyer. You know who I
mean?”
“Yes.”
“Understand that I’m just guessing. We’ll have to hire a ‘public
opinions consultant,’ a publicity agent, and let him do the work. And it
might be all for nothing.”
“Could we lower the cost by shipping swimmers in Doctor Jansskee’s
time retarder field?”
Garner looked utterly astonished. Torrance grinned, recognizing the
reaction: Is This A Dolphin Talking? “Yes,” said Garner, nodding to
himself. “Right. We won’t even need tanks. Let the humans do the crew
work, and keep you frozen until they can find and seed a small sea, like the
Mediterranean…”
It went on and on.
“…So it’s settled,” said Garner, a long time later. “Talk it over with the
dolphins, especially the ones with power, but don’t make a move until I get
back. I want to pick a publicity agent. The right publicity agent.”
“I hate to remind you, but isn’t there a chance you won’t come back?”
“Holy Hannah! I completely forgot.” Garner glanced down at his wrist.
“There goes my cat nap. Quick, Charley, start talking about Greenberg.
What’s your opinion of him?”
“Prejudiced, I’m afraid. I like him and envy him his hands. He is very
alien to me. And yet, perhaps not.” Charley let himself sink to the bottom
of the tank. Torrance took the opportunity to clear his throat, which felt
like he’d been eating used razor blades.
Charley surfaced and blew steam. “He is not alien. Negative! He thinks
a lot like me, because he took contact from me several times before we
chanced it the other way around. He is a practical joker—no, that is very
far from the true concept. Well, it will have to do. Larrry is a dolphin type
of practical joker. Years ago he selected a few of our most famous jokes, old
japes which we consider classics, translated them into something he could
use as a walker, and then decided not to use them because he might go to
prison for it. If he is no longer afraid of prison he might be tempted to play
his jokes.”
“Uh huh.”
“Such as something I have not tried yet with a swimmer. I must use the
English word: hypnotism.”
Torrance said, “I didn’t get that.”
“Defined as an induced state of monomania.”
“Oh, hypnotism.”
“Larrry has studied it thoroughly, and even tried it out, and for him it
works. On a swimmer it might be ineffective.”
“He’s already tried it,” said Garner. “Anything else?”
“Garrnnrr, you must understand that the dolphin gurgle-buzz-
SQUEEEE is not truly a practical joke. It is a way of looking at things.
Putting a monkey wrench in machinery is often the only way to force
somebody to repair, replace, or redesign the machinery. Especially legal or
social machinery. Biting off somebody’s fin at exactly the right time can
change his whole attitude toward life, often for the better. Larrry
understands this.”
“I wish I did. Thanks for your time, Charley.”
“Negative! Negative! Thank you for yours!”
An hour to the long jump. Luke’s throat felt well used. He might still
have time for a fifteen-minute cat nap, but he’d wake up feeling worse than
ever.
He sat in the Struldbrugs’ reading room and thought about Greenberg.
Why had he become an alien? Well, that was easy. With two sets of
memories to choose from, he’d naturally chosen the identity most used to
sorting itself out from other identities. But why cling to it? He must know
by now that he was not the Sea Statue. And he’d had a happy life as Larry
Greenberg.
His wife was something to envy—and she loved him. According to Dr.
Snyder, he was stable, well adjusted. He liked his work. He thought of
himself as something special.
But the Sea Statue was all alone in the universe, the last of its race,
marooned among hostiles. The Greenberg Sea Statue had also lost his
ability of—well, telepathic hypnosis was close enough.
Any sane person would rather be Greenberg.
Garner thought, I’ll have to assume that Greenberg as Greenberg
literally cannot think with the Sea Statue memories in his mind. He must
remain the Sea Statue to function at all. Otherwise he’d have at least tried
to change back.
But that peculiar arrogance he’d displayed under interrogation. Not—a
slave. Not human.
A robot bonged softly next to his ear. Garner turned and read in flowing
light on the waiter’s chest: “You are requested to call Mr. Charles Watson at
once.”
Chick Watson was fat, with thick lips and a shapeless putty nose. He
wore crew-cut, bristly black hair and, at the moment, a gray seventeen-
hundred shadow over cheeks and jaw. He had a harmless look. Centered
on his desk was a large screen viewer running film at abnormal speed. Not
one in a thousand could read that fast.
A buzzer sounded. Chick snapped off the reader and turned on the
phone. For a fat man he moved quickly and accurately.
“Here.”
“Lucas Garner calling, sir. Do you want to see him?”
“Desperately.” Chick Watson’s voice belied his appearance. It was a
voice of command, a deep, ringing bass.
Luke looked tired. “You wanted me, Chick?”
“Yeah, Garner. I thought you could help me with some questions.”
“Fine, but I’m pressed for time.”
“I’ll make it quick. First, this message from Ceres to Titan Enterprises.
The Golden Circle made a takeoff under radio silence yesterday, from
Topeka Base, and the Belt intends to submit a bill for tracking. Titan sent
the notice here. They say their ship must have been stolen.”
“That’s right. Kansas City has the details. It’s a very complicated story.”
“An hour later the Navy ship Iwo Jima—”
“Also stolen.”
“Any connection with the Sea Statue incident at UCLA?”
“Every connection. Look, Chick—”
“I know, get it from Kansas City. Finally…” Chick fumbled among the
spools of film on his desk. His voice was suspiciously mild as he said, “Here
it is. Your notification that you’ll be leaving Topeka on a commandeered
Navy ship, the Heinlein; departure: Topeka Base at twenty-one hundred;
destination: unknown, probably Neptune; purpose: official business.
Garner, I always said it would happen, but I never really believed it.”
“I haven’t gone senile, Chick. This is urgent.”
“Fastest attack of senility I ever heard of. What could possibly be urgent
enough to get you into space at your age?”
“It’s that urgent.”
“You can’t explain?”
“No time.”
“Suppose I order you not to go.”
“I think that would cost lives. Lots of lives. It could also end human
civilization.”
“Melodramatic.”
“It’s the literal truth.”
“Garner, you’re asking me to assume my own ignorance and let you go
ahead on your own because you’re the only expert on the situation. Right?”
Hesitation. “I guess that’s right.”
“Fine. I hate making my own decisions. That’s why they put me behind
a desk. But, Garner, you must know things Kansas City doesn’t. Why don’t
you call me after takeoff? I’ll be studying in the meantime.”
“In case I kick off? Good idea.”
“Don’t let it slip your mind, now.”
“Sure not.”
“And take your vitamins.”
Like a feathered arrow the Golden Circle fell away from the sun. The
comparison was hackneyed but accurate, for the giant triangular wing was
right at the rear of the ship, with the slender shaft of the fuselage projecting
deep into the forward apex. The small forward wings had folded into the
sides shortly after takeoff. The big fin was a maze of piping. Live steam,
heated by the drive, circled through a generator and through the cooling
pipes before returning to start the journey again. Most of the power was fed
into the fusion shield of the drive tube. The rest fed the life-support system.
In one respect the “arrow” simile was inexact. The arrow flew sideways,
riding the sun-hot torch which burned its belly.
Kzanol roared his displeasure. The cards had failed again! He swept the
neat little array between his clublike hands, tapped them into deck
formation, and ripped the deck across. Then, carefully, he got to his feet.
The drive developed one terran gravity, and he hadn’t quite had time to get
used to the extra weight. He sat down at the casino table and dug into the
locker underneath. He came out with a new deck, opened it, let the
automatic shuffler play with it for a while, then took it out and began to lay
it out solitaire style. The floor around him was littered with little pieces of
magnetized plastic card.
Perhaps he could think up some fitting punishment for the pilot, who
had taught him this game.
The pilot and copilot sat motionless in the control room. From time to
time the pilot used his hands to change course a trifle. Every fourteen
hours or so the copilot would bring Kzanol a bowl of water and then return
to her seat. Actinic gas streamed from the belly of the ship, pushing it to
ever higher velocities.
It was a beautiful night. Years had passed since Garner last saw the stars;
in the cities they couldn’t shine through the smog and the neon glare, and
even the American continents were mostly city. Soon he would see them
more clearly than he had in half a century. The air was like the breath of
Satan. Garner was damp with sweat, and so were Anderson and Neumuth.
“I still say we could do this by ourselves,” said Anderson.
“You wouldn’t know what to look for,” Garner countered. “I’ve trained
myself for this. I’ve been reading science fiction for decades. Centuries!
Neumuth, where are you going?”
Neumuth, the short dark one, had turned and was walking away. “Time
to get strapped down,” he called back. “Bon voyage!”
“He’s going forward, to the cockpit of the booster,” said Anderson. “We
go up that escalator to the ship itself.”
“Oh. I wish I could see it better. It’s just one big shadow.”
The shadow was a humped shadow, like a paper dart with a big lizard
clinging to its back. The paper glider was a ramjet-rocketplane, hydrogen
fueled in the ramjet and using the cold liquid hydrogen to make its own
liquid oxygen in flight. The slim cylinder clinging to its upper surface was
a fusion drive cruiser with some attachments for rescue work. It carried two
men.
Using its fusion motor in Earth’s atmosphere would have been a capital
offense. In taking off from ground eighteen hours earlier, Masney and
Kzanol/Greenberg had broken twelve separate local laws, five
supranational regulations and a treaty with the Belt.
Another ship roared a god’s anger as it took off. Garner blinked at the
light. “That was our rendezvous ship,” Anderson said matter-of-factly.
Luke was tired of having to ask silly-seeming questions. He wasn’t going
to like Anderson, he decided. If the kid wanted to tell him why they
needed a rendezvous ship, he would.
They had reached the bottom of the escalator. “Meet you at the top,”
said Garner, reaching into his ashtray. Anderson stared, jolted, as an
invalid’s travel chair became a flying saucer. An Arm using an illegal flying
machine? An Arm?
Anderson rode up the stairs, whistling. This trip might be fun after all.
“Just leave the chair on the escalator platform,” he said at the top.
“We’ve made arrangements to have it delivered to the local Struldbrugs’
Club. They’ll take good care of it. I’ll carry you in, sir.”
“You get my medikit. I’ll walk,” said Garner. And he did, wobbling and
using his arms freely. He barely reached his gee chair. Anderson found the
medikit and followed. He checked Garner’s crash web before he used his
own.
“Neumuth? Ready,” said Anderson, as if into empty air. He continued,
“The other ramjet-rocket carried a bundle of solid fuel rockets as big as this
ship. They’re strap-ons. We don’t have any more power than the Golden
Circle, and we’re a day and a half behind them, so we use the strap-ons to
give us an initial boost. Inefficient, but if it works—”
“—It’s good,” Garner finished for him. His voice was thickened by the
pull of the linear accelerator. For five seconds the soundless pressure
lasted, two gravities of pull. Then the rams fired and they were off.
It would take two days of uncomfortable two-gee acceleration to get
there first, thought Garner, compressed in his chair. His old bones would
take a beating. Already he was missing the gadgets in his own chair. This
trip wasn’t going to be fun.
Lars was eating a very messy sardine-and-egg sandwich when the
buzzer buzzed. He put it down gently, using both hands, so that it wouldn’t
bounce in the nearly nonexistent gravity. He wiped his hands on his
coverall, which he washed frequently, and went to the transceiver.
The maser beam had crossed the void in one instantaneous beep. The
radio translated it into sound, then thoughtfully scaled it down against the
minute Doppler shift. What came out was the colorless voice of Cutter,
duty man at Ceres.
“Thank you, Eros, your message received in full. No more emergencies
this time, Lam. Topeka Base called us eight hours ago, giving us the time
of takeoff and predicted course. According to your report the takeoff was
four minutes late, but that’s typical. Keep us posted.
“Thank you, Eros, your—”
Lars switched it off and went back to his sandwich. Briefly he wondered
if Cutter had noticed that the Navy ship was following the two he had
tracked eighteen hours ago. No doubt he had.
“You’re taking it too hard,” said Dale Snyder.
Judy shrugged.
Again Dale took in the puffy eyelids showing beneath the makeup, the
unfamiliar lines in Judy’s pretty twenty-eight-year-old face, the death-grip
on her coffee glass, her rigid position in what should have been an easy
chair. “Look here,” he said. “You’ve got far too many things working on
you. Have you considered—I mean, have you given any thought to
invoking your agreement with Larry concerning adultery? At least you
could eliminate one of your tensions. And you’re not helping him by
worrying.”
“I know. I’ve thought about it. But—” she smiled, “not with a friend,
Dale.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Dale Snyder said hastily. And blushed.
Fortunately the bandages covered most of it. “What about going to Vegas?
The town’s full of divorcees of both sexes, most of them temporarily
terrified of getting married again. Great for a short-term affair. You could
cut it short when Larry comes back.”
He may have put too much assurance into the last sentence, because
Judy’s grip tightened on her glass and relaxed immediately. “I don’t think
so,” she said listlessly.
“Think about it some more. You could even do some gambling.”
Two gravities! Twelve hours ago he would have sneered at himself. Two
gravities, lying on his back? Luke could have done it on his head. But that
was twelve hours ago, twelve hours of double weight and throbbing metal
and noise and no sleep. The strap-on fission/fusion motors roared in pairs
outside the hull. Two had been dropped already. Ten remained, burning
two at a time. It would be a day and a half before ship’s weight returned to
normal.
The stars were hard, emphatic points. Never had the sky been so black;
never had the stars been so bright. Luke felt that they would have burned
tiny holes in his retinae if he could have held his eyes fixed on one point.
Tiny multicolored blindnesses to add to his enviable collection of scars.
The Milky Way was a foggy river of light, with sharp actinic laser points
glaring through.
So here he was.
He’d been seventy-two the day they launched the first passenger ship:
an orbital craft, clumsy and spavined and oversized by today’s standards,
nothing more than a skip-glider. They’d told him he was too old to buy a
ticket. What was he now? He wanted to laugh, but there was pressure on
his chest.
With an effort he turned his head. Anderson was locking a sheet of
transparent plastic over part of the complex wraparound control panel.
Most of the panel was already under the plastic sheets. He saw Luke
looking at him, and he said, “Nothing to do from now on but watch for
rocks. I’ve put us above the plane of the Belt.”
“Can we afford the extra time?”
“Sure. If they’re going to Neptune.” Anderson’s voice came cheerful
and energetic, though slurred by the extra weight on his cheeks.
“Otherwise they’ll beat us anyway, to wherever they’re going. And we won’t
know it until they make turnover.”
“We’ll have to risk that.”
The extra weight wasn’t bothering Anderson at all.
One gravity is standard for manned spacecraft. Some rescue ships; and
a few expresses in the Belt, have attachments for clusters of fusion/fission
strap-on engines to cut their transit time. Often it makes sense. More often
it doesn’t. Given continuous acceleration, the decrease in trip time varies
as the square root of the increase in power. Greenberg and the ET should
have expected their pursuers, had they known of them, to stay a day and a
half behind all the way to Neptune.
A strap-on can only be used once. The smooth cylindrical shell
contains only hydrogen gas under pressure and a core of uranium alloy.
The fusion shield generator is external; it stays with the ship when the
strap-on falls away. The moment the shield forms on the inside of the shell,
neutrons from the core begin to reflect back into the uranium mass, and
everything dissolves in the chain reaction. As time decreases the pressure
inside the trapped star, the tiny exhaust aperture is designed to wear away,
keeping the acceleration constant.
This time the strap-ons were vital. The Heinlein would beat the others
to Neptune by six hours—
If they were headed for Neptune! But if Diller were wrong, or if Diller
had lied—if Diller, like Greenberg, thought he was an alien—if the fleeing
ships were en route to some asteroid—then the Heinlein would overshoot.
When the others made turnover it would be too late. The Heinlein would
be going too fast.
Of course, there were always the missiles. And the Belt would consider
it a violation of treaty if the Golden Circle or the Iwo Jima landed in the
Belt. They might be persuaded to attack.
But there was Lloyd Masney.
With a full minute’s delay in transmission, his discussion with Chick
Watson had been both tiring and unproductive. Now Chick knew
everything he knew, except for the exhaustive details he’d collected on
Greenberg’s life. They’d reached some obvious decisions. They would not
send any more ships from Earth, ships which would obviously arrive far too
late to help. Earth would fire at sight if either of the target ships reached
anywhere and started back. Chick would keep his communications open
for Garner, ready to search out any information he might need. And one
other decision—
“No, we can’t call on the Belt for help.” Chick’s expression dismissed
the idea with the contempt he felt it deserved. “Not with Belt relations the
way they are now. They know what they’d do to us with an embargo on
uranium, and we know what we’d do to them by holding off their vitamins,
and both sides are just itching to see who’d collapse first. You think they’d
believe a story like ours? All the proof we can offer is second hand, from
their point of view. They’d think we were setting up our own mining
operation, or trying to claim a moon. They’d think anything at all, because
all they can tell for sure is that three ships from Earth are on their way to
Neptune.
“Worse yet, they might just assume that this telepathy amplifier won’t
reach beyond Earth. In which case they could make a better deal with
Greenberg, king of the world, than they can with us.”
“I’ll never buy that,” Garner had answered. “But you’re right, there’s no
point in crying for help. There may be a better answer.”
And so they waited. If they were right, if the stolen ships were going to
the eighth planet, they would be turning in six days. Luke and Anderson
had nothing to do until the ET’s gave them their orders.
Luke went to sleep, finally, smiling. He smiled because the gees were
pulling on his cheeks. Anderson was sleeping too, letting the autopilot do
the work.
At twenty-one hundred the next day the last pair of strap-ons burned
out, and were dropped. Now six tumbling pairs of thick-walled metal
cylinders followed the Heinlein in a line millions of miles long. In a
century all would reach interstellar space. Some would eventually pass
between the galaxies.
The ship went on at a comfortable one gee. Luke scowled ferociously
to exercise his facial muscles, and Anderson stepped into the airlock to do
isometric exercises.
The rocks of the Belt slipped by below, faster every second.
He was a clerkish-looking man with a droning voice, and he called
himself Ceres Base. From his appearance he might never have had a name
of his own. He wanted to know what an Earth Navy ship was doing in the
Belt.
“We have passage,” Anderson told him curtly.
Yes, said Ceres, but what is the Heinlein’s purpose?
Garner whispered, “Let me have the mike.”
“Just talk. He can hear you.”
“Ceres, this is Lucas Garner, Arm of the UN. Why the sudden shift?”
“Mr. Garner, your authority does not exist here in—”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You just now realized we’re following the Golden Circle. Didn’t you?”
“Are you really? To what purpose?”
“None of your business. But I may tell one of your superiors, if you pick
the right superior. Get him on fast, were getting further away every
minute.”
“The Belt will not allow you passage unless you explain your purpose
here.”
“The Belt won’t touch us. Good-by.”
At the sound of the bell Marda rolled off the couch and walked
smoothly into the phone booth. Already there was only a slight pull in her
abdomen from the surgical cement, though the operation was just twelve
hours old. A slight pull when she moved, to remind her of what she had
lost.
“Lit!” she called. “Ceres. It’s for you.”
Lit trotted in from the garden.
Cutter looked apprehensive for once. “Remember the two bandit ships
from Topeka Base? Someone’s joined the procession.”
“Took them long enough. We warned them days ago. When did it take
off?”
“Two days ago.”
“Two days, Cutter?”
“Lit, the Heinlein gave us plenty of warning and an accurate course
projection. She also used strap-on boosters. The time/position curve looks
completely different from the curves for the bandits. It took me this long to
see that everybody’s going in the same direction.”
“Damn it, Cutter—never mind. Anything else?”
“The Heinlein’s passing Ceres now. Do you want to talk to Lucas
Garner, Arm of the UN?”
“An Arm? No. What’s an Arm doing out here?”
“He won’t say. He might tell you.”
“What makes you so sure the Belt won’t stop us?”
“Well, they can’t catch us and board us. All they could do is throw
missiles at us, right?”
“You make me so happy.”
“Belters aren’t stupid, Anderson. Uh, oh.”
A space-tanned Caucasian with black hair and wrinkled eyes looked
out of the screen at them and said, “Do I have the honor of addressing
Lucas Garner aboard the Heinlein?”
“Right. Who’s this?”
“Charles Martin Shaeffer. First Speaker, Belt Political section. May I
ask—”
“‘Little’ Shaeffer?”
The mahogany man’s face froze for an instant, then barely smiled.
“They call me Lit. What are you up to, Garner?”
“You I’ll tell, Shaeffer. Now don’t interrupt, because it’s a long story…”
It took fifteen minutes to tell. Shaeffer listened without comment.
Then there were questions. Shaeffer wanted details, clarification. Then
some of the questions were repeated. There were veiled accusations, which
became less veiled. Anderson kept the beam fixed and sensibly let Luke do
the talking. After an hour of question-and-answer, Luke shut it off.
“That’s as much cross examination as I’m taking today, Shaeffer.”
“What did you expect me to do, swallow your tale whole? Your opinion
of Belters needs revision.”
“No, Shaeffer, it doesn’t. I never expected to be believed. You can’t
afford to believe me; the propaganda value would be enormous if Earth
took you in on such a wild story.”
“Naturally. On the other hand, what you’re trying to tell me is that an
alien monster is threatening all of human civilization. In view of this it
seems odd that you object to answering a few questions.”
“Nuts. Shaeffer, do this. Send a few armed—”
“I’m not taking orders—”
“Don’t interrupt me, Shaeffer. Send a few armed ships to follow me to
Neptune. I’m sure that’s where they’re going; they’ve already passed
turnover for most of the asteroids. It’ll take your ships a while to catch us.
They may get there in time to help us out, and they may not. If you think
I’m a liar, then send your ships along only to make sure I don’t do any
poaching. Regardless of what you suspect me of, you’ll need ships to stop
me, right? But arm them, Shaeffer. Arm them good.
“Your only other choice is to start a war, right? Right. If you want my
story confirmed call the Arms office in Los Angeles, then call the UN
Comparative Cultures Exhibit in Brasilia Ciudad and ask if they’ve still got
the Sea Statue. That’s all you can do. So call me back and tell me how
many ships you’re sending.” Luke gestured to Anderson, who turned him
off.
“Jerk,” said Anderson, with feeling.
“Not at all. He did the right thing. He’ll keep on doing it. First he’ll
send ships after us, including one with antiradar which will have to get
there later than the others because of the extra weight. He’ll call Earth and
get my story confirmed as well as he can. The worst he can think of me
then is that I’m thorough. Finally he’ll call us and tell us he’s sending one
less ship than he is, leaving out the antiradar. That ship gives the Belt every
chance to catch me red-handed, doing whatever illegal treaty-breaking
thing they think I’m doing, especially since I don’t know the Belt’s
discovered antiradar—”
“Uh huh.”
“But if they don’t catch me at anything then they cooperate with me.”
“Uh huh. It’s perfect. But will they be able to handle it when we turn
out to be telling the truth?”
“Sure. They’ll be armed for us, and a weapon is a weapon. Besides
which, some of them will believe me. Belters, they’re always waiting for the
first alien contact. They’ll be armed for bear, regardless.” Garner rubbed
his scalp. “I wonder what the Sea Statue is armed for?”
A dry tooth socket is not extremely painful. The pain is mild. What
drives the unfortunate victim to thoughts of suicide is, the pain never lets
up. There is no escape.
Marda felt the gentle, reminding pull in her abdomen every time she
moved.
Many Belt women were childless. Some had been spayed by solar
storms. Some were frigid, and their frigidity let them endure the loneliness
of a singleship. Some had undesirable recessive genes; and, contrary to
popular terran belief, the Belt had fertility laws. Some could not conceive
in free or nearly free fall. They were a special class, the exiles from
Confinement.
What was Lit doing in that phone booth? It had been over an hour.
He was furious, she could see that. She’d never seen him so mad. Even
after the screen went dark, he just sat there glaring at the screen.
Something made Marda get up and push open the soundproof door.
Lit looked around. “That Arm. That flatlander. Marda, can you imagine an
Arm getting huffy with me?”
“He really pushed all your buttons, didn’t he? What happened, Lit?”
“Oh…” Lit banged the heels of his hands together. “You remember
those two ships that took off from Topeka Base without—”
“I never heard about it.”
“Right. I forgot.” She’d hardly been in a mood to listen then. “Well, two
days ago…”
By the time he finished he was almost calm. Marda felt safe in saying,
“But, Lit, you cross-examined him for a full hour. What else could he do
but cut you off or admit he was lying?”
“Good point. What I’m really mad about is that tale he told me.”
“You’re sure he was lying? It sounds almost too fantastic.”
“Aw, honey. It is too fantastic.”
“Then forget it.”
“That’s not the point. What’s he want with Neptune? Why’s he need
three ships? And why, in the name of Reason, does he commandeer the
Golden Circle from Titan Enterprises?”
“To back up his story?”
“No. I think it’s the other way around. His story was tailored to fit the
facts.”
Slowly he turned back to face the blank screen. He sat for a while, with
Marda watching him, and then he said, “I’m going to have to do just as he
told me. That burns me. Remind me to tell you someday why I hate Arms.”
“Okay. Later today, then.”
“Good girl.” But he’d already forgotten her. Still he stared at the blank
screen, not willing to give Ceres its orders until he’d thought them out
completely. Finally he muttered, “I can get the jump on him. I’ll send the
ships from the lead Trojans; he’ll be passing right over them. We’ll be after
him faster than he thinks.” His hand darted out. “And—mph. I can send a
radar proof. Operator? Get me a maser to Achilles, fast.”
Of course, the whole ploy could be a red herring, he thought, waiting
for the operator to call back. A distraction for something going on right
here in the Belt. Well, they won’t get away with that either. Every ship that
leaves Earth or the Moon is going to be questioned. We’ll board some of
them, and follow the ones that won’t allow it. Earth will get its share too.
I’ll make our espionage system think the end of the world is coming.
Four and a half days later neither Kzanol nor Kzanol/Greenberg had
turned ship. It seemed they really were going to Neptune. If so they would
be turning in eighteen hours.
It was already time for Anderson to turn ship. He did. “We’ll get there
six hours ahead of them,” he told Garner.
“Good.”
“Of course, they could be headed for outer space. It could be a
coincidence that they’re going in that direction. Then we’ll lose them.”
“In those ships? Besides, I never doubted they were going to Neptune. I
just didn’t want to take chances.”
“Uh huh. I’m just hypothesizing. How about some lunch?”
“Good.” It was high noon. The life-support system didn’t include
enough room to walk around in, but it did have a mechanized kitchen; and
one thing the space conquerors had learned early was that caviar is cheaper
than corn flakes. Caviar has far more food value per payload ounce. So
Garner and Anderson ate prefrozen crepes Veronique and wondered how
long it would be before they could exercise off the extra pounds.
While they were feeding the plates back into the food slot, Garner
found something else to worry about. “Can we turn our telescope around?”
“Sure. Why?”
“To follow the other ships. They’re still ahead of us, and we’re moving
ass-backwards.”
“We can’t see them now because the glare of our exhaust blocks our
view. But we’ll be passing them in six hours, and we can watch them from
then on.”
“We’ll never catch them,” said the man in the lead ship. He was a tall,
spindly Negro with prematurely white hair and an habitual poker face.
“They’ll be three days ahead of us all the way. Poachers!”
Somebody, Smoky from his accent, said, “It’d be four if we hadn’t
started from Achilles.”
“Something on the scope,” said one of the other ships. All five were
singleships, hurriedly converted to war potential from their mining duties
in the lead cluster of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.
“Like what?”
“Specks of hydrogen light. Moving almost as fast as the Arm, judging by
the red shift. Way ahead of him.”
“Is it too late to call Ceres?”
“Direct, yes. She’ll be behind the Trojans for a while.”
“Tartov! Call Phoebe and say that there are three ships past Uranus, all
en route to Neptune, all moving at approx the same speed. I want ETAs for
each of them.”
“I hear you, Lew.”
The fleet of five ships looked like a small swarm of fireflies. They were
only thousands of miles apart; they stayed that close to avoid irritating
message delays. The distance would still have hidden them from each
other if they had been using chemical fuels or ion jets, but the searing light
of the fusion drives showed brighter than any of the surrounding stars.
“Lew?”
“Here.”
“I’m sure one of them is a honeymoon special. It’s got a strong oxygen
line in its spectrum.”
“Yeah? The Arms are thorough, you’ve got to give them credit.”
Tartov said, “They must be after something big. Something
tremendous.”
None of the others spoke. Perhaps they were reserving judgment.
Behind the swarm, falling further behind with each second, a lone firefly
struggled in pursuit.
Something went by like a falling comet, if there were such a thing.
“There goes Greenberg,” said Anderson, grinning. The blue-white light
faded slowly into the background of stars.
“The Golden Circle should be by in a few minutes,” he added.
“Greenberg’s ship is just a touch faster.”
Garner didn’t answer.
Anderson turned to look at him. “Something bugging you?” he asked
kindly.
Garner nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it for days. I just now
realized that there isn’t any good answer. It’s like trying to keep a teleport in
jail.”
“What is?”
“Trying to keep either of those birds from picking up the amplifier.”
He slapped his chair absently for the cigarette button, caught himself
and scowled. “Look. We can’t get to it first. We don’t know how they plan
to find it themselves. Probably they just remember where they put it. We
don’t even know how big it is! We can’t arrest them; at least we can’t arrest
the ET because he’d just turn us into spare butlers, and we’ll have trouble
with Greenberg because he’s got an armed ship and Masney can use the
guns. He may be better than you, son.” Garner looked horribly like a
Greek tragic mask, but his voice was the voice of a very worried man. “It
seems to me that the only thing we can do is shoot on sight.”
“You can’t do that!” Anderson protested. “You’ll kill Greenberg and
Masney both!”
“I don’t want to kill anyone. Give me another choice!”
“Well, give me a chance to! I haven’t even thought about it yet!” He
screwed his young face into a smooth semblance of Garner’s. “Hey!” he
exclaimed suddenly. “Yeah, I’ve got something. You don’t have to shoot on
sight. You can wait to find out if what they’re looking for is really on
Neptune.”
“What good will that do?”
“They could have left something on one of the moons, or in orbit. But
if it’s on Neptune, they can’t get at it! Neither of their ships develops more
than one gee. Neptune’s pull is higher than that. They can’t land.”
“No good. The ET has a winged ship. But that’s good thinking anyway,
son.”
“You bet it is,” Anderson said angrily. “How the hell is he going to get
back up?”
Luke Garner looked like he’d seen a vision. After a moment he asked,
“Son, have you ever thought of joining the Arms?”
“Why—” Anderson began modestly.
Who are you?
The two stared at one another.
WHO ARE YOU???????
“Lucas Launcelot Garner. Arm.”
“Leroy. George Anderson’s boy. The astronaut.”
I DON’T WANT YOU FOLLOWING ME. The Mind was blasting,
angry. Even when merely “thinking aloud,” it held Garner and Anderson
physically and mentally paralyzed. Then it came to a decision. Anderson
reached toward the control panel. His fingernails rapped against plastic. He
began fumbling at the catches on the guard panel.
Garner pushed him back with one hand.
It lashed him. Garner felt it stop his heart, and he gasped, horribly.
Right now? he wondered. His sight turned red and went out.
He came back to life with a singing in his head. Anderson was looking
terribly haggard. He had a spray hypo in his hand. “Thank God,” he
blurted. “I thought you were gone.”
“Heart stopped,” Garner wheezed. (Not this time.) “First time it’s ever
happened. What did you use?”
“Adrenalin in the heart. Are you all right?”
“Sure. Considering.”
The young pilot was still pale. “You know what he told me to do? I was
going to turn off the fusion shield! They’d have seen it on Earth.” He
shuddered. “In daylight they’d have seen it! Very lucky thing you stopped
me. But how did you know?”
“I knew what he wanted for a result. Never mind. How did you know it
was my heart?”
“I felt him do it. Well, we don’t have to worry about him until we get to
Neptune. He went out of range right after he stopped your heart.”
“We’ll have to shoot first with that bird.”
“It’ll be a pleasure,” Anderson said furiously.
Kzanol strained to hang onto the enemy minds, but it was no use. Not
only was distance against him; the difference in velocities was even more of
a barrier. A slight relativistic difference in time rates could make
communication impossible, even between two thrints.
He turned his attention back to the cards. The pilot, who was English,
called this game Patience. It was well named. Kzanol was learning patience
the hard way. The floor of the lounge was littered with scraps of torn
plastic; but this one deck had already survived ten lost games. It was the last
deck on board.
Growling deep in his throat, like the carnivore he was, Kzanol scraped
the cards together and shuffled them. He was learning coordination, too.
And he had learned something about himself: he would not let a slave see
him cheating at cards. He had cheated once, and the pilot had somehow
guessed. He would not cheat again.
Kzanol jumped. Another one! This one was too far to the side to
control, but easily close enough to sense. And yet…the image had a
fuzziness that had nothing to do with distance. As if the slave were asleep.
But…different.
For half an hour it stayed within reach. In that time Kzanol satisfied
himself that there was no other slave on board. He did not think of another
thrint. He would have recognized the taste of a thrint command.
At six hundred hours the next morning, Greenberg’s ship turned
around. Three minutes later the Golden Circle did the same. Anderson
found the prints in the scope camera when he woke up: two lights which
stretched slowly into bright lines, then contracted with equal deliberation
into somewhat brighter points.
The time passed slowly. Garner and Anderson were already deep in a
tournament which they played on the viewer screen: a rectangular array of
dots to be connected by lines, with victory going to the player who
completed the most squares. Almost every day they raised the stakes.
On the morning of the last day Garner got back to even. At one point
he had been almost eleven thousand dollars in debt. “See?” he said. “You
don’t give up all your pleasures as you get older.”
“Just one,” Anderson said thoughtlessly.
“More than that,” Garner admitted. “My taste buds have been wearing
out for, lo, these many years. But I guess someday someone will find a way
to replace them. Just like my spinal cord. That wore out too.”
“Wore out? You mean—it wasn’t an accident? The nerves just—died?”
“Just went into a coma would be more like it.”
A swift change of subject was in order. “Have you got any better idea of
what we do when we get to Neptune? Do we hide on one of the moons
and watch?”
“Right,” said Garner.
But half an hour later he asked, “Can we reach Earth from here?”
“Only by maser,” Anderson said dubiously. “Everyone on Earth will be
able to listen in. The beam will spread that far. Have you got any secrets
from the man on the slidewalk?”
“Don’t worry about it. Aim a maser at Earth.”
It took half an hour for Anderson to center the beam and set it tracking.
“If it’s ‘Love to Mother,’ you’re dead,” he warned Garner.
“My mother passed away some time ago. In fact, it’s been just about a
century. And she thought she was an old woman! Hello, Arm
Headquarters. This is Lucas Garner calling the United Nations
Technological Police.”
Anderson nudged him with an elbow. “Are you waiting for an answer,
shnook?”
“Of course not!” Habits are hard to break. “This is Garner calling Arm
Headquarters, Earth. Please aim your reply at Neptune. We urgently need
the following information from Dorcas Jansky. Does his retarder field stop
radar completely? Repeat, completely. Would the ET suit do the same?”
He put down the mike. “Okay, son, repeat that a few times.”
“All right, it’s on repeat. Now what was that all about?”
“I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out,” Garner said
smugly. “The ET has been frozen for about two billion years, according to
Greenberg. I think he was telling the truth. He couldn’t know that there’s
something on Neptune unless he put it there two billion years ago. And
how could he assume that it hasn’t fallen apart or rusted to death or
whatever, after all that time?”
“It’s in a retarder field.”
“Right.”
Anderson looked at the chron. “You’ll be getting your answer in a little
over eight hours, not counting the time it takes to get what’s-his-name.
Figure an hour; they’ll be calling around nineteen thirty. So let’s get some
sleep. We’ll be coming in about three tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. Sleeping pills?”
“Uh huh.” Anderson punched buttons on the medicine box. “Luke, I
still think you were waiting for Earth to answer.”
“You can’t prove it, son.”
Twenty-one forty-five. Garner studied the board for a moment, then
drew one short line between two dots of light. The scanner, set to follow
the movements of the tip of his stylus, reproduced the line on the board.
The radio boomed to life.
“This is Arm Headquarters calling spaceship Heinlein. Arm
Headquarters calling Lucas Garner, spaceship Heinlein. Garner, this is
Chick. I got hold of Jansky this morning, and he spent three hours doing
experiments in our lab. He says a retarder field does, repeat does, reflect
one hundred percent of energy of any frequency, including radar, and
including everything he could think of. Visible, ultraviolet, infrared, radio,
X rays. If you’re interested, he thinks there’s a mathematical relation
between a retarder field and a fusion shield. If he finds one, do you want to
know? Is there anything else we can help you with?”
“You can help me with this game,” Luke muttered. But Anderson had
erased it, along with the six-inch curve Luke had drawn when he jerked his
arm at the sound of the radio.
The man in the lead ship ran fingers through his cottony hair like a
man sorely puzzled. He barely had room in the tiny control bubble. “All
ships,” he said. “What the hell did he mean by that?”
After a few moments someone suggested, “Code message.” Others
chorused agreement. Then Tartov asked, “Lew, does Earth have something
called a retarder field?”
“I don’t know. And there’s nowhere we can beam a maser that some
Earth ship won’t get in it.” He sighed, for masers are always a chore to use.
“Someone ask the Political Section about retarder fields.”
“Retarder fields?”
“Retarder fields. And they sent us the full text of the message to
Garner.”
Lit smiled with one side of his mouth. “Retarder fields were part of
Garner’s story. I knew he’d be thorough, but this is ridiculous.” He thought
of the thousands of Belt ships he’d put on standby alert, just in case
Garner’s fleet was intended to distract attention from things closer to home;
and he thought of five mining ships and a priceless radar proof headed for
what might as well be outer space. Garner was causing more than his fair
share of activity. “All right, I’ll play his silly game. Beam Arm Headquarters
and ask them what they know about retarder fields.”
Cutter was shocked. “Ask the Arms?” Then he got the joke, and his face
was chilled by a smile. On Cutter a smile always looked false.
It wasn’t until Arm Headquarters cautiously denied all knowledge of
retarder fields, that Lit Shaeffer began to have doubts.
With the first jarring clang of the alarm Garner was awake. He saw
Anderson groan and open his eyes, but the eyes weren’t seeing anything.
“Meteor strike!” he bawled.
Anderson’s eyes became aware. “Not funny,” he said.
“No?”
“No. Are you the type who yells ‘Red Alert’ on a crowded slidewalk?
What time is it?”
“Oh three oh four.” Garner looked out at the stars. “No Neptune.
Why?”
“Just a sec.” Anderson fooled with the attitude jets. The ship swung
around. Neptune was a blue-green ball, dim in the faint sunlight. Usually a
world that close is awe-inspiring, if not blinding. This world only looked
terribly cold. “There it is. What’ll I do with it?”
“Put us in a search orbit and start scanning with the radar. Can you set
it to search for something as dense as dwarf star matter?”
“You mean, set it to search below the crust? Will do, Captain.”
“Anderson?”
“Uh huh?” He was already at work on the instrument panel.
“You will remember that we have a time limit?”
Anderson grinned at him. “I can put this thing in a forced orbit and
finish the search in five hours. Okay?”
“Great.” Luke started punching for breakfast.
“There’s just one thing. We’ll be in free fall some of the time. Can you
take it?”
“Sure.”
Anderson moved in. When he finished, the ship balanced nose down,
one thousand miles above the surface, driving straight at the planet with a
force of more or less one gee. The “more or less” came from Anderson’s
constant readjustments.
“Now don’t worry,” Anderson told him. “I’m trying keep us out of the
atmosphere, but if we do happen to land in the soup all I have to do is turn
off the motor. The motor is all that’s holding us in this tight orbit. We’d fall
straight up into outer space.”
“So that’s what a forced orbit is. How are you working the search?”
“Well, on a map it would look like I’m following lines of longitude. I’ll
turn the ship sideways for a few minutes every time we cross a pole, so we
can keep changing our line of search. We can’t just let the planet turn
under us. It would take almost sixteen hours.”
The world rolled beneath them, one thousand miles below—more or
less. There was faint banding of the atmosphere, but the predominant color
was bluish white. Anderson kept the radar sweeping at and below the ward
horizon, which on the radar screen looked like stratified air. It was solid
rock.
“Understand, this is just to find out if it’s there,” Anderson said an hour
later. “If we see a blob, we’ll have pinned within five hundred miles. That’s
all.”
“That’s all we need.”
At nine hours Anderson turned the ship around, facing outward. He
ached from shoulders to fingertips. “It’s not there,” he said wearily. “Now
what?”
“Now we get ready for a fight. Get us headed toward Nereid and turn
off the drive.”
The bright stars that were two fusion-drive spacecraft were too close to
the tiny Sun to be easily seen. Anderson couldn’t even find the Golden
Circle. But Greenberg’s ship came steadily on, blue and brightening at the
edge of the Sun’s golden corona. Garner and Anderson were on a ten-hour
path to Nereid, Neptune’s outermost moon. They watched as Greenberg’s
light grew brighter.
At nine thirty the light began to wiggle. Greenberg was maneuvering.
“Do we start shooting?” Anderson wanted to know.
“I think not. Let’s see where he’s going.”
They were on the night side of the planet. Greenberg was diving toward
Neptune at a point near the twilight line. He was clearly visible.
“He’s not coming toward Nereid,” said Anderson. They were both
whispering, for some reason.
“Right. Either he left it on Triton, or it’s in orbit. Could it be in orbit
after that long?”
“Missile’s tracking,” Anderson whispered.
Greenberg was past Triton before he started to decelerate. “In orbit?”
wondered Garner. “He must have nuts.”
Twenty minutes later Greenberg’s ship was a wiggling between the
horns of Neptune’s cold blue crescent. They watched its slow crawl toward
one of the horns. He was in a forced orbit, covering a search pattern of
surface. “Now what?” Anderson asked.
“We wait and see. I give up, Anderson. I can’t understand it.”
“I swear it’s not on Neptune.”
“Uh, oh.” Garner pointed. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.” A tiny spear
of light was going by the lighted edge of the planet.
The blue-green ball was larger than he had anticipated. For the first
time Kzanol regretted his carelessness in not finding out more about the
eighth planet when he had the chance, some two billion years ago. He
asked the pilot and copilot, who remembered that Neptune had 1.23 gee at
surface. Earth gee, of course. For Kzanol it would be about two and a half.
Kzanol stood at one of the small windows, his jaw just above the lower
edge, his leathery lips drawn back in a snarl of worry. Not long now! One
way or another. For the pilot was nudging the ship into a search orbit.
Someone was already there.
It was the half-asleep free slave he’d passed at the halfway point. He was
almost around the curve of the world, but he would be back in eighteen
diltun or so. Kzanol had the pilot put the Golden Circle in orbit and turn
off the motor. Let the slave do the searching.
The ship went by underneath, spitting fire at the stars. The slave was
indeed marking out a search pattern. Kzanol let him go on.
And he wondered. How was he going to get down, on a motor which
simply didn’t have the power?
He let the pilot think about it, and the pilot told him. On rockets,
wings, and rams, all going at once. But even the pilot couldn’t think of a
way back up.
Kzanol/Greenberg, of course, had no warning at all. At its present
setting his radar would have shown Kzanol’s ship as more transparent than
air. Even the planet itself was translucent. Kzanol/Greenberg kept watch
over the radar screen, sure that if Masney missed the suit, he wouldn’t.
“Why isn’t the other ship searching too?” Anderson wondered. “It’s just
floating.”
“Ordinarily,” said Garner, thinking out loud, “I’d think they were in
cahoots. There’s no need for them both to search. But how—? Oh. I get it.
The ET has taken control of Masney and Greenberg. Either that or he’s
letting them do his job for him without their knowing it.”
“Wouldn’t the job get done quicker if they both searched?”
“I’m beginning to wonder if this alien isn’t the aristocrat’s aristocrat.
Maybe he thinks that anyone who works is a slave. Since he’s a master…
But the real question is, what are they searching for, and where is it?
“Look, son, why don’t you warm up the radio and point the maser at
our fleet of Belters. I might as well fill them in.”
One thing about the Belt ships: at least the air plant could handle pipe
tobacco. The man in the third ship was the only man in the fleet who took
advantage of the fact, one of exactly six in the entire Belt. He was known,
not too affectionately, as Old Smoky.
Once he had been a flatlander. For nearly thirty years he had piloted a
succession of circumlunar tourist boats. His nights he had spent in a small,
cheap apartment a few stories above the vehicular traffic level in Los
Angeles. On holidays he went to the beach, and was lucky to find enough
clear sand to sit on; his vacations were spent in foreign cities, strange and
novel and undeniably fascinating but generally just as crowded as Los
Angeles. Once he stayed two weeks in what was left of the Amazon jungle.
He smuggled some cigarettes in with him, risking two years in prison, and
ran out in five days. When he found he was telling every friend and
stranger how much he wanted a smoke, he went back to the cities.
He had met Lucas Garner in the line of duty; Garner’s duty. There was
a massive sit-in to protest rumored corruption in the Fertility Board; and
when the law hauled Smoky off the top strip he met Garner in the uniform
of a police chief. Somehow they got to be friends. Their respective views
on life were just close enough to make for violent, telling, fun arguments.
For years they met irregularly to argue politics. Then Luke joined the
Arms. Smoky never forgave him.
One day Smoky was rounding the Moon nose down with a load of
tourists, when he felt a sudden, compelling urge to turn nose out and keep
driving until all the stars were behind him. He fought it down, and landed
in Death Valley that evening as he had landed seven-thousand-odd times
before. That night, as he approached his apartment through the usual
swirling mob, Smoky realized that he hated every city in the world.
He had saved enough to buy his own mining ship. Under the
circumstances the Belt was glad to have him. He learned caution before
the Belt killed him, and he earned enough to keep his ship in repair and
himself in food and tobacco.
Now he was the only man in the fleet who could recognize Lucas
Garner’s voice. When the radio burst to life he listened carefully to the
message, then called Lew to report that it really was Garner.
For Smoky, the broadcast removed all doubt. It was Garner himself.
The old man was not above a judicious lie, but he was not prone to risk his
life. If he was near Neptune in a leaky terran Navy crate, he must have an
outstanding reason to be there.
Thoughtfully Old Smoky checked through his arsenal of two radar
missiles, one heat seeker, and a short-range laser “cannon.” The war of the
worlds was here at last!
Kzanol was baffled. After six hours of searching, the slave Masney had
covered the entire planet. The suit wasn’t there!
He let the slave begin his second search, for the sake of thoroughness.
He took his own ship to Triton. The Brain could not compute the course of
moons; one of them may have gotten in the way of the ship as it speared
toward Neptune. Very likely it had been Triton. That moon was not only
closer than Nereid, it was far bigger: 2500 miles thick as compared to 200.
A nerve-wracking hour later, an hour of flying upside down over
Triton’s surface with the jet firing outward and the lightly pitted moon
showing flat overhead, Kzanol admitted defeat. No white flash had shown
itself on the radar screen, though Neptune itself had glowed through the
transparent image of the larger moon. He turned his attention to the small
moon.
“So that’s it!” Anderson’s face glowed. “They thought it was on the
surface and it wasn’t. Now they don’t know where it is!” He frowned in
thought. “Shouldn’t we get out of here? The honeymooner’s aiming itself
at Nereid, and we’re too close for comfort.”
“Right,” said Garner. “But first we turn the missile loose. The one that’s
homed on the alien. We can worry about Greenberg later.”
“I hate to do it. There’re two other people on the Golden Circle.” A
moment passed. Lengthened. “I can’t move,” said Anderson. “It’s that third
button under the blue light.”
But Luke couldn’t move either.
“Who’d have thought he could reach this far?” he wondered bitterly.
Anderson couldn’t help but agree. The ship continued to fall toward
Nereid.
To the Power, distance was of little importance. What mattered was
numbers.
Nereid was a bust. The deep radar went through it as through a warped
window pane, and showed nothing. Kzanol gave it up and watched the
half-asleep slave for a while. His tiny flame burned bravely against the
Neptunian night.
Kzanol was in a bad state of mind. It seemed that his ship had missed
not only Neptune but both its moons. What could have gone wrong with
the Brain? Probably it had never been intended to last three hundred years.
But deep in the bottom of his mind, he knew better. The Brain had missed
deliberately. Kzanol had ordered it to commit suicide, not realizing what
he asked. The Brain—which was a machine, not a slave, not subject to the
Power—had disobeyed. His ship must have hurtled through the solar
system and gone on into interstellar space at .97 light. By now it would be
beyond the curve of the universe.
He felt the muscles pulling at his mouth, flattening the eating tendrils
against his cheeks to protect them, opening his jaws as wide as they would
go, and wider, pulling his lips back from the teeth until they were ready to
split. It was an involuntary reaction, a reaction of fear and rage,
automatically readying the thrint for a battle to the death. But there was
nothing to fight. Soon Kzanol’s jaws closed and his head drooped between
his massive shoulders.
All in all, the only pleasure he had was to watch the last ship searching
Neptune for the third time—and to see its bright flame suddenly lengthen,
then shorten again. The sleepy slave had given up.
Then Kzanol knew that he too was going to Triton. A feeling of noble
pity stole over him, and he remembered the tradition that the family of
Racarliw had never mistreated a slave. Kzanol went to meet the sleeper at
Triton.
“One…two…I can’t find Garner’s ship. He must have landed
somewhere, or turned off his drive. The others are just milling around.”
“Funny he hasn’t called us. I hope nothing’s happened to him.”
“We’d have seen the explosion, Smoky. Anyway, he was going for
Nereid when his drive stopped. If it failed, we can find him later.”
When Kzanol was close enough, he Told the sleeper to turn ship and
join him. In an hour the Navy ship and the Golden Circle were alongside.
Kzanol’s pilot and copilot were worried about the fuel situation, so as
soon as the sleeper’s ship was close enough Kzanol Told him to transfer his
fuel to the Golden Circle. He waited while various clanking and banging
sounds rang through the ships. Fortunately the cards were magnetized, and
there was webbing to hold him in his seat. He followed-the movements of
his three personal slaves with the back of his mind: the sleeper near the
tail, the pilot and copilot motionless in the cockpit. He didn’t want to risk
their lives by letting them help the sleeper.
Naturally he jumped like a terrified gazelle when his airlock door
swung open and a slave walked in.
A slave with a mind shield.
“Hi!” it said, incomprehensibly in English. “I guess we’ll need a
translator.” And it coolly walked forward to the control room. At the door it
stopped and gestured—with Kzanol’s disintegrator.
A man of Leeman’s talent and education should never have been given
such a boring job. Leeman knew it could never have happened in the Belt.
Someday soon he would migrate to the Belt, where he would be
appreciated.
Meanwhile, Geoffrey Leeman was the foreman of the Lazy Eight III’s
skeleton maintenance crew.
Leeman envied the crew of the other section, the drive section at
Hamburg. Busybodies with good intentions were constantly ordering minor
changes in the starship’s drive while they waited for politics to let them
launch. The Lazy Eight III’s life system hadn’t been altered in two years.
Until today.
Now Leeman and his three subordinates watched a horde of
technicians doing strange things to the number three “stateroom.” A
complete balloon of fine wire mesh was being strung over the walls, floor,
and ceiling. Heavy machinery was being welded to what would be the
ship’s floor and was now the outer wall. Taps were let into the power
system. Leeman and his men found themselves running errands through
the ring-shaped corridor, bringing coffee and sandwiches and detail
diagrams, tools and testing machinery and cigarettes. They had no idea
what was going on. The newcomers were willing to answer questions, but
the answers were gibberish. As:
“We’ll be able to triple the number of passengers!” said the man with a
head like a speckled brown egg. He shook an ammeter for emphasis.
“Triple!”
How?
The man waved his ammeter to include the room. “We’ll have them
standing in here like rush-hour commuters in an elevator,” he confided.
When Leeman accused him of levity he became mortally offended and
refused to say another word.
By the end of the day Leeman felt like a flatworm in a four-dimensional
maze.
Somehow he managed it so that the entire group went to dinner
together, for mutual brain-picking. Things became clearer during dinner.
Leeman’s ears went up when he heard the phrase “retarder field.”
Dinner turned into a party. It was almost two hundred before Leeman
could make a phone call. The other man almost hung up. But Leeman
knew the words to stop him.
The Lings’ first honeymoon had been spent at Reno, Nevada, thirty
years ago. Since then Ling Wu had become rich in wholesale
pharmaceuticals. Recently the Fertility Board had granted the couple the
rare privilege of having more than two children. And here they were.
Here, before the crystal wall of the main dance bubble, looking out and
down at a ringed and banded world. They didn’t hear the music behind
them. It was magic music, the sound of imagination, brought to life by the
wild, desert loveliness before them. Soft curves of ice ran out to a horizon
like the lip of a nearby cliff; and above the cliff hung a bauble, a
decoration, an aesthetic wonder such as no habitable world has ever
known.
Ask an amateur astronomer about Saturn. He won’t just tell you; he’ll
drag out his telescope and show you. He’ll break your arm to show you.
Ling Dorothy, fourth generation San Franciscan, pushed the palms of
her hands against the crystal wall as if half wanting them to go through.
“Oh, I hope. I hope,” she said, “I hope it never comes for us!”
“What, Dot?” Ling Wu smiled up at her, for she was an inch taller than
he was.
“The Golden Circle.”
“It’s five days late already. I love it here too, but I’d hate to think people
died just to let us stay a little longer.”
“Haven’t you heard, Wu? Mrs. Willing was just telling me that
somebody stole the Golden Circle right off the spaceport field!”
“Mrs. Willing is a romantic.”
“Givvv me ti’, givvv me ti’,” Charley mimicked. “First Larrry, then
’Arrnerr. Time is all we get. Do they want the stars all for themselves?”
“I think you underrate them,” said the older dolphin.
“Surely there’s room for both of us on any world.” Charley hadn’t been
listening. “They practically didn’t know we were here until a short time
ago. We could be useful, I know we could.”
“Why shouldn’t they have time? Do you know how much time they
themselves needed?”
“What do you mean?”
“The first walker story about a trip to the moon is thousands of years
old. They didn’t get there until a hundred and fifty years ago. Have a little
patience,” said the one with the worn teeth and the scarred jaw.
“I don’t have thousands of years. Must I spend my life looking at the sky
until my eyes dry out?”
“You wouldn’t be the first. Not even the first swimmer.”
Dale Snyder walked down the hall like a conqueror planning new
conquests. When he passed patients he smiled and nodded, but his brisk
walk discouraged conversation. He reached the door to the nurses’ lounge
and turned in.
It took him fifteen seconds to reach the coffee stand. In that time Dale
Snyder aged forty years. His body sagged; his shoulders slumped; his
cheeks slid half an inch downward, leaving a mask of puffy-eyed
discouragement. He poured a foam-plastic cup of black coffee, regarded it
with curled lip, and poured it down the drain. A moment of indecision
before he refilled the cup from another spigot. Yerba mate. At least it would
taste different.
It did. He flowed into a chair and stared out the window, the cup
warming his hand. Outside, there were trees and grass and what looked like
brick walks. Menninger’s was a labyrinth of buildings, none more than four
stories tall. A mile-high skyscraper would have saved millions in land, even
surrounded by the vitally necessary landscaping; but many woman patients
would have run screaming from the sexual problems represented by such a
single, reaching tower.
Dale shook himself and gulped at the brew. For ten minutes he could
forget the patients.
The patients. The “alien shock” patients. They had fooled him at first,
him and others, with their similar behavior. Only now was it becoming
obvious that their problems were as different as their fingerprints. Each had
gone into some kind of shock when the alien cut loose. Dale and his
colleagues had tried to treat them as a group. But that was utterly wrong.
Each had borrowed exactly what he needed from the ET’s tantrum of
rage and shock and grief and fear. Each had found what he had needed or
feared. Loneliness, castration syndrome, fear of violation, xenophobia,
claustrophobia—there was no point even in cataloguing the list.
There weren’t enough doctors. There wasn’t room for the number of
doctors they would need. Dale was exhausted—and so was everyone else.
And they couldn’t show it.
The cup was empty.
“On your feet, soldier,” Dale said aloud. At the door he stood aside for
Harriet Something, a cheerfully overweight woman who looked like
everybody’s mother. His mind held the afterimage of her smile, and he
wondered, how does she do it? He didn’t see the smile drain away behind
his back.
“It’s the details,” said Lit. “The double damned details. How could they
have covered so many details?”
“I think he told you the truth,” Marda said decisively.
Lit looked at his wife in surprise. Marda was notoriously slow to reach
decisions. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “The Arms could have attended
to all these—little things. What bothers me is the work it must have taken.
Hiding Greenberg. Coaching his wife. Tearing things up in the starship’s
life system. They can put everything back later, of course, but imagine
going to all that trouble! And the disturbance at Menninger’s. My God,
how could they have worked that? Training all those patients! And they
flatly couldn’t have borrowed the Golden Circle. Ninety millionaires at the
Titan Hotel are all screaming murder because they can’t go home on time.
Thirty more on Earth are going to miss their honeymoon trips. Titan would
never have let that happen! The Arms must have out-and-out stolen that
ship.”
“Occam’s Razor,” said Marda.
“Occam’s—? Oh. No. Either way, I have to make just too many
assumptions.”
“Lit, how can you take the chance? If Garner isn’t lying, the whole
solar system’s in danger. If he is, what’s his motive?”
“You’re really convinced, aren’t you?”
Marda bobbed her head vigorously.
“Well, you’re right. We can’t take the chance.”
When he came out of the phone booth he said, “I just sent the fleet the
record of my interview with Garner. The whole bloody hour. I’d like to do
more, but Garner’ll hear everything I say. At this distance he’s bound to be
in the maser beam.”
“They’ll be ready this way.”
“I wonder. I wish I could have warned them about the helmet. The
very worst thing I can think of is that Garner might get his hands on the
damn thing. Well, Lew’s bright, he’ll think of that himself.”
Later he called Ceres again, to find out how the other side of the check
was going. For more than two weeks now, Belt ships had been stopping and
searching Earth ships at random. If Garner’s snark hunt was an attempt to
cover something, it wasn’t going to work! But Ceres reported no results to
date.
Ceres was wrong. The search-and-seizure tactics had had at least one
result. Tension had never been so high between Earth and Belt.
The copilot sat motionless listening to Kzanol/Greenberg’s side of the
conversation. He couldn’t understand overspeak, but Kzanol/Greenberg
could; and Kzanol listened to the shielded slave through the mind of the
copilot.
“I ought to get rid of you right away,” Kzanol mused. “A slave that can’t
be controlled can’t be trusted.”
“That’s truer than you know.” A hint of bitterness showed in
Kzanol/Greenberg’s voice. “But you can’t kill me yet. I have some
information that you need very badly.”
“So? What information?”
“I know where the second suit is. I also know why we weren’t picked
up, and I’ve figured out where the rrgh—where our race is now.”
Kzanol said, “I think I also know where the second suit is. But for
whatever else you may know, I won’t kill you.”
“Big of you.” Kzanol/Greenberg waved the disintegrator negligently.
“I’ll tell you something you can’t use first, to prove I know my stuff. Did
you know whitefoods were intelligent?”
“Whitefood droppings.”
“Humans have found them on Sirius A-III-1. They’re definitely
whitefoods. They’re also definitely sentient. Can you think of any way they
could have developed intelligence?”
“No.”
“Of course not. If any form of life has ever been mutation-proof, it’s the
whitefoods. Besides, what does a herbivore with no manipulatory
appendages, and no natural defenses except sentient herders to kill off
natural enemies, want with intelligence? No, the tnuctipun must have
made them sentient in the first place. Making the brains a delicacy was just
an excuse for making them large.”
Kzanol sat down. His mouth tendrils stood straight out, as if he were
smelling with them. “Why should they do that?”
He was hooked.
“Let me give it to you all in one bundle,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. He
took off his helmet and sat, found and lighted a cigarette, taking his time,
while Kzanol grew silently but visibly enraged. There was no reason why
the thrint shouldn’t get angry, Kzanol/Greenberg thought, as long as he
didn’t get too angry.
“All right,” he began. “First point is that the whitefoods are sentient.
Second point, you remember that there was a depression when Plorn’s
tnuctipun came up with antigravity.”
“Powerloss, yes,” Kzanol said fervently—and untactfully. “He should
have been assassinated right away.”
“Not him. His tnuctipun. Don’t you see? They were fighting an
undeclared war even then. The free tnuctipun must have been behind it
all the time: the tnuctip fleet that escaped into space when Thrintun found
the tnuctip system. They didn’t try to reach Andromeda. They must have
stayed between the stars, where nobody ever goes…went. A few civilized
tnuctip must have taken their orders. The whitefoods were their spies; every
noble in the galaxy, everyone who could afford to, used to keep whitefoods
on his land.”
“You’re a ptavv fool. You’re basing all these suppositions on the idiotic
idea that whitefoods are intelligent. That’s nonsense. We’d have sensed it.”
“No. Check with Masney if you don’t believe me. Somehow the
tnuctipun must have developed a whitefood brain that was immune to the
Power. And that one fact makes it certain that the whole ploy was
deliberate. The whitefood spies. The antigravity, released to cause a
depression. There may have been other ideas, too. Mutated racing viprin
were introduced a few years before antigravity. They put all the legitimate
viprin ranches out of business. That started the depression, and antigravity
sped it along. The sunflowers were usually the only defense for a
plantation; and everyone who had land had a sunflower border. It got the
landowners used to isolation and independence, so that they might not
cooperate in wartime. I’d give odds the tnuctipun had a spray to kill
sunflowers. When the depression was in full swing they struck.”
Kzanol didn’t speak. His expression was hard to read.
“This isn’t all supposition. I’ve got solid facts. First, the bandersnatchi,
whitefoods to us, are sentient. Humans aren’t stupid. They wouldn’t make
a mistake like that. Second, it’s a fact that you weren’t picked up when you
hit F124. Why?”
“That is an ingesting good question. Why?”
This was the starting point, the hurt that had rankled in
Kzanol/Greenberg’s breast for sixteen days of retrospection and
introspection, sixteen days during which he had had nothing to do but
supervise Masney and brood on his bad luck. His mind had followed a path
that started with a brooding, silent bandersnatch and ended in a war fought
aeons ago. But he could have missed it all, he might have been spared all
this torment and danger, if only that fool of a caretaker had seen the flash.
He had not, and there could be only one reason.
“Because there wasn’t anyone on the Moon. Either the caretaker was
killed in the revolt, or he was off fighting somewhere. Probably he was
dead. The tnuctipun would have moved at once to cut off our food supply.”
“To what?” Kzanol was clearly lost. Thrintun had never fought
anything but other thrintun, and the last war had been fought before star
travel. Kzanol knew nothing of war.
The thrint tried to get back to basics. “You said you could tell me where
the thrintun are now.”
“With the tnuctipun. They’re dead, extinct. If they weren’t dead they
would have reached Earth by now. That goes for the tnuctipun too, and
nearly every other species that served us. They must have all died in the
war.”
“But that’s insane. Somebody has to win a war!”
He sounded so sincere that Kzanol/Greenberg laughed. “Not so. Ask
any human. Ask a Russian or a Chinese. They’ll think you’re a fool for
needing to ask, but they’ll tell you all about Pyrrhic victory. Shall I tell you
what may have happened?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. “This is pure conjecture, but it makes
sense to me, and I’ve had two weeks to think about it. We must have been
losing the war. If we were, some thraargh—excuse me. Some members of
our race must have decided to take all the slaves with them. Like
Grandfather’s funeral ceremony, but bigger. They made an amplifier
helmet strong enough to blanket the entire galaxy. Then they ordered
everything within reach to commit suicide.”
“But that’s a horrible attitude!” Kzanol bristled with moral outrage.
“Why would a thrint do a thing like that?”
“Ask a human. He knows what sentients are capable of when someone
threatens them with death. First they declaim that the whole thing is
horribly immoral, and that it’s unthinkable that such a threat would ever be
carried out. Then they reveal that they have similar plans, better in every
respect, and have had them for years, decades, centuries. You admit the Big
Amplifier would have been technically feasible?”
“Of course.”
“Do you doubt that a slave race in revolt would settle for nothing less
than our total extinction?”
Tendrils writhed in battle at the corners of Kzanol’s mouth. When he
finally spoke, he said, “I don’t doubt it.”
“Then—”
“Certainly we’d take them with us into extinction! The sneaky,
dishonorable lower-than-whitefoods, using our concessions of freedom to
destroy us! I only desire that we got them all.”
Kzanol/Greenberg grinned. “We must have. How else can we explain
that none of our slaves are in evidence except whitefoods? Remember
whitefoods are immune to the Power.
“Now, that other information. Have you looked for your second suit?”
Kzanol returned to the present. “Yes, on the moons. And you searched
Neptune. I’d have known if Masney found it. Still, there’s one more place
I’d like to search.”
“Go ahead. Let me know when you’re finished.”
Gyros hummed faintly as the Golden Circle swung around. Kzanol
looked straight ahead, his Attention in the control room.
Kzanol/Greenberg lit a cigarette and got ready for a wait.
If Kzanol had learned patience, so had his poor man’s imitation.
Otherwise he would have done something foolish when the thrint blithely
took over Masney, his own personal slave. He could have killed the thrint
merely for using his own body—Kzanol/Greenberg’s own stolen body, by
every test of memory. And the effort of dealing with Kzanol, face to his own
personal face!
But he had no choice.
The remarkable thing was that he was succeeding. He faced a full-
grown thrint on the thrint’s own territory. He had gone a long way toward
making Kzanol accept him as another thrint mind, a ptavv at least. Kzanol
still might kill him; he wished that the thrint would pay more attention to
the disintegrator! But he had done well so far. And was proud of it, which
was all to the good. Kzanol/Greenberg’s self-respect had been very low.
There was no more to be done now. He had better stay out of Kzanol’s
way for a while.
Kzanol’s first move was to radar Kzanol/Greenberg’s ship. When that
failed to turn up the suit, Kzanol took over Masney again and made him
search it from radar cone to exhaust cone, checking the assumption that
the shielded slave had somehow sneaked the suit aboard and turned off the
stasis field. He found nothing.
But the other seemed so sure of himself! Why, if he didn’t have the
suit?
They searched Triton again. Kzanol/Greenberg could see Kzanol’s
uncertainty growing as the search progressed. The suit wasn’t on Neptune,
wasn’t on either moon, positively wasn’t on the other ship, couldn’t have
stayed in orbit this long. Where was it?
The drive went off. Kzanol turned to face his tormentor, who suddenly
felt as if his brain was being squeezed flat. Kzanol was giving it everything
he had: screaming sense and gibberish, orders and rage and raw red hate,
and question, question, question. The pilot moaned and covered his head.
The copilot squealed, stood up and turned half around, and died with foam
on her lips. She stood there beside the gaming table, dead, with only the
magnets in her sandals to keep her from floating away. Kzanol/Greenberg
faced the thrint as he would have faced a tornado.
The mental tornado ended. “Where is it?” asked Kzanol.
“Let’s make a deal.” Kzanol/Greenberg raised his voice so that the pilot
could hear. In the corner of his eye he saw that the thrint had gotten the
point: the pilot was coming in from the control bubble to take the copilot’s
place as translator.
Kzanol took out his variable-knife. He treated the disintegrator with
supreme disregard. Perhaps he didn’t think of it as a weapon. In any case,
nothing uses a weapon on a thrint except another thrint. He opened the
variable-knife to eight feet and stood ready to wave the invisibly thin blade
through the rebellious sentient’s body.
“I dare you,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. He didn’t bother to raise the
disintegrator.
GET OUT, Kzanol told the pilot. Kzanol/Greenberg could have
shouted. He’d won! Slaves may not be present at a battle, or a squabble,
between thrint and thrint.
The pilot moved slowly toward the airlock. Too slowly. Either some
motor area had been burned out in the mind fight, or the slave was
reluctant to leave. Kzanol probed.
ALL RIGHT. BUT HURRY.
Very quickly, the pilot climbed into his spacesuit before leaving. The
family of Racarliw had never mistreated a slave…
The airlock door swung shut. Kzanol asked, “What kind of deal?”
He couldn’t understand the answer. Feeling disgusted with himself, he
said, “We’ll have to turn on the radio. Ah, here it is.” He bent his face
against the wall so that a pair of eating tendrils could reach into the recess
and flip a switch. Now the pilot could hear Kzanol/Greenberg speaking
through his suit radio.
It never occurred to either that they were circling Robin Hood’s barn.
The slave couldn’t be present in person.
“I repeat,” said Kzanol. “What kind of deal?”
“I want a partnership share in control of Earth. Our agreement is not to
be invalidated if we find other, uh, beings like you, or a government of
same. Half to you, half to me, and your full help in building me an
amplifier. You’d better have the first helmet; it might not fit my brain. I
want your oath, your…Wait a minute, I can’t pronounce it.” He picked up
a bridge sheet and wrote, “prtuuvl,” in the dots and curlicues of overspeak.
“I want you to swear by that oath that you will protect my half ownership to
the best of your ability, and that you will never willingly jeopardize my life
or my health, provided that I take you to where you can find the second
suit. Swear also that we’ll get humans to build me another amplifier, once
we get back.”
Kzanol thought for a full minute. His mental shield was as solid as the
door on a lunar fort, but Kzanol/Greenberg could guess his thoughts well
enough. He was stalling for effect. Certainly he had decided to give the
oath; for the prtuuvl oath was binding between thrint and thrint. Kzanol
need only regard him as a slave…
“All right,” said Kzanol. And he gave the prtuuvl oath without missing a
single syllable.
“Good,” Kzanol/Greenberg approved. “Now swear to the same
conditions, by this oath.” He pulled a bridge sheet from his breast pocket
and passed it over. Kzanol took it and looked.
“You want me to swear a kpitlithtulm oath too?”
“Yes.” There was no need to spell it out for Kzanol, nor even to repress
his dolphin grin. The kpitlithtulm oath was for use between thrint and
slave. If he swore the kpitlithtulm oath and the prtuuvl oath he would be
committed for keeps, unless he chose to regard Kzanol/Greenberg as a
plant or a dumb animal. Which would be dishonorable.
Kzanol dropped the paper. His mind shield was almost flickering, it was
so rigid. Then his jaws opened wide and his lips pulled back from the
needle fangs in a smile more terrible than Tyrannosaurus rex chasing a
paleontologist, or Lucas Garner hearing a good joke. Seeing Kzanol, who
could doubt that this was a carnivore? A ravenous carnivore which
intended to be fed at any moment. One might forget that Kzanol was half
the weight of a man, and see instead that he was larger than one hundred
scorpions or three wildcats or a horde of marching soldier ants or a school
of piranha.
But Kzanol/Greenberg recognized it as a smile of rueful admiration, a
laughing surrender to a superior adversary, the smile of a good loser. With
his thrint memories he saw further than that. Kzanol’s smile was as phony
as a brass transistor.
Kzanol gave the oath four times, and made four invalidating technical
mistakes. The fifth time he gave up and swore according to protocol.
“All right,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “Have the pilot take us to Pluto.”
“A-a-all right, everybody turn ship and head for three, eighty-four,
twenty-one.” The man in the lead ship sounded wearily patient. “I don’t
know what the game is, but we can play just as good as any kid on the
block.”
“Pluto,” said someone. “He’s going to Pluto!” He seemed to take it as a
personal affront.
Old Smoky Petropoulos thumbed the transmitter. “Lew, hadn’t one of
us better stop and find out what’s with the other two ships?”
“Uh. Okay, Smoky, you do it. Can you find us later with a maser?”
“Sure, boss. No secrets?”
“Hell, they know we’re following them. Tell us anything we need to
know. And find out where Garner is! If he’s in the honeymooner I want to
know it. Better beam Woody in Number Six too, and tell him to go
wherever Garner is.”
“Of course, Pluto. Don’t you get it yet?” It was not the first time
Kzanol/Greenberg had had doubts about his former self’s intelligence. The
doubts were getting hard to ignore. He’d been afraid Kzanol would figure it
out for himself. But—?
“No,” said Kzanol, glowering.
“The ship hit one of Neptune’s moons,” Kzanol/Greenberg explained
patiently, “so hard that the moon was smacked out of orbit. The ship was
moving at nearly lightspeed. The moon picked up enough energy to
become a planet, but it was left with an eccentric orbit which still takes it
inside Neptune at times. Naturally that made it easy to spot.”
“I was told that Pluto came from another solar system.”
“So was I. But it doesn’t make sense. If that mass dived into the system
from outside, why didn’t it go back out again to complete the hyperbola?
What could have stopped it? Well, I’m taking a gamble.
“There’s only one thing that bothers me. Pluto isn’t very big. Do you
suppose the suit may have been blown back into space by the explosion
when it hit?”
“If it was, I’ll kill you,” said Kzanol.
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” begged Garner. “Aha! I’ve got it. Smoky
Petropoulos. How are you?”
“Not as good as your memory. It’s been a good twenty-two years.”
Smoky stood behind the two seats, in the airlock space, and grinned at the
windshield reflection of the two men. There wasn’t room to do much else.
“How the hell are you, Garner? Why don’t you turn around and shake
hands with an old buddy?”
“I can’t, Smoky. We’ve been ordered not to move by a BEM that
doesn’t take no for an answer. Maybe a good hypnotherapist could get us
out of this fix, but we’ll have to wait ’til then. By the way, meet Leroy
Anderson.”
“Hi.”
“Now give us a couple of cigarettes, Smoky, and put them in the
corners of our mouths so we can talk. Are your boys chasing Greenberg
and the BEM?”
“Yeah.” Smoky fumbled with cigarettes and a lighter. “Just what is this
game of musical chairs?”
“What do you mean?”
Old Smoky put their cigarettes where they belonged. He said, “That
honeymoon special took off for Pluto. Why?”
“Pluto!”
“Surprised?”
“It wasn’t here,” said Anderson.
“Right,” said Garner. “We know what they’re after, and we know now
they didn’t find it here. But I can’t imagine why they think it’s on Pluto.
Oops! Hold it” Garner puffed furiously at his cigarette: good honest
tobacco with the tars and nicotine still in it. He didn’t seem to have any
trouble moving his face. “Pluto may have been a moon of Neptune once.
Maybe that has something to do with it. How about Greenberg’s ship? Is it
going in the same direction?”
“Uh uh. Wherever it is, its drive is off. We lost sight of it four hours
ago.”
Anderson spoke up. “If your friend is still aboard he could be in
trouble.”
“Right,” said Garner. “Smoky, that ship could be falling into Neptune
with Lloyd Masney aboard. You remember him? A big, stocky guy with a
mustache.”
“I think so. Is he paralyzed too?”
“He’s hypnotized. Plain old garden-variety hypnotized, and if he hasn’t
been told to save himself, he won’t. Will you?”
“Sure. I’ll bring him back here.” Smoky turned to the airlock.
“Hey!” Garner yelped. “Take the butts out of our mouths before our
faces catch fire!”
From his own ship Smoky called Woody Atwood in Number Six, the
radar proof, and told his story. “It looks like the truth, Woody,” he finished.
“But there’s no point in taking chances. You get in here and stick close to
Garner’s ship; if he makes a single move he’s a bloody liar, so keep an eye
open. He’s been known to be tricky. I’ll see if Masney is really in trouble.
He shouldn’t be hard to find.”
“Pluto’s a week and a half away at one gravity,” said Anderson, who
could do simple computations in his head. “But we couldn’t follow that
gang even if we could move. We don’t have the fuel.”
“We could refuel on Titan, couldn’t we? Where the hell is Smoky?”
“Better not expect him back today.”
Garner growled at him. Space, free fall, paralysis, and defeat were all
wearing away at his self-control.
“Hey,” he whispered suddenly.
“What?” The word came in an exaggerated stage whisper.
“I can wiggle my index fingers,” Garner snapped. “This hex may be
wearing off. And mind your manners.”
Smoky was back late the next day. He had inserted the pointed nose of
his ship into Masney’s drive tube to push Masney’s ship. When he turned
off his own drive the two ships tumbled freely. Smoky moved between
ships with a jet pack in the small of his back. By this time Atwood had
joined the little group, and was helping Smoky, for it would have been
foolish to suspect trickery after finding Masney.
Not because Masney was still hypnotized. He wasn’t. Kzanol had freed
him from hypnosis in the process of taking him over, and had, kindly or
thoughtlessly, left him with no orders when he departed for Pluto. But
Masney was near starvation. His face bore deep wrinkles of excess skin, and
the skin of his torso was a loose, floppy, folded tent over his ribcage.
Kzanol/Greenberg had repeatedly forgotten to feed him, remembering
only when hunger seemed about to break him out of hypnosis. Kzanol
would never have treated a slave that way; but Kzanol, the real Kzanol, was
far more telepathic than the false. And Kzanol/Greenberg hadn’t learned to
think of daily food intake as a necessity. So much food was a luxury, and a
foolish one.
Masney had started an eating spree as soon as the Golden Circle was
gone, but it would be some time before he was “stocky” again. His ship’s
fuel was gone, and he was found drifting in a highly eccentric orbit about
Triton, an orbit which was gradually narrowing.
“Couldn’t possibly be faked,” Smoky said when he called the Belt fleet.
“A little bit better fakery, and Masney would be dead. As it is, he’s only very
sick.”
Now the four ships fell near Nereid.
“We’ve got to refuel all these ships,” said Garner. “And there’s a way to
do it.” He began to tell them.
Smoky howled. “I won’t leave my ship!”
“Sorry, Smoky. See if you can follow this. We’ve got three pilots, right?
You, Woody, Masney. Me and Anderson can’t move. But we’ve got four
ships to pilot. We have to leave one.”
“Sure, but why mine?”
“Five men to carry in three ships. That means we keep both two-man
ships. Right?”
“Right.”
“We give up your ship, or we give up a radar proof ship. Which would
you leave?”
“You don’t think we’ll get to Pluto in time for the war?”
“We might as well try. Want to go home?”
“All right, all right.”
The fleet moved to Triton without Number Four, and with half of
Number Four’s fuel transferred to Masney’s ship, the Iwo Jima. Garner was
Masney’s passenger, and Smoky was in the Heinlein with Anderson. The
three ships hovered over the big moon’s icy surface while their drives
melted through layer after layer of frozen gases, nitrogen and oxygen and
carbon dioxide, until they reached the thick water ice layer. They landed
on water ice, each in its own shallow cone. Then Woody and Smoky went
after Number Four.
Smoky brought the singleship down with its tank nearly empty. They
drained what was left into the Iwo Jima, and followed it with the Heinlein’s
supply. Woody turned off the cooling unit in the singleship’s hydrogen
tank, dismantled the heater in the cabin and moved it into the tank. He
had to cut a hole in the wall to get in.
The next few hours were spent cutting blocks of water ice. Masney was
still convalescing, so the Belters had to do all the work. When they broke
off they were exhausted, and two laser cutting tools were near death; but
Number Four’s fuel tank was filled with warm, not very clean water.
They hooked up the battery from Number Six to electrolyze the melted
ice. Hydrogen and oxygen, mixed, poured into the Heinlein’s tank. They
set the thermostat above the condensation point of hydrogen; but the
oxygen fell as snow, and Smoky and Woody alternated positions in the
bottom of the tank, shoveling the snow out. Once they had to take Number
Six up and fly her around to recharge her batteries. Always there was the
flavor of time passing, of the “war” leaving them further behind with each
passing minute.
In two days they had fueled all three ships. The tanks were not full, but
they would carry the little secondary fleet to Pluto, driving all the way, with
fuel to spare. Number Four was useless, her tank clogged with dirt.
“We’ll be three days late for whatever happens,” Woody said glumly.
“Why go at all?”
“We can stay close enough for radio contact,” Smoky argued. “I’d like
to have Garner close enough to tell the fleet what to do. He knows more
about these Bug Eyed Monsters than any of us.”
Luke said, “Main argument is that it may take the fleet three days to
lose. Then we get there and save the day. Or we don’t. Let’s go.”
Woody Atwood masered the fleet immediately, knowing that the others
could not intercept the conversation. If they had moved into the maser
beam their radio would have blown sky high.
“Matchsticks!” Kzanol’s voice dripped with thrintun contempt. “We
might just as well be playing Patience.” It was a strange thing to say,
considering that he was losing.
“Tell you what,” Kzanol/Greenberg suggested. “We could divide the
Earth up now and play for people. We’d get about eight billion each to play
with, with a few left over. In fact, we could agree right now that the Earth
should be divided by two north-south great circle lines, leave it at that ’til
we get back with the amplifier, and play with eight billion apiece.”
“Sounds all right. Why north-south?”
“So we each get all the choices of climate there are. Why not?”
“Agreed.” Kzanol dealt two cards face down and one up. “Seven stud,”
announced the pilot.
“Fold,” said Kzanol/Greenberg, and watched Kzanol snarl and rake in
the antes. “We should have brought Masney,” he said. “It might be
dangerous, not having a pilot.”
“So? Assume I’d brought Masney. How would you feel, watching me
operate your former slave?”
“Lousy.” In point of fact, he now saw that Kzanol had shown rare tact in
leaving Masney behind. Lloyd was a used slave, one who had been owned
by another. Tradition almost demanded his death, and certainly decreed
that he must never be owned by a self-respecting thrint, though he might
be given to a beggar.
“Five stud,” said the pilot. He sat where he could see neither hand,
ready to wrap his human tongue around human, untranslatable poker
slang when Kzanol wished to speak, and ready to translate for
Kzanol/Greenberg. Kzanol dealt one up, one down.
“That’s funny,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “I almost remembered
something, but then it slipped away.”
“Open your mind and I’ll tell you what it was.”
“No. It’s in English anyway. From the Greenberg memories.” He
clutched his head. “What is it? It seems so damned appropriate. Something
about Masney.”
“Play.”
“Nine people.”
“Raise five.”
“Up ten.”
“Call. Greenberg, why is it that you win more than I do, even though
you fold more often?”
Kzanol/Greenberg snapped his fingers. “Got it! ‘When I am grown to
man’s estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and
boys Not to meddle with my toys.’ Stevenson.” He laughed. “Now what
made me…”
“Deuce for you, queen for me,” said the pilot. Kzanol continued in
thrintun: “If men had telepathic recorders they wouldn’t have to meddle
with sounds that way. It has a nice beat, though.”
“Sure,” Kzanol/Greenberg said absently. He lost that hand, betting
almost two hundred on a pair of fours.
Somewhat later Kzanol looked up from the game. “Communicator,” he
said. He got up and went to the pilot room. Kzanol/Greenberg followed.
They took seats next to the control room door and the pilot turned up the
volume.
“…Atwood in Number Six. I hope you’re listening, Lew. There is
definitely an ET on the honeymooner, and he definitely has wild talents.
There’s nothing phony about any of this. The alien paralyzed the Arm and
his chauffeur from a distance of around a million miles. He’s pretty callous,
too. The man in the second ship was left drifting near Triton, half starved
and without fuel, after the alien was through with him. Garner says
Greenberg was responsible. Greenberg’s the one who thinks he’s another
ET. He’s on the honeymooner now. There are two others on the
honeymooner, the pilot and copilot. Garner says shoot on sight, don’t try to
approach the ship. I leave that to you. We’re three days behind you, but
we’re coming anyway. Number Four is on Triton, without fuel, and we
can’t use it until we clean the mud out of the tank. Only three of us can fly.
Garner and his chauffeur are still paralyzed, though it’s wearing off a little.
We should have a hypnotherapist for these flatlanders, or they may never
dance again.
“In my opinion your first target is the amplifier, if you can find it. It’s
far more dangerous than any single ET. The Belt wouldn’t want it except
for research, and I know some scientists who’d hate us for giving up that
opportunity, but you can imagine what Earth might do with an amplifier
for telepathic hypnosis.
“I’m putting this on repeat.
“Lew, this is Atwood in Number Six. Repeat, Atwood in…”
Kzanol/Greenberg pulled a cigarette and lit it. The honeymooner had
a wide selection; this one was double filtered, mentholated, and made from
de-nicotinized tobaccos. It smelled like gently burning leaves and tasted
like a cough drop. “Shoot on sight,” he repeated. “That’s not good.”
The thrint regarded him with undisguised contempt. To fear a slave—!
But then, it was only a ptavv itself.
Kzanol/Greenberg glared. He knew more about people than Kzanol
did, after all!
“All ships,” said the man in the lead ship. “I say we shoot now.
Comments?”
There were comments. Lew waited them out, and then he spoke.
“Tartov, your humanitarian impulses do you credit. No sarcasm
intended. But things are too sticky to worry about two flatlanders in a
honeymoon special. As for finding the amplifier, I don’t think we have to
worry about that. Earth won’t find it before we do. They don’t know what
we know about Pluto. We can post guard over the planet until the Belt
sends us an automatic orbital guardian. Radar may show us the amplifier;
in that case we drop a bomb on it, and the hell with the research
possibilities. Have I overlooked anything?”
A feminine voice said, “Send one missile with a camera. We don’t want
to use up all our firepower at once.”
“Good, Mabe. Have you got a camera missile?”
“Yes.”
“Use it.”
The Iwo Jima had been a week out from Earth, and Kzanol/Greenberg
had been daydreaming, as usual. For some reason he’d remembered his
watch: the formal elbow watch with the cryogenic gears, now buried in the
second suit. He’d have to make a new band.
But what for? It always ran slow. He’d had to adjust it every time he
came back from a visit…From a visit to another plantation. From a trip
through space.
But of course. Relativity had jinxed his watch. Why hadn’t he seen that
before?
Because he’d been a thrint?
“Raise thirty,” said Kzanol. He had a five down to match his pair
showing and it wasn’t that he thought Kzanol/Greenberg was bluffing, with
his four-straight showing. He hadn’t noticed that the numbers were in
sequence.
Stupid. Thrintun were stupid. Kzanol couldn’t play poker even when
drawing on the pilot’s knowledge. He hadn’t guessed that his ship must
have hit Pluto. He didn’t need brains; he had the Power.
Thrintun hadn’t needed intelligence since they’d found their first slave
race. Before, the Power hadn’t mattered; there was nothing to use it on.
With an unlimited supply of servants to do their thinking, was it any
wonder they had degenerated?
“Raise fifty,” said Kzanol/Greenburg. The thrint smiled.
“I never thought the Arms was a grand idea,” said Luke. “I think they’re
necessary. Absolutely necessary. I joined because I thought I could be
useful.”
“Luke, if flatlanders need thought police to keep them alive, they
shouldn’t stay alive. You’re trying to hold back evolution.”
“We are not thought police! What we police is technology. If someone
builds something that has a good chance of wiping out civilization, then
and only then do we suppress it. You’d be surprised how often it happens.”
Smoky’s voice was ripe with scorn. “Would I? Why not suppress the
fusion tube while you’re at it? No, don’t interrupt me, Luke, this is
important. They don’t use fusion only in ships. Half Earth’s drinking water
comes from seawater distilleries, and they all use fusion heat. Most of
Earth’s electricity is fusion, and all of the Belt’s. There’s fusion flame in
crematoriums and garbage disposal plants. Look at all the uranium you
have to import, just to squirt into fusion tubes as primer! And there are
hundreds of thousands of fusion ships, every last one of which—”
“—turns into a hydrogen bomb at the flip of a switch.”
“Too right. So why doesn’t the Arms suppress fusion?”
“First, because the Arms was formed too late. Fusion was already here.
Second, because we need fusion. The fusion tube is human civilization,
the way the electrical generator used to be. Thirdly, because we won’t
interfere with anything that helps space travel. But I’m glad—”
“You’re begging the…”
“MY TURN, Smoky. I’m glad you brought up fusion, because that’s the
whole point. The purpose of the Arms is to keep the balance wheel on
civilization. Knock that balance wheel off kilter, and the first thing that
would happen would be war. It always is. This time it’d be the last. Can
you imagine a full-scale war, with that many hydrogen bombs just waiting
to be used? Flip of a switch, I think you said.”
“You said. Do you have to stamp on human ingenuity to keep the
balance wheel straight? That’s a blistering condemnation of Earth, if true.”
“Smoky, if it weren’t top secret I could show you a suppressed projector
that can damp a fusion shield from ten miles away. Chick Watson got to be
my boss by spotting an invention that would have forced us to make
murder legal. There was—”
“Don’t tell me about evidence you can’t produce.”
“All right, dammit, what about this amplifier we’re all chasing?
Suppose some bright boy came up with an amplifier for telepathic
hypnosis? Would you suppress it?”
“You produce it and I’ll answer.”
Masney said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, you two!”
“Dead right,” Anderson’s voice answered. “Give us innocent bystanders
an hour’s rest.”
The man in the lead ship opened his eyes. Afterimages like pastel
amoebae blocked his vision; but the screen was dark and flat. “All ships,”
he said. “We can’t shoot yet. We’ll have to wait ’til they turn around.”
Nobody questioned him. They had all watched through the camera in
its nose as Mabe Doolin’s test missile approached the Golden Circle. They
had watched the glare of the honeymooner’s drive become blinding, even
with the camera picture turned all the way down. Then the screens had
gone blank. The fusing hydrogen turned missiles to molten slag before they
could get close.
The honeymooner was safe for another day.
Kzanol/Greenberg reached a decision. “Hold the fort,” he said. “I’ll be
right back.”
Kzanol watched him get up and pull on his space suit. “What are you
doing?”
“Slowing down the opposition, if I’m lucky.” The near-ptavv went up
the ladder into the airlock.
Kzanol sighed, pocketed the one-man matchsticks of the ante, and
shuffled for solitaire. He knew that the slave with the ptavv mind was
making a tremendous fuss over nothing. Perhaps it had brooded too long
on the hypothetical tnuctip revolt, until all slaves looked dangerous.
Kzanol/Greenberg emerged on the dorsal surface of the hull. There
were a number of good reasons for putting the airlock there, the best being
that men could walk on the hull while the drive was on. He put his
magnetic sandals on, because it would be a long fall if he slipped, and
walked quickly aft to the tail. A switch buried in the vertical fin released a
line of steps leading down the curve of the hull to the wing. He climbed
down. The hydrogen light was terribly bright; even with his eyes covered
he could feel the heat on his face. When he knelt on the trailing edge the
wing shielded him from the light.
He peered over the edge. If he leaned too far he would be blinded, but
he had to go far enough to see…Yes, there they were. Five points of light,
equally bright, all the same color. Kzanol/Greenberg dropped the nose of
the disintegrator over the edge and pulled the trigger.
If the disintegrator had had a maser type of beam, it could have done
some real damage. But then, he could never have hit any of those tiny
targets with such a narrow beam. Still, the cone spread too rapidly.
Kzanol/Greenberg couldn’t see any effect. He hadn’t really expected to. He
held the digger pointed as best he could the five clustered stars. Minutes
ticked by.
“What the hell…Lew! Are we in a dust cloud?”
“No.” The man in the lead ship looked anxiously at frosted quartz of his
windshield. “Not that our instruments can tell. This may be the weapon
Garner told about. Does everyone have a messed-up windshield?”
A chorus of affirmatives.
“Huh! Okay. We don’t know how much power there is that machine,
but it may have a limit. Here’s what do. First, we let the instruments carry
us for a while. Second, we’re eventually going to break our windshields so
we can see out, so we’ll be going the rest of the way in closed suits. But we
can’t do that yet! Otherwise our faceplates will frost up. Third point.” He
glared round for emphasis, though nobody saw him. “Nobody outside for
any reason! For all we know, that gun can peel our suits right off our backs
in ten seconds. Any other suggestions?”
There were.
“Call Garner and ask him for ideas.” Mabel Doolin in Number Two
did that.
“Withdraw our radar antennae for a few hours. Otherwise they’ll
disappear.” They did. The ships flew on, blind.
“We need something to tell us how far this gun has dug into our ships.”
But nobody could think of anything better than “Go look later.”
Every minute someone tested the barrage with a piece of quartz. The
barrage stopped fifteen minutes after it had started. Two minutes later it
started again, and Tartov, who was out inspecting the damage, scrambled
into his ship with his faceplate opaqued along the right side.
Kzanol looked up to see his “partner” climbing wearily down through
the airlock. “Very good,” he said. “Has it occurred to you that we may need
the disintegrator to dig up the spare suit?”
“Yeah, it has. That’s why I didn’t use it any longer than I did.” In fact
he’d quit because he was tired, but he knew Kzanol was right. Twenty-five
minutes of a most continuous operation was a heavy drain on the battery. “I
thought I could do them some damage. I don’t know whether I did or not.”
“Will you relax? If they get too close I’ll take them and get us some
extra ships and body servants.”
“I’m sure of that. But they don’t have to get that close.”
The gap between the Golden Circle and the Belt fleet closed slowly.
They would reach Pluto at about the same time, eleven days after the
honeymooner left Neptune.
“There she goes,” said somebody.
“Right,” said Lew. “Everyone ready to fire?”
Nobody answered. The flame of the honeymooner’s drive stretched
miles into space, a long, thin line of bluish white in a faint conical
envelope. Slowly it began to contract.
“Fire,” said Lew, and pushed a red button. It had a tiny protective
hatch over it, now unlocked. With a key.
Five missiles streaked away, dwindling match flames. The
honeymooner’s fire had contracted to a point.
Minutes passed. An hour. Two.
The radio beeped. “Garner calling. You haven’t called. Hasn’t anything
happened yet?”
“No,” said Lew into the separate maser mike. “They should have hit by
now.”
Minutes dragging by. The white star of the honeymoon special burned
serenely.
“Then something’s wrong.” Garner’s voice had crossed the light-
minutes between him and the fleet. “Maybe the disintegrator burned off
the radar antennae on your missiles.”
“Son of a bitch! Sure, that’s exactly what happened. Now what?”
Minutes.
“Our missiles are okay. If we can get close enough we can use them.
But that gives them three days to find the amplifier. Can you think of a way
to hold them off for three days?”
“Yeah.” Lew was grim. “I’ve an idea they won’t be landing on Pluto.”
He gnawed his lip, wondering if he could avoid giving Garner this
information. Well, it wasn’t exactly top secret, and the Arm would probably
find out anyway. “The Belt has made trips to Pluto, but we never tried to
land there. Not after the first ship took a close-up spectroscopic reading…”
They played at a table just outside the pilot room door.
Kzanol/Greenberg had insisted. He played with one ear cocked at the
radio. Which was all right with Kzanol, since it affected the other’s playing.
Garner’s voice came, scratchy and slightly distorted, after minutes of
silence. “It sounds to me as if it all depends on where they land. We can’t
control that. We’d better think of something else, just in case. What have
you got besides missiles?”
The radio buzzed gently with star static.
“I wish we could hear both sides,” Kzanol growled. “Can you make any
sense of that?”
Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head. “We won’t, either. They must know
we’re in Garner’s maser beam. But it sounds like they know something we
don’t.”
“Four.”
“I’m taking two. Anyway, it’s nice to know they can’t shoot at us.”
“Yes. Well done.” Kzanol spoke with absent-minded authority, using the
conventional overspeak phrase to congratulate a slave who shows proper
initiative. His eye was on his cards. He never saw the killing rage in his
partner’s face. He never sensed the battle that raged across the table, as
Kzanol/Greenberg’s intelligence fought his fury until it turned cold.
Kzanol might have died that day, howling as the disintegrator stripped away
suit and skin and muscle, without ever knowing why.
Ten days, twenty-one hours since takeoff. The icy planet hung
overhead, huge and dirty white, with the glaring highlight which had
fooled early astronomers. From Earth, only that bright highlight is visible,
actually evidence of Pluto’s flat, almost polished surface, making the planet
look very small and very dense.
“Pretty puny,” said Kzanol.
“What did you expect of a moon?”
“There was F-28. Too heavy even for whitefoods.”
“True. Mmph. Look at that big circle. Looks like a tremendous meteor
crater, doesn’t it?”
“Where? Oh, I see it.” Kzanol listened. “That’s it! Radar’s got it cold.
Powerloss,” he added, looking at the radar telescope through the pilot’s
eyes, “you can almost see the shape of it. But we’ll have to wait for the next
circuit before we can land.”
Slowly the big ship turned until its motor faced forward in its orbit.
The Belt fleet stayed a respectful distance away—very respectful, four
million miles respectful. Without the telescopes Pluto barely showed a
disc.
“Everybody guess a number,” said Lew. “Between one and one
hundred. When I get yours I’ll tell you mine. Then we call Garner and let
him pick. Whoever gets closest to Garner’s number is It.”
“Three.” “Twenty-eight.” “Seventy.”
“Fifty. Okay, I’ll call Garner.” Lew changed to maser. “One calling
Garner. One calling Garner. Garner, we’ve about decided what to do if he
doesn’t go down. None of our ship radars are damaged, so we’ll just
program one ship to aim at the honeymooner at top speed. We watch
through the telescopes. When our ship gets close enough we blow the
drive. We want you to pick a number between one and one hundred.”
Seconds passing. Garner’s fleet was closer now, nearing the end of its
trip.
“This is Tartov in Number Three. He’s going down.”
“Garner here. I suggest we wait and use the radar proof, if we can. It
sounds like you’re planning for one man to ride in somebody’s airlock until
he can reach the Belt. If so, wait for us; we may have room for an extra in
one of the Earth ships. You still want a number? Fifty-five.”
Lew swallowed. “Thanks, Garner.” He turned off his maser-finder.
“Three again. You’re saved by the bell, Lew. He’s going down on the
night side. In the predawn area. Couldn’t be better. He may even land in
the Crescent!”
Lew watched, his face pale, as the tiny light burned above Pluto’s dim
white surface. Garner must have forgotten that a singleship’s control
bubble was its own airlock; that it had to be evacuated whenever the pilot
wanted to get out. Lew was glad the flatlander fleet had followed. He did
not relish the idea of spending several weeks riding on the outside of a
spaceship.
Kzanol/Greenberg swallowed, swallowed again. The low acceleration
bothered him. He blamed it on his human body. He sat in a window seat
with the crash web tightly fastened, looking out and down.
There was little to see. The ship had circled half the world, falling ever
lower, but the only feature on an unchanging cue-ball surface had been
the slow creep of the planetary shadow. Now the ship flew over the night
side, and the only light was the dim light of the drive, dim at least when
reflected from this height. And there was nothing to see at all…until now.
Something was rising on the eastern horizon, something a shade lighter
than the black plain. An irregular line against the stars. Kzanol/Greenberg
leaned forward as he began to realize just how big the range was, for it
couldn’t be anything but a mountain range. “What’s that?” he wondered
aloud.
“One hundredth diltun.” Kzanol probed the pilot’s mind. The pilot
said, “Cott’s Crescent. Frozen hydrogen piled up along the dawn side of
the planet. As it rotates into daylight the hydrogen boils off and then
refreezes on the night side. Eventually it rotates back to here.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
Evanescent mountains of hydrogen snow, smooth and low, like a tray of
differently sized snowballs dropped from a height. They rose gently before
the slowing ship, rank behind rank, showing the tremendous breadth of the
range. But they couldn’t show its length. Kzanol/Greenberg could see only
that the mountains stretched half around the horizon; but he could
imagine them marching from pole to pole around the curve of the world.
As they must. As they did.
The ship was almost down, hovering motionless a few miles west of the
beginning rise of the Crescent. A pillar of fire licked a mile down to touch
the surface. Where it touched, the surface disappeared. A channel like the
bed of a river followed below the ship, fading into the darkness beyond the
reach of the light.
The ship rode with nose tilted high; the fusion flame reached slightly
forward. Gently, gently, one mile up, the Golden Circle slowed and
stopped.
Where the flame touched, the surface disappeared. A wide, shallow
crater formed below the descending ship. It deepened rapidly. A ring of fog
formed, soft and white and opaque, thickening in the cold and the dark,
closing in on the ship. Then there was nothing but the lighted fog and the
crater and the licking fusion fire.
This was the most alien place. He had been wasting his life searching
out the inhabited worlds of the galaxy; for never had they given him such a
flavor of strangeness as came from this icy world, colder than…than the
bottom of Dante’s Hell.
“We’ll be landing on the water ice layer,” the pilot explained, just as if
he’d been asked. He had. “The gas layers wouldn’t hold us. But first we
have to dig down.”
Had he been searching for strangeness? Wasn’t that a Greenberg
thought slipping into his conscious mind? Yes. This soul-satisfaction was
the old Greenberg starlust; he had searched for wealth, only wealth.
The crater looked like an open pit mine now, with a sloping ring wall
and then an almost flat rim and then another, deeper ring wall and…
Kzanol/Greenberg looked down, grinning and squinting against the glare,
trying to guess which layer was which gas. They had been drilling through
a very thick blanket of ice, hundreds or thousands of feet thick. Perhaps it
was nitrogen? Then the next layer, appearing now, would be oxygen.
The plain and the space above it exploded in flame.
“She blows!” Lew crowed, like a felon reprieved. A towering, twisting
pillar of yellow and blue flame roared straight up out of the telescope, out
of the pale plain where there had been the small white star of the Golden
Circle. For a moment the star shone brightly through the flames. Then it
was swamped, and the whole scope was fire. Lew dropped the
magnification by a ten-factor to watch the fire spread. Then he had to drop
it again. And again.
Pluto was on fire. For billions of years a thick blanket of relatively inert
nitrogen ice had protected the highly reactive layers below. Meteors, as
scarce out here as sperm whales in a goldfish bowl, inevitably buried
themselves in the nitrogen layer. There had been no combustion on Pluto
since Kzanol’s spaceship smashed down from the stars. But now hydrogen
vapor mixed with oxygen vapor, and they burned. Other elements burned
too.
The fire spread outward in a circle. A strong, hot wind blew out and up
into vacuum, fanning great sheets of flame over the boiling ices until raw
oxygen was exposed. Then the fire dug deeper. There were raw metals
below the thin sheet of water ice; and it was thin, nonexistent in places, for
it had all formed when, the spaceship struck, untold eons ago, when food
yeast still ruled Earth. Sodium and calcium veins; even iron burns furiously
in the presence of enough oxygen and enough heat. Or chlorine, or
fluorine; both halogens were present, blowing off the top of Pluto’s frozen
atmosphere, some burning with hydrogen in the first sheets of flame. Raise
the temperature enough and even oxygen and nitrogen will unite.
Lew watched his screen in single-minded concentration. He thought of
his future great-great-grandchildren and wondered how he could possibly
make them see this as he saw it now. Old and leathery and hairless and
sedentary, he would tell those children: “I saw a world burning when I was
young…” He would never see anything as strange.
Pluto was a black disc almost covering his scope screen, with a cold
highlight near the sunward arm. In that disc the broad ring of fire had
almost become a great circle, with one arc crawling over the edge of the
world. When it contracted on the other side of the world there would be an
explosion such as could only be imagined. But in the center the ring was
darkening to black, its fuel nearly burned out.
The coldest spot within the ring was the point where the fire had
started.
The Golden Circle had gone straight up, ringing and shivering from the
blast, with sheets of fire roaring past the wing and hull. Kzanol/Greenberg
had the wind knocked out of him. Kzanol was just now recovering
consciousness. The ship was not yet harmed. It certainly hadn’t been
harmed by the heat of combustion. The ship’s underbelly was built to
withstand fusion heat for weeks.
But the pilot was out of control. His reflexes had taken over at the
instant the shock wave hit, and then his conscious mind…He found
himself his own master for the first time in weeks, and he made his
decision. He turned off the fuel feed. The drive couldn’t possibly be started
again. Kzanol raged and told him to die, and he did, but it was too late.
The ship, deprived of power, bucked and swooped in the burning wind.
Kzanol/Greenberg cursed fluent and ancient English. Below him a
wall of fire tens of miles high retreated toward the horizon. The ship hadn’t
turned over; the gyros must still be working.
The buffeting from below eased as the firelight died. The ship began to
fall.
Deliberately, reluctantly, Lew took his eyes off the screen and shook
himself. Then he turned on the radio. “All ships,” he said. “Drive to Pluto
at max. We can watch the fireworks on the way. Tartov, program us a
course to land us on the dawn side of whatever’s left of Cott’s Crescent.
Hexter, you haven’t done anything useful lately. Find Ceres with a maser
so I can fill them in to date. Comments?”
“This is Tartov. Lew, for Pete’s sake! The planet’s on fire! How can we
land?”
“We’ve got four million miles to drive. The fire should be out when we
get there. Oh, all right, get us into an orbit, but you’re still gonna program
our landing.”
“I think we ought to leave a ship in orbit. Just in case.”
“All right, Mabe. We’ll gamble for who stays up. More comments?”
Three men and a woman pushed buttons that squirted volatilized
uranium into fusion tubes and followed it with hydrogen. A growing storm
of neutrons produced fission which produced heat which produced fusion.
Four blue-white stars formed, very long and very thin. The bright ends
swung toward Pluto. They began to move.
“That’s that,” Masney said wearily. “And a good thing, too. Do you
suppose there ever was a telepathy amplifier?”
“I’m sure there is. And it’s not over yet.” Luke was flexing his fingers
and looking worried. Pluto showed on the screen before him, with the edge
of the fire a straight line creeping west to east. “Lloyd, why do you think I
didn’t want the Belt to beat us to Pluto? Why did we come after them,
anyway? That amplifier is a new weapon! If the Belt takes it apart and
makes one that humans can use, we could see the worst and most
permanent dictatorship in history. It might never end at all.”
Masney looked at the future Luke had painted and, judging by his
expression, found it evil. Then he grinned. “They can’t land. It’s all right,
Luke. They can’t get down to the helmet with that fire going.”
“That fire isn’t burning any more where the honeymooner came
down.”
Masney looked. “Right. Is Pluto still explosive?”
“I don’t know. There might still be pockets of unburned material. But
they can go down if they want, regardless. All they have to do is land on the
day side, where there’s no hydrogen, and land so fast they don’t burn
through the nitrogen layer. They’d sink into it, of course, from heat leakage
through the hulls, so they’d eventually have to dig their way out. But that’s
nothing. What counts is the hydrogen. Miss that and you probably won’t
start a fire.
“Now, they’ll almost certainly go down for the amplifier as soon as the
fire stops. We’ve got to destroy it before they get it. Or after.”
“Take a look,” said Lloyd.
Four bright points formed in a cluster on the screen. In seconds they
had grown into lines a mile long, all pointing in the same direction.
“We’ve got some time,” said Masney. “They’re millions of miles from
Pluto.”
“Not far enough.” Luke reached to close the intership circuit. “Calling
Heinlein. Anderson, the Belt fleet just took off for Pluto from four million
miles away. How long?”
“They started from rest?”
“Close enough.”
“Lessee…mmmmmmmmmm…five hours ten minutes, approx. No
less, maybe more, depending on whether they’re scared of the fire.”
“How long for us?”
“Fifty-nine hours now.”
“Thanks, Anderson.” Luke turned off the radio. Strange, how Smoky
had sat there without saying a word. In fact, he hadn’t said much of
anything lately.
With a chill, Luke realized that Smoky’s thoughts must run very like his
own. With the ET a dead issue, the question was: Who got the helmet?
Belt or Earth? And Smoky wasn’t about to trust Earth with it.
Larry Greenberg opened his eyes and saw darkness. It was cold. “The
lights don’t work,” said a voice in his mind.
“Did we crash?”
“We did indeed. I can’t imagine why we’re still alive. GET UP.”
Larry Greenberg got up and marched down the aisle between the
passengers’ seats. His muscles, bruised and aching, seemed to be acting by
themselves. He went to the pilot seat, removed the pilot and sat down. His
hands strapped him, then folded themselves into his lap. There he sat.
Kzanol stood beside him, barely in the range of his peripheral vision.
“Comfortable?”
“Not quite,” Larry confessed. “Could you leave one arm free for
smoking?”
“Certainly.” Larry found his left arm would obey him. He still couldn’t
move his eyes, though he could blink. He pulled a cigarette and lit it,
moving by touch.
He thought, “It’s a good thing I’m one of those people who can shave
without a mirror.”
Kzanol asked, “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It means I don’t get uncoordinated without my eyes.”
Kzanol stood watching him, a blurred mass at the edge of sight. Larry
knew what he wanted. He wouldn’t do it; he wouldn’t ask.
What did Kzanol look like? he wondered.
He looked like a thrint, of course. Larry could remember being
Kzanol/Greenberg, and all he had seen was a smallish, handsome,
somewhat undergroomed thrint. But when he’d walked past Kzanol on his
way to the pilot room, his fleeting glimpse had found something terrifying,
something one-eyed and scaly and iridescent green, with gray giant
earthworms writhing at the corners of a mouth like a slash in a child’s
rubber ball, with sharply pointed metallic teeth, with oversized arms and
huge three-fingered hands like mechanical grabs.
The thrintun voice was chilly, by its own standards. “Are you
wondering about my oath?”
“Oaths. Yes, now that you mention it.”
“You can no longer claim to be a thrint in a human body. You are not
the being I gave my oath to.”
“Oaths.”
“I still want you to help me manage Earth.”
Larry had no trouble understanding even the inflections in overspeak,
and Kzanol, of course, could now read his mind. “But you’ll manage me,”
said Larry.
“Yes, of course.”
Larry raised his cigarette and tapped it with a forefinger. The ash fell
slower than mist past his gaze and disappeared from sight. “There’s
something I should tell you,” he said.
“Condense it. My time is short; I have to find something.”
“I don’t think you should own the Earth any more. I’ll stop you if I
can.”
Kzanol’s eating tendrils were doing something strange. Larry couldn’t
see what it was. “You think like a slave. Not a ptavv, a slave. You have no
conceivable reason to warn me.”
“That’s my problem.”
“Quite. DON’T MOVE UNTIL I RETURN.” The command carried
overtones of disgust. A dark blur that was Kzanol moved and vanished.
Alone in the pilot room, Larry listened to the clanking, squeaking, and
mental cursing that meant Kzanol was searching for something. He heard
when the thrint sharply ordered the pilot to return to life and show him AT
ONCE where he’d hidden the contaminated portable radar…The
command, a mere explosion of frustration, stopped suddenly. So did the
sounds of search.
Presently Larry heard the airlock chugging to itself.
The clerk was a middleman. It was his job to set priorities on messages
sent into and received from deep space. At three in the morning he
answered the ring of the outside phone.
“Hello, Arms Maser Transceiving Station,” he said a little sleepily. It
had been a dull night.
It was no longer dull. The small brunette who looked out of his screen
was startlingly beautiful, especially to the man who saw her unexpectedly
in the dead hours.
“Hello. I have a message for Lucas Garner. He’s on the way to
Neptune, I think.”
“Lucas Garner? What—I mean, what’s the message?”
“Tell him that my husband is back to normal, and he should take it
into consideration. It’s very important.”
“And who is your husband?”
“Larry Greenberg. That’s G-r-e”
“Yes, I know. But he’s beyond Neptune by now. Wouldn’t Garner
already know anything you know about Greenberg?”
“Not unless he’s telepathic.”
“Oh.”
It was a tricky decision for a clerk. Maser messages cost like uranium,
less because of the power needed and the wear and tear on the delicate
machines than because of the difficulty of finding the target. But only
Garner could decide whether an undependable “hunch” was important to
him. The clerk risked his job and sent the message.
The fire had slowed now. Most of the unburned hydrogen had been
blown before the fire, until it was congested into a cloud mass opposite on
Pluto from the resting place of the Golden Circle. Around that cloud bank
raged a hurricane of awesome proportions. Frozen rain poured out of the
heavens in huge lens-shaped drops, hissing into the nitrogen snow. The
layers above nitrogen were gone, vaporized, gas diluting the hydrogen
which still poured in. On the borderline hydrogen burned fitfully with
halogens, and even with nitrogen to form ammonia, but around most of
the great circle the fires had gone out. Relatively small, isolated
conflagrations ate their way toward the new center. The “hot” water ice
continued to fall. When it had boiled the nitrogen away it would begin on
the oxygen. And then there would be a fire.
At the center of the hurricane the ice stood like a tremendous Arizona
butte. Even the halogens were still frozen across its flat top, thousands of
square miles of fluorine ice with near-vacuum above. Coriolis effects held
back the burning wind for a time.
On the other side of the world, Kzanol stepped out of the Golden
Circle.
He turned once to look back. The honeymoon ship was flat on her
belly. Her landing gear was retracted, and a wide, smooth crater was
centered under the drive exhaust cone. Star-hot hydrogen had leaked from
the fusion tube for some time after its fuel was cut off. The fuselage was
twisted, though not broken. Her forward wings had been jarred open, and
now hung broken from their sockets. One tip of the triangular major wing
curled up where it had stabbed against rock-hard ice.
She was doomed, she was useless. Kzanol walked on.
The thrintun space suit was a marvelous assemblage of tools. No
changes had been made in it for centuries before Kzanol’s time, for the
design had long been perfect, but for an unsuspected flaw in the
emergency systems, and the naïve thrintun had never reached that level of
sophistication which produces planned obsolescence. The temperature
inside the suit was perfect, even a little warmer than in the ship.
But the suit could not compensate for the wearer’s imagination. Kzanol
felt the outer chill as his ship fell behind. Miles-thick blankets of nitrogen
and oxygen snow had boiled away here, leaving bubbly permafrost which
showed dark and deep green in the light of his helmet lamp. There was
fog, too, not dense but very deep, a single bank that stretched halfway
around the world. The fog narrowed his universe to a circular patch of
bubbly ice.
Moving in great, easy flying hops, he reached the first rise of the
crescent in forty minutes. It was six miles from the ship. The crescent was
now a slightly higher rise of permafrost, scarred and pitted from the fire
that had crossed it. Kzanol’s portable radar, borrowed from the Circle’s
lockers, showed his goal straight ahead at the limit of its range. About a
mile ahead, and almost a thousand feet deep in permafrost.
Kzanol began to climb the slope.
“We’re out of arrows,” the man in Number Two ship said gloomily. He
meant missiles. “How do we protect ourselves?”
Lew said, “We’ll be on our way home before Garner comes within
sniffing distance of Pluto. The best he can do is shoot at us as we pass. His
arrows aren’t good enough to hit us when we’re moving that fast, except by
accident. He knows it. He won’t even try, because it might start the Last
War.”
“He may decide the stakes are high enough.”
“Dammit, Tartov, what choice have we got? Garner must not be
allowed to leave here with that amplifier! If he does, we’ll see a period of
slavery such as nobody has even dreamed of up to now,” Lew exhaled
noisily through his nostrils. “We’ve got to go down and destroy the thing by
hand. Land on the dawn side and mount an expedition. Hexter, can you
dismount a ship’s radar so it’ll still work?”
“Sure, Lew. But it’ll take two men to carry it.”
Tartov said, “You miss my point. Of course we’ve got to wreck the damn
amplifier. But how can we prove to Garner that we did wreck it? Why
should he trust us?”
Lew ran spatulate fingers through tangled cotton hair. “My apologies,
Tartov. That’s a damn good question. Comments?”
Kzanol aimed the disintegrator thirty degrees downward and flipped the
firing switch.
The tunnel formed fast. Kzanol couldn’t see how fast for there was
nothing but darkness inside after the first second. A minor hurricane blew
out of the tunnel. He leaned against the wind as against a wall. In the
narrow cone of the beam the “wind” was clear, but beyond the edge it was
a dust storm. The wind was dust, too, icy dust torn to particles of two and
three molecules each by the mutual repulsion of the nuclei.
After ten minutes Kzanol decided the tunnel must be getting too wide.
The opening was less than a foot across; he used the disintegrator to
enlarge it. Even when he turned off the digging tool he couldn’t see very
far into it.
After a moment he walked into the darkness.
With his left hand Larry reached out and shook the pilot’s shoulder.
Nothing. It was like a wax figure. He would probably have felt the same
way. But the man’s cheek was cool. He was not paralyzed, but dead.
Somewhere in the back of his mind was Judy. It was different from the
way it had been in the past. Now, he believed it. Even when separated by
over three billion miles, he and Judy were somehow aware of each other.
But no more than that.
He couldn’t tell her anything. He couldn’t warn her that the Bug Eyed
Whoosis was hours or minutes from owning the Earth.
The pilot couldn’t help him. He had had an instant to make a choice,
that professional hauler of millionaires, and he had made first a right
choice and then a wrong one. He had decided to die, killing everyone
aboard ship, and that was right. But he should have turned off the fusion
shield, not the fuel feed! Now he was dead, and Kzanol was loose.
It was his fault. Without Larry Greenberg, Kzanol would have been
blasted to gas when he made turnover for Pluto. He’d never have known
the suit was on Pluto! The knowledge was galling.
Where was his mind shield? Two hours ago he had held an
impenetrable telepathic wall, a shield that had stood up to Kzanol’s most
furious efforts. Now he couldn’t remember how he’d done it. He was
capable of it, he knew that, and if he could—hold it.
No, it was gone. Some memory, some thrintun memory.
Well, let’s see. He’d been in Masney’s office when the thrint had
screamed at everybody to shut off their minds. His mind shield had—but it
had already been there. Somehow he had already known how to use it. He
had known ever since.
Sunflowers eight feet across. They turned round and round, following
the sun as it circled the plantation at Kzathit’s pole. Great silver paraboloid
platters sending concentrated sunlight to their dark green photosynthetic
nodes. Flexible mirrors mounted on thick bulging stalks, mirrors that could
ripple gently to put the deadly focus wherever they wanted it: on a
rebellious slave or a wild animal or an attacking enemy thrint. That focus
was as deadly as a laser cannon, and the sunflowers never missed. For some
reason they never attacked members of the House they protected.
In the grounded luxury liner, Larry Greenberg tingled. Fish on fire!
The sunflowers must have been controlled by the tnuctipun house slaves!
He had not the slightest proof, but he knew. On a day in the past, every
sunflower in the galaxy must have turned on its owner…He thought, We
thrintun—those thrintun really set themselves up. Suckers!
Remembering again, he saw that the sunflowers weren’t as big as they
looked. He was seeing them from Kzanol’s viewpoint, Kzanol one and a
half feet tall, a child of eight thrintun years. Kzanol half grown.
The maser beam reached for Pluto, spreading itself wide, dropping ever
so slightly in frequency as it climbed out of the Sun’s gravitational well. By
the time it reached its target more than five hours had passed, and the wave
front was a quarter of a million miles across.
Pluto didn’t stop it. Pluto barely left a noticeable hole. There was
enormous power behind this beam. The beam went on into the void,
moving almost straight toward the galactic center, thinned by dust clouds
and distance. It was picked up centuries later by beings who did not
resemble humanity in the least. They were able to determine the shape of
the conical beam, and to determine its apex. But not accurately enough.
In its wake—
Tartov said, “You were right, Lew. There’s no fire where we’re going.”
“That’s that, then. You three go on down. I’ll warp into an orbit.”
“We really ought to draw again, you know.”
“Nuts, Mabe. Think how much I’ll win at poker after using up all my
bad luck out here. Got my orbit, Tartov?”
“Hook in your idiot savant and I’ll give it the data direct.”
“Autopilot on.”
BEEP.
Lew felt his ship turning as the sound of the beep ended. The spears of
fusion light alongside him began to dwindle in size. Could they manage
without him? Sure, they were Belters. If danger came it would come here,
in orbit. He said, “All ships. Good luck. Don’t take any stupid chances.”
“Hexter calling. Something on the Earth channel, Lew.”
Lew used his frequency dial. “Can’t find it.”
“It’s a little low.”
“Oh. Typical…Dammit, it’s in code. Why should it be in code?”
“Maybe they’ve got little secrets,” Tartov suggested. “Whatever it is, it’s
bound to be a good reason to finish this fast.”
“Yeah. Look, you go ahead and land. I’ll send this to Ceres for
decoding. It’ll take twelve hours to get an answer, but what the hell.”
Why should it be in code?
Lit Shaeffer would have known.
Even now, sitting in his office deep in the rock of Ceres, with the
bubble of Confinement winding its snail-slow orbit thirty miles overhead,
Lit was preparing a note of apology to the United Nations. It was the
hardest work he’d ever done! But there seemed, no way out.
A week and a half ago there had been a maser message from Neptune.
Garner’s story was true: he had gone to Neptune in pursuit of a wildly
dangerous ET. Lit had scowled and ordered an immediate end to the
harassment of Earth shipping.
But the damage was done. For two weeks the Belt had persecuted
Earth’s meager shipping; had used codes in maser transmissions, even in
solar weather forecasts, in violation of a century’s tradition; had used their
espionage network so heavily that its existence became insultingly obvious.
Secretiveness and suspicion were the rule as never before. Earth had
retaliated in kind.
Now the Belt had stopped using codes, but Earth had not.
Did the coded messages contain vital information? Almost certainly
not, Lit would have guessed. Certain messages decoded at random bore
him out. But the Belt couldn’t be sure, which, of course, was the whole
point.
And Belt ships were searched at Earth’s ports, with insulting
thoroughness.
This mistrust had to be stopped now. Lit gritted his teeth and continued
writing.
The message started to repeat, and Lloyd switched it off with a decisive
click.
“She felt him die,” said Luke. “She didn’t know it, but she felt him die.”
His thoughts ran on without him…She’d felt him die. What was it that
let some people know things they couldn’t possibly know? There seemed to
be more and more of them lately. Luke had never been remotely psychic,
and he’d envied the lucky few who could find lost rings or lost criminals
without the slightest effort, with no more explanation than, “I thought you
might have dropped it in the mayonnaise,” or, “I had a hunch he was
hiding in the subway, living off the tenth-mark peanut machines.”
Parapsychologists with their special cards had proven that psy powers exist;
and had gone no further than that, in close to two hundred years, except
for psionics devices like the contact machine. “Psionics,” to Luke, meant “I
don’t know how the damn thing works.”
How did Judy know that the Golden Circle had crashed? You couldn’t
know the answer, so you hung a tag on it. Telepathy.
“And even then,” said Luke, not knowing that he spoke. “she managed
to fool herself. Marvelous!”
“Did she?”
Luke’s head jerked up and around. Lloyd was scared and not trying to
hide it. He said, “The Golden Circle was a tough ship. Her drive was in her
belly, remember? Her belly was built to stand fusion heat. And the
explosion was below her.”
Luke felt his own nerves thrill in sympathetic fear. “We’ll find out right
now,” he said, and touched the control panel. “All ships, listen in.
Anderson, what do you know about the Golden Circle?”
“Yeah, I heard it too. It could be; it just could be. The people who built
the honeymooners knew damn well that one accident or one breakdown
could ruin a billion-mark business. They built the ships to stand up to
anything. The Golden Circle’s life system is smaller in proportion than the
life system of any ship here, just because they put so much extra weight in
the walls and in the failsafe systems.”
In a dull voice, Smoky said, “And we’re out of it.”
“Hell we are. That message was in code. Lloyd, get the maser pointed
at Pluto. We’ve got to warn the Belters. Smoky, is there a Mayday signal we
can use?”
“No need. They’ll hear you. It’s too late anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re going down.”
Kzanol walked slowly through a tunnel which gleamed dull white
where the light fell. With practice he had learned to stay the right distance
behind the disappearing far wall, following his disintegrator beam, so that
he walked in a sloppy cylinder six feet in diameter. The wind roared past
him and ceased to be wind; it was flying dust and ice particles, flying in
vacuum and low gravity, and it packed the tunnel solidly behind him.
The other suit was two hundred feet beyond the end of the sloping
tube.
Kzanol looked up. He turned off the disintegrator and stood, stiffly
furious, waiting. They had dared! They were just beyond control range, too
far away and moving in fast, but they were decelerating as they closed in.
He waited, ready to kill.
Mature consideration stopped him. He needed a ship in which to leave
Pluto; his own was shot to heat death. Those above him were single seaters,
useless to him, but he knew that other ships were coming. He must not
frighten them away.
He would let these ships land.
Lew’s singleship hung nose down over the surface of Pluto. He’d set the
gyros that way. The ship would be nose down for a long time, perhaps until
the gyros wore out. Yet he could see nothing. The planetary surface was
hidden beneath a curtain of boiling storm clouds.
He knew that he had passed Cott’s Crescent some minutes ago. He had
heard the hum of an open intership circuit. Now, coming toward him over
the curved horizon, was a storm within a storm: the titanic whirling
hurricane he had passed over twice already. Pluto takes months to rotate.
Only a monumental flow of air, air newly created, rushing around from the
other side of the planet, could have carried enough lateral velocity to build
such a sky whirlpool from mere Coriolis effects. Flames flickered in its
roiling rim; but the center was a wide circle of calm, clear near-vacuum all
the way down to the icy plateau.
Over the radio came the sound of Garner’s voice.
“…Please answer at once so we’ll know you’re all right. There is a real
chance that the ET survived the crash, in which case—”
“Now you’re telling me, you know-it-all son of a bitch!” Lew couldn’t
talk. His tongue and his lips were as frozen as the rest of his voluntary
muscles. He heard the message all the way through, and he heard it
repeated, and repeated. Garner sounded more urgent than he had ten
minutes ago.
The hurricane was almost below him now. He looked straight down
into the eye.
From one of the murky fires in the rim of the eye, a tongue reached
inward.
It was like the first explosion, the one he’d watched through the
telescope. But this wasn’t the telescope! The whole plateau was lost in
multicolored flame in the first twenty seconds. With the leisurely torpor of
a sleepy ground sloth on a cold morning, the fire stood up and reached for
him. It was fire and ice, chunks of ice big enough to see, ice burning as it
rose in the clutch of the height and might, a blazing carnivore reaching to
swallow him.
Viprin race. Bowed skeletal shapes like great albino whippets seemed
to skim the dirt surface of the track, their jet nacelle nostrils flaring, their
skins shining like oil, racing round and round the audience standing
breathless in the center of the circle. The air was thick with Power:
thousands of thrintun desperately hurling orders at their favorites, knowing
perfectly well that the mutant viprin didn’t have the brains to hear. Kzanol
on one of the too-expensive seats, clutching a lavender plastic cord,
knowing that this race, this race meant the difference between life as a
prospector and life as a superintendent of cleaning machinery. He would
leave here with commercials to buy a ship, or with none.
Larry dropped it. It was too late in Kzanol’s life. He wanted to
remember much earlier. But his brain seemed filled with fog, and the
thrintun memories were fuzzy and hard to grasp. As Kzanol/Greenberg he
had had no trouble with his memory, but as Larry he found it infuriatingly
vague.
The earliest thing he could remember was that scene of the sunflowers.
He was out of cigarettes. The pilot might have some in his pocket, but
Larry couldn’t quite reach it. And he was hungry; he hadn’t eaten in some
ten hours. A gnal might help. Definitely one would help, for it would
probably kill him in seconds. Larry tore a button from his shirt and put it in
his mouth. It was round and smooth, very like a gnal.
He sucked it and let his mind dissolve.
Three ships rested on the other side of what remained of Cott’s
Crescent. In the control bubbles the pilots sat motionless, waiting for
instructions and thinking furious, futile thoughts. In the fourth…Kzanol’s
eating tendrils stood away from his mouth as he probed.
It was rather like probing his own memory of the crash. A brightly
burning wind, a universe of roaring, tearing flame and crushing shocks.
Well, it wasn’t as if he needed Lew. Kzanol turned his disintegrator on
and began walking. Something bright glimmered through the dark ice
wall.
“They don’t answer,” said Lloyd.
Luke let himself sag against the constant one-gee deceleration. Too
little, too late…the Belt was beaten. And then his eyes narrowed and he
said, “They’re bluffing.”
Masney turned inquiringly.
“Sure. They’re bluffing, Lloyd. They’d be fools not to. We handed them
such a perfect chance! Like four spades up in a five stud hand. The perfect
opportunity to get us fighting the wrong enemy.”
“But we’d be getting this same scary silence if they were really caught.”
Luke spoke jerky phrases as the answers came. “Right. We get quiet
radios either way. But we get the same answer either way, too. Shoot to kill.
Either the fleet is on its way back with amplifier, or the ET has it and is on
its way to conquer the Earth. Either way, we have to attack.”
“You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Tell me.”
“We’ll have to kill Atwood and Smoky first. And Anderson.”
“O-o-oh. Right, about Atwood. He’d never let us shoot at his friends,
whether they’re slaves or not. But we can hope Anderson can control
Smoky.”
“How’s your coordination?”
“My—?” Luke pondered his uncertain, shaky hands and newly clumsy
fingers, his lack of control over his sphincter muscles. Paralysis hangover.
“Right again. Smoky’d make mincemeat of Anderson.” A gusty sigh. “We’ll
have to blow both ships.”
“Luke, I want a promise.” Masney looked like Death. He was an old
man in his own right, and he had been starved for some time. “I want you
to swear that the first smell we get of the thought amplifier, we destroy it.
Not capture, Luke. Destroy!”
“All right, Lloyd. I swear.”
“If you try to take it home, I’ll kill you. I mean it.”
His finger, an oversized finger in an oversized mouth with tiny needle
teeth. He was on his side, more a lump of flesh than anything else, and he
sucked his finger because he was hungry. He would always be hungry.
Something huge came in, blocking light. Mother? Father. His own arm
moved, jerking the finger contemptuously away, scraping it painfully on
the new teeth. He tried to put it back, but it wouldn’t move. Something
forceful and heavy told him never to do that again. He never did.
No mind shield there. Funny, how sharp that picture was, the memory
of early frustration.
Something…
The room was full of guests. He was four thrintun years old, and he was
being allowed out for the first time. Shown proudly by his father. But the
noise, the telepathic noise, was too loud. He was trying to think like
everybody at once. It frightened him. Something terrible happened. A
stream of dark brown semiliquid material shot out of his mouth and spread
over the wall. He had defecated in public.
Rage, red and sharp. Suddenly he had no control over his limbs; he was
running, stumbling toward the door. Rage from his father and shame from
himself—or from his father? He couldn’t tell. But it hurt, and he fought it,
closed his mind to it. Father went like a blown flame, and the guests too,
and everybody was gone. He was all alone in an empty world. He stopped,
frightened. The other minds came back.
His father was proud, proud! At the age of four little Kzanol already had
the Power!
Larry grinned a predatory grin and got up. His vac suit—? In the
lounge, on one of the seats. He got it and screwed it down and went out.
Kzanol tugged at the great bright bulk until it came out of the ice. It
looked like a great rippled goblin lying on its back.
The ice had packed the tunnel solidly behind him; air tight, in fact.
That was fortunate. Kzanol had used compressed air from his own suit to
pressurize his icy chamber. He frowned at the dials on his upper chest,
then took his helmet off.
The air was cold and thin. But now he needn’t carry the amplifier
helmet back to the ship. He could put it on here.
He looked down at the suit and realized that he’d want help getting it
back. Kzanol turned his Attention to Larry Greenberg. He found a blank.
Greenberg was nowhere.
Had he died? No, surely Kzanol would have sensed that.
This wasn’t good, not even a little bit good. Greenberg had warned him
that he would try to stop him. The slave must be on his way now, with his
mind shield in full working order. Fortunately the amplifier would stop
him. It would control a full-grown thrint.
Kzanol reached down to turn the suit on its face. It was…not heavy, but
massive…but it moved.
It was snowing. In the thin air the snow fell like gravel thrown by an
explosion. It fell hard enough to kill an unprotected man. Where it hit it
packed itself into a hard surface, just crunchy enough for good walking.
Luckily Greenberg didn’t have to see. He could sense exactly where
Kzanol was and he walked confidently in that direction. His suit wasn’t as
good as Kzanol’s. The cold seeped gently through his gauntlets and boots.
He’d suffered worse than this on skiing trips, and loved it.
Then the Power came lashing at his brain. His mind shield went up
hard. The wave was gone in a moment. But now he couldn’t find Kzanol.
The thrint had put up his mind shield. Larry stopped, bewildered, then
went on. He had a compass, so he would not walk in circles. But Kzanol
must now know he was coming.
Gradually the afterimage pushed into his mind. In every sense, in eye
and ears and touch and kinesthetic nerves, he felt what Kzanol had been
doing when his Power lashed out.
He’d been bending over the second suit.
It was too late.
He couldn’t run; the vac suit wasn’t built for it. He looked around in a
rising tide of desperation, and then, because there was no help for it, he
walked on.
Walk. Knock the ice off your faceplate, and walk.
Walk until you’re Told to stop.
Half an hour later, an hour after he’d left the ship, he began to see
powdery snow. It was light and fluffy, very different from the falling icy
bullets. It was the residue of Kzanol’s digging. He could use it as a guide.
The powder snow grew deeper and deeper, until suddenly it reared as a
towering mountain of packed snow. When he tried to climb it Larry kept
slipping down the side in a flurry of snow. But he had to get up there!
When Kzanol opened the suit it would be all over. He kept climbing.
He was halfway up, and nearly exhausted, when the top began to move.
Snow shot out in a steady stream and fell in a slow fountain. Larry slid
hastily down for fear of being buried alive.
The snow continued to pour out. Kzanol was digging his way back…
but why wasn’t he wearing the helmet?
The fountain rose higher. Particles of ice, frozen miles up in Pluto’s
burned and cooling atmosphere, pelted through the drifting fountain and
plated itself on Larry’s suit. He kept moving to keep his joints free. Now he
wore a sheath of translucent ice, shattered and cracked at the joints.
And suddenly he guessed the answer. His lips pulled back in a smile of
gentle happiness, and his dolphin sense of humor rose joyfully to the
surface.
Kzanol climbed out of the tunnel, tugging the useless spare suit behind
him. He’d had to use the disintegrator to clear away the snow in the tunnel,
and he’d had to climb it at a thirty-degree rise, dragging a bulk as heavy as
himself and wearing a space suit which weighed nearly as much. Kzanol
was very tired. Had he been human, he would have wept.
The sight of the slope down was almost too much. Plow his feet
through that stuff—? But he sighed and sent the spare suit rolling down the
mountainside. He watched it hit the bottom and stay, half buried. And he
followed it down.
The ice fell faster than ever, hundreds of thousands of tons of brand
new water freezing and falling as the planet tried to regain its equilibrium
state, forty degrees above absolute zero. Kzanol stumbled blind, putting
one big chicken foot in front of the other and bracing for the jar as it fell,
keeping his mind closed because he remembered that Greenberg was
around somewhere. His mind was numb with fatigue and vicarious cold.
He was halfway down when the snow rose up and stood before him like
a thrintun giant. He gasped and stopped moving. The figure slapped one
mitten against its faceplate and the thick ice shattered and fell. Greenberg!
Kzanol raised the disintegrator.
Almost casually, with a smile that was purest dolphin, Larry reached
out a stiff forefinger and planted it in Kzanol’s chest.
For thirty-four hours the singleship had circled Pluto, and it was too
long by far. Garner and Masney had been taking turns sleeping so that they
could watch the scope screen for the actinic streak of a singleship taking
off. There had been little talk between the ships. What talk there was was a
strain for all, for every one of the five men knew that battle was very close,
and not one was willing even to hint at the possibility. Now Lew’s
singleship showed in the scope screen even with its drive off. Now Luke,
watching although it was his off watch, watching though he knew he
should sleep, watching through lids that felt like heavy sandpaper, Luke
finally said the magic words.
“They’re not bluffing.”
“Why the sudden decision?”
“It’s no good, Lloyd. Bluff or no bluff, the fleet would have taken off as
soon as they found the amplifier. The longer they wait, the closer we get to
their velocity, and the more accurate our arrows get. They’ve been down
too long. The ET has them.”
“I thought so all along. But why hasn’t he taken off?”
“In what? There’s nothing on Pluto but singleships. He can’t fly. He’s
waiting for us.”
The conference was a vast relief to all. It also produced results. One
result was that Woody Atwood spent a full thirty hours standing up in the
airlock of the Iwo Jima.
Four million miles respectful had been good enough for the Belter
fleet. It would have to do for Garner. His ship and one other came to an
easy one-gee stop in mid-space. The third had taken a divergent path, and
was now several hundred miles above the still-shrouded surface.
“It’s funny,” said Smoky. “Every time you decide one of our ships is
expendable, it turns out to be a Belt ship.”
“Which ship would you have used, Old Smoky?”
“Don’t confuse me with logic.”
“Listen,” said Masney.
Faintly but clearly, the radio gave forth a rising and falling scream like
an air raid siren.
“It’s the Lazy Eight’s distress signal,” said Anderson.
Number Six was now a robot. The Heinlein’s drive controls now
operated the singleship’s drive, and Anderson pushed attitude jet buttons
and pulled on the fuel throttle as he watched the Heinlein’s screen—which
now looked through Number Six’s telescope. They had had to use the
singleship, of course. A two-man Earth ship must be just what the ET
desperately needed.
“Well, shall we take her down?”
Woody said, “Let’s see if Lew’s all right.”
Anderson guided the singleship over to where the lead ship circled
Pluto, turned off the drive and used attitude jets to get even closer. At last
he and four others looked directly through the frosted, jagged fragments of
Lew’s control bubble. There were heat stains on the metal rim. Lew was
there, a figure in a tall, narrow metal armor spacesuit; but he wasn’t
moving. He was dead or paralyzed.
“We can’t do anything for him now,” said Smoky.
“Right,” said Luke. “No sense postponing the dreadful moment. Take
’er down.”
The distress signal was coming out of a field of unbroken snow.
Anderson had never worked harder in his life. Muttering ceaselessly
under his breath, he held the ship motionless a mile over the distress signal
while snow boiled and gave him way. Mist formed on the Heinlein’s screen,
then fog. He turned on an infrared spotlight, and it helped, but not much.
Smoky winced at some of the things young Anderson was saying. Suddenly
Anderson was silent, and all five craned forward to see better.
The Golden Circle came out of the ice.
Anderson brought the singleship down as gently as he knew how. At the
moment of contact the whole ship rang like a brass bell. The picture in the
screen trembled wildly.
In the ensuing silence, a biped form climbed painfully through the
topside airlock in the Golden Circle. It climbed down and moved toward
them across the snow.
The honeymooner was no longer a spaceship, but she made an
adequate meeting hall and hospital. Especially hospital, for of the ten men
who faced each other around the crap table, only two were in good health.
Larry Greenberg, carrying a thrintun spacesuit on each shoulder, had
returned to find the Golden Circle nearly buried in ice. The glassy
sheathing over the top of the ship was twenty feet thick. He had managed
to burn his way through the hard way, with a welder in his suit kit, but his
fingers and toes were frostbitten when he uncovered the airlock. For nearly
three days he had waited for treatment. He was very little pleased to find
Number Six empty, but he had gotten his message across by showing the
watchers at her scope screen. All’s safe; come down.
Smoky Petropoulos and Woody Atwood, doing all the work because
they were still the only ones able, had moved the paralyzed Belters to the
Golden Circle in the two-man ships. The four were still unable to use
anything but their eyes and, now, their voices. Lew’s hands and wrists and
feet and neck all had a roasted look where the skin showed through the
blisters. His suit cooling system had been unable to cope with the heat
during those seconds of immersion in flaming gases. If the gas hadn’t been
so extremely thin, some plastic connection in his air pack or his cooling
system would surely have melted—as he would tell eager listeners again
and again in the years to come. But that was for later. Later, the others
would remember that they had all been wearing suits because they’d been
forced to break their windshields, and that if Smoky and Woody hadn’t
found them that way they’d have starved in their ships. For now, they were
safe.
Garner and Anderson were nearly over their induced paralysis, which
now showed only in an embarrassing lack of coordination.
“So we all made it,” said Luke, beaming around at the company. “I was
afraid the Last War would start on Pluto.”
“Me too,” said Lew. His voice was barely slurred. “We were afraid you
wouldn’t take the hint when we couldn’t answer your calls. You might have
decided that was some stupid piece of indirection.” He blinked and
tightened his lips, dismissing the memory. “So what’ll we do with the spare
suit?”
Now he had everybody’s attention. This was a meeting hall, and the
suit was the main order of business.
“We can’t let Earth have it,” said Smoky. “They could open it. We don’t
have their time stopper.” Without looking at Luke, he added, “Some
inventions do have to be suppressed.”
“You could get it with a little research,” said Garner. “So—”
“Dump it on Jupiter,” Masney advised. “Strap it to the Heinlein’s hull
and let Woody and me fly it. If we both come back alive you know it got
dumped on schedule. Right?”
“Right,” said Lew. Garner nodded. Others in the lounge tasted the idea
and found it good, despite the loss of knowledge which must be buried
with the suit. Larry Greenberg, who had other objections, kept them to
himself.
“All agreed?” Lew swept his eyes around the main lounge. “Okay. Now,
which one is the amplifier?”
There was a full two seconds of dismayed silence.
Greenberg pointed. “The wrinkled one with both hands empty.”
Once it had been pointed out, the difference was obvious. The second
suit had wrinkles and bumps and bulges; the limbs were twisted; it had no
more personality than a sack. But the suit that was Kzanol—
It lay in one corner of the lounge, knees bent, disintegrator half raised.
Even in the curious shape of arms and legs, and in the expressionless
mirror of its face, one could read the surprise and consternation which
must have been the thrint’s last emotions. There must have been fury too,
frustrated fury that had been mounting since Kzanol first saw the fused,
discolored spot which was the rescue switch on his second suit.
Garner tossed off his champagne, part of the stock from the
honeymooner’s food stores. “So it’s settled. The Sea Statue goes back to the
UN Comparative Cultures Exhibit. The treasure suit goes to Jupiter. I
submit the Sun might be safer, but what the hell. Greenberg, where do you
go?”
“Home. And then Jinx, I think.” Larry Greenberg wore what Lucas
Garner decided was a bittersweet smile, though even he never guessed
what it meant. “They’ll never keep Judy and me away now. I’m the only
man in the universe who can read bandersnatchi handwriting.”
Masney shook his head and started to laugh. He had a rumbling,
helpless kind of laugh, as infectious as mumps. “Better not read their
minds, Greenberg. You’ll end up as a whole space menagerie if you aren’t
careful.”
Others took up the laughter, and Larry smiled with them, though only
he knew how true were Masney’s words.
Or had Garner guessed? The old man was looking at him very
strangely. If Garner guessed that, two billion years ago, Kzanol had taken a
racarliw slave as a pet and souvenir—
Nonsense.
So only Larry would ever know. If the suit were opened it could start a
war. With controlled hydrogen fusion as common today as electrical
generators had been a century and a half back, any war might be the very
last. So the suit had to go to Jupiter; and the doomed racarliw slave had to
go with it, buried in dead, silent stasis for eternity.
Could Larry Greenberg have sacrificed an innocent sentient, even for
such a purpose? To Larry plus dolphin plus thrint, it wasn’t even difficult.
Just a slave, whispered Kzanol. Small, stupid, ugly: worth half a
commercial at best.
Can’t defend himself, thought Charley. He has no rights.
Larry made a mental note never to tell Judy, even by accident, and then
went on to more pleasant thoughts.
What was he thinking? Garner wondered. He’s dropped it now; I might
as well stop watching him.
But I’d give my soul if I could read minds for an hour, if I could pick
the hour.
OceanofPDF.com
AT THE BOTTOM OF A HOLE
OceanofPDF.com
INTENT TO DECEIVE
OceanofPDF.com
CLOAK OF ANARCHY
OceanofPDF.com
THE WARRIORS
OceanofPDF.com
MADNESS HAS ITS PLACE
A world that had forgotten war did not easily accept the possibility
of invading aliens.
LN
III Things ran smoother for me because John Junior had made a
place for himself in Ceres.
Even so, they had to train me. Twenty years earlier I’d spent a week in
the Belt. It wasn’t enough. Training and a Belt citizen’s equipment used up
most of my savings and two months of my time.
Time had brought me to Mercury, and the lasers, eight years before.
Lightsails are rare in the inner solar system. Between Venus and
Mercury there are still lightsail races, an expensive, uncomfortable, and
dangerous sport. Cargo craft once sailed throughout the Asteroid Belt, until
fusion motors became cheaper and more dependable.
The last refuge of the lightsail is a huge, empty region: the cometary
halo, Pluto and beyond. The lightsails are all cargo craft. That far from Sol
their thrust must be augmented by lasers, the same Mercury lasers that
sometimes hurl an unmanned probe into interstellar space.
These were different from the launch lasers I was familiar with. They
were enormously larger. In Mercury’s lower gravity, in Mercury’s windless
environment, they looked like crystals caught in spiderwebs. When the
lasers fired, the fragile support structures wavered like a spiderweb in the
wind.
Each stood in a wide black pool of solar collector, as if tar paper had
been scattered at random. A collector sheet that lost fifty percent of its
power was not removed. We would add another sheet but continue to use
all the available power.
Their power output is dangerous to the point of fantasy. For safety’s sake
the Mercury lasers have to be continuously linked to the rest of the solar
system across a lightspeed delay of several hours. The newer solar
collectors also pick up broadcasts from space or from the control center in
Challenger Crater. Mercury’s lasers must never lose contact. A beam that
strayed where it wasn’t supposed to could do untold damage.
They were spaced all along the planet’s equator. They were hundreds
of years apart in design, size, technology. They fired while the sun was up
and feeding their square miles of collectors, with a few fusion generators for
backup. They flicked from target to target as the horizon moved. When the
sun set, it set for thirty-odd Earth days, and that was plenty of time to make
repairs—
“In general, that is.” Kathry Perritt watched my eyes to be sure I was
paying attention. I felt like a schoolboy again. “In general we can repair
and update each laser station in turn and still keep ahead of the dawn. But
come a quake, we work in broad daylight and like it.”
“Scary,” I said too cheerfully.
She looked at me. “You feel nice and cool? That’s a million tons of soil,
old man, and a layer cake of mirror sheeting on top of that, and these old
heat exchangers are still the most powerful ever built. Daylight doesn’t
scare you? You’ll get over that.”
Kathry was a sixth-generation Belter from Mercury, taller than me by
seven inches, not very strong, but extremely dexterous. She was my boss. I’d
be sharing a room with her…and yes, she rapidly let me know that she
expected us to be bedmates.
I was all for that. Two months in Ceres had shown me that Belters
respond to social signals I don’t know. I had no idea how to seduce anyone.
Sylvia and Myron had been born on Mars in an enclave of arcologists
digging out the cities beneath the deserts. Companions from birth, they’d
married at puberty. They were addicted to news broadcasts. News could get
them arguing. Otherwise they behaved as if they could read each other’s
minds; they hardly talked to each other or to anyone else.
We’d sit around the duty room and wait and polish our skills as
storytellers. Then one of the lasers would go quiet, and a tractor the size of
some old Chicago skyscraper would roll.
Rarely was there much of a hurry. One laser would fill in for another
until the Monster Bug arrived. Then the robots, riding the Monster Bug
like one of Anton’s aircraft carriers, would scatter ahead of us and set to
work.
Two years after my arrival my first quake shook down six lasers in four
different locations and ripped a few more loose from the sunlight
collectors. Landscape had been shaken into new shapes. The robots had
some trouble. Sometimes Kathry could reprogram them. Otherwise her
team had to muscle them through, with Kathry to shout orders and me to
supply most of the muscle.
Of the six lasers, five survived. They seemed built to survive almost
anything. The robots were equipped to spin new support structure and to
lift the things into place, with a separate program for each design.
Maybe John Junior hadn’t used influence in my behalf. Flatlander
muscles were useful when the robots couldn’t get over the dust pools or
through the broken rock. For that matter, maybe it wasn’t some Belt
tradition that had made Kathry claim me on sight. Sylvia and Myron were
lockstepped, and I might have been female or bend. Maybe she thought
she was lucky.
After we’d remounted the lasers that had survived, Kathry said, “They’re
all obsolete, anyway. They’re not being replaced.”
“That’s not good,” I said.
“Well, good and bad. Lightsail cargo is slow. If the light wasn’t almost
free, why bother? The interstellar probes haven’t sent much back yet, and
we might as well wait. At least the Belt Speakers think so.”
“Do I gather I’ve fallen into a kind of a blind alley?”
She glared at me. “You’re an immigrant flatlander. Were you expecting
to be First Speaker for the Belt? You thinking of moving on?”
“Not really. But if the job’s about to fold—”
“Another twenty years, maybe. Jack, I’d miss you. Those two—”
“It’s all right, Kathry. I’m not going.” I waved both arms at the blazing
dead landscape, said “I like it here,” and smiled into her bellow of laughter.
I beamed a tape to Anton when I got the chance.
“If I was ever angry, I got over it, as I hope you’ve forgotten anything I
said or did while I was, let’s say, running on automatic. I’ve found another
life in deep space, not much different from what I was doing on Earth…
though that may not last. These lightsail pusher lasers are a blast from the
past. Time gets them, the quakes get them, and they’re not being replaced.
Kathry says twenty years.
“You said Phoebe left Earth, too. Working with an asteroid mining setup?
If you’re still trading tapes, tell her I’m all right and I hope she is, too. Her
career choice was better than mine, I expect…”
I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
Three years after I expected it Kathry asked, “Why did you come out
here? It’s none of my business, of course—”
Customs differ: I’d been three years in her bed before she had worked
up to this. I said, “Time for a change” and “I’ve got children and
grandchildren on the moon and Ceres and Floating Jupiter.”
“Do you miss them?”
I had to say yes. The result was that I took half a year off to bounce
around the solar system.
After I visited my kids and grandkids, I stayed three weeks with Phoebe.
She’s second in command of a mining setup on a two-kilometer asteroid
orbiting beyond Jupiter. They’ve been refining the metal ores and shaping
them into scores of kilometers of electromagnetic mass driver, then
running the slag down the mass driver: a rocket with real rocks in it and an
arbitrarily high exhaust velocity, limited only by the length of the mass
driver, which they keep extending. The asteroid will reach Ceres as mostly
refined metal.
I think Phoebe was bored; she was seriously glad to see me. Still, I
came back early. My being away from Mercury made us both antsy.
Another year passed, and once again Kathry wanted to know, “Why
Mercury?”
I said, “What I did on Earth was a lot like this. The difference is, on
Earth I’m dull. Here—am I dull?”
“You’re fascinating. You won’t talk about the ARM, so you’re fascinating
and mysterious. I can’t believe you’d be dull just because of where you are.
Why did you leave, really?”
So I said, “There was a woman.”
“What was she like?”
“She was smarter than me. I was a little dull for her. So she left, and
that would have been okay. But she came back to my best friend.” I shifted
uncomfortably and said, “Not that they drove me off Earth.”
“No?”
“No. I’ve got everything I once had herding construction robots on
Earth, plus one thing I wasn’t bright enough to miss. I lost my sense of
purpose when I left the ARM.”
I noticed that Myron was listening. Sylvia was watching the holo walls,
the three that showed the face of Mercury: rocks blazing like coals in the
fading twilight, with only the robots and the lasers to give the illusion of
life. The fourth wall generally carried newscasts. Just then it showed a view
up the trunk into the waving branches of the tremendous redwoods they’ve
been growing for three hundred years in Hovestraydt City on the moon.
“These are the good times,” I said. “You have to notice or they’ll go
right past. We’re holding the stars together and having a fine time doing it.
Notice how much dancing we do? On Earth I’d be too old and creaky for
that—” Sylvia was shaking my shoulder. “Sylvia, what?”
I heard it as soon as I stopped talking: “Tombaugh Station relayed this
picture, the last broadcast from the Fantasy Prince. Once again, the Fantasy
Prince has apparently been—”
Starscape glowed within the fourth holo wall. Something came out of
nowhere, moving hellishly fast, and stopped so quickly that it might have
been a toy. It was egg-shaped, studded with what my memory said were
weapons.
Phoebe won’t have made her move yet. The warcats will have to be
deep in the solar system before her asteroid mine can be a deterrent. Then
one or another warcat ship will find streams of slag sprayed across its path,
impacting at comet speeds and higher.
By now Anton must know whether the ARM actually has plans of its
own to repel an interstellar invasion.
Me, I’ve already done my part. I worked on the computer shortly after I
first arrived. Nobody’s tampered with it since. The dime disk is in place.
We kept the program relatively simple.
Until and unless the warcats destroy something that’s being pushed by a
laser from Mercury, nothing will happen. The warcats must condemn
themselves. Then the affected laser will lock on to the warcat ship…and so
will every Mercury laser that’s getting sunlight. Twenty seconds, then the
system goes back to normal until another target disappears.
If the warcats can be persuaded that Sol system is defended, maybe
they’ll give us time to build defenses.
Asteroid miners dig deep for fear of solar storms and meteors. Phoebe
might survive the warcat weapons. We might survive here, too, with
shielding built to block the hellish sun and laser cannon to battle incoming
ships. But that’s not the way to bet.
We might get one ship.
It might be worth doing.
OceanofPDF.com
A GIFT FROM EARTH
To Hank
A good critic, a good Friend
The Ramrobot
The Car
III —Finished.
Millard Parlette pushed his chair back and viewed the typewriter with
satisfaction. His speech lay on his desk, last page on top, back-to-front. He
picked up the stack of paper with long, knobby fingers and quickly shuffled
it into correct order.
—Record it now?
—No. Tomorrow morning. Sleep on it tonight, see if I’ve left anything
out. I don’t have to deliver it until day after tomorrow. Plenty of time to
record the speech in his own voice, then play it over and over until he’d
learned it by heart.
But it had to go over. The crew had to be made to understand the
issues. For too long they had lived the lives of a divinely ordained ruling
class. If they couldn’t adapt—
Even his own, descendants…they didn’t talk politics often, and when
they did, Millard Parlette noticed that they talked in terms not of power but
of rights. And the Parlettes were not typical. By now Millard Parlette could
claim a veritable army of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren,
and so forth; yet he made every effort to see them all as often as possible.
Those who had succumbed to the prevalent crewish tastes—eldritch styles
of dress, elegantly worded slander, and all the other games the crew used to
cloak their humdrum reality—had done so in spite of Millard Parlette. The
average crew was utterly dependent on the fact that he was a crew.
And if the power balance should shift?
They’d be lost. For a time they’d be living in a false universe, under
wrong assumptions; and in that time they would be destroyed.
What chance…What chance that they would listen to an old man from
a dead generation?
No. He was just tired. Millard Parlette dropped the speech on his desk,
stood up, and left the study; At least he would force them to listen. By order
of the Council, at two o’clock Sunday every pure-blooded crew on the
planet would be in front of his teedee set. If he could put it across…he
must.
They had to understand the mixed blessing of Ramrobot #143.
Rain filled the coral house with an incessant drumming. Only
Implementation police moved within and without. The last unconscious
colonist was on his way out the door on a stretcher as Major Jansen
entered.
He found Jesus Pietro lounging in an easy chair in the living room. He
put the handful of photos beside him.
“What’s this supposed to be?”
“These are the ones we haven’t caught yet, sir.”
Jesus Pietro pulled himself erect, conscious once again of his soaked
uniform. “How did they get past you?”
“I can’t imagine, sir. Nobody escaped after he was spotted.”
“No secret tunnels. The echo sounders would have found them. Mpf.”
Jesus Pietro shuffled rapidly through the photos. Most had names beneath
the faces, names Jesus Pietro had remembered and jotted down earlier that
night. “This is the core,” he said. “We’ll wipe out this branch of the Sons of
Earth if we can find these. Where are they?”
The aide was silent. He knew the question was rhetorical. The Head
was leaning back with his eyes on the ceiling.
—Where were they?
—There were no tunnels out. They had not left underground.
—They hadn’t run away. They would have been stopped, or if not
stopped, seen. Unless there were traitors in Implementation. But there
weren’t. Period.
—Could they have reached the void edge? No, that was better guarded
than the rest of the grounds. Rebels had a deplorable tendency to go off the
edge when cornered.
—An aircar? Colonists wouldn’t have an aircar, not legally, and none
had been reported stolen recently. But Jesus Pietro had always been
convinced that at least one crew was involved in the Sons of Earth. He had
no proof, no suspect; but his studies of history showed that a revolution
always moves down from the top of a society’s structure.
A crew might have supplied them with an escape car. They’d have
been seen but not stopped. No Implementation officer would halt a car
—“Jansen, find out if any cars were sighted during the raid. If there were,
let me know when, how many, and descriptions.”
Major Jansen left without showing his surprise at the peculiar order.
An officer had found the housecleaner nest, a niche in the south wall,
near the floor. The man reached in and carefully removed two
unconscious adult housecleaners and four pups, put them on the floor,
reached in to remove the nest and the food dish. The niche would have to
be searched.
Jesus Pietro’s clothes dried slowly, in wrinkles. He sat with his eyes
closed and his hands folded on his belly. Presently he opened his eyes,
sighed, and frowned slightly.
—Jesus Pietro, this is a very strange house.
—Yes. Almost garishly colonist. (Overtones of disgust.)
Jesus Pietro looked at the pink coral walls, the flat-sanded floor which
curved up at the edge of the rug to join the walls. Not a bad effect if a
woman were living here. But Harry Kane was a bachelor.
—How much would you say a house like this cost?
—Oh, about a thousand stars, not including furnishings. Furnishings
would cost twice that. Rugs, ninety stars if you bought one and let it spread.
Two housecleaners, mated, fifty stars.
—And how much to put a basement under such a house?
—Mist Demons, what an idea! Basements have to be dug by hand, by
human beings! It’d cost twenty thousand stars easily. You could build a
school for that. Who would ever think of digging a basement under an
architectural coral house?
—Who indeed?
Jesus Pietro stepped briskly to the door. “Major Jansen!”
The sequel was likely to be messy. Jesus Pietro retired to the flying
office while a team went in with an echo sounder. Yes, there was a large
open space under the house. Major Chin wanted to find the entrance, but
that might take all night, and the sounds might warn the colonists. Jesus
Pietro sat firmly on his curiosity and ordered explosives.
It was messy. The rebels had put together some ingenious devices from
materials anyone would have considered harmless. Two men died before
sleepy-gas grenades could be used.
When all was quiet, Jesus Pietro followed the demolition teams into the
basement. They found one of the unconscious rebels leaning on a dead-
man switch. They traced the leads to a homemade bomb big enough to
blow house and basement to bits. While they disconnected the bomb, Jesus
Pietro studied the man, making a mental note to ask him if he’d chickened
out. He’d found that they often did.
Behind one wall was a car, a three-year-old four-seater model with a
bad scrape on the ground-effect skirt. Jesus Pietro could see no way to get it
out of the basement, and neither could anyone else. The house must have
been formed over it. Of course, thought Jesus Pietro; they dug the basement
then grew the house over it. He had his men cut away the wall so that the
car could be removed later if it was thought worthwhile. They’d practically
have to remove the house.
There was a flight of steps with a trapdoor at the top. Jesus Pietro,
examining the small bomb under the trapdoor, congratulated himself
(pointedly, in Major Chin’s hearing) on not allowing Major Chin to search
for the entrance. He might have found it. Someone removed the bomb
and opened the trapdoor. Above was the living room. An asymmetrical
section of mutated grass rug had reluctantly tom away and come up with
the door. When the door was lowered, it would grow back within twenty
minutes.
After the dead and unconscious had been filed away in patrol wagons,
Jesus Pietro walked among them, comparing the faces with his final stack
of photos. He was elated. With the exception of one man, he had collected
Harry Kane and his entire guest list. The organ banks would be supplied
for years. Not only would the crew have a full supply, which they always
did anyway, but there would be spare parts for exceptional servants of the
regime; i.e., for civil servants such as Jesus Pietro and his men. Even the
colonists would benefit. It was not at all unusual for the Hospital to treat a
sick but deserving colonist if the medical supplies were sufficient. The
Hospital treated everyone they could. It reminded the colonists that the
crew ruled in their name and had their interests at heart.
And the Sons of Earth was dead. All but one man, and from his picture
he wasn’t old enough to be dangerous.
Nonetheless Jesus Pietro had his picture tacked to the Hospital bulletin
boards and sent a copy to the newscast station with the warning that he was
wanted for questioning.
It was not until dawn, when he was settling down to sleep, that he
remembered who belonged to that face. Matthew Keller’s nephew, six
years older than when he’d pulled that cider trick.
He looked just like his uncle.
The rain stopped shortly before dawn, but Matt didn’t know it.
Sheltered from the rain by a cliff and by a thick clump of watershed trees,
he slept on.
The cliff was the Beta-Gamma cliff. He’d fetched up against it
sometime last night, dizzy and bruised and wet and winded. He could have
collapsed there or tried running parallel to the cliff. He had chosen to
collapse. If Implementation found him, he’d never awaken, and he had
known it as he went to sleep. He had been too exhausted to care.
He woke about ten with a ferocious headache. Every separate muscle
hurt from running and from sleeping on bare ground. His tongue felt like
the entire Implementation police force had marched over it in sweat socks.
He stayed on his back, looking up into the dark trees his ancestors had
called pines, and tried to remember.
So much to begin and end in one night.
The people seemed to crowd around him. Hood, Laney, the four tall
men, the kid who drank behind the bar, the laughing man who stole crew
cars, Polly, Harry Kane, and a forest of anonymous elbows and shouting
voices.
All gone. The man whose scar he wore. The woman who’d left him
flat. The genial mastermind-bartender. And Laney! How could he have lost
Laney?
They were gone. Over the next few years they might reappear in the
form of eyes, lengths of artery and vein, grafts of hair-bearing scalp…
By now the police would be looking for Matt himself.
He sat up, and every muscle screamed. He was naked. Implementation
must have found his clothes in Laney’s room. Could they match the
clothes to him? And if they couldn’t, they’d still wonder how a man came
to be wandering stark naked in open countryside. On the pedwalks of
Earth there were licensed nudists, and on Wunderland you didn’t need a
license; but on the Plateau there was no substitute for clothing.
He couldn’t turn himself in. By now he’d never prove he wasn’t a rebel.
He’d have to get clothes, somehow, and hope they weren’t looking for him
already.
He surged to his feet, and it hit him again. Laney. Laney in the dark,
Laney looking at him in the lamplit bed. Polly, the girl with the secret.
Hood, first name Jayhawk. A wave of sickness caught him, and he doubled
over, retching. He stopped the spasms by sheer willpower. His skull was a
throbbing drum. He straightened and walked to the edge of the watershed
forest.
To right and left the watershed trees stretched along the base of the
Beta-Gamma cliff. Beta Plateau above him, unreachable except by the
bridge, which must be miles to the left. Before him, a wide meadow with a
few grazing goats. Beyond that, houses. Houses in all directions, thickly
clustered. His own was perhaps four miles away. He’d never reach it
without being stopped.
How about Harry’s house? Laney had said there was a hiding place.
And the ones who left before the raid…some of them might have returned.
They could help him.
But would they?
He’d have to try it. He might reach Harry’s house, crawling through the
grass. The luck of Matt Keller might hold that far. He’d never reach his
own.
His luck held: the strange luck that seemed to hide Matt Keller when
he didn’t want to be noticed. He reached the house two hours later. His
knees and belly were green and itchy from the grass.
The grounds about the house were solidly spread with wheel tracks. All
of Implementation must have been in on the raid. Matt saw no guards, but
he went carefully in case they were inside. Implementation guards or rebel
guards, he could still be shot. Though a guard might hesitate to shoot him,
he’d want to ask questions first. Like: “Where’s your pants, buddy?”
Nobody was inside. A dead or sleeping family of housecleaners lay
against one wall, beneath their looted nest. Dead, probably, or drugged.
Housecleaners hated, light; they did their work at night. The rug showed a
gaping hole that reached down through indoor grass and architectural
coral to a well-furnished hole in the ground. The living-room walls were
spotted with explosion marks and mercy-bullet streaks. So was the
basement, when Matt climbed down to look.
The basement was empty of men and nearly empty of equipment.
Scars showed where heavy machinery had stood, more scars where it had
been torn loose or burned loose. There were doors, four of them, all crude
looking and all burned open. One led to a kitchen; two opened on empty
storerooms. One whole wall lay on its side, but the piece of equipment
beyond was intact. The hole left by the fallen wall might have been big
enough to remove it, but certainly the hole in the living-room floor was
not.
It was a car, a flying car of the type used by all crew families. Matt had
never before seen one close up. There it was beyond the broken wall, with
no possible way to get it out. What in blazes had Harry Kane wanted with a
car that couldn’t be flown?
Perhaps this was what had brought on the raid. Cars were strictly
denied to colonists. The military uses of a flying car are obvious. But why
wasn’t its theft noticed earlier? The car must have been here when the
house was built.
Dimly Matt remembered a story he’d heard last night. Something
about a stolen car set to circle the Plateau until the fuel ran out. No doubt
the car had fallen in the mist, watched by furious, impotent crew. But—
suppose he’d heard only the official version? Suppose the fuel had not ran
out; suppose the car had dipped into the mist, circled below the Plateau,
and come up where Harry Kane could bury it in a hidden basement?
Probably he’d never know.
The showers were still running. Matt was shivering badly when he
stepped in. The hot water thawed him instantly. He let the water pour
heavily down on the back of his neck, washing the grass stains and dirt and
old sweat from him as it ran in streams to his feet. Life was bearable. With
all its horrors and all its failures, life was bearable where there were hot
showers.
He thought of something then, and metaphorically his ears pricked up.
The raid had been so big. Implementation had grabbed everyone at the
party. From the number of tracks, it was likely they had taken even those
who had left early, putting them to sleep one-by-one and two-by-two as they
turned toward home. They must have returned to the Hospital with close
to two hundred prisoners.
Some were innocent. Matt knew that. And Implementation was usually
fair about convictions. Trials were always closed, and only the results were
ever published, but Implementation usually preferred not to convict the
innocent. Suspects had returned from the Hospital.
—But that wouldn’t take long. The police could simply release
everyone without a hearing aid, with notations to keep an eye on them in
future. He who wore a hearing aid was guilty.
—But it would take time to reduce around a hundred convicted rebels
to their component parts. The odds were that Laney, Hood, and Polly were
still alive. Certainly they could not all be dead by this time.
Matt stepped out of the shower and began looking for clothes. He
found a closet which must have belonged to Harry Kane, for the shorts
were too wide and the shirts were too short. He dressed anyway, pulling
shirt and shorts into a million wrinkles with the belt. At a distance he’d
pass.
The clothes problem was as nothing, now. The problem he faced was
much worse.
He had no idea how long it took to take a man apart and store him
away, though he could guess that it would take a long time to do it right.
He didn’t know whether Implementation, in the person of the dread
Castro, would want to question the rebels first. But he did know that every
minute he waited reduced the odds that each of the partygoers was still
alive. Right now the odds were good.
Matt Keller would go through life knowing that he had passed up his
chance to save them.
But, he reminded himself, it wasn’t really a chance. He had no way to
reach Alpha Plateau without being shot. He’d have to cross two guarded
bridges.
The noonday sun shone through clean air on a clean, ordered world—
in contrast to the gutted coral shell behind him. Matt hesitated on the
doorstep, then resolutely turned back to the jagged hole in Harry Kane’s
living room. He must know that it was impossible. The basement was the
heart of the rebel stronghold—a heart which had failed. If Implementation
had overlooked a single weapon…
There were no weapons in the car, but he found an interesting
assortment of scars. Ripped upholstery showed bolts attached to the
exposed metal walls, but the bolts had been cut or torn out. Matt found six
places which must have been gun mounts. A bin in back might have held
makeshift hand grenades. Or sandwiches; Matt couldn’t tell.
Implementation had taken anything that might have been a weapon, but
they didn’t seem to have harmed the car. Presumably they would come
back and dig it out someday if they thought it worth the effort.
He got in and looked at the dashboard, but it didn’t tell him anything.
He’d never seen a car dashboard. There had been a cover over it,
padlocked, but the padlock lay broken on the floor and the cover was loose.
Harry’s padlock? Or the original owner’s?
He sat in the unfamiliar vehicle, unwilling to leave because leaving
would mean giving up. When he noticed a button labeled Start, he pushed
it. He never heard the purr of the motor starting.
The blast made him spasm like a galvanized frog. It came all in one
burst, like the sound of a gunshot as heard by a fly sitting in the barrel.
Harry must have set something to blow up the house! But no, he was still
alive. And there was daylight pouring in on him.
Daylight.
Four feet of earth had disappeared from above him. A wall of the house
was in his field of vision. It leaned. Harry Kane must have been a genius
with shaped charge explosives. Or known one. Come to that, Matt could
have done the job for him. The mining worms didn’t do all his work.
Daylight. And the motor was running. He could hear an almost
soundless hum now that his ears had recovered from the blast. If he flew
the car straight up…
He’d have had to cross two guarded bridges to reach Alpha Plateau.
Now he could fly there—if he could learn to fly before the car killed him.
Or, he could go home. He wouldn’t be noticed, despite his ill-fitting
clothes. Colonists tended to mind their own business, leaving it to the crew
and Implementation to maintain order. He’d change clothes, burn these,
and who would know or ask where he’d been over the weekend?
Matt sighed and examined the dashboard again. He couldn’t quit now.
Later, maybe, when he crashed the car, or when they stopped him in the
air. Not now. The blast that had freed his path was an omen one he
couldn’t ignore.
Let’s see. Four levers set at zero. Fans: 1-2, 1-3, 2-4, 3-4. Why would those
little levers be set to control the fans in pairs? He pulled one toward him.
Nothing.
A small bar with three notches: Neutral. Ground. Air. Set on Neutral.
He moved it to Ground. Nothing. If he’d had the Ground Altitude set for
the number of inches he wanted, the fans would have started. But he didn’t
know that. He tried Air.
The car tried to flop over on its back.
He was in the air before he had it quite figured out. In desperation he
pulled all the fan throttles full out and tried to keep the car from rolling
over by pushing each one in a little at a time. The ground dwindled until
the sheep of Beta Plateau were white flecks and the houses of Gamma
were tiny squares. Finally the car began to settle down.
Not that he could relax for a moment.
Fans numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 were left front, right front, left rear, right rear.
Dropping lever 1-2 dropped the front of the car; 3-4, the back; 1-3, the left
side; 2-4, the right side. He had the car upright, and he began to think he
had the knack of it.
But how to go forward?
There were Altitude and Rotation dials, but they didn’t do anything. He
didn’t dare touch the switch with the complicated three-syllable word on it.
But…suppose he tilted the car forward? Depressed the 1-2 throttle.
He did, just a little. The car rotated slowly forward. Then faster! He
pulled the lever out hard. The rotation slowed and stopped when the
Plateau stood before his face like a vertical wall. Before the wall could
strike him in the face, he got the car righted, waited until his nerves
stopped jumping, then…tried it again.
This time he pushed the 1-2 lever in a little, waited three seconds,
pulled it out hard. It worked, after a fashion. The car began to move
forward with its nose dipped.
Luckily he was facing Alpha Plateau. Otherwise he would have had to
fly backwards, and that would have made him conspicuous. He didn’t
know how to turn around.
He was going pretty fast. He went even faster when he found a knob
labeled Slats. The car also started to drop. Matt remembered the venetian-
blind arrangements under the four fans. He left the slats where they were,
leveled the car’s altitude. It must have been right because the car kept
moving forward.
It was hardly wobbling at all.
And Matt was faced with the most spectacular view he had ever known.
The fields and woods-orchards of Beta rolled beneath. Alpha Plateau
was quite visible at this height. The Alpha-Beta cliff was a crooked line
with a wide river following the bottom. The Long Fall. The river showed
flashes of blue within the steep channel it had carved for itself. Cliff and
river terminated at the void edge to the left, and the murmur of the river’s
fall came through the cockpit plastic. To the right was a land of endless
jagged, tilted plains, softening and blurring in the blue distance.
Soon he would cross the cliff and turn toward the Hospital. Matt didn’t
know just what it looked like, but he was sure he’d recognize the huge
hollow cylinders of the spacecraft. A few cars hovered over Beta, none very
close, and a great many more showed like black midges over Alpha. They
wouldn’t bother him. He hadn’t decided how close he would get to the
Hospital before landing; even crew might not be permitted within a certain
distance. Other than that he should be fairly safe from recognition. A car
was a car, and only crew flew cars. Anyone who saw him would assume he
was a crew.
It was a natural mistake. Matt never did realize just where he went
wrong. He had fine judgment and good balance, and be was flying the car
as well as was humanly possible. If someone had told him a ten-year-old
crew child could do it better, he would have been hurt.
But a ten-year-old crew child would never have lifted a car without
flipping the Gyroscope switch.
As usual, but much later than usual, Jesus Pietro had breakfast in bed.
As usual, Major Jansen sat nearby, drinking coffee, ready to run errands
and answer questions.
“Did you get the prisoners put away all right?”
“Yes, sir, in the vivarium. All but three. We didn’t have room for them
all.”
“And they’re in the organ banks?”
“Yes, Sir.”
Jesus Pietro swallowed a grapefruit slice. “Let’s hope they didn’t know
anything important. What about the deadheads?”
“We separated out the ones without ear mikes and turned them loose.
Fortunately we finished before six o’clock. That’s when the ear mikes
evaporated.”
“Evaporated, forsooth! Nothing left?”
“Doctor Gospin took samples of the air. He may find residues.”
“It’s not important. A nice trick, though, considering their resources,”
said Jesus Pietro.
After five minutes of uninterrupted munching and sipping sounds, he
abruptly wanted to know, “What about Keller?”
“Who, Sir?”
“The one that got away.”
And after three phone calls Major Jansen was able to say, “No reports
from the colonist areas. Nobody’s volunteered to turn him in. He hasn’t
tried to go home, or to contact any relative or anyone he knows
professionally. None of the police in on the raid recognize his face. None
will admit that someone got past him.”
More silence, while Jesus Pietro finished his coffee. Then, “See to it
that the prisoners are brought to my office one at a time. I want to find out
if anyone saw the landing yesterday.”
“One of the girls was carrying photos, Sir. Of package number three.
They must have been taken with a scopic lens.”
“Oh?” For a moment Jesus Pietro’s thoughts showed clear behind a
glass skull. Millard Parlette! If he found out—“I don’t know why you
couldn’t tell me that before. Treat it as confidential. Now get on with it.
No, wait a minute,” he called as Jansen turned to the door. “One more
thing. There may be basements that we don’t know about. Detail a couple
of echo-sounder teams for a house-to-house search on Delta and Eta
Plateaus.”
“Yes, sir. Priority?”
“No, no, no. The vivarium’s two deep already. Tell them to-take their
time.”
The phone stopped Major Jansen from leaving. He picked it up,
listened, then demanded, “Well, why call here? Hold on.” With a touch of
derision he reported, “A car approaching, sir, being flown in a reckless
manner. Naturally they had to call you personally.”
“Now why the—mph. Could it be the same make as the car in Kane’s
basement?”
“I’ll ask.” He did. “It is, sir.”
“I should have known there’d be a way to get it out of the basement.
Tell them to bring it down.”
Geologists (don’t give me a hard time about that word) believed that
Mount Lookitthat was geologically recent. A few hundreds of thousands of
years ago, part of the planet’s skin had turned molten. Possibly a convection
current in the interior had carried more than ordinarily hot magma up to
melt the surface; possibly an asteroid had died a violent, fiery death. A slow
extrusion had followed, with, viscous magma rising and cooling and rising
and cooling until a plateau with fluted sides and an approximately flat top
stood forty miles above the surface.
It had to be recent. Such a preposterous anomaly could not long resist
the erosion of Mount Lookitthat’s atmosphere.
And because it was recent, the surface was jagged. Generally the
northern end was higher, high enough to hold a permanent sliding glacier,
and too high and too cold for comfort. Generally rivers and streams ran
forth, to join either the Muddy or the Long Fall, both of which had carved
deep canyons for themselves through the Southland. Both canyons ended
in spectacular waterfalls, the tallest in the known universe. Generally the
rivers ran south; but there were exceptions, for the surface of Mount
Lookitthat was striated, differentiated, a maze of plateaus divided by cliffs
and chasms.
Some plateaus were flat; some of the cliffs were straight and vertical.
Most of these were in the south. In the north the surface was all tilted
blocks and strange lakes with deep, pointed bottoms, and the land would
have been cruel to a mountain goat. Nonetheless these regions would be
settled someday, just as the Rocky Mountains of Earth were now part of
suburbia.
The slowboats had landed in the south, on the highest plateau around.
The colonists had been forced to settle lower down. Though they were the
more numerous, they covered less territory, for the crew had cars, and
flying cars can make a distant mountain-home satisfactory where bicycles
will not. Yet Alpha Plateau was Crew Plateau, and for many it was better to
live elbow to elbow with one’s peers than out in the boondocks in splendid
isolation.
So Alpha Plateau was crowded.
What Matt saw below him were all houses. They varied enormously in
size, in color, in style, in building material. To Matt, who had lived out his
life in architectural coral, the dwellings looked like sheer havoc, like debris
from the explosion of a time machine. There was even a clump of
deserted, crumbling coral bungalows, each far bigger than a colonist’s
home. Two or three were as large as Matt’s old grade school. When
architectural coral first came to the Plateau, the crew had reserved it for
their own use. Later it had gone permanently out of style.
None of the nearby buildings seemed to be more than two stories tall.
Someday there would be skyscrapers if the crew kept breeding. But in the
distance two squat towers rose from a shapeless construction in stone and
metal. The Hospital, without a doubt. And straight ahead.
Matt was beginning to feel the strain of flying. He had to divide his
attention between the dashboard, the ground, and the Hospital ahead. It
was coming closer, and he was beginning to appreciate its size.
Each of the empty slowboats had been built to house six crew in
adequate comfort and fifty colonists in stasis. Each slowboat also included a
cargo hold, two water-fueled reaction motors and a water fuel tank. And all
of this had to be fitted into a hollow double-walled cylinder the shape of a
beer can from which the top and bottom have been removed with a can
opener. The slowboats had been circular flying wings. In transit between
worlds they had spun on their axes to provide centrifugal gravity; and the
empty space inside the inner hull, now occupied only by two intersecting
tailfins, had once held two throwaway hydrogen balloons.
They were big. Since Matt could not see the inner emptiness which
the crew called the Attic, they looked far bigger. Yet they were swamped by
the haphazard-looking stone construction of the Hospital. Most of it was
two stories high, but there were towers which climbed halfway up the
ships’ hulls. Some would be power stations, others—he couldn’t guess.
Flat, barren rock surrounded the Hospital in a half-mile circle, rock as
naked as the Plateau had been before the slowboats brought a carefully
selected ecology. From the edge of the perimeter a thin tongue of forest
reached across the rock to touch the Hospital.
All else had been cleared away. Why, Matt wondered, had
Implementation left that one stretch of trees?
A wave of numbness hit him and passed, followed by a surge of panic.
A sonic stun-beam! For the first time he looked behind him. Twenty to
thirty Implementation police cars were scattered in his wake.
It hit him again, glancingly. Matt shoved the 1-3 throttle all the way in.
The car dipped left, tilted forty-five degrees or more before he moved to
steady it. He shot away to the left, gathering speed toward the void edge of
Alpha Plateau.
The numbness reached him and locked its teeth. They had been trying
to force him to land; now they wanted him to crash before he could go
over the edge. His sight blurred; he couldn’t move. The car dropped,
sliding across space toward the ground and toward the void.
The numbness ebbed. He tried to move his hands and got nothing but
a twitch. Then the sonic found him again, but with lessened intensity. He
thought he knew why. He was outracing the police because they did not
care to sacrifice altitude for speed, to risk striking the lip of the void edge.
That was a game for the desperate.
Through blurred eyes he saw the dark cliff-edge come up at him. He
missed it by yards. He could move again, jerkily, and he turned his head to
see the cars dropping after him. They must know they’d lost him, but they
wanted to see him fall.
How far down was the mist? He’d never known. Miles, certainly. Tens
of miles? They’d hover above him until he disappeared behind the mist.
He couldn’t go back to the Plateau; they’d stun him, wait, and scrape up
what was left after the crash. There was only one direction he could go
now.
Matt flipped the car over on its back.
The police followed him down until their ears began to pop. Then they
hovered, waiting. It was minutes before the fugitive car faded from sight,
upside down all the way, a receding blurred dark mote trailing a hairline of
shadow through the mist, flickering at the edge of human vision. Gone.
“Hell of a way to go,” someone said. It went over the intercom, and
there were grunts of agreement.
The police turned for home, which was now far above them. They
knew perfectly well that their cars were not airtight. Almost, but not quite.
Even in recent years men had taken their cars below the Plateau to prove
their courage and to gauge what level they could reach before the air
turned poisonous. That level was far above the mist. Someone named
Greeley had even tried the daredevil stunt of dropping his car with the fans
set to idle, falling as far as he could before the poison mist could leak into
his cabin. He had dropped four miles, with the hot, noxious gasses
whistling around the door, before he had had to stop. He had been lucky
enough to get back up before he passed out. The Hospital had had to
replace his lungs. On Alpha Plateau he was still a kind of hero.
Even Greeley would never have flipped his car over and bored for the
bottom. Nobody would, not if he knew anything about cars. It might come
apart in the air!
But that wouldn’t occur to Matt. He knew little about machinery.
Earth’s strange pets were necessities, but machinery was a luxury. Colonists
needed cheap houses and hardy fruit trees and rugs that did not have to be
made by hand. They did not need powered dishwashers, refrigerators,
razors, or cars. Complex machinery had to be made by other machines,
and the crew were wary of passing machines to colonists. Such machinery
as they had was publicly owned. The most complex vehicle Matt knew was
a bicycle. A car wasn’t meant to fly without gyroscopes, but Matt had done
it.
He had to get down to the mist to hide himself from the police. The
faster he fell, the farther he’d leave them behind.
At first the seat pressed against him with the full force of the fans; about
one-and-a-half Mount Lookitthat gravities. The wind rose to a scream, even
through the soundproofing. Air held him back, harder and harder, until it
compensated for the work of the fans; and then he was in free fall. And still
he fell faster! Now the air began to cancel gravity, and Matt tried to fall to
the roof. He had suspected that he was making the car do something
unusual, but he didn’t know how unusual. When the wind resistance
started to pull him out of his seat, he snatched at the arms and looked
frantically for something to hold him down. He found the seat belts. Not
only did they hold him down, once he managed to get them fastened; they
reassured him. Obviously they were meant for just this purpose.
It was getting dark. Even the sky beneath his feet was darkening, and
the police cars were not to be seen. Very well. Matt pushed the fan throttles
down to the Idle notches.
The blood rushing to his head threatened to choke him. He turned the
car right side up. Pressure jammed him deep in his seat with a force no
man had felt since the brute-force chemical rockets, but he could stand it
now. What he couldn’t endure was the heat. And the pain in his ears. And
the taste of the air.
He pulled the throttles out again. He wanted to stop fast.
Come to that, would he know when he stopped? This around him was
not a wispy kind of mist, but a dark blur giving no indication of his velocity.
From above, the mist was white; from below, black. Being lost down here
would be horrible. At least he knew which way was up. It was fractionally
lighter in that direction.
The air tasted like flaming molasses.
He had the throttles all the way out. Still the gas crept in. Matt pulled
his shirt over his mouth and tried to breathe through that. No good.
Something like a black wall emerged from the mist-blur, and he tilted the
car in time to avoid crashing against the side of Mount Lookitthat. He
stayed near the black wall, watching it rush past him. He’d be harder to see
in the shadow of the void edge.
The mist disappeared. He shot upward through sparkling sunlight.
When he thought he was good and clear of the foul mist, and when he
couldn’t stand to breathe hot poison for another second, he put the window
down. The car whipped to the side and tried to turn over. A hurricane
roared through the cabin. It was hot and thick and soupy, that hurricane,
but it could be breathed.
He saw the edge of the Plateau above him, and he pushed the throttles
in a little to slow down. His stomach turned a flip-flop. For the first time
since he’d gotten into the car, he had time to be sick. His stomach tried to
turn over, his head was splitting from the sudden changes in pressure, and
the Implementation sonics were having their revenge in twitching, jerking
muscles. He kept the car more or less upright until the edge of the Plateau
came level with him. There was a stone wall along the edge here. He eased
the car sideways, eased it back when he was over the wall, tilted it by guess
and hope until he was motionless in the air, then let it drop.
The car fell about four feet. Matt opened the door but stopped himself
from getting out. What he really wanted to do was faint, but he’d left the
fans idling. He found the Neutral…Ground…Air toggle and shoved it
forward without much care. He was tired and sick, and he wanted to lie
down.
The toggle fell in the Ground slot.
Matt stumbled out the door—stumbled because the car was rising. It
rose four inches off the ground and began to slide. During his
experimenting Matt must have set the ground altitude, so that the car was
now a ground-effect vehicle. It slid away from him as he tried to reach for
it. He watched on hands and knees as it glided away across the uneven
ground, bounced against the wall and away, against the wall and away. It
circled the end of the wall and went over the edge.
Matt flopped on his back and closed his eyes. He didn’t care if he never
saw a car again.
The motion sickness, the sonic aftereffects, the poisoned air he’d
breathed, the pressure changes—they gripped him hard, and he wanted to
die. Then, by stages, they began to let go. Nobody found him there. A
house was nearby, but it had a vacant look. After some time Matt sat up
and took stock of himself.
His throat hurt. There was a strange, unpleasant taste in his mouth.
He was still on Alpha Plateau. Only crew would go to the trouble of
building walls along a void edge. So he was committed. Without a car he
could no more leave Alpha Plateau than he could have arrived there in the
first place.
But the house was architectural coral. Bigger than anything he was
used to, it was still coral. Which meant that it should have been deserted
about forty years.
He’d have to risk it. He needed cover. There were no trees nearby, and
trees were dangerous to hide in; they would probably be fruit trees, and
someone might come apple-picking. Matt got up and moved toward the
house.
IV The hospital was the control nexus of a world. It was not a large
world, and the settled region totaled a mere 20,000 square miles; but that
region needed a lot of control. It also required considerable electricity,
enormous quantities of water to be moved up from the Long Fall River,
and a deal of medical attention. The Hospital was big and complex and
diversified. Two fifty-six-man spacecraft were its east and west corners.
Since the spacecraft were hollow cylinders with the airlocks opening to the
inside (to the Attic, as that inner space had been called when the rotating
ships were between stars and the ship’s axis was Up), the corridors in that
region were twisted and mazelike and hard to navigate.
So the young man in Jesus Pietro’s office had no idea where he was.
Even if he’d managed to leave the office unguarded, he’d have been
hopelessly lost. And he knew it. That was all to the good.
“You were on the dead-man switch,” said Jesus Pietro.
The man nodded. His sandy hair was cut in the old Belter style, copied
from the even older Mohawk. There were shadows under his eyes as if
from lack of sleep, and the lie was borne out by a slump of utter
depression, though he had been sleeping since his capture in Harry Kane’s
basement.
“You funked it,” Jesus Pietro accused. “You arranged to fall across the
switch so that it wouldn’t go off.”
The man looked up. Naked rage was in his face. He made no move, for
there was nothing he could do.
“Don’t be ashamed. The dead-man switch is an old trick. It almost
never gets used in practice. The man in charge is too likely to change his
mind at the last second. It’s a—”
“I fully expected to wake up dead!” the man shouted.
“—natural reaction. It takes a psychotic to commit suicide. No, don’t
tell me all about it. I’m not interested. I want to hear about the car in your
basement.”
“You think I’m a coward, do you?”
“That’s an ugly word.”
“I stole that car.”
“Did you?” The skeptical tone was genuine. Jesus Pietro did not believe
him. “Then perhaps you can tell me why the theft went unnoticed.”
The man told him. He talked eagerly, demanding that Jesus Pietro
recognize his courage. Why not? There was nobody left to betray. He
would live as long as Jesus Pietro Castro was interested in him, and for
three minutes longer. The organ bank operating room was three minutes’
walk away. Jesus Pietro listened politely. Yes, he remembered the car that
had tauntingly circled the Plateau for five days. The young crew owner had
given him hell for letting it happen. The man had even suggested—
demanded—that one of Castro’s men drop on the car from above, climb
into the cockpit, and bring it back. Jesus Pietro’s patience had given out,
and he had risked his life by politely offering to help the young man
perform the feat.
“So we buried it at the same time we built the basement,” the prisoner
finished. “Then we let the house grow over it. We had great plans.” He
sagged into his former position of despair but went on talking, mumbling.
“There were gun mounts. Bins for bombs. We stole a sonic stunner and
mounted it in the rear window. Now nobody’ll ever use them.”
“The car was used.”
“What?”
“This afternoon. Keller escaped us last night. He returned to Kane’s
home this morning, took the car and flew it nearly to the Hospital before
we stopped him. The Mist Demons know what he thought he was doing.”
“Great! ‘The last flight of—’ We never got around to naming it. Our air
force. Our glorious air force. Who did you say?”
“Keller. Matthew Leigh Keller.”
“I don’t know him. What would he be doing with my car?”
“Don’t play games. You are not protecting anyone. We drove him off
the edge. Five ten, age twenty-one, hair brown, eyes blue—”
“I tell you I never met him.”
“Good-by.” Jesus Pietro pushed a button under his desk. The door
opened.
“Wait a minute. Now, wait—”
Lying, Jesus Pietro thought, after the man was gone. Probably lied
about the car too. Somewhere in the vivarium the man who really took the
car waited to be questioned. If it was stolen. It could equally well have been
supplied by a crew member, by Jesus Pietro’s hypothetical traitor.
He had often wondered why the crew would not supply him with truth
drugs. They would have been easy to manufacture from instructions in the
ship’s libraries. Millard Parlette, in a mellow mood, had once tried to
explain. “We own their bodies,” he had said. “We take them apart on the
slightest pretext; and if they manage to die a natural death, we get them
anyway, what we can save. Aren’t the poor bastards at least entitled to the
privacy of their own minds?”
It seemed a peculiar bleeding-heart attitude, coming from a man whose
very life depended on the organ banks. But others apparently felt the same.
If Jesus Pietro wanted his questions answered, he must depend on his own
empirical brand of psychology.
Polly Tournquist. Age: twenty. Height: five one. Weight: ninety-five.
She wore a crumpled party dress in the colonist style. In Jesus Pietro’s eyes
it did nothing for her. She was small and brown, and compared to most of
the women Jesus Pietro met socially, muscular. They were work muscles,
not tennis muscles. Traces of callus marred her hands. Her hair, worn
straight back, had a slight natural curl to it but no trace of style.
Had she been raised as crew girls were raised, had she access to
cosmetics available on Alpha Plateau, she would have known how to be
beautiful. Then she wouldn’t have been bad at all, once the callus left her
hands and cosmetic treatment smoothed her skin. But, like most colonists,
she had aged faster than a crew.
She was only a young colonist girl, like a thousand other young colonist
girls Jesus Pietro had seen.
She bore his silent stare for a full minute before she snapped, “Well?”
“Well? You’re Polly Tournquist, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You had a handful of films on you when you were picked up last
night. How did you get them?”
“I prefer not to say.”
“Eventually I think you will. Meanwhile, what would you like to talk
about?”
Polly looked bewildered. “Are you serious?”
“I am serious. I’ve interviewed six people today. The organ banks are
full and the day is ending. I’m in no hurry. Do you know what those films
of yours imply?”
She nodded warily. “I think so. Especially after the raid.”
“Oh, you saw the point, did you?”
“It’s clear you have no more use for the Sons of Earth. We’ve always
been some danger to you—”
“You flatter yourselves.”
“But you’ve never had a real try at wiping us out. Not till now. Because
we serve as a recruiting center for your damned organ banks!”
“You amaze me. Did you know this when you joined?”
“I was fairly sure of it.”
“Then why join?”
She spread her hands. “Why does anybody join? I couldn’t stand the
way things are now. Castro, what happens to your body when you die?”
“Cremated. I’m an old man.”
“You’re crew. They’d cremate you anyway. Only colonists go into the
banks.”
“I’m half crew,” said Jesus Pietro. His desire to talk was genuine, and
there was no need for reticence with a girl who was, to all intents and
purposes, dead. “When my—you might say—pseudo-father reached the
age of seventy, he was old enough to need injections of testosterone.
Except that he chose a different way to get them.”
The girl looked bewildered, then horrified.
“I see you understand. Shortly afterward his wife, my mother, became
pregnant. I must admit they raised me almost as a crew. I love them both. I
don’t know who my father was. He may have been a rebel, or a thief.”
“To you there’s no difference, I suppose.” The girl’s tone was savage.
“No. Back to the Sons of Earth,” Jesus Pietro said briskly. “You’re quite
right. We don’t need them anymore, not as a recruiting center nor for any
other purpose. Yours was the biggest rebel group on Mount Lookitthat.
We’ll take the others as they come.”
“I don’t understand. The organ banks are obsolete now, aren’t they?
Why not publish the news? There’d be a worldwide celebration!”
“That’s just why we don’t broadcast the news. Your kind of sloppy
thinking! No, the organ banks are not obsolete. It’s just that we’ll need a
smaller supply of raw material. And as a means of punishment for crimes
the banks are as important as ever!”
“You son of a bitch,” said Polly. Her color was high, and her voice held
an icy, half-controlled fury. “So we might get uppity if we thought we were
being killed to no purpose!”
“You will not be dying to no purpose,” Jesus Pietro explained patiently.
“That has not been necessary since the first kidney transplant between
identical twins. It has not been necessary since Landsteiner classified the
primary blood types in 1900. What do you know about the car in Kane’s
basement?”
“I prefer not to say.”
“You’re being very difficult.”
The girl smiled for the first time. “I’ve heard that.”
His reaction took Jesus Pietro by surprise. A flash of admiration,
followed by a hot flood of lust. Suddenly the bedraggled colonist girl was
the only girl in the universe. Jesus Pietro held his face like frozen stone
while the flood receded. It took several seconds.
“What about Matthew Leigh Keller?”
“Who? I mean—”
“You prefer not to say. Miss, Tournquist, you probably know that there
are no truth drugs on this world. In the ships’ libraries are instructions for
making scopolamine, but no crew will authorize me to use them. Hence I
have developed different methods.” He saw her stiffen. “No, no. There will
be no pain. They’d put me in the organ banks if I used torture. I’m only
going to give you a nice rest.”
“I think I know what you mean. Castro, what are you made of? You’re
half colonist yourself. What makes you side with the crew?”
“There must be law and order, Miss Tournquist. On all of Mount
Lookitthat there is only one force for law and order, and that force is the
crew.” Jesus Pietro pushed the call button.
He did not relax until she was gone, and then he found himself shaken.
Had she noticed that flash of desire? What an embarrassing thing to
happen! But she must have assumed he was only angry. Of course she had.
Polly was in the maze of corridors when she suddenly remembered
Matt Keller. Her regal dignity, assumed for the benefit of the pair of
Implementation police who were her escorts, softened in thought. Why
would Jesus Pietro be interested in Matt? He wasn’t even a member. Did it
mean that he had escaped?
Odd, about that night. She’d liked Matt. He’d interested her. And then,
suddenly…It must have looked to him as if she’d brushed him off. Well, it
didn’t matter now. But Implementation should have turned him loose. He
was nothing but a deadhead.
Castro. Why had he told her all that? Was it part of the coffin cure?
Well, she’d hold out as long as possible. Let Castro worry about who might
know the truth of Ramrobot #143. She had told nobody. But let him worry.
The girl looked about her in pleased wonder at the curving walls and
ceiling with their peeled, discolored paint, at the spiral stairs, at the matted,
withered brown rug which had been indoor grass. She watched the dust
puff out from her falling feet, and she ran her hands over the coral walls
where the paint had fallen away. Her new, brightly dyed falling-jumper
seemed to glow in the gloom of the deserted house.
“It’s very odd,” she said. Her crewish accent was strange and lilting.
The man lifted an arm from around her waist to wave it about him.
“They live just like this,” he said in the same accent. “Just like this. You can
see their houses from your car on the way to the lake.”
Matt smiled as he watched them walk up the stairs. He had never seen
a two-story coral house; the balloons were too hard to blow, and the second
floor tended to sag unless you maintained two distinct pressures. Why
didn’t they come to Delta Plateau if they wanted to see how colonists lived?
But why should they? Surely their own lives were more interesting.
What strange people they were. It was hard to understand them, not
only because of the lilt but because certain words meant the wrong things.
Their faces were alien, with flared nostrils and high, prominent
cheekbones. Against the people Matt had known, they seemed fragile,
undermuscled, but graceful and beautiful to the point where Matt
wondered about the man’s manhood. They walked as though they owned
the world.
The deserted house had proved a disappointment. He’d thought all was
lost when the crew couple came strolling in, pointing and staring as if they
were in a museum. But with luck they would be up there for some time.
Matt moved very quietly from the darkness of a now doorless closet,
picked up their picnic basket, and ran on tiptoe for the door. There was a
place where he could hide, a place he should have thought of before.
He climbed over the low stone wall with the picnic basket in one hand.
There was a three-foot granite lip on the void side. Matt settled himself
cross-legged against the stone wall, with his head an inch below the top
and his toes a foot from the forty-mile drop to hell. He opened the picnic
basket.
There was more than enough for two. He ate it all, eggs and
sandwiches and squeezebags of custard and a thermos of soup and a
handful of olives. Afterward he kicked the basket and the scraps of plastic
wrap into the void. His eyes followed them down.
Consider:
Anyone can see infinity by looking up on a clear night. But only on the
small world of Mount Lookitthat can you see infinity by looking down.
No, it’s not really infinity. Neither is the night sky, really. You can see a
few nearby galaxies; but even if the universe turns out to be finite, you see a
very little distance into it. Matt could see apparent infinity by looking
straight down.
He could see the picnic basket falling. Smaller. Gone.
The plastic wrap. Fluttering down. Gone.
Then, nothing but the white mist.
On a far-distant day they would call the phenomenon Plateau trance. It
was a form of autohypnosis well known to Plateau citizens of both social
classes, differing from other forms only in that nearly anyone could fall into
such a state by accident. In this respect Plateau trance compares to ancient,
badly authenticated cases of “highway hypnosis” or to more recent studies
of “the far look,” a form of religious trance endemic to the Belt of Sol. The
far look comes to a miner who spends too many minutes staring at a single
star in the background of naked space. Plateau trance starts with a long,
dreamy look down into the void mist.
For a good eight hours Matt had not had a chance to relax. He would
not get a chance tonight, and he didn’t want to dwell on that now. Here
was his chance. He relaxed.
He came out of it with a niggling suspicion that time had passed. He
was lying on his side, his face over the edge staring down into
unfathomable darkness. It was night. And he felt wonderful.
Until he remembered.
He got up and climbed carefully over the wall. It would not do to slip,
three feet from the edge, and he was often clumsy when he felt this
nervous. Now his stomach seemed to have been replaced by a plastic
demonstration model from a biology class. There was a jerkiness in his
limbs.
He walked a little way from the wall and stopped. Which way was the
Hospital?
Come now, he thought. This is ridiculous.
Well, there was a swelling hill to his left. Light glowed faintly along its
rim. He’ll try that.
The grass and the earth beneath it ended as he reached the top. Now
there was stone beneath his bare feet, stone and rock dust untouched by
three hundred years of the colony planting program. He stood at the crest
of the hill looking down on the Hospital. It was half a mile away and
blazed with light. Behind and to either side were other lights, the lights of
houses, none within half a mile of the Hospital. Against their general glow
he saw the black tongue of forest he’d noticed that morning.
In a direction not quite opposite to the dark, sprawling line of trees, a
straighter line of light ran from the Hospital to a cluster of buildings at the
perimeter of the bare region. A supply road.
He could reach the trees by moving along the edge of town. The trees
would give him cover until he reached the wall—but it seemed a poor risk.
Why would Implementation leave that one line of cover across a bare, flat
protective field? That strip of forest must be loaded with detection
equipment.
He started across the rock on his belly.
He stopped frequently. It was tiring, moving like this. Worse than that,
what was he going to do when he got inside? The Hospital was big, and he
knew nothing about the interior. The lighted windows bothered him.
Didn’t the Hospital ever sleep? The stars shone bright and cold. Each time
he stopped to rest, the Hospital was a little closer.
So was the wall that surrounded it. It leaned outwards and on this side
there was no break at all.
He was a hundred yards from the wall when he found the wire. There
were big metal pegs to hold it off the ground, pegs a foot high and thirty
yards apart, driven into the rock. The wire itself was bare coppery metal
strung taut a few inches off the ground. Matt had not touched it. He
crossed it very carefully, staying low but not touching the wire at any time.
Faintly there came the sound of alarm bells ringing inside the wall.
Matt stopped where he was. Then he turned and was over the wire in one
leap. When he hit the ground he didn’t move. His eyes were closed tight.
He felt the faint touch of numbness which meant a sonic beam. Evidently
he was out of range. He risked a look behind him. Four searchlights
hunted him across the bare rock. The wall was lousy with police.
He turned away, afraid they’d see his face shining. There were whirring
sounds. Mercy-bullets falling all around him, slivers of glassy chemical
which dissolved in blood. They weren’t as accurate as lead pellets, but one
must find him soon.
A light pinned him. And another, and a third.
From the wall came a voice. “Cease fire.” The whirr of anesthetic
slivers ended. The voice spoke again, bored, authoritative, tremendously
amplified. “Stand up, you. You may as well walk, but we’ll carry you if we
have to.”
Matt wanted to burrow like a rabbit. But even a rabbit wouldn’t have
made headway in the pitted, dusty stone. He stood up with his hands in the
air.
There was no sound, no motion.
One of the lights swung away from him. Then the others. They moved
in random arcs for a while, crossing the protective-rock field with swooping
blobs of light. Then, one by one, they went out.
The amplified voice spoke again. It sounded faintly puzzled. “What set
off the alarms?”
Another voice, barely audible in the quiet night. “Don’t know, sir.”
“Maybe a rabbit. All right, break it up.”
The figures on the wall disappeared. Matt was standing all alone with
his hands in the air. After a while he put them down and walked away.
The man was tall and thin, with a long face and a short mouth and no
expression. His Implementation-police uniform could not have been
cleaner nor better pressed if he’d donned it a moment ago for the first time.
He sat beside the door, bored and used to it, a man who had spent half his
life sitting and waiting.
Every fifteen minutes or so he would get up to look at the coffin.
Seemingly the coffin had been built for Gilgamesh or Paul Bunyan. It
was oak, at least on the outside. The eight gauge dials along one edge
appeared to have been pirated from somewhere else and attached to the
coffin by a carpenter of only moderate skill. The, long-headed man would
stand up, go to the coffin, stand over the dials for a minute. Something
could go wrong, after all. Then he would have to act in a hurry. But
nothing ever did, and he would return to his chair and wait some more.
Problem:
Polly Tournquist’s mind holds information you need. How to get at it?
The mind is the body. The body is the mind.
Drugs would interfere with her metabolism. They might harm her.
You’d risk it, but you’re not allowed drugs anyway.
Torture? You could damage a few fingernails, bend a few bones. But it
wouldn’t stop there. Pain affects the adrenal glands, and the adrenal glands
affect everything. Sustained pain can have a savage, even permanent, effect
on a body needed for medical supplies. Besides, torture is unethical.
Friendly persuasion? You could offer her a deal. Her life, and
resettlement in some other region of the Plateau, for anything you want to
know. You’d like that, and the organ banks are full…But she won’t deal.
You’ve seen them before. You can tell.
So you give her a nice rest.
Polly Tournquist was a soul alone in space. Less than that, for there was
nothing around her that could have been identified as “space.” No heat, no
cold, no pressure, no light, no darkness, no hunger, no thirst, no sound.
She had tried to concentrate on the sound of her heartbeat, but even
that had disappeared. It was too regular. Her mind had edited it out.
Similarly with the darkness behind her closed, bandaged eyelids: the
darkness was uniform, and she no longer sensed it. She could strain her
muscles against the soft, swaddling bandages that bound her, but she
sensed no result, for the slack was small fractions of an inch. Her mouth
was partly open; she could neither open it further nor close it on the foam-
rubber mouthpiece. She could not bite her tongue, nor find it. In no way
could she produce the sensation of pain. The ineffable peace of the coffin
cure wrapped her in its tender folds and carried her, screaming silently,
into nothingness.
What happened?
He sat at the edge of the grass on the hill above the Hospital. His eyes
were fixed on its blazing windows. His heart beat softly against his knee.
What happened? They had me. They had me!
He had walked away. Bewildered, helpless, beaten, he had waited for
the magnified voice to shout its orders. And nothing had happened. It was
as if they had forgotten him. He had walked away with the feel of death at
his back, waiting for the numbness of a sonic stun-beam or the prick of a
mercy-bullet or the roar of the officer’s voice.
Gradually, against all reason, he had sensed that they were not going to
come for him.
And then he ran.
His lungs had stopped their tortured laboring many minutes ago, but
his brain still spun. Perhaps it would never stop. He had run until he
collapsed, here at the top of the hill, but the fear that drove him was not
the fear of the organ banks. He had fled from an impossible thing, from a
universe without reason. How could he have walked away from that plain
of death with no eye to watch him? It smacked of magic, and he was afraid.
Something had suspended the ordinary laws of the universe to save his
life. He had never heard of anything that could do that…except the Mist
Demons. And the Mist Demons were a myth. They had told him so when
he was old enough. The Mist Demons were a tale to frighten children, like
the reverse of a Santa Claus. The old wives who found powerful beings in
the mist beyond the edge of the world had followed a tradition older than
history, perhaps as old as man. But nobody believed in the Mist Demons.
They were like the Belt miners’ Church of Finagle, whose prophet was
Murphy. A half-bitter joke. Something to swear by.
They had me and they let me go. Why?
Could they have had a purpose? Was there some reason the Hospital
should let a colonist sneak to its very walls, then let him go free?
Could the organ banks be full? But there must be someplace they could
keep a prisoner until there was room.
But if they thought he was a crew! Yes, that was it! A human figure on
Alpha plateau—of course they’d assume he was crew. But so what? Surely
someone would have come to question him.
Matt began pacing a tight circle at the top of the low hill. His head
whirled. He’d walked to certain death and been turned loose. By whom?
Why? And what did he do next? Go back and give them another chance?
Walk to the Alpha-Beta Bridge and hope nobody would see him sneaking
across? Fly down the cliff, vigorously flapping his arms?
The awful thing was that he didn’t know it wouldn’t work. Magic,
magic. Hood had talked about magic.
No, he hadn’t. He’d practically turned purple denying that magic was
involved. He’d been talking about…psychic powers. And Matt had been so
involved in watching, Polly that he couldn’t remember anything Hood had
said.
It was very bad luck. Because this was his only out. He had to assume
that he had a psychic power, though he had not the remotest idea what
that implied. At least it put a name to what had happened.
“I’ve got a psychic power,” Matt announced. His voice rang with queer
precision in the quiet night.
Fine. So? If Hood had gone into detail on the nature of psychic powers,
Matt couldn’t remember. But he could fairly well drop the idea of flying
down the Alpha-Beta cliff. Whatever else was true of man’s unexplored
mental powers, they must be consistent. Matt could remember the feeling
that he wouldn’t be noticed if he didn’t want to be, he had never flown, nor
even dreamed of flying.
He ought to talk to Hood.
But Hood was in the Hospital. He might be dead already.
Well…
Matt had been eleven years old when Ghengis, or Dad, brought two
charms home for gifts. They were model cars, just the right size for charm
bracelets, and they glowed in the dark. Matt and Jeanne had loved them at
sight and forever.
One night they had left the charms in a closet for several hours,
thinking they would grow brighter when they “got used to the dark.” When
Jeanne opened the closet, they had lost all their glow.
Jeanne was near tears. Matt’s reaction was different. If darkness robbed
the charms of their powers…
He hung them next to a light bulb for an hour. When he turned off the
light, they glowed like little blue lamps.
A tide of small, loosely packed clouds was spreading across the stars. In
all directions the town lights had gone out, all but the lights of the
Hospital. The Plateau slept in a profound silence.
Well…he’d tried to sneak into the Hospital. He’d been caught. But
when he stood up in the glare of spotlights, they couldn’t see him. The why
of it was just as magical as before, but he thought he was beginning to see
the how of it.
He’d have to risk it. Matt began to walk.
He’d never planned for it to go this far. If only he’d been stopped before
it was too late. But it was too late, and he had the sense to know it.
Strictly speaking, he should have been wearing something bright. A
blue shirt with a tangerine sweater, iridescent green pants, a scarlet cape
with an S enclosed in a yellow triangle. And…rimmed glasses? It had been
a long time since grade school. Never mind; he’d have to go as he was.
A good thing he liked flamboyant gestures.
He skirted the edge of the bare region until he reached the houses.
Presently he was walking through dark streets. The houses were fascinating
and strange. He would have enjoyed seeing them by daylight. What
manner of people lived in them? Colorful, idle, happy, eternally young and
healthy. He would have liked to be one of them.
But he noticed a peculiar thing about the houses. Heterogeneous as
they were in form, color, style, building material, they had one thing in
common. Always they faced away from the Hospital.
As if the Hospital inspired them with fear. Or guilt.
There were lights ahead. Matt walked faster. He had been walking for
half an hour now. Yes, there was the supply road, lit bright as day by two
close-spaced lines of street lamps. A broken white line ran down the
curving middle.
Matt stepped out to the white line and began following it toward the
Hospital.
Again his shoulders were unnaturally rigid, as with the fear of death
from behind. But the danger was all before him. The organ banks were the
most humiliating imaginable form of death. Yet Matt feared something
worse.
Men had been released from the Hospital to tell of their trials. Not
many, but they could talk. Matt could guess a little of what waited for him.
They would see him, they would fire mercy-bullets into him, they
would carry him on a stretcher into the Hospital. When he woke, he would
be taken to his first and last interview with the dread Castro. The Head’s
burning eyes would look into his, and he would rumble, “Keller, eh? Yes,
we had to take your uncle apart. Well, Keller? You walked up here like you
thought you were a crew with an appointment. What did you think you
were doing, Keller?”
And what was he going to say to that?
The Hospital
The Vivarium
I. Lead-in.
The wonder was that it had taken so long to pass these laws.
The organ-bank problem could have started in the year 1900, when
Karl Landsteiner separated human blood into four types: A, B, AB, and O.
Or in 1914, when Albert Hustin found that sodium citrate would prevent
blood from clotting. Or in 1940, when Landsteiner and Wiener found the
Rh factor. Blood banks could so easily have been supplied by condemned
criminals, but apparently nobody had realized it.
And there was Hamburger’s work in the 1960s and 1970s, in a Parisian
hospital where kidney transplants were made from donors who were not
identical twins. There were the antirejection serums discovered by Mostel
and Granovich in the 2010s…
Nobody seemed to have noticed the implications—until the middle of
the twenty-first century.
There were organ banks all over the world, inadequately supplied by
people kind enough to will their bodies to medical science.
How useful is the body of a man who dies of old age? How fast can you
reach a car accident? And in 2043, Arkansas, which had never rescinded
the death penalty, made the organ banks the official state method of
execution.
The idea had spread like wildfire…like a moral plague, as one critic of
the time had put it. Millard Parlette had researched it very thoroughly,
then cut all of the historical matter out of his speech, afraid it would lose
him his audience. People, especially crew, did not like to be lectured.
1. Life. The organ banks can cure nearly anything, and the
government can regulate which citizens shall benefit, on
grounds that materials are running short. Priorities become
vital.
2. Death. No citizen will protest when the government
condemns a man to die, not when his death gives the citizen
his chance to live.
Untrue and unfair. There were always altruists. But let it stand.
Millard Parlette frowned. How would the average crew react to the
truth about the Covenant of Planetfall?
What they were taught in school was true, in the main. The Covenant
of Planetfall, the agreement which gave the crew authority over the
colonists, had existed since the Planck landing. The colonists had agreed to
it, all of them.
The rationale held, too. The crew had taken all the risks, done all the
work of decades, suffered and slaved through years of training, to reach a
target which might be habitable. The colonists had slept peacefully
through all those weary years in space. It was right that the crew should
rule.
But—how many crew knew that those first colonists had signed the
Covenant at gunpoint? That eight had died rather than sign away their
freedom?
Was it Millard Parlette’s place to tell them?
Yes, it was. They had to understand the nature of power politics. He left
the notation unchanged.
B. The Hospital:
A. It does not make the organ banks obsolete. The capsule held
only four items. To replace the organ banks would require
hundreds, or thousands, each a separate project.
B. But any colonist report would blow it out of all proportion.
Colonists would assume that capital punishment would stop now.
VII. Conclusion.
Violently or peaceably, the rule of the crew ends when the colonists
learn of Ramrobot Capsule #143.
OceanofPDF.com
Polly’s Eyes
Parlette’s Hand
The Slowboat
XIII Polly moved at a gliding run. The gas filter was in place over
her nose. She held the sonic straight out ahead of her, pointed around the
curve of the inner hull. If an enemy appeared, that was where he would be,
right in the gunsight. Nobody would come at her from behind. She was
moving too fast.
As one of the inner core of the Sons of Earth, Polly knew the Planck as
well as she knew her own home. The flight control room was a diameter’s
distance from airlock. She ticked off the doors as she passed under them.
Hydroponics…Library…
Flight Control. The door was closed. No ladder.
Polly crouched and sprang. She caught the handle at the top of her
leap. The door was not locked; it was closed, because nobody ever used the
flight control room. Unfortunately the door opened inward, upward. She
dropped back, frustrated, landing silently on her toes.
If she’d chosen the fusion room…but the fusion room was for fine
control. There, the Hospital electricians kept power running to the colonist
regions. She’d have run into people, and they might have stopped her.
The guard had carried a wallet.
She leapt again, caught the knob and turned it, pushed the wallet
between the door and the jamb, where the catch of the lock ought to be.
Again she dropped, and again she leapt. This time she slapped the flat of
her hand hard against the door. It flipped upward…and over.
Far down the curve of the corridor someone yelled, “What’s going on
down there?”
Polly’s chest heaved, pulling deep lungfuls of air through her nose,
under perfect control. She jumped a last time, caught the jamb, and pulled
herself up. Heavy footsteps…Before someone could come into sight, she
had closed the door.
There was a ladder here, built into what had been the ceiling.
Doubtless the Planck’s original crew had used it to climb down from those
six control chairs after the First Landing. Polly used it now.
She squirmed into the second seat on the left and found the control
panel and the bypass. Part of the wall had been pried up, and a simple iron
bar had been welded into place between two plates, removing control from
the flight control room and giving it directly to the fusion room. In flight
both control points had been necessary: the fusion room to keep the drive
working and stable, and the flight control room to keep it pointed. Now the
fusion drive was used only for making electricity. And Polly’s control panel
was dead.
She went down the ladder fast. There was a tool closet by the door. If it
held a welding arc—
It did.
And if there was no anesthetic gas around—or if it wasn’t
inflammable…
Nothing exploded as she turned on the welder. She began welding the
door shut.
Almost immediately she attracted attention. She could hear excited
voices, muffled by the door. Then there was the faint numbness of a sonic
beamer. The door didn’t conduct subsonics well, but she couldn’t take this
long. Nonetheless she finished the welding job before she went back up
the ladder.
She used the welding arc to cut away the bypass. It was slow work.
Implementation would surely have barged in on her before she finished.
Now they could whistle for entrance. She had all the time in the world. In
their world.
Matt reached the corridor and began to walk, leaving the interrogation
room open behind him. He walked bent, with his chest half collapsed and
his arms folded over the pain. He’d forgotten to take the remaining sonic.
“I’m not the domineering type,” he muttered, perversely enjoying the
sound of his own voice. And, “Either that, or I’m trying to dominate the
wrong woman.”
A heavy figure came pounding around the curve. Jesus Pietro Castro,
wearing a gas filter and carrying a heavy mercy-sliver gun, looked up in
time to avoid a collision. He jerked to a stop, and then his mouth dropped
open as he took in blue eyes, brown hair, a bitter and angry colonist’s face,
an ear with a small piece bitten out of it, and blood soaked into the collar
of a crewish overjacket.
“You agree?” Matt said brightly.
Castro raised his gun. The “luck” was off.
And all the rage and humiliation in Matt broke loose. “All right,” he
yelled, “look at me! Damn you, look at me! I’m Matthew Keller.”
The Head stared. He did not fire. He stared.
“I crashed my way into your crummy Hospital single-handed, twice! I
came through walls and void mist and sleepy gas and mercy bullets to
rescue that damn woman, and when I got her loose, she punched me in
the gut and folded me up like a flower! So go ahead and look!”
Castro looked and looked.
And finally Matt realized that he should have fired.
Castro swiveled his head from side to side in a negative motion. But his
eyes never left Matt. And slowly, slowly, as if he were knee deep in
hardening cement, he moved one slow step forward.
Abruptly Matt realized what was happening. “Don’t look away,” he said
hastily. “Look at me.” The Head was close enough now, and Matt reached
out and pushed the barrel of the mercy-gun aside, still striving to hold
Castro’s eyes. “Keep looking.”
They stared eye to eye. Above his bulky false nose, Castro’s eyes were
remarkable: all white and black, all whites and huge, expanded pupils,
with practically no iris showing. His jaw hung loose under the snowy
handlebar moustache. He was melting; the perspiration ran in slow streams
into his collar. Like a man in an ecstasy of fear, or awe, or worship…he
stared.
Contract the pupils of eyes not your own, and you got psychic
invisibility. Expand them, and you got…what? Fascination?
For damn sure, he had the Head’s complete attention. Matt drew back
his fist, cocked it—and couldn’t follow through. It would have been like
attacking a cripple. Castro was a cripple: one of his arms was in a sling.
There was shouting from down the corridor, from the direction Polly
had taken.
The Head moved another gluey step forward.
Too many enemies, before and behind. Matt slapped the gun out of
Castro’s hand, then turned and ran.
As he dropped through the door to the coffin room, he saw the Head
still looking after him, still held in the strange spell. Then he pushed the
door closed above him.
Polly cut the last of the bar away, and the control board came alight.
She ran her eyes quickly over the lighted dials, then once more, slowly.
According to the control board, the fusion drive was as cold as Pluto’s
caves.
Polly whistled between her teeth. It was no malfunction of the board.
The several dials checked each other too well. Someone had decided to
black out the colony regions.
She couldn’t start the drive from here. And she’d never reach the fusion
room; she’d locked herself in with a vengeance.
If only this had been the Arthur Clarke! Castro would never dare cut
power to the crew. The Clarke’s fusion plant must be going full blast.
Well, now, she thought in growing excitement. She slid out onto the
ladder. There might be a way to reach the Clarke.
Jesus Pietro felt a hand shaking his shoulder. He turned and found
Major Jansen. “What is it?”
“We’ve flooded the Planck with gas, sir. Everyone who wasn’t warned
should be unconscious, unless he’s behind doors. I wish there weren’t so
many filters floating around, though. Whoever we’re after has had too good
a chance to pick one up.”
“Good,” said Jesus Pietro. He couldn’t concentrate. He wanted to be
alone, to think…no, he didn’t want to be alone…“Carry on,” he said. “Try
the coffin room. He may be in there.”
“He isn’t. Or if he is, there’s more than one traitor. Somebody’s in the
flight control room, welded in. It’s a good thing the fusion plant is off.”
“Get him out. But try the coffin room, too.”
Major Jansen moved off in the direction of all the commotion. Jesus
Pietro wondered what he’d find when he finally looked in the coffin room.
Had Keller’s ghost really gone in there, or had he faded out while running
up the corridor? Jesus Pietro wasn’t sure.
But he was sure of the ghost.
He would never in his life forget those eyes. Those binding, blinding,
paralyzing eyes. They would haunt him the rest of his life—however many
minutes that might be. For surely the ghost didn’t intend to let him go now.
His handphone rang. Jesus Pietro picked it off his belt and said, “The
Head.”
“Sir, we’re getting some very strange reports,” said the voice of Miss
Lauessen. “A large number of cars are converging on the Hospital.
Someone claiming to represent the Council is accusing you of treason.”
“Me? Of treason?”
“Yes, sir.” Miss Lauessen sounded strange. And she kept calling him Sir.
“What grounds?”
“Shall I find out, sir?”
“Yes. And order them to land outside the defense perimeter. If they
don’t, set patrol cars on them. It’s obviously the Sons of Earth.” He clicked
off and immediately thought, But where did they all come from? And where
did they get the cars?
And he thought, Keller?
His handphone buzzed.
Miss Lauessen’s voice had turned plaintive—almost querulous. “Sir,
the fleet of cars is led by Millard Parlette. He accuses you of malfeasance
and treason, and he orders you to give yourself up for trial.”
“He’s gone insane.” Jesus Pietro tried to think. It was all coming at
once. Was this why Keller had appeared to him, shown himself at last? No
mysterious symbols, this time; no invisible breaking of fingers. Keller’s
eyes…“Try to land the old man without hurting him. The other cars too.
Order them to set their cars on autopilot. Tell them they won’t be hurt.
Give them one minute; then knock them out with sonics.”
“I hesitate to remind you, sir, but Millard Parlette is your superior
officer. Will you give yourself up?”
Then Jesus Pietro remembered that Miss Lauessen was almost pure
crew. Did her veins carry Parlette blood? It was reputedly easy to come by.
He said the only thing he could.
“No.”
The phone cut off, cut him off from the Hospital switchboard and from
the world outside.
He’d gone off half-cocked, and be knew it. Somehow Polly’s blow in the
belly had made him want to die. He’d stumbled out into the corridor to be
captured.
Not this time. He scooped up the remaining sonic and started for the
ladder. This time he’d know just what he was doing when he went through
that door.
But why go through it at all? The thought stopped him at the foot of
the ladder. If Polly was going to blow the drive—
No, she’d never get that far. And she’d had all the rescuing she was
entitled to. It was time to think about escape. He looked up at the exit—
and shivered.
Some escape hatch. The moment he poked his head out there,
somebody would shoot at it. He had to see his enemy to use the “luck,” and
he couldn’t see in all directions at once.
Yet, this room was no place to stand off a siege. All anyone would have
to do would be to fire mercy-needles down toward the floor. If he looked
before he fired, the “luck” would get him; but that statement applied to an
ordinary sonic stunner. And so he wouldn’t look.
He had to get out.
But—Castro’s nose piece. It meant Implementation was using gas. The
corridor must be already full of it.
Too many things to think about! Matt cursed and began going through
a guard’s pockets. The guard stirred and tried to strangle Matt with limp
fingers. Matt played the sonic over them both, then finished his search.
Neither guard had a gas filter.
Matt looked up at the door. He could chance it, of course, but if there
was gas in the corridor, only that airtight door was protecting him now. It
had to be airtight, of course.
Get to another room? There were the doors leading to what must be
bedrooms. But they were halfway up the walls and too far from the ladder.
And there, just under the exit, was a small door placed where any good
apartment would have a coat closet. He might be able to reach it.
It wasn’t a coat closet, of course. It held two spacesuits.
And it wasn’t easy to reach. Matt had to lean far out from the ladder to
turn the knob, let the door fall open, and then jump for the opening.
Leaving the cubbyhole would be just as bad when the time came.
Spacesuits. They had hung on hooks; now they sprawled on the floor
like empty men. Thick rubbery fabric, with a heavy metal neck-ring set
with clamps to hold the separate helmet. Metal struts in the fabric braced
the rocket backpack and the control unit under the chin.
Would the air converter still work? Ridiculous, after three hundred
years. But there might still be air in the tank. Matt found a knob in the
control panel of one suit, twisted it, and got a hiss.
So there was still stored air. The suit would protect him against gas.
And the big fishbowl of a helmet would not interfere with his vision, nor
his “luck.”
He snatched up the gun when the door to the corridor dropped open.
A long moment later two legs came into sight of the ladder. Matt played
the sonic over them. A man grunted in surprise and toppled into view, and
down.
A voice of infinite authority spoke. “You! Come out of there!”
Matt grinned to himself. Quietly he put the gun aside and reached for
the suit. A wave of dizziness made the world go dreamy. He’d been right
about the gas.
He turned the air knob on full and put his head through the neck ring.
He took several deep breaths, then held his breath while he slid feet first
into the suit.
“You haven’t got a chance! Come on out or we’ll come in after you!”
Do that. Matt pulled the helmet over, his head and resumed breathing.
The dizziness was passing, but he had to move carefully. Especially since
the suit was a size too, small for him.
The door dropped open suddenly, and there was a spattering of mercy-
slivers. A snarling face and a hand came into view, the hand firing a mercy-
gun. Matt shot at the face. The man slumped, head down, but he didn’t
fall; someone pulled him up out of sight by his ankles.
The air in the suit had a metallic smell thick enough to cut. Matt
wrinkled his nose. Anyone else would have been satisfied with one escape
from the Hospital. Who but Lucky Matt Keller would have—
There was a roar like a distant, continuous explosion. What, Matt
wondered, are they trying now? He raised the gun.
The ship shook, and shook again. Matt found himself bouncing about
like a toy in a box. Somehow he managed to brace his feet and shoulders
against walls. I thought the son of a bitch was bluffing! He snatched at the
stunner as it threatened to slide out into space.
The ship jumped, slapping hard against his cheekbone, as one whole
wall of the ship ripped away. The roar was suddenly louder, much louder.
“We’re too close,” said Parlette.
Hood, in the driver’s seat, said, “We have to be close enough to give
orders.”
“Nonsense. You’re afraid someone will call you a coward. Hang back, I
tell you. Let my men do the fighting; they know what they’re doing. We’ve
practiced enough.”
Hood shrugged and eased back on the 3-4 throttle. Already theirs was
the last car in a swarm of more than forty, an armada of floating red
taillights against the starry night. Each car carried two of Parlette’s line, a
driver and a gunman.
Parlette, hovering like a vulture over the car’s phone, suddenly crowed,
“I’ve got Deirdre Lauessen! All of you, be quiet. Listen, Deirdre, this is an
emergency…”
And the others, Harry Kane and Lydia Hancock and Jay Hood, listened
while Parlette talked.
It took him several minutes, but at last he leaned back, smiling with
carnivorous white teeth. “I’ve done it. She’ll put our accusation on the
intercom. Now we’ll have Implementation fighting each other.”
“You’ll have a tough time justifying that accusation,” Harry Kane
warned him.
“Not at all. By the time I finished, I could convince Castro himself that
he was guilty of treason, malfeasance of duty, and augmented incest.
Provided—” He paused for effect. “Provided we can take the Hospital. If I
control the Hospital, they’ll believe me. Because I’ll be the only one
talking.
“The main point is this. In law I am the man in charge of the Hospital,
and have been since Castro was the size of Hood. If it weren’t me, it would
be some other crew of course. In practice, it’s Castro’s Hospital, and I have
to take it away from him. We have to have control before we can begin
changing the government of Mount Lookitthat. But once I’ve got control, I
can keep it.”
“Look ahead.”
“Police cars. Not many.”
“Tight formation. I wonder if that’s good? None of us ever had any
training in dogfights.”
“Why didn’t you fight each other?”
“We expected to fight,” said Parlette. “We never expected to fight the
Hospital. So we—”
“What the Mist Demons is that?”
Parlette was leaning far forward in his seat, his mismatched hands
bracing him against the dashboard. He didn’t answer.
Harry shook his shoulder. “What is it? It looks like fire all around one
end of the Hospital.” Parlette seemed rigid with shock.
And then one whole end of the Hospital detached itself from the main
structure and moved sedately away. Orange flame bloomed all around its
base.
“That,” said Millard Parlette, “is the Planck taking off on its landing
motors.”
Polly was in the upper-left-hand seat. She manipulated the controls in
front of her with extreme delicacy, but still the knobs turned in short
jumps. Minute flakes of rust must be coming loose somewhere in the chain
of command that led from this control chair to the fission piles.
Finally the piles were hot.
And Polly tried the water valves.
It seemed to her that long ago someone had decided to keep the
slowboats ready for a fast takeoff. It must have been during the first years of
the colony, when nobody—crew or colonist—had been sure that an
interstellar colony was possible. Then, others had forgotten, and the only
changes made since then had been the necessary ones.
Until the slowboats themselves were part of the structure of the
Hospital, and the interiors of the lifesystems were a maze of ladders and
jury-rigs. Until the organ banks were moved entirely out of the ships, and
the suspended animation rooms were closed off for good. Until the ships
were nothing more than electrical generating plants—if one turned a blind
eye to the interrogation room and perhaps to other secrets.
And still the tool closets were undisturbed. And still there were
spacesuits in the upended rooms, behind doors which hadn’t been opened
for centuries.
And still there was water in the landing fuel tanks and uranium in the
landing motors. Nobody had bothered to remove them. The water had not
evaporated, not from tanks made to hold water for thirty years against
interstellar vacuum. The uranium…
Polly valved water into the hot motors, and the ship roared. She yipped
in triumph. The ship shuddered and shook along her whole length. From
beneath the welded door there were muffled screams.
There was more than one way to tell a joke! The Planck’s fusion drive
was dead, but the Arthur Clarke’s drive must be running hot. And when
Polly dived the Planck on it from the edge of atmosphere, the explosion
would tear the top from Alpha Plateau!
“Come loose,” she whispered.
The Planck pulled loose from the rock around it, rose several feet, and
settled, mushily. The huge ship seemed to be bouncing, ponderously, on
something soft. Polly twisted the water fuel valve to no effect. Water and
pile were running at peak.
Polly snarled low in her throat. The pile must be nearly dead; it
couldn’t even manage to lift the ship against Mount Lookitthat’s point
eight gee. If it weren’t for the landing skirt guiding the blast for a ground
effect, they wouldn’t be moving at all!
Polly reached far across to the seat on her right. A bar moved under her
hand, and at the aft end of the Planck, two fins moved in response. The
ship listed to the side and drifted back to nudge the Hospital, almost gently
—once, twice.
Live flame roared through the Hospital. It was water vapor heated
beyond incandescence, to the point where oxygen dissociated itself from
hydrogen, and it cut where it hit. Like death’s hurricane it roared through
the corridors, cutting its way through walls where there were no corridors.
It killed men before they knew what was killing them, for the first touch of
the superheated steam made them blind.
The drive flame spread its fiery death through a third of the ground
floor.
To men inside and outside the Hospital, to men who had never met
and never would, this was the night everything happened at once. Sane
men locked their doors and found something to hide under while they
waited for things to stop happening.
“Laney. It must be Laney,” said Jay Hood. “She got through.”
“Elaine Mattson?”
“Right. And she got to the Planck. Can you imagine?”
“She must have a wonderful sense of timing. Do you know what will
happen when she blows the drive?”
“Oh, my God. What’ll we do?”
“Keep flying,” said Parlette. “We’d never get out of range now. We
might just as well bull through with this and hope Miss Mattson realizes
the colonists are winning.”
“More police cars,” said Harry Kane. “Left and right, both.”
Polly touched the bar again. The ship tilted to the other side and began
to drift ponderously away from the Hospital.
She dared tilt the ship no farther. How much clearance did she have
under the landing skirt? A foot? A yard? Ten? If the skirt touched the
ground, the ship would go over on its side.
That was not part of Polly’s plan.
Behind her the door had turned red hot. Polly glanced back with bared
teeth. She moved her hands over the board, but in the end left the settings
just the way they were. She’d have to circle all the way around the
Hospital, but then she’d have a gliding run at the Arthur Clarke.
And she’d hit it again and again until one ship failed.
She never noticed when the red spot on the door turned white and
burned through.
The ship jumped three feet upward, and Matt’s head snapped down
against the closet floor. When he looked up, the outer hull side of the
room was tearing away like tissue paper, except for the agonized scream of
old metal dying. And Matt was looking straight into Castro’s office.
He couldn’t think; he couldn’t move. The scene had a quality of
nightmare; it was beyond the rational. Magic! he thought, and, Not again!
The Hospital was drifting away, dreamlike. His ears had gone dead, so
that it all took place in an eerie silence. The ship was taking off…
And there was no air in his helmet. The tank had held only one last
wheeze. He was suffocating. He pulled the clamps up with fingers gone
limp and tingly, tossed the helmet away, and gulped air. Then he
remembered the gas.
But it was clean hot air, air from outside, howling through the gaping
hole in the outer hull. He sucked at it, pulling it to him. There were spots
before his eyes.
The ship was going up and down in a seasick manner. Wavering in the
drive, Matt thought, and tried to ignore it. But one thing he couldn’t
ignore:
Polly had reached the controls. Apparently she was taking the ship up.
No telling how high they were already; the lights of the Hospital had
dwindled to the point where everything outside was uniformly black
against the lighted room. They were going up, and the room was wide
open to naked space, and Matt had no helmet.
The room seemed steadier. He jumped for the ladder. The suit was
awkward, but he caught the ladder and made his way down, fighting the
imbalance caused by his backpack. It wasn’t until he touched bottom that
the backpack caught his conscious attention.
After all, if the Planck’s landing motors still worked, why not a
spacesuit’s backpack?
He peered down at a control panel meant to be read by fingertips. With
the helmet on, he couldn’t have done it. The backpack was studded with
small rocket motors; he wanted the ones on the bottom, of course.
How high was he now?
He tried the two buttons on the bottom, and something exploded on
his back. It felt about right, as if it were trying to lift him. There was only
one throttle knob. Doubtless it controlled all the jets at once, or all that
were turned on at a given time.
Well, what else did he need to know? How high was he?
He took one last deep breath and went out the hole in the wall. He saw
blackness around him, and he twisted the throttle hard over. It didn’t move.
It was already on full. Matt had something like one second to realize that
the backpack was for use in space, that it probably wouldn’t have lifted its
own weight against gravity.
He hit.
Moving carefully, so as not to interfere with the men using welding
torches, Major Jansen peered up into the hole in the flight-control-room
door.
They had pushed a platform into position under the door, so that two
men could work at once. The platform rose and settled, rose and settled, so
that the major had to brace himself with his hands flat on the ceiling. He
could see raven hair over the top of a control chair, and one slender brown
arm hanging down.
Jesus Pietro, standing below, called, “How long?”
“A few seconds,” said one of the men with cutting torches. “Unless she
welded the hinge side too.”
“Do you know where we’re going?” called the Head. “I do.”
Major Jansen looked down, surprised. The Head sounded so odd! And
he looked like an old man in poor health. He seemed unable to
concentrate on what was going on. He’s ready for retirement, Major Jansen
thought with compassion. If we live through this…
“I do,” Jesus Pietro repeated, and nodded to himself.
Major Jansen turned away. He had no time to feel sympathy for the
Head, not while this was going on.
“She welded the hinge side,” said one of the cutters.
“How long?”
“Three minutes if we work from both ends.”
The ship continued to move, drifting along on its cushion of fire.
Fire swept along the edge of the trapped forest, leaving a line of licking
red and orange flame, ignored by the embattled aircars above. Presently
there were explosions among the trees, and then the whole tongue of forest
was aflame.
Now the Planck had left the defense perimeter and moved into a place
of shops and houses. The crew who lived in those houses were awake, of
course; nobody could have slept through that continuous roar. Some stayed
where they were; some made for the street and tried to run for it. The ones
who reached their basements were the ones who lived. A block-wide path
of exploded, burning houses was the wake of the Planck.
But now the houses were empty, and they didn’t burn. They were of
architectural coral, and they had been deserted, most of them, for upwards
of thirty years.
“We’re through, sir.” The words were hardly necessary. The cutters
were pushing the door aside, their hands protected by thick gloves. Major
Jansen shoved through and went up the ladder with panic at his back.
Polly’s control board bewildered him. Knowing that he knew as much
about flying spacecraft as anyone behind him, he continued to search for
the dial or wheel or lever that would change the Planck’s direction. Finally,
puzzled, he looked up; and that was his undoing.
The flight control room was long. It projected through the cargo
section to where the outer and inner hulls met, and most of it was
transparent. Major Jansen looked out through the outer hull, and he saw
what was happening outside.
He saw the glow of the drive flames near the bottom of his view. To the
right, a coral house exploding: the last house. Not far ahead, the black line
of the void edge, coming closer.
And he froze.
“We’re going over,” said Jesus Pietro, standing under him on the ladder.
He showed neither surprise nor fear.
Major Jansen screamed and buried his face in his arms.
Jesus Pietro squeezed past him and into the left-hand seat. His decision
was based on logic alone. If Major Jansen had not found the right control,
then he was looking at the wrong panel; and this was the only other control
panel the colonist girl could reach from where she was sitting. He found
the fin controls and tried them.
The ship tilted back and began to slow.
Still slowing, it drifted over the edge.
Jesus Pietro leaned back in his seat and watched. The Planck was no
longer supported by the ground effect. Jesus Pietro felt a sensation like an
elevator starting down. He watched the cliff go by, faster and faster, a black
shadow. Presently it was half the sky, and the other half was stars.
Presently the stars went out.
The ship began to grow hot. It was hot and dark outside, and the
ancient walls of the Planck creaked and groaned as the pressure rose. Jesus
Pietro watched, waiting.
Waiting for Matthew Keller.
Balance of Power
OceanofPDF.com
THERE IS A TIDE
I Then, the planet had no name. It circles a star which in 2830 lay
beyond the fringe of known space, a distance of nearly forty light-years
from Sol. The star is a G3, somewhat redder than Sol, somewhat smaller.
The planet, swinging eighty million miles from its primary in a reasonably
circular orbit, is a trifle cold for human tastes.
In the year 2830 one Louis Gridley Wu happened to be passing. The
emphasis on accident is intended. In a universe the size of ours almost
anything that can happen, will. Take the coincidence of his meeting—
But we’ll get to that.
Louis Wu was one hundred and eighty years old. As a regular user of
boosterspice, he didn’t show his years. If he didn’t get bored first, or broke,
he might reach a thousand.
“But,” he sometimes told himself, “not if I have to put up with any
more cocktail parties, or Bandersnatch hunts, or painted flatlanders
swarming through an anarchy park too small for them by a factor of ten.
Not if I have to live through another one-night love affair or another
twenty-year marriage or another twenty-minute wait for a transfer booth
that blows its zap just as it’s my turn. And people. Not if I have to live with
people, day and night, all those endless centuries.”
When he started to feel like that, he left. It had happened three times
in his life, and now a fourth. Presumably, it would keep happening. In
such a state of anomie, of acute anti-everything, he was no good to anyone,
especially his friends, most especially himself. So he left. In a small but
adequate spacecraft, his own, he left everything and everyone, heading
outward for the fringe of known space. He would not return until he was
desperate for the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice.
On the second trip he had gritted his teeth and waited until he was
desperate for the sight of a Kzinti face.
That was a long trip, he remembered. And, because he had only been
three and a half months in space on this fourth trip, and because his teeth
still snapped together at the mere memory of a certain human voice…
because of these things, he added, “I think this time I’ll wait till I’m
desperate to see a Kdatlyno. Female, of course.”
Few of his friends guessed the wear and tear these trips saved him. And
them. He spent the months reading, while his library played orchestrated
music. By now he was well clear of known space. Now he turned the ship
ninety degrees, beginning a wide circular arc with Sol at its center.
He approached a certain G3 star. He dropped out of hyperdrive well
clear of the singularity in hyperspace which surrounds any large mass. He
accelerated into the system on his main thruster, sweeping the space ahead
of him with the deep-radar. He was not looking for habitable planets. He
was looking for Slaver stasis boxes.
If the pulse returned no echo, he would accelerate until he could shift
to hyperdrive. The velocity would stay with him, and he could use it to
coast through the next system he tried, and the next, and the next. It saved
fuel.
He had never found a Slaver stasis box. It did not stop him from
looking.
As he passed through the system, the deep-radar showed him planets
like pale ghosts, light gray circles on the white screen. The G3 sun was a
wide gray disk, darkening almost to black at the center. The near-black was
degenerate matter, compressed past the point where electron orbits
collapse entirely.
He was well past the sun, and still accelerating when the screen showed
a tiny black fleck.
“No system is perfect, of course,” he muttered as he turned off the
drive. He talked to himself a good deal, out here where nobody could
interrupt him.
“It usually saves fuel,” he told himself a week later. By then he was out
of the singularity, in clear space. He took the ship into hyperdrive, circled
halfway round the system, and began decelerating. The velocity he’d built
up during those first two weeks gradually left him. Somewhere near where
he’d found a black speck in the deep-radar projection, he slowed to a stop.
Though he had never realized it until now, his system for saving fuel
was based on the assumption that he would never find a Slaver box. But
the fleck was there again, a black dot on the gray ghost of a planet. Louis
Wu moved in.
The world looked something like Earth. It was nearly the same size,
very much the same shape, somewhat the same color. There was no moon.
Louis used his telescope on the planet and whistled appreciatively.
Shredded white cloud over misty blue…faint continental outlines…a
hurricane whorl near the equator. The ice caps looked big, but there
would be warm climate near the equator. The air looked sweet and
noncarcinogenic on the spectrograph. And nobody on it. Not a soul!
No next-door neighbors. No voices. No faces.
“What the hell,” he chortled. “I’ve got my box. I’ll just spend the rest of
my vacation here. No men. No women. No children.” He frowned and
rubbed the fringe of hair along his jaw. “Am I being hasty? Maybe I should
knock.”
But he scanned the radio bands and got nothing. Any civilized planet
radiates like a small star in the radio range. Moreover, there was no sign of
civilization, even from a hundred miles up.
“Great! Okay, first I’ll get that old stasis box.” He was sure it was that.
Nothing but stars and stasis boxes were dense enough to show black in the
reflection of a hyperwave pulse.
He followed the image around the bulge of the planet. It seemed the
planet had a moon after all. The moon was twelve hundred miles up, and
it was ten feet across.
“Now why,” he wondered aloud, “would the Slavers have put it in
orbit? It’s too easy to find. They were in a war, for Finagle’s sake! And why
would it stay here?”
The little moon was still a couple of thousand miles away, invisible to
the naked eye. The scope showed it clearly enough. A silver sphere ten feet
through, with no marks on it.
“A billion and a half years it’s been there,” said Louis to himself, said
he. “And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Something would
have knocked it down. Dust, a meteor, the solar wind. Tnuctip soldiers. A
magnetic storm. Nah.” He ran his fingers through straight black hair grown
too long. “It must have drifted in from somewhere else. Recently. Wha—”
Another ship, small and conical, had appeared behind the silvery
sphere. Its hull was green, with darker green markings.
OceanofPDF.com
SAFE AT ANY SPEED
In the two hundred years between Beowulf Shaeffer and Louis Wu,
little had changed on the surface. Known Space was somewhat
larger. Most ships used a reactionless drive, the “thruster.” The
birthright lotteries had been in use on Earth almost since Shaeffer’s
time.
It was the birthright lotteries, which made being born a matter of
sheer luck, that eventually created the Teela Brown gene. Teela
Brown’s story is chronicled in Ringworld. There were other teelas on
Earth, and their effect was catastrophic, at least for a writer. Stories
about infinitely lucky people tend to be dull.
One tale survives from the golden age that followed.
LN
But how, you ask, could a car have managed to fail me?
Already I can see the terror in your eyes at the thought that your car,
too, might fail. Here you are with an indefinite lifespan, a potentially
immortal being, taking every possible precaution against the abrupt
termination of your godhead; and all for nothing. The disruptor field in
your kitchen dispose-all could suddenly expand to engulf you. Your transfer
booth could make you disappear at the transmitter and forget to deliver you
at the receiver. A slidewalk could accelerate to one hundred miles per
hour, then slew sideways to throw you against a building. Every
boosterspice plant in the Thousand Worlds could die overnight, leaving
you to grow old and gray and wrinkled and arthritic. No, it’s never
happened in human history; but if a man can’t trust his car, fa’ Pete’s sake,
what can he trust?
Rest assured, reader, it wasn’t that bad.
For one thing, it all happened on Margrave, a world in the first stages of
colonization. I was twenty minutes out of Triangle Lake on my way to the
Wiggly River logging region, flying at an altitude of a thousand feet. For
several days the logging machines had been cutting trees which were too
young, and a mechanic was needed to alter a few settings in the boss brain.
I was cruising along on autopilot, playing double-deck complex solitaire in
the back seat, with the camera going so that just in case I won one I’d have
a film to back up my bragging.
Then a roc swooped down on me, wrapped ten huge talons around my
car, and swallowed it.
Right away you’ll see that it couldn’t happen anywhere but Margrave.
In the first place, I wouldn’t have been using a car for a two-hour trip on
any civilized world. I’d have taken a transfer booth. In the second place,
where else can you find rocs?
Anyway, this big damn bird caught me and ate me, and everything
went dark. The car flew blithely on, ignoring the roc, but the ride became
turbulent as the roc tried to fly away and couldn’t. I heard grinding sounds
from outside. I tried my radio and got nothing. Either it couldn’t reach
through all that meat around me, or the trip through the bird’s gullet had
brushed away my antennas.
There didn’t seem to be anything else I could do. I turned on the cabin
lights and went on with the game. The grinding noises continued, and now
I could see what was causing them. At some time the roc had swallowed
several boulders, for the same reason a chicken swallows grit: to help
digestion. The rocks were rubbing against the car under peristalsis, trying
to break it down into smaller pieces for the murky digestive juices to work
on.
I wondered how smart the boss brain was. When it saw a roc glide in for
a landing at the logging camp, and when it realized that the bird was
incapable of leaving no matter how it shrieked and flapped its wings, would
the master computer draw the correct conclusion? Would it realize the bird
had swallowed a car? I was afraid not. If the boss brain were that smart it
would have been in business for itself.
I never found out. All of a sudden my seat cocoon wrapped itself
around me like an overprotective mother, and there was a meaty three-
hundred-mile-per-hour Smack!
The cocoon unwrapped itself. My cabin lights still showed red-lit fluid
around me, but it was getting redder. The boulders had stopped rolling
around. My cards were all over the cabin, like a snowstorm.
Obviously I’d forgotten one teensy little mountain when I programmed
the autopilot. The roc had been blocking the radar and sonar, with
predictable results. A little experimenting showed that my drive had failed
under the impact, my, radio still wouldn’t work, and my emergency flares
refused to try to fire through a roc’s belly.
There was no way to get out, not without opening my door to a flood of
digestive juices. I could have done that if I’d had a vac suit, but how was I
to know I’d need one on a two-hour car trip?
There was only one thing to do.
I collected my cards, shuffled, and started a new game.
It was half a year before the roc’s corpus decomposed enough to let me
out. In that time I won five games of double complex solitaire. I’ve only got
films for four; the camera ran out. I’m happy to say that the emergency
food-maker worked beautifully if a little monotonously, the airmaker never
failed, and the clock TV kept perfect time as a clock. As a TV it showed
only technicolor ripples of static. The washroom went out along about
August, but I got it fixed without much trouble. At 2:00 P.M. on October 24
I forced the door open, hacked my way through the mummified skin and
flesh between a couple of roc ribs, and took a deep breath of real air. It
smelled of roc. I’d left the cabin door open, and I could hear the airmaker
whine crazily as it tried to absorb the smell.
I fired off a few flares, and fifteen minutes later a car dropped to take
me home. They say I was the hairiest human being they’d ever seen. I’ve
since asked Mr. Dickson, the president of General Transportation, why he
didn’t include a depil tube in the emergency stores.
“A castaway is supposed to look like a castaway,” he tells me. “If you’re
wearing a year’s growth of hair, your rescuer will know immediately that
you’ve been lost for some time and will take the appropriate steps.”
General Transportation has paid me a more than adequate sum in a
compensation for the fact that my car was unable to handle a roc. (I’ve
heard that they’re changing the guarantees for next year’s model.) They’ve
promised me an equal sum for writing this article. It seems there are
strange and possibly damaging rumors going around concerning my
delayed arrival at Wiggly River.
Rest assured, reader. I not only lived through the accident without
harm, but came out of it with a substantial profit. Your car is perfectly safe,
provided it was built later than 3100 A.D.
OceanofPDF.com
AFTERTHOUGHTS
Near thirty years ago I was just getting into the swing of constructive
daydreaming: letting my imagination flow until I had something, then
guiding it.
A violent picture ran through my mind, with no story around it at first. I
saw men building a campfire out of what they did not know to be stage tree
logs…
The stage tree came from World of Ptavvs. I had developed an elaborate
background for the race that ruled the galaxy over a billion years ago. The
stage tree was the cheapest part of their spacecraft launch industry, an
organically grown solid fuel rocket: tree on the outside, chemicals in the
core around a star-shaped hollow.
It bothered me, losing all those fascinating life-forms…
…The fire catches slowly, then burns briskly. Suddenly the logs are
going off like so much dynamite!
Well, why shouldn’t some of those life-forms have survived in evolved
form?
A Relic of the Empire was set in Beowulf Shaeffer’s time, but it linked
Lucas Garner’s era to the cosmos of the Man-Kzin Wars and after. From
that point on I was elaborating a future history. The kzinti were already
involved via “The Warriors.” I set A Gift from Earth in an intermediate era.
In Ringworld even the sunflowers of Slaver times were found to have
survived. Early tales of planetary exploration became part of the fabric.
It was fun fitting pieces together.
In 1968 or so Norman Spinrad persuaded me that restricting my stories
to Known Space was stunting my growth as a writer. So I gave it up. Well, I
did! A few days later I started writing Ringworld.
Writing Ringworld made me realize how tangled and complex my
basic assumptions had become. There were too many unlikely miracles left
over from individual stories: stasis fields, teleportation booths, an
invulnerable spacecraft hull, Teela Brown, made lucky by generations of a
puppeteer breeding program. Every story set later in time must be
examined for reasons why a transfer booth or stasis field or General
Products hull, or sheer luck, will not solve the problem.
The Ringworld was settled, as was Earth, by Pak breeders and had been
built by Pak protectors. But the story was too complex already; I couldn’t
open that topic, too! In Ringworld I let Louis Wu deduce the wrong
answer.
Protectors didn’t surface on the Ringworld until The Ringworld
Engineers.
It took me twenty-five years to really find the handle on the Teela
Brown gene. It’s there, in The Ringworld Throne.
I like to leave the playground open when I leave. It delights me when
readers go further than the story and begin to rebuild the playground
equipment. I pass on a few interesting suggestions from readers:
Mathematically, the Ringworld can be treated very simply, as a
suspension bridge with no endpoints. The Ringworld floor (now called
scrith) needs a tensile strength equivalent to the force that holds an atomic
nucleus together. MIT students noticed the Ringworld’s instability right
away, and a high school class in Florida noticed that most of the topsoil
would end up in the sea bottoms in a few thousand years. For them I
designed the Ringworld’s attitude jets and flup circulation system.
A metal base with a stasis field around it can be used as the floor of a
settlement on an antimatter planet.
Hank Stine suggested Matt Keller’s interestingly limited psychic power,
later known as “Plateau eyes.”
Dan Alderson published two thousand words on the Grog problem as
raised in Handicap. His conclusion: the Grogs can be controlled, if need
be, by Bandersnatchi (as first seen in World of Ptavvs.) The dinosaur-sized
sapient creatures are demonstrably immune to hypnotic telepathy.
However, they must be spacelifted to Jinx.
“There Is a Tide” was suggested in a conversation with Tom Digby and
Dan Alderson. Dan also gave me details for the meteor defense used in The
Ringworld Engineers. I miss him a lot.
Many readers have done mathematical treatments of the problem
raised in the short story “Neutron Star.” Maximum stress: a million gees at
perihelion, at Shaeffer’s head and feet, experienced for a very short time.
But Shaeffer’s ship leaves the neutron star spinning outrageously and keeps
the spin! Shaeffer won’t survive unless the ship’s been programmed to shed
that spin. See Crashlander to see why General Products would have done
that.
For quick access to details of Known Space, see Chaosium’s old
Ringworld game or The Guide to Larry Niven’s Ringworld by Kevin Stein
and The Man-Kzin Wars, eight volumes and counting, all from Baen
Books. But these books include ideas that were not mine. For my ideas
alone, use the Timeline and Bibliography in this book, absolutely current
as of October 1995.
In an early version of Tales of Known Space I told you that the series
was complete and invited you to dream up your own stories.
I should have phrased that better! The invitation is to daydream, to
criticize or elaborate, to use the playground equipment to your heart’s
content…not to violate my copyrights, for Kdapt’s sake! The Man-Kzin Wars
are the only legitimate source of Known Space stories not written by Larry
Niven, and I’m the editor; the writers enter by invitation only.
As for Known Space, it doesn’t seem to be through with me.
OceanofPDF.com
BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Worlds of
Larry Niven
Series
OceanofPDF.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
OceanofPDF.com
About the Author
LARRY NIVEN was born in 1938 in Los Angeles, California. In 1956, he
entered the California Institute of Technology, only to flunk out a year and
a half later after discovering a bookstore jammed with used science-fiction
magazines. He graduated with a B.A. in mathematics (minor in
psychology) from Washburn University, Kansas, in 1962, and completed
one year of graduate work before he dropped out to write. His first
published story, “The Coldest Place,” appeared in the December 1964
issue of Worlds of If. He won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1966
for “Neutron Star,” and in 1974 for “The Hole Man.” The 1975 Hugo
Award for Best Novelette was given to The Borderland of Sol. His novel
Ringworld won the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1970 Nebula
Award for Best Novel, and the 1972 Ditmar, an Australian award for Best
International Science Fiction.
OceanofPDF.com
THE COLOR OF SUNFIRE
OceanofPDF.com
OceanofPDF.com