He sat before an eight-foot circle of clear twing, looking endlessly out on a view that was less than exciting.
Even a decade ago those stars had been a sprinkling of dull red dots in his wake. When he cleared the forward view, they would shine a hellish blue, bright enough to read by. To the side, the biggest had been visibly flattened. But now there were only stars, white points sparsely scattered across a sky that was mostly black. This was a lonely sky. Dust clouds hid the blazing glory of home.
The light in the center of the view was not a star. It was big as a sun, dark at the center, and bright enough to have burned holes in a man’s retinae. It was the light of a Bussard ramjet, burning a bare eight miles away. Every few years Phssthpok spent some time watching the drive, just to be sure it was burning evenly. A long time ago he had caught a slow, periodic wavering in time to prevent his ship from becoming a tiny nova. But the blue-white light had not changed at all in the weeks he’d been watching it.
For most of a long, slow lifetime the heavens had been crawling past Phssthpok’s porthole. Yet he remembered little of that voyage. The time of waiting had been too devoid of events to interest his memory. It is the way with the protector stage of the Pak species, that his leisure memories are of the past, when he was a child and, later, a breeder, when the world was new and bright and free of responsibilities. Only danger to himself or his children can rouse a protector from his normal dreamy lassitude to a fighting fury unsurpassed among sentient beings.
Phssthpok sat dreaming in his disaster couch.
The cabin’s attitude controls were beneath his left hand. When he was hungry, which happened once in ten hours, his knobby hand, like two fistfuls of black walnuts strung together, would reach into a slot on his right and emerge with a twisted, fleshy yellow root the size of a sweet potato. Terrestrial weeks had passed since Phssthpok last left his disaster couch. In that time he had moved nothing but his hands and his jaws. His eyes had not moved at all.
Before that there had been a period of furious exercise. It is a protector’s duty to stay fit.
Even a protector with nobody to protect.
The drive was steady, or enough so to satisfy Phsstbpok. The protector’s knotted fingers moved, and the heavens spun about him. He watched the other bright light float into the porthole. When it was centered he stopped the rotation.
Already brighter than any star around it, his destination was still too dim to be more than a star. But it was brighter than Phssthpok had expected, and he knew that he had let time slip away from him. Too much dreaming! And no wonder. He’d spent most of twelve hundred years in that couch, staying immobile to conserve his food supply. It would have been thirty times that but for relativistic effects.
Despite what looked to be the most crippling case of arthritis in medical history, despite weeks spent like a paralytic, the knobby protector was instantly in motion. The drive flame went mushy; expanded; began to cool. Shutting down a Bussard ramjet is almost as tricky as starting one. At ramjet speeds the interstellar hydrogen comes on as gamma rays. It would have to be guided away by magnetic fields, even if it were not being burned as fuel.
He had reached the most likely region of space. Ahead was the most likely star. Phssthpok’s moment of success was hard upon him. The ones he had come to help (if they existed at all; if they hadn’t died out in all this time; if they circled this star and not one less likely) wouldn’t be expecting him. Their minds were nearly animal. They might or might not use fire, but they certainly wouldn’t have telescopes. Yet they were waiting for him... in a sense. If they were here at all, they had been waiting for two and a half million years.
He would not disappoint them.
He must not.
A protector without descendants is a being without purpose. Such an anomaly must find a purpose, and quickly, or die. Most die. In their minds or their glands a reflex twitches, and they cease to feel hunger. Sometimes such a one finds that he can adapt the entire Pak species as his progeny; but then he must find a way to serve that species. Phssthpok was one of the lucky few.
It would be terrible if he failed.
Nick Sohl was coming home.
The quiet of space was around him, now that his ears had learned to forget the hum of the ship’s drive. Two weeks’ worth of tightly coiled stubble covered his jaw and the shaved scalp on either side of his cottony Belter crest. If be concentrated he could smell himself. He had gone mining in Saturn’s rings, with a singleship around him and a shovel in his hand (for the magnets used to pull monopoles from asteroidal iron did look remarkably like shovels). He would have stayed longer; but he liked to think that Belt civilization could survive without him for just about three weeks.
A century ago monopoles had been mere theory, and conflicting theory at that. Magnetic theory said that a north magnetic pole could not exist apart from a south magnetic pole, and vice-versa. Quantum theory implied that they might exist independently.
The first permanent settlements had been blooming among the biggest Belt asteroids when an exploring team found monopoles scattered through the nickel-iron core of an asteroid. Today they were not theory, but a thriving Belt industry. A magnetic field generated by monopoles acts in an inverse linear relationship rather than an inverse square. In practical terms, a monopole-based motor or instrument will reach much further. Monopoles were valuable where weight was a factor, and in the Belt weight was always a factor. But monopole mining was still a one man operation.
Nick’s luck had been poor. Saturn’s rings were not a good region for monopoles anyway; too much ice, too little metal. The electromagnetic field around his cargo box probably held no more than two full shovelfuls of north magnetic poles. Not much of a catch for a couple of weeks backbreaking labor... but still worth good money at Ceres.
He’d have been satisfied to find nothing. Mining was an excuse the First Speaker for the Belt Political Section used to escape from his cramped office buried deep in the rock of Ceres, from the constant UN-Belt squabbles, from wife and children, friends and acquaintances, enemies and strangers. And next year, after frantic weeks spent catching up with current events, after the next ten months spent manipulating the politics of the solar system, he would be back.
Nick was building up speed for the trip to Ceres, with Saturn a fantastic bauble behind him, when he saw his mining magnet swing slowly away from the cargo box. Somewhere to his left was a new and powerful source of monopoles.
A grin split his face like lightning across a black sky. Better late than never! Too bad he hadn’t found it on the way out; but he could sell it once he’d located it... which would take doing. The needle wavered between two attractions, one of which was his cargo box.
He invested twenty minutes focusing a com laser on Ceres. “This is Nick Sohl, repeating, Nicholas Brewster Sohl. I wish to register a claim for a monopole source in the general direction of—“ He tried to guess how much his cargo was affecting the needle. “—of Sagittarius. I want to offer this source for sale to the Belt government. Details follow, half an hour.”
He then turned off his fusion motor, climbed laboriously into suit and backpac, and left the ship carrying a telescope and his mining magnet.
The stars are far from eternal, but for man they might as well be. Nick floated among the eternal stars, motionless though falling toward the tiny sun at tens of thousands of miles per hour. This was why he went mining. The universe blazed like diamonds on black velvet, an unforgettable backdrop for golden Saturn. The Milky Way was a jeweled bracelet for all the universe. Nick loved the Belt from the carved-out rocks to the surface domes to the spinning inside-out bubble worlds; but most of all he loved space itself.
A mile from the ship he used ‘scope and mining magnet to fix the location of the new source. He moved back to the ship to call in. A few hours from now he could take another fix and pin the source by triangulation.
When he reached the ship the communicator was alight. The gaunt fair face of Martin Shaeffer, Third Speaker, was talking to an empty acceleration couch.
“—Must call in at once, Nick. Don’t wait to take your second fix. This is urgent Belt business. Repeating. Martin Shaeffer calling Nick Sohl aboard singleship Hummingbird—“
Nick refocused his laser. “Lit, I’m truly honored. A simple clerk would have sufficed to record my poor find. Repeating.” He set the message to repeat, then started putting away tools. Ceres was light-minutes distant.
He did not try to guess what emergency might need his personal attention. But he was worried.
Presently the answer came. Lit Shaeffer’s expression was strange, but his tone was bantering. “Nick, you’re too modest about your poor find. A pity we’re going to have to disallow it. One hundred and four miners have already called in to report your monopole source.”
Nick gaped. One hundred and four? But he was in the outer system... and most miners preferred to work their own mines anyway. How many had not called in?
“They’re all across the system,” said Lit. “It’s a hell of a big source. As a matter of fact, we’ve already located it by paralax. One source, forty AU out from the sun, which makes it somewhat further away than Pluto, and eighteen degrees off the plane of the solar system. Mitchikov says that there must be as big a mass of south magnetic monopoles in the source as we’ve mined in the past century.”
Outsider! thought Nick. And: Pity they’ll disallow my claim.
“Mitchikov says that big a source could power a really big Bussard ramjet—a manned ramrobot.” Nick nodded at that. Ramrobots were robot probes to the nearby stars, and were one of the few sources of real UN-Belt cooperation. “We’ve been following the source for the past half-hour. It’s moving into the solar system at just over four thousand miles per second, freely falling. That’s well above even interstellar speeds. We’re all convinced it’s an Outsider.
“Any comments?
“Repeating—“
Nick switched it off and sat for a moment, letting himself get used to the idea. An Outsider!
Outsider was Belter slang for alien; but the word meant more than that. The Outsider would be the first sentient alien ever to contact the human race. It (singular) would contact the Belt instead of Earth, not only because the Belt held title to most of the solar system but because those humans who had colonized space were clearly more intelligent. There were many hidden assumptions in the word, and not every Belter believed them all.
And the emergency had caught Nick Sohl on vacation. Censored dammit! He’d have to work by message laser. “Nick Sohl calling Martin Shaeffer, Ceres Base. Yes, I’ve got comments. One, it sounds like your assumption is valid. Two, stop blasting the news all over the system. Some flatlander ship might pick up the fringes of a message beam. We’ll have to bring them in on it sooner or later, but not just yet. Three, I’ll be home in five days. Concentrate on getting more information. We won’t have to make any crucial decisions for awhile.” Not until the Outsider entered the solar system, or tried sending messages of its own. “Four—“ Find out if the son of a bitch is decelerating! Find out where he’ll stop! But he couldn’t say any of that. Too specific for a message laser. Shaeffer would know what to do. “There is no four. Sohl out.”
The solar system is big and, in the outer reaches, thin. In the main Belt, from slightly inside Mars’s orbit to slightly outside Jupiter’s, a determined man can examine a hundred rocks in a month. Further out, he’s likely to spend a couple of weeks coming and going, just to look at something he hopes nobody else has noticed.
The main Belt is not mined out, though most of the big rocks are now private property. Most miners prefer to work the Belt. In the Belt they know they can reach civilization and civilization’s byproducts: stored air and water, hydrogen fuel, women and other people, a new air regenerator, autodocs and therapeutic psychomimetic drugs.
Brennan didn’t need drugs or company to keep him sane. He preferred the outer reaches. He was in Uranus’s trailing Trojan point, following sixty degrees behind the ice giant in its orbit. Trojan points, being points of stable equilibrium, are dust collectors and collectors of larger objects. There was a good deal of dust here, for deep space, and a handful of rocks worth exploring.
Had he found nothing at all, Brennan would have moved on to the moons, then to the leading Trojan point. Then home for a short rest and a visit with Charlotte; and, because his funds would be low by then, a paid tour of duty on Mercury, which he would hate.
Had he found pitchblende he would have been in the point for months.
None of the rocks held enough radioactives to interest him. But something nearby showed the metallic gleam of an artifact. Brennan moved in on it, expecting to find some Belt miner’s throwaway fuel tank, but looking anyway. Jack Brennan was a confirmed optimist.
The artifact was the shell of a solid fuel rocket motor. Part of the Mariner XX, from the lettering.
The Mariner XX, the ancient Pluto fly-by. Ages ago the ancient empty shell must have drifted back toward the distant sun, drifted into the thin Trojan-point dust and coasted to a stop. The hull was pitted with dust holes and was still rotating with the stabilizing impulse imparted three generations back.
As a collectoes item the thing was nearly beyond price. Brennan took phototapes of it in situ before he moved in to attach himself to the flat nose and used his jet backpac to stop the rotation. He strapped it to the fusion tube of his ship, below the lifesystem cabin. The gyros could compensate for the imbalance.
In another sense the bulk presented a problem.
He stood next to it on the slender metal shell of the fusion tube. The antique motor was half as big as his mining singleship, but very light, little more than a metal skin for its original shaped-core charge. If Brennan had found pitchblende the singleship would have been hung with cargo nets under the fuel ring, carrying its own weight in radioactive ore. He would have returned to the Belt at half a gee. But with the Mariner relic as his cargo he could accelerate at the one gee which was standard for empty singleships.
It might just give him the edge he’d need.
If he sold the tank through the Belt, the Belt would take thirty percent in income tax and agent’s fees. But if he sold it on the Moon, Earth’s Museum of Spaceflight would charge no tax at all.
Brennan was in a good position for smuggling. There were no goldskins out here. His velocity over most of his course would be tremendous. They couldn’t begin to catch him until he approached the Moon. He wasn’t hauling monopoles or radioactives; the magnetic and radiation detectors would look right through him. He could swing in over the plane of the system, avoiding rocks and other ships.
But if they did get him they’d take one hundred percent of his find. Everything.
Brennan smiled to himself. He’d risk it.
Phsstbpok’s mouth closed once, twice, three times. A yellow tree-of-life root separated into four chunks, raggedly, because the edges of Phssthpok’s beak were not sharp. They were blunt and uneven, like the top of a molar. Phssthpok gulped four times.
He had hardly noticed the action. It was as if his hand, mouth and belly were on automatic, while Phssthpok watched the scope screen.
Under 10^4 magnification the screen showed three tiny violet points.
Looking around the edge of the scope screen Phsstbpok could see only the bright yellow star he’d called GO Target #1. He’d been searching for planets. He’d found one, a beauty, the right size and approximate temperature, with a transparent water-bearing atmosphere and an oversized moon. But he’d also found myriads of violet points so small that at first hed thought they were mere flashes in his retinae.
They were real, and they moved. Some moved no faster than planetary objects; others, hundreds of times faster than escape velocity for the system. They glowed intensely hot, the color of a neutron star in its fourth week of life, when its temperature is still in the millions of degrees.
Obviously they were spacecraft. At these speeds, natural objects would have been lost to interstellar space within months. Probably they used fusion drives. If so, and judging from their color, they burned hotter and more efficiently than Phssthpok’s own.
They seemed to spend most of their time in space. At first he’d hoped they were some form of space-born life, perhaps related to the starseeds of the galactic core. But as he drew nearer the yellow sun he’d bad to abandon the idea. All the sparks had destinations, from the myriad small orbiting rocks to the moons and planets of the inner system. One frequent target was the world with the water atmosphere, the one hed classified as Pak-habitable. No lifeform native to space could have taken its gravity or its atmosphere.
That planet, GO Target #1-3, was the biggest such target, though the spacecraft touched many smaller bodies. Interesting. If the pilots of those fusion craft had developed on GO Target #1-3, they would naturally prefer lighter gravities to heavier.
But the ones he sought hadn’t the minds to build such craft. Had something alien usurped their places?
Then he and his thousands had given their long lives to extract only a sterile vengeance.
Phssthpok felt fury building in him. He held it back. It needn’t be the answer. GO Target #1 was not the only likely target. Probability was only twenty-eigbt percent. He could hope that the ones he had come to help circled another star.
But he’d have to check.
There is a minimum speed at which a Bussard ramjet will operate, and Phssthpok was not far above it. He had planned to coast through the system until he found something definite. Now he would have to use his reserve fuel. He had already found a blue-white spark moving at high velocity toward the inner system. He should be able to match its course.
Nick landed Hummingbird, hurriedly issued orders for unloading and sale of his cargo, and went underground. His office was some two miles beneath the rocky bubble-dotted surface of Ceres, buried deep in the nickel-iron substrate.
He hung his suit and helmet in the vestibule of his office. There was a painting on the front of the suit, and he patted it affectionately before he went in. He always did that.
Most Belters decorated their suits. Why not? The interior of his suit was the only place many a Belter could call home, and the one possession he had to keep in perfect condition. But even in the Belt, Nick Sohl’s suit was unique.
On an orange background was the painting of a girl. She was short; her head barely reached Nick’s neck ring. Her skin was a softly glowing green. Only her lovely back showed across the front of the suit. Her hair was streaming bonfire flames, flickering orange with touches of yellow and white, darkening into red-black smoke as it swept across the girl’s left shoulder. She was nude. Her arms were wrapped around the suit’s torso, her hands touching the air pac on its back; her legs embraced the suit’s thighs, so that her heels touched the backs of the flexible metal knee joints. It was a very beautiful painting, so beautiful that it almost wasn’t vulgar. A pity the suit’s sanitary outlet wasn’t somewhere else.
Lit lounged in one of the guest chairs in Nick’s office, his long legs sprawling far across the rug. He was attenuated rather than big. Too much of his childhood had been spent in free fall. Now he could not fit into a standard pressure suit or spacecraft cabin; and wherever he sat, he looked like he was trying to take over.
Nick dropped into his own chair and closed his eyes for a moment, getting used to the feel of being First Speaker again. With his eyes still closed he said, “Okay, Lit. What’s been happening?”
“Got it all here.” Rustle of paper. “Yah. The monopole source is coming in over the plane of the solar system, aimed approximately at the sun. As of an hour ago, it was two point two billion miles out. For a week after we spotted it it showed a steady acceleration of point nine two gee, largely lateral and braking thrust to warp its course around the sun. Now it’s mainly deceleration, and the thrust has dropped to point one four gee. That aims it through Earth’s orbit.”
“Where will Earth be then?”
“We checked that. If he goes back to point nine two gee at-- this point, he’ll be at rest eight days from now.
“And that’s where Earth will be.” Lit looked grim. “All of this is more than somewhat approximate. All we really know is that he’s aimed at the inner system.”
“But Earth is the obvious target. Hardly fair. The Outsider’s supposed to contact us, not them. What have you done about anything?”
“Mostly observations. We’ve got photos of what looks like a drive flame. A fusion flame, somewhat cooler than ours.”
“Less efficent, then... but if he’s using a Bussard ramjet, he’s getting his fuel free. I suppose he’s below ramjet speeds now, though.”
“Right.”
“He must be huge. Could be a warship, Lit. Using that big a monopole source.”
“Not necessarily. You know how a ramrobot works? A magnetic field picks up interstellar hydrogen plasma, guides it away from the cargo pod and constricts it so that the hydrogen undergoes fusion. The difference is that nobody can ride them because too much hydrogen gets through as radiation. In a manned ship you’d need enormously greater control of the plasma fields.”
“That much more?”
“Mitchikov says yes, if he came from far enough away. The further he came, the faster he must have, been going at peak velocity.”
“Um.”
“You’re getting paranoid, Nick. Why would any species send us an interstellar warship?”
“Why would anyone send us a ship at all? I mean, if you’re going to be humble about it... Can we contact that ship before it reaches Earth?”
“Oddly enough, I thought of that. Mitchikov has several courses plotted. Our best bet is to start a fleet from the trailing Jupiter Trojans sometime within the next six days.”
“Not a fleet. We want the Outsider to see us as harmless. Do we have any big ships in the Trojans?”
“The Blue Ox. She was about to leave for Juno, but I commandeered her and had her cargo tank cleared.”
“Good. Nice going.” The Blue Ox was a mammoth fluid cargo carrier, as big as one of the Titan Hotel’s luxury liners, though not as pretty. “We’ll want a computer, a good one, not just a ship’s autopilot. Also a tech to run it, and some spare senses for the machine. I want to use it as a translator, and the Outsider might talk by eye-blinks or radio or modulated current. Can we maybe fit a singleship into the Ox’s cargo hold?”
“What for?”
“Just in case. Well give the Ox a lifeboat. If the Outsider plays rough someone might get away.”
Lit did not say paranoia, but he was visibly restraining himself.
“He’s big,” Nick said patiently. “His technology is powerful enough to get him across interstellar space. He could be friendly as a puppy, and someone could still say something wrong.” He picked up the phone and said, “Get me Achilles, main switchboard.”
It would take awhile for the operator to focus a laser on Achilles. Nick hung up to wait. And the phone went off jarringly in his hand.
“Yes?”
“This is Traffic Control,” said the phone. “Cutter. Your office wanted anything on the big monopole source.”
Nick opened the volume control so Shaeffer could hear. “Right. What?”
“It’s matching course with a Belt ship. The pilot doesn’t seem to be evading contact.”
Sohl’s lips tightened. “What kind of ship?”
“We can’t tell from this distance. Probably a mining singleship. They’ll be matching orbit in thirty-seven hours twenty minutes, if neither of them change their minds.”
“Keep me posted. Set nearby telescopes on watch. I don’t want to miss anything.” Nick rang off. “You heard?”
“Yah. Finagle’s First Law.”
“Can we stop that Belter?”
“I doubt it.”
It could have been anyone. It turned out to be Jack Brennan.
He was several hours from turnover en route to Earth’s Moon. The Mariner XX’s discarded booster rode his hull like an undernourished Siamese twin. Its whistle was still fixed in the flat nose, the supersonic whistle whose pitch had controlled the burning of the solid fuel core. Brennan had crawled inside to look, knowing that any damage might lower the relic’s value.
For a used one-shot, the relic was in fine shape. The nozzle had burned a little unevenly, but not seriously so; naturally not, given that the probe had reached its destination. The Museum of Spaceflight would pay plenty for it.
In the Belt, smuggling is illegal but not immoral. Smuggling was no more immoral to Brennan than forgetting to pay a parking meter would have been to a flatlander. If you got caught you paid the fine and that was that.
Brennan was an optimist. He didn’t expect to be caught.
He had been accelerating for four days at just short of one gee. Uranus’s orbit was far behind him; the inner system far ahead. He was going at a hell of a clip. There were no observed relativity effects, he wasn’t going that fast, but his watch would need resetting when he arrived.
Have a look at Brennan. He masses one hundred and seventy-eight pounds per one gee, stands six feet two inches tall. Like any Belter, he looks much like an undermuscled basketball player. Since he has been sitting in that control couch for most of four days, he is beginning to look and feel crumpled and weary. But his brown eyes are clear and steady, twenty-twenty, having been corrected by microsurgery when he was eighteen. His straight dark hair is an inch-wide strip running from forehead to nape along a brown polished scalp. He is white; which is to say that his Belter tan is no darker than Cordovan leather; as usual it covers only his hands and his face and scalp above the neck. Elsewhere he is the color of a vanilla milkshake.
He is forty-five years old. He looks thirty. Gravity has been kind to the muscles of his face, and growth salve to the potential bald spot at the crown of his head. But the developing fine lines around his eyes stand out clearly now, since he has been wearing a puzzled frown for the past twenty hours. He has become aware that something is following him.
At first he’d thought it was a goldskin, a Ceres cop. But what would a goldskin be doing this far from the sun?
Even at second glance it could not have been a goldskin. Its drive flame was too fuzzy, too big, not bright enough. Third glance included a few instrument readings. Brennan was accelerating, but the stranger was decelerating, and still had enormous velocity. Either it had come from beyond Pluto’s orbit, or its drive must generate tens of gees. Which gave the same answer.
The strange light was an Outsider.
How long had the Belt been waiting for him? Let any man spend some time between the stars, even a flatland moonship pilot, and someday he would realize just how deep the universe really was. Billions of light years deep, with room for anything at all. Beyond doubt the Outsider was out there somewhere; the first alien species to contact Man was going about its business beyond the reach of Belt telescopes.
Now the Outsider was here, matching courses with Jack Brennan.
And Brennan wasn’t even surprised. Wary, yes. Even frightened. But not surprised, not even that the Outsider had chosen him. That was an accident of fate. They had both been beading into the inner system from roughly the same direction.
Call the Belt? The Belt must know by now. The Belt telescope net tracked every ship in the system; the odds were that it would find any wrong-colored dot moving at the wrong speed. Brennan bad expected them to find his own ship, had gambled that they wouldn’t find it soon enough. Certainly they’d found the Outsider. Certainly they were watching it; and by virtue of that fact they must be watching Brennan too. In any case Brennan couldn’t laser Ceres. A flatland ship might pick up the beam. Brennan didn’t know Belt policy on Earth-Outsider contacts.
The Belt must act without him.
Which left Brennan with two decisions of his own.
One was easy. He didn’t have a snowman’s chance of smuggling anything. He would have to alter course to reach one of the major asteroids, and call the Belt the first chance he had to advise them of his course and cargo.
But what of the Outsider?
Evasion tactics? Easy enough. Axiomatically, it is impossible to stop a hostile ship in space. A cop can match course with a smuggler, but he cannot make an arrest unless the smuggler cooperates—or runs out of fuel. He can blow the ship out of space, or even ram with a good autopilot; but how can he connect airlocks with a ship that keeps firing its drive in random bursts? Brennan could head anywhere, and all the Outsider could do was follow or destroy him.
Running would be sensible. Brennan did have a family to potect. Charlotte could take care of herself. She was an adult Belter, as competent to run her own life as Brennan himself, though she had never found enough ambition to earn her pilot’s license. And Brennan had paid the customary fees in trust for Estelle and Jennifer. His daughters would be raised and educated.
But he could do more for them. Or he could become a father again... probably with Charlotte. There was money strapped to his hull. Money was power. Like electrical or political power, its uses could take many forms.
Contact the alien and he might never see Charlotte again. There were risks in being the first to meet an alien species.
And obvious honors.
Could history ever forget the man who met the Outsider?
Just for a moment he felt trapped. As if fate were playing games with his lifeline... but he couldn’t turn this down. Let the Outsider come to him. Brennan held his course.
The Belt is a web of telescopes. Hundreds of thousands of them.
It has to be that way. Every ship carries a telescope. Every asteroid must be watched constantly, because asteroids can be perturbed from their orbits, and because a map of the solar system has to be up-to-date by seconds. The light of every fusion drive has to be watched. In crowded sectors ships can run through each other’s exhausts if someone doesn’t warn them away; and the exhaust from a fusion motor is deadly.
Nick Sohl kept glancing up at the screen, down at the stack of dossiers on his desk, up at the screen... The screen showed two blobs of violet-white light, one bigger than the other, and vaguer. Already they could both appear on the same screen, because the asteroid taking the pictures was almost in line with their course.
He had read the dossiers several times. Ten of them; and each might be the unknown Belter who was now approaching the Outsider. There had been a dozen dossiers. In the outer offices men were trying to locate and eliminate these ten as they had already found two, by phone calls and com lasers and dragnets.
Since the ship wasn’t running, Nick had privately eliminated six of the dossiers. Two had never been caught smuggling: a mark of caution, whether he’d never smuggled or never been caught. One he knew; she was a xenophobe. Three were old-timers; you don’t get to be an oldtimer in the Belt by taking foolish chances. In the Belt the Finagle-Murphy Laws are only half a joke.
One of four miners had had the colossal arrogance to appoint himself humanity’s ambassador to the universe. Serve him right if he blows it, thought Nick. Which one?
A million miles short of Jupiter’s orbit, moving well above the plane of the solar system, Phssthpok matched velocities with the native ship and began to close in.
Of the thousands of sentient species in the galaxy, Phssthpok and Phssthpok’s race had studied only their own. When they ran across other species, as in the mining of nearby systems for raw materials, they destroyed them as quickly and safely as possible. Aliens were dangerous, or might be, and Pak were not interested in anything but Pak. A protector’s intelligence was high; but intelligence is a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.
Phsstbpok was working strictly from ignorance. All he could do was guess.
At a guess, then, and assuming that the oval scratch in the native ship’s hull was really a door, the native would be not much taller and not much shorter than Phssthpok. Say, three to seven feet tall, depending on how much elbow room it needed. Of course the oval might not be designed for the native’s longest length, as for the biped Phssthpok. But the ship was small; it wouldn’t hold something too much larger than Phssthpok.
One look at the native would tell him. If it was not Pak, he would need to ask it questions. If it was—
There would still be questions, many of them. But his search would be over. A few ship’s days to reach GO Target #1-3, a short time to learn their language and explain how to use what he’d brought, and he could stop eating.
It showed no awareness of Phssthpok’s ship. A few minutes and he would be alongside, yet the stranger made no move—cancel. The native had turned off its drive. Phssthpok was being invited to match courses.
Phssthpok did. He wasted neither motion nor fuel; he might have spent his whole life practicing for this one maneuver. His lifesystem pod coasted alongside the native ship, and stopped.
His pressure suit was on, but he made no move. Phssthpok dared not risk his own person, not when he was so close to victory. If the native would only step out on the hull...
Brennan watched the ship come alongside.
Three sections, spaced eight miles apart. He saw no cable joining them. At this distance it might be invisibly thin. The biggest, most massive section must be the drive: a cylinder with three small cones jutting at angles from the tail. Big as it was, the cylinder must be too small to hold fuel for an interstellar voyage. Either the Outsider had dropped expendable tanks along the way, or... a manned ramrobot?
Section two was a sphere some sixty feet across. When the ship finally stopped moving, this section was immediately opposite Brennan. A large circular window stared out of the sphere, so that the sphere looked like a great eyeball. It turned to follow Brennan as it moved past. Brennan found it difficult to return that uncanny stare.
He was having second thoughts. Surely the Belt government could have organized a better meeting than this...
The trailing pod—he’d had a good look as it eased past. It was egg shaped, perhaps sixty feet long by forty feet through. The big end, facing away from the drive section, was so uniformly pitted with dust grains that it looked sandblasted. The small end was pointed and smooth, almost shiny. Brennan nodded to himself. A rarnscoop field would have protected the forward end from micro-meteoroids during acceleration. During deceleration its training position would have done the same.
There were no breaks in the egg.
There was motion within the bulging iris of the center section. Brennan strained, trying to see more... but nothing more happened.
It was a peculiar way to build a ship, he thought. The center pod must be the life support system, if only because it had a porthole and the trailing pod did not. And the drive was dangerously radioactive; otherwise why string the ship out like this? But that meant that the lifesystem was positioned to protect the trailing pod from the drive radiation. Whatever was in that trailing pod must be more important than the pilot, in the opinion of the pilot.
Either that, or the pilot and the designer had both been inept or insane.
The Outsider ship was motionless now, its drive going cold, its lifesystem section a few hundred feet away. Brennan waited.
I’m being chauvinistic, he told himself. I can’t judge an alien’s sanity by Belt standards, can I?
His lip curled. Sure I can. That ship is badly designed.
The alien stepped out onto its hull.
Every muscle in Brennan jerked as he saw it. The alien was a biped; it looked human enough from here. But it had stepped through the porthole. It stood on its own hull, motionless, waiting.
It had two arms, one head, two legs. It used a pressure suit. It carried a weapon—or a reaction pistol; there was no way to tell. But Brennan saw no backpac. A reaction pistol takes a deal more skill than a jet backpac. Who would use one in open spare?
What the Finagle was it waiting for?
Of course. For Brennan.
For a wild moment he considered starting the drive now, get out of here before it was too late! Cursing his fear, Brennan moved deliberately to the door. The men who built singleships built as cheaply as possible. His ship had no airlock; there was just the door, and pumps to evacuate the lifesystem. Brennan’s suit was tight. All he had to do was open the door.
He stepped outside on sandal magnets.
The seconds stretched away as Brennan and the Outsider examined each other. It looks human enough, Brennan thought. Biped. Head on top. But if it’s human, and if it’s been in space long enough to build a starship, it can’t be as inept as this ship says it is.
Have to find out what it’s carrying. Maybe it’s right. Maybe its cargo is worth more than its life.
The Outsider jumped.
It fell toward him like a falcon diving. Brennan stood his ground, frightened, but admiring the alien’s skill. The alien didn’t use its reaction pistol. Its jump had been perfect. It would land right next to Brennan.
The Outsider hit the hull on springy limbs, absorbing its momentum like any Belter. It was smaller than Brennan: no more than five feet tall. Brennan saw dimly through its faceplate. He recoiled, a long step backward. The thing was hideously ugly. Chauvinism be damned: the Outsider’s face would stop a computer.
The one backward step didn’t save him.
The Outsider was too close. It reached out, wrapped a pressurized mitten around Brennan’s wrist, and jumped.
Brennan gasped and, too late, tried to jerk away. The Outsider’s grip was like spring steel inside its glove. They were spinning away through space toward the eyeball-shaped life support system, and not a thing Brennan could do about it.
“Nick,” said the intercom.
“Here,” said Nick. He’d left it open.
“The dossier you want is labeled ‘Jack Brennan.’”
“How do you know?”
“We called his woman. He has only one, a Charlotte Wiggs, and two kids. We convinced her it was urgent. She finally told us he was off searching the Uranus Trojan points.”
“Uranus... that sounds right. Cutter, do me a favor.”
“Sure. Official?”
“Yes. See to it that Hummingbird is fueled and provisioned and kept that way until further notice. Fit it with strap-on boosters. Then get a com laser focused on ARM Headquarters, New York, and keep it there. You’ll need three, of course.” For relays as the Earth rotated.
“Okay. No message yet?”
“No, just hold a laser ready in case we need it.”
The situation was so damn fluid. If he needed help from Earth he’d need it quickly and badly. The surest way to convince the flatlanders would be to go himself. No First Speaker had ever touched Earth... and he didn’t expect to now; but The Perversity of the Universe Tends Toward a Maximum.
Nick began to skim Brennan’s dossier. Too bad the man had children.
Phssthpok’s first clear memories dated from the day he woke to the fact that he was a protector. He could conjure blurred memories from before: of pain, fighting, discovering new foods, experiences in sex and affection and hate and tree climbing in the valley of Pitchok; watching curiously, half a dozen times, as various female breeders bore children he could smell were his. But his mind had been vague then.
As a protector he thought sharply and clearly. At first it had been unpleasant. He had had to get used to it. There had been others to help him, teachers and such.
There was a war, and he had graduated into it. Because he had had to develop the habit of asking questions, it had been years before he understood its history:
Three hundred years earlier several hundred major Pak families had allied to refertilize a wide desert area of the Pak world. Erosion and overgrazing had produced that desert, not war, though there were mildly radioactive patches all across it. No place on the Pak world was entirely free from war.
The heartbreakingly difficult task of reforesting had been completed a generation ago. Immediately and predictably the alliance had split into several smaller alliances, each determined to secure the land for its own descendants. By now most of the earlier alliances were gone. A number of families had been exterminated, and the surviving groups changed sides whenever expedient to protect their blood lines. Phssthpok’s blood line now held with South Coast.
Phssthpok enjoyed war. Not because of the fighting. As a breeder he’d had fights, and war was less a matter of fighting than of outwitting the enemy. At its start it had been a fusion bomb war. Many of the families had died during that phase, and part of the reclaimed desert was desert once more. Then South Coast had found a damper field to prevent fissionables from fissioning. Others had swiftly copied it. Since then the war had been artillery, poison gas, bacteria, psychology, infantry, even freelance assassination. It was a war of wits. Could South Coast counteract propaganda designed to split off the Meteor Bay region? If Eastersea Alliance had an antidote to river poison Iota, would it be easier to steal it from them or invent our own? If Circle Mountains should find an innoculation for bacterial strain Zeta-Three, how likely was it that they’d turn a mutated strain against us? Should we stick with South Coast, or could we do better with Eastersea? It was fun.
As Phssthpok learned more the game grew more complex. His own Virus QQ would kill all but eight percent of breeders but would leave their protectors unharmed... unharmed and fighting with doubled fury to salvage a smaller and less vulnerable group of strain-resistant hostages. He agreed to suppress it. Aak(pop) Family had too many breeders for the local food supply; he rejected their offer of alliance but blocked their path toward Eastersea.
Then Eastersea Alliance built a pinch field generator which could set off a fusion reaction without previous fission.
Phssthpok had been a protector for twenty-six years.
The war ended within a week. Eastersea had the recultivated desert, the part that wasn’t bare and sterile from seventy years of war. And there had been a mighty flash over the Valley of Pitchok.
The infants and breeders of Phssthpok’s line had lived in the Valley of Pitchok for unremembered generations. He had seen that awful light on the horizon and known that all his descendants were dead or sterile, that he had no blood line left to protect, that all he could do was to stop eating until he was dead.
He hadn’t felt that way since. Not until now.
But even then, thirteen centuries ago in biological time, he hadn’t felt this awful confusion. What was this pressure-suited thing at the end of his arm? Its faceplate was darkened against sunlight. It looked like a breeder, as far as he could tell from the shape of the suit. But they couldn’t have built spacecraft or pressure suits.
Phssthpok’s sense of mission had held steady for more than twelve centuries. Now it was drowning in pure confusion. Now he could regret that the Pak knew nothing of other intelligent species. The biped form might not be unique to Pak. Why should it be? Phssthpok’s shape was good designing. If he could see this native without his suit... if he could smell it! That would tell the tale.
They landed next to the porthole. The Outsider’s aim was inhumanly accurate. Brennan didn’t try to fight as the Outsider reached through the curved surface, grasped something, and pulled them both inside. The transparent material resisted movement, like invisible taffy.
In quick, jerky movements, the alien stripped off its pressure suit. The suit was flexible fabric, including the transparent bubble. There were drawstrings at the joints. With its suit off, but still maintaining its iron grip on Brennan, the alien turned to look at him.
Brennan wanted to scream.
The thing was all knobs. Its arms were longer than human, with a single elbow joint in something like the right place; but the elbow was a ball seven inches across. The hands were like strings of walnuts. The shoulders and the knees and the hips bulged like cantaloupes. The head was a tilted melon on a nonexistent neck. Brennan could find no forehead, no chin. The alien’s mouth was a flat black beak, hard but not shiny, which faded into wrinkled skin halfway between mouth and eyes. Two slits in the beak were the nose. Two human looking eyes were protected by not at all human looking masses of deeply convoluted skin, and by a projecting shelf of brow. From the beak the head sloped backward as if streamlined. A bony ridge rose from the swelling skull, adding to the impression of streamlining.
It wore nothing more than a vest with big pockets, a human-seeming garment as inappropriate as a snap-brim Fedora on Frankenstein’s monster. The swollen joints on its five-fingered hand felt like a score of ball bearings pressing into Brennan’s arm.
Thus, the Outsider. Not merely an obvious alien. A dolphin was an obvious alien, but a dolphin was not horrible. The Outsider was horrible. It looked like a cross between human and... something else. Man’s monsters have always been that. Grendel. The Minotaur. Mermaids were once considered horrors: all lovely enticing woman above, all scaly monster below. And that fitted too, for the Outsider was apparently sexless, with nothing but folds of armor-like skin between its legs.
The inset eyes, human as an octopus eye, looked deep into Brennan’s own.
Abruptly, before Brennan could make a move to fight back, the Outsider took two handfuls of Brennan’s rubberized suit and pulled them apart. The suit held, stretched, then ripped from crotch to chin. Air puffed. Brennan felt his ears pop.
No point in holding his breath. Several hundred feet of vacuum separated him from his own ship’s breathing air. Brennan sniffed cautiously.
The air was thin, and it carried a strange scent.
“You son of a bitch,” said Brennan. “I could have died.”
The Outsider didnt answer. It stripped off Brennan’s suit like peeling an orange, without unnecessary roughness but without excessive care. Brennan fought. One wrist was still manacled by the alien’s grip, but Brennan braised his free fist against the alien’s face without causing it to do more than blink. Its skin was like leather armor. It finished stripping away the suit and held Brennan out for inspection. Brennan kicked it where its groin ought to be. The alien noticed and looked down, watched as Brennan kicked twice more, then returned to its inspection.
Its gaze moved over Brennan, head to feet, feet to head, insultingly familiar. In regions of the Belt where air and temperature were controlled, the Belters practiced nudity all their lives. Never before had Brennan felt naked. Not nude; naked. Defenseless. Alien fingers reached to probe his scalp along the sides of the Belter crest; massaged the knuckles of his hand, testing the joints beneath the skin. At first Brennan continued to fight. He couldn’t even distract the alien’s attention.
Then he waited, limp with embarrassment, enduring the examination.
Abruptly it was over. The knobby alien jumped across the room, dug briefly into a bin along one wall, came up with a folded rectangle of clear plastic. Brennan thought of escape; but his suit was in ribbons. The alien shook the thing open, ran fingers along one edge. The bag popped open as if he’d used a zipper.
The alien jumped at Brennan, and Brennan jumped away. It bought him a few seconds of relative freedom. Then knobby steel fingers closed on him and pushed him into the sack.
Brennan found that he couldn’t open it from inside. “I’ll suffocate!” he screamed. The alien made no response. It wouldn’t have understood him anyway. It was climbing back into its suit.
Oh, no. Brennan struggled to rip the sack.
The alien tucked him under an arm and moved out through the porthole. Brennan felt the clear plastic puff out around him, thinning the air inside even further. He felt ice-picks in his ears. He stopped struggling instantly. He waited with the fatalism of despair while the alien moved through vacuum, around the eyeball-shaped hull to where an inch-thick tow line stretched away toward the trailing pod.
There are few big cargo ships in the Belt. Most miners prefer to haul their own ore. The ships that haul large cargoes from asteroid to asteroid are not large; rather, they are furnished with a great many attachments. The crew string their payload out on spars and rigging, in nets or on lightweight grids. They spray foam plastic to protect fragile items, spread reflective foil underneath to ward off hot backlighting from the drive flame, and take off on low power.
The Blue Ox was a special case. She carried fluids and fine dusts; refined quicksilver and mined water, grain, seeds, impure tin scooped molten from lakes on dayside Mercury, mixed and dangerous chemicals from Jupiter’s atmosphere. Such loads were not always available for hauling. So the Ox was a huge tank with a small three-man lifesystem and a fusion tube running through her long axis; but since her tank must sometimes become a cargo hold for bulky objects, it had been designed with mooring gear and a big lid.
Einar Nilsson stood at the rim of the hold, looking in. He was seven feet tall, and overweight for a Belter; and that was overweight for anyone, for the fat had gone into his belly and the great round curve of second chin. He was all curves; there were no sharp edges on him anywhere. It had been a long time since he rode a singleship. He did not like the high gravity.
The device on his suit was a Viking ship with snarling dragon prow, floating half-submerged in the bright, milky swirl of a spiral galaxy.
Nilsson’s own small, ancient mining ship bad become the Ox’s lifeboat. The slender length of its fusion tube, flared at the end, stretched almost the length of the hold. There was an Adzhubei 4-4 computer, almost new; there were machines intended to serve as the computer’s senses and speakers, radar and radio and sonics and monochromatic lights and hi-fi equipment. Each item was tethered separately, half a dozen ways, to hooks on the inner wall.
Nilsson nodded, satisfied, his graying blond Belter crest brushing the crown of his helmet. “Go ahead, Nate.”
Nathan La Pan began spraying fluid into the tank. In thirty seconds the tank was filled with foam which was already hardening.
“Close ‘er up.”
Perhaps the foam crunched as the great lid swung down. The sound did not carry. Patroclus Port was in vacuum, open beneath the black sky.
“How much time we got, Nate?”
“Another twenty minutes to catch the optimum course,” said the young voice.
“Okay, get aboard. You too, Tina.”
“Sold.” The voice clicked off. Nathan was young, but he had already learned not to waste words over a phone. Einar had taken him on at the request of his father, an old friend.
The computer programmer was something else again. Einar watched her slender figure arcing toward the Ox’s airlock. Not a bad jump. Perhaps a touch too much muscle?
Tina Jordan was an expatriate flatlander. She was thirty-four years old, old enough to know what she was doing, and she loved ships. Probably she had sense enough to stay out of the way. But she had never flown a singleship. Einar tended to distrust people who did not trust themselves enough to fly alone. Well, there was no help for it; nobody else at Patroclus Base could run an Adzhubei 4-4.
The Ox would make a lateral run to put her in the path of the alien ship, then curve inward toward the sun. Einar looked away into diamond-studded darkness, in a direction almost opposite the sun. The sparse, dim points of the Trailing Trojans did not block his view. He did not expect to see the Outsider, and he didn’t. But it was there, falling to meet the Ox’s J-shaped orbit.
Three blobs in a line, a fourth hanging nearby. Nick stared at the screen, his eyes squinched almost shut so that strain lines showed like webs around his eyelids. Whatever had happened, it had happened now.
Other matters begged for the First Speaker’s attention. Dickerings with Earth on the funding of ramrobots and on apportionment of ramrobot cargoes among the four interstellar colonies. Trade matters regarding Mercurian tin. The extradition problem. He was spending too much time on this... but something kept telling him that it could be the most important event in human history.
Cutter’s voice burst jarringly from a speaker. “Nick? The Blue Ox wants to take off.”
“Fine,” said Nick.
“Okay. But I notice they aren’t armed.”
“They’ve got a fusion drive, don’t they? And oversized attitude jets to aim it. If they need more than that we’ve got a war on our hands.” Nick clicked off.
And sat wondering. Was he right? Even an H-bomb would be less effective as a weapon than the directed exhaust of a fusion drive. And an H-bomb was an obvious weapon, an insult to a peace-loving Outsider. Still...
Nick went back to Brennan’s dossier. It was thin. Belters would not accept a government that kept more than minimal tabs on them.
John Fitzgerald Brennan was very much the average Belter. Forty-five years of age. Two daughters—Estelle and Jennifer—by the same woman, Charlotte Leigh Wiggs, a professional farming machine repairwoman in Confinement. Brennan had the beginnings of a nice retirement fund, though he’d drained it twice for trust funds for his children. He had twice lost loads of radioactive ore to the goldskins. Once would have been typical. Belters laugh at inept smugglers, but a man who has never been caught may be suspected of never having tried. No guts.
Suit design: The Madonna of Port Lligat. Dali. Nick frowned. Miners sometimes lost their grip on reality, out there. But Brennan was alive and fairly well-off on his own earnings, and he’d never had an accident.
Twenty years ago he’d worked with a crew mining molten tin on Mercury. Mercury was rich with valuable nonferrous elements, though the sun’s magnetic field made special ships necessary; a solar storm could pick up a metal ship and drop it miles away. Brennan had been competent, and he’d made good money, but he’d quit after ten months and never worked with a crew again. Apparently he didn’t like working with others.
Why had he let the Outsider catch him?
Hell, Nick would have done the same. The Outsider was here in the system; somebody had to meet him. Runrung would have been an admission that Brennan couldn’t handle such a meeting.
His family wouldn’t have stopped him. They were Belters; they could take care of themselves.
But I wish he’d run, Nick thought. His fingers beat a nervous tattoo on his desk.
Brennan was all alone in a small space.
It had been a hairy, scary ride. The Outsider had jumped into space with a balloonful of Brennan, balanced itself against his mass and used its reaction pistol. They, had coasted for twenty minutes. Brennan had been near suffocation before they reached the trailing pod.
He remembered the alien touching a flat-nosed tool to the hull, then pulling them both through a viscous surface that looked like metal from both sides. The alien had unzipped the balloon, turned and jumped and vanished through the wall while Brennan was still tumbling helplessly in air.
The air tasted like the cabin air, though the peculiar scent was much stronger. Brennan drew it in in great rarefied gasps. The Outsider had left the balloon behind. It floated toward him like a translucent ghost, menacing and inviting, and Brennan began to laugh, a painful sound, almost like sobbing.
He began to look around him.
The light was greener than the sunlight tubes he was used to. The only clear space was the space he floated in, as roomy as the lifesystem of his singleship. On his right were a number of squarish crates whose material was almost wood, certainly a plant of some kind. To his left, a massive rectangular solid with a lid, almost like a big deep freeze. Above and around him, the curved wall.
So he’d been right. This was a cargo hold. But half of the space in this teardrop-shaped hold was still locked off from him.
And all through the air, a peculiar scent, like an unfamiliar perfume. The smell in the lifesystem had been an animal smell, the smell of the Outsider. This was different.
Below him, behind a net of coarse weave, were things that looked like yellow roots. They occupied most of what Brennan could see of the cargo hold. Brennan jumped down at them, wrapped his fingers in the net to bring his eyes closer.
The smell became hugely more intense. He’d never smelled, imagined, dreamed anything like it.
They still looked like pale yellow roots: a cross between a sweet potato and a peeled piece of the root of a small tree. They were squat and wide and fibrous, pointed at one end and knife-flattened at the other. Brennan reached through the net, got a two-finger grip on one, tried to pull it through the net and couldn’t.
He’d had breakfast just before the Outsider pulled alongside. Yet, with no warning grumblings in his belly, suddenly he was ravenously hungry. His lips skinned back from teeth and gums. He stabbed his fingers through the net, grasped for the roots. For minutes he tried to pull one through holes that were just too small. He tore at the net, raging. The net was stronger than human flesh; it would not tear, though fingernails did. He screamed his frustration. The scream brought him to his senses.
Suppose he did get one out? What then?
EAT IT! His mouth ran saliva.
It would kill him. An alien plant from an alien world, a plant that an alien species probably saw as food. He should be thinking of a way out of here!
Yet his fingers were still tearing at the net. Brennan kicked himself away. He was hungry. The fragments of his suit were gone, left behind in the Outsider’s cabin, including the water and food-syrup nipples in his helmet. Was there water in here? Could he trust it? Would the Outsider guess that he had a use for partially burnt hydrogen?
What would he do for food?
He had to get out of here.
The plastic bag. He fielded it from the air and examined it. He found out how to seal and unseal it—from the outside. Wonderful. Wait—yes! He could turn the bag inside out, seal it from the inside. Then what?
He couldn’t move around in that plastic bag. No hands. Even in his own suit it would have been risky, jumping across eight miles of space without a backpac. He couldn’t get through the wall anyway.
He had to distract his stomach somehow.
So. Why were the contents of this hold so valuable?
How could they be worth more than the pilot, who was needed to get them to where they were going?
Might as well see what else is here.
The rectangular solid was a glossy, temperatureless material. Brennan found the handle easily enough, but he couldn’t budge it. Then the smell of the roots made a concerted attack on his hunger, and he yelled and pulled with all the strength of killing rage. The handle jarred open. It was built for Outsider strength.
The box was filled with seeds, large seeds like almonds, frozen in a matrix of frost, bitterly cold. He wrenched one loose with numbing fingers. The air about him was turning the color of cigarette smoke when he closed the lid.
He put the seed in his mouth, warmed it with saliva. It had no taste; it was merely cold, and then not even that. He spit it out.
So. Green light and strange, rich-smelling air. But not too thin, not too strange; and the light was cool and refreshing.
If Brennan liked the Outsider’s lifesystem, the Outsider would like Earth. He had brought a crop to plant, too. Seeds, roots, and... what?
Brennan kicked across the clear space to the stack of crates. Not all the strength of his back and legs would tear a crate loose from the wall. Contact cement? But a lid came up with great reluctance and a creaking noise. Sure enough, it had been glued down; the wood itself had torn away. Brennan wondered what strange plant had produced it.
Inside was a sealed plastic bag. Plastic? It looked and felt like a strong commercial sandwich wrap gone crinkly with age. What was inside felt like fine dust packed nearly solid. It was dark through the plastic.
Brennan floated near the crates, one hand gripping the torn lid. He wondered.
An autopilot, of course. The Outsider was only backup for the autopilot: it didn’t matter what happened to him, he was only a safety device. The autopilot would get this crop to where it was going.
To Earth? But a crop meant other Outsiders, following.
He had to warn Earth.
Right. Good thinking. How?
Brennan laughed at himself. Was ever a man so completely trapped? The Outsider had him. Brennan, a Belter and a free man, had allowed himself to become property. His laughter died into despair.
Despair was a mistake. The smell of the roots had been waiting to pounce.
...It was the pain that brought him out of it. His hands were bleeding from cuts and abrasions. There were sprains and blisters and bruises. His left little finger screamed its agony at him; it stuck out at a strange angle, and it swelled as he watched. Dislocated or broken. But he’d torn a hole in the net, and his right hand gripped a fibrous root.
He threw it as hard as he could and instantly curled in upon himself, hugging his knees as if to surround his pain and smother it. He was angry, he was scared. Why, that damnable smell had turned off his mind as if he were no more than a child’s toy robot!
He floated through the cargo space like a football, hugging his knees and crying. He was hungry and angry and humiliated and scared. The Outsider had seared his mind with his own unimportance. But this was worse.
Why? What did the Outsider want with him?
Something smacked him across the back of the head. In one fluid motion Brennan snatched the missile out of the air and bit into it. The root had returned to him on a ricochet orbit. It was tough and fibrous between his teeth. Its taste was as indescribable and as delicious as its scent.
In a last lucid moment Brennan wondered how long he would take to die. He didn’t much care. He bit again, and swallowed.
Phssthpok tracked a chain of answers with dogged persistence; but behind every answer there were more questions. His native captive smelled wrong: strange, animalistic. He was not of those Phssthpok had come seeking. Where were they, then?
They had not come here. The natives of GO Target #1-3 would have offered little resistance to colonists, judging by this one sample. But protectors would have exterminated them anyway, as a precaution. Some other star, then. Where?
The natives might have astronomical knowledge enough to tell him. With ships like these they might even have reached nearby stars.
In pursuit of answers, Phssthpok poised and leapt toward the native’s vehicle. It was an hour’s jump, but Phssthpok was not hurried. With his superb reflexes he did not even need the reaction pistol.
His captive would keep. Presently Phssthpok would have to learn his language, to question him. Meanwhile he would not hurt anything. He was too terrified, and too puny. Bigger but weaker than a breeder.
The captive ship was small. Phssthpok found little more than a cramped life support system, a long drive tube, a ring-shaped liquid hydrogen tank with a cooling motor. The toroidal fuel tank was detachable, with room for several more along the slender length of the drive tube. Around the rim of the cylindrical life support system were attachments for cargo, booms and folded fine-mesh nets and retractable hooks.
Several hooks now secured a lightweight metal cylinder which showed signs of erosion. Phssthpok examined it, dismissed it without knowing its purpose. Obviously it was not needed for the ship to function.
Phssthpok found no weaponry.
He did find inspection panels in the drive tube. Within an hour he could have built his own crystal-zinc fusion tube, had he the materials. He was impressed. The natives might be more intelligent than he had guessed, or luckier. He moved up to the lifesystem and through the oval door.
The cabin included an acceleration couch, banks of controls surrounding it in a horseshoe, a space behind the couch big enough to move around in, an automatic kitchen that was part of the horseshoe, and attachments to mechanical senses of types frequently used in Pak warfare. But this was no warship. The natives’ senses must be less acute than Pak senses. Behind the cabin were machinery and tanks of fluid, which Phssthpok examined with great interest.
If these machines were well designed, then GO Target #1-3 was habitable. Very. A bit heavy, both in air and in gravity. But—to a people who had been travelling for five hundred thousand years, it would have looked irresistible.
Had they reached here, they would have stopped.
That cut Phssthpok’s region of search in half. His target must be inward from here, back toward the galactic core. They simply had not got this far.
The life support system was most puzzling to Phssthpok. He found things he flatly didn’t understand, that he would never understand.
The kitchen, for instance. Weight was important in space. Surely the natives could have provided a lightweight food, synthetic if necessary, capable of keeping the pilot fed and healthy indefinitely. The saving in effort and fuel consumption would have been enormous when multiplied by the number of ships he’d seen. Instead they preferred to carry a variety of prepackaged foods, and a complex machine to select and prepare them. They had chosen to cool these foods against decomposition rather than reduce them to d powder. Why?
Pictures, for instance. Phssthpok understood photographs, and he understood graphs and maps. But the three works of art on the back wall were neither. They were charcoal sketches. One showed the head of a native like Phssthpok’s captive, but with longer crest of hair and with odd pigmentation around eyes and mouth; the others must have been younger editions of the same uncomfortably Pak-like species. Only heads and shoulders were shown. What was their purpose?
Under other circumstances the design on Brennan’s spacesuit might have provided a clue.
Phssthpok had noticed that design and understood in part. For members of a cooperative, space-going subgroup, it would be useful to code spacesuits in bright colors. Others would recognize the pattern at great disItances. The native’s design seemed overcomplex, but not enough so to rouse Phssthpok’s curiosity.
For Phssthpok would never understand art or luxury.
Luxury? A Pak breeder might appreciate luxury, but was too stupid to make it for himself. A protector hadn’t the motivation. A protector’s desires were all connected to the need to protect his blood line.
Art? There had been maps and drawings among the Pak since before Pak history. But they were for war. You didn’t recognize your loved ones by sight anyway. They smelled right.
Reproduce the smell of a loved one?
Phssthpok might have thought of that, had the painting oii Brennan’s chest been anything else. That would have been a concept! A method of keeping a protector alive and functioning long after his line was dead. It could have changed Pak history. If only Phssthpok had been led to understand representational art...
But what could he make of Brennan’s suit?
Its chest was a copy in fluorescent dyes of Salvador Dali’s Madonna of Port Lligat. There were mountains floating above a soft blue sea, resisting gravity, their undersides flat and smooth. There were a woman and child, supernaturally beautiful, with windows through them. There was nothing for Phssthpok.
One thing he understood immediately.
He was being very careful with the instrument panel. He didn’t want to wreck anything before he found out how to pull astronomical data from the ship’s computer. When he opened the solar storm warning to ascertain its purpose, he found it surprisingly small. Curious, he investigated further. The thing was made with magnetic monopoles.
In one kangaroo leap Phssthpok was crossing interplanetary space. He fired half the gas charge in his reaction pistol, then composed himself to wait out the fifteen minutes of fall.
He’d jumped toward the cargo pod. It would be necessary to tie the native down against acceleration. Already a cursory inspection of the native’s ship had cut his search area in half... and now he must abandon it. The native might have knowledge even more valuable. Even so, Phssthpok bitterly regretted the need to protect his captive; for the time involved could cost him his mission and his life.
The natives used monopoles. They must have means to detect them. Phssthpok had captured a native—a hostile act. And Phssthpok’s unarmed ship used a bigger mass of south poles than were to be found in this solar system.
Probably they were after him now.
They couldn’t catch him in any reasonable time. Their drives would be more powerful; gravity on GO Target #1-3 was about one point zero nine. But they wouldn’t have ramjet fields. Before their bigger drives could make a difference they’d be out of fuel... provided he started in time.
He braked to meet the cargo section, used his softener and oozed through the opaque twing hull. He reached for a handhold without looking, knowing where it would be, his eyes searching for the native.
He missed the handhold. He floated across the empty space while his muscles turned to jelly and melted.
The native had broken through the net and was burrowing feebly among the roots. His belly had become a hard, distended bulge. There was no sentience in his eyes.
With a kind of bewildered fury, Phssthpok thought: How can I get anything done it they keep changing the rules?
Stop that. I’m thinking like a breeder. One step at a time...
Phssthpok reached for a handhold and pushed himself down to Brennan. Brennan was limp now, his eyes half closed with the whites showing under the lids, his hand still clutching half of a root. Phssthpok set him rotating to make an examination.
All right.
Phssthpok climbed through the hull into vacuum and made his way around to the small end of the egg. There he crawled back inside, emerging in a cubicle just big enough to hold him.
Now he must find a hiding place.
No question now of leaving this solar system. He would have to abandon the rest of his ship. Let them chase the monopoles in his empty drive section.
It would be like hiding all his children in the same cave, but there was no help for that. It could have been worse. Though the instruments in the cargo pod were designed only to drop that section from orbit around some planet, the motor itself—the gravity polarizer—would take him anywhere he wanted to go within GO Target #1’s gravity well. Except that he would have to do everything right the first time. Except that he could only land once. As a ship’s drive, the gravity polarizer had many of the virtues and faults of a paraglider. He could aim it anywhere be wanted to go, even after he’d killed his velocity, provided that he wanted to go down. The polarizer would not lift him against gravity.
Compared to the fusion drive controls, the controls around him were fiercely complicated. Phssthpok began doing things to them. The line at the small end of the egg separated in a puff of flame. The twing around him became transparent... and slightly porous; in a century it would have lost a dangerous amount of air. Phssthpok’s manlike eyes took on a glassy look. The next moves would take intense concentration. He hadn’t dared tie the captive down; or otherwise restrict him. To avoid crushing him, he would have to keep the internal and external gravities exactly balanced. The hull, which carried the polarizing field, might melt at these accelerations.
The rest of his ship floated in Phssthpok’s rear screen. He twisted two knobs hard over, and it was gone.
Where to now?
He’d need weeks to hide. He couldn’t hope to hide on GO Target #1-3, given their technology.
But space was too open to hide in.
He could only land once. Where he came down, he’d have to stay, unless he could rig some kind of launching or signaling device.
Phssthpok began to search the sky for planets. His eyes were good, and planets were big and dim, easy to spot. The ringed gas giant would have been a good one—easy to hide in the rings—except that it was behind him. A gas giant ahead of him, with moons—too far ahead. He’d have to coast for days to reach it. The natives must be after him now. Without a telescope he’d never see them until too late.
That one. He’d studied it when he had a telescope. Small, with low gravity and a trace of atmosphere. Asteroids all around it, and too much atmosphere for vacuum cementing. With luck, it should make for deep dust pools.
He should have studied it before. There might be mining industries, or even colonies. Too late now. He had no choice; he had had no real choice in quite some time. That planet was his target. When the time came to leave he would have to hope the native could signal his kind. He didn’t like it much.