The robot was a four-foot upright cylinder floating placidly in one corner of the Struldbrugs’ Club reading room. Its muted two tone brown blended with the walls, making it almost invisible. Externally the robot was motionless. In its flared base, fans whirred silently, holding it two inches off the floor, and inside the featureless dome that was its head, scanners revolved endlessly, watching every corner of the room.
Without taking his eyes off the reading screen, Lucas Garner reached for his glass. He found it with careful fingertips, picked it up and tried to drink. It was empty. He held it aloft, wiggled it and, still without looking up, said, “Irish coffee.”
The robot was at his elbow. It made no move to take the double-walled glass. Instead, it chimed softly. Garner looked up at last, scowling. A line of lighted print flowed across the robot’s chest.
“Terribly sorry, Mr. Garner. You have exceeded your maximum daily alcohol content.”
“Cancel, then,” said Luke. “Go on, beat it.”
The robot scooted for its corner. Luke sighed—it was partly his own fault—and went back to reading. The tape was a new medical tome on “The Aging Process in Man.”
Last year he had voted with the rest to let the Club autodoc monitor the Club serving robots. He couldn’t regret it. Not a single Struldbrug was less than one hundred and fifty-four years of age, by Club law, and the age requirement went up one year for every two that passed. They needed the best and most rigid of medical protection.
Luke was a prime example. He was approaching, with little enthusiasm, his one hundred and eighty-fifth birthday. He had used a travel chair constantly for twenty years. Luke was a paraplegic, not because of any accident to his spine, but because his spinal nerves were dying of old age. Central nervous tissue never replaces itself. The disproportion between his thin unused legs and his massive shoulders and arms and huge hands made him look a little ape-like. Luke was aware of this, and rather enjoyed it.
His attention was wholly on the tape he was speedreading when he was disturbed again. A barely audible murmur of voices filled the reading room with a formless, swelling whisper. Regretfully Luke turned to look.
Someone was walking in his direction, using a purposeful stride which could not have been matched by any Struldbrug. The man had the long, narrow frame of one who has spent some years on a stretch rack. His arms and the skin below his larynx were negro dark; but his hands and his heavily lined face were the black of a starless night, a true space black. His hair was a cockatoo’s crest, an inch-wide strip of snow-white rug from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck.
A Belter had invaded the Struldbrugs’ Club. No wonder they whispered!
He stopped before Luke’s chair. “Lucas Garner?” His voice and manner were grave and formal.
“Right,” said Luke.
The man lowered his voice. “I’m Nicholas Sohl, First Speaker for the Belt Political Section. Is there someplace we can talk?”
“Follow me,” said Luke. He touched controls in the arm of his chair, and the chair rose on an air cushion and moved across the room.
He settled them in an alcove off the main hall. He said, “You really caused an uproar in there.”
“Oh? Why?” The First Speaker sprawled limp and boneless in a masseur chair, letting the tiny motors knead him into new shapes. His voice was still quick and crisp with the well known Belt accent.
Luke couldn’t decide whether be was joking. “Why? For one thing, you’re nowhere near admission age.”
“The guard didn’t say anything. He just sort of stared.”
“I can imagine.”
“Do you know what brought me to Earth?”
“I heard. There’s an alien in the system.”
“It was supposed to be secret.”
“I used to be an ARM, a member of the United Nations Police. They didn’t retire me until two years ago. I’ve still got contacts.”
“That’s what Lit Shaeffer told me.” Nick opened his eyes. “Excuse me if I’m being rude. I can stand your silly gravity lying in a ship’s couch, but I don’t like walking through it.”
“Relax then.”
“Thanks. Garner, nobody at the UN seems to realize how urgent this is. There’s an alien in the system. He’s performed a hostile act, kidnapped a Belter. He’s abandoned his interstellar drive, and we can both guess what that means.”
“He’s planning to stay. Tell me about that, will you?”
“Simple enough. You know the Outsider ship came in three easy-to-assemble parts?”
“I found out that much.”
“The trailing section must have been a re-entry capsule. We might have guessed there’d be one. Two and a half hours after Brennan and the Outsider made contact, that section disappeared.”
“Teleport?”
“No, thank Finagle. We’ve got one film panel that shows a blurred streak. The acceleration was huge.”
“I see. Why come to us?”
“Huh? Garner, this is humanity’s business!”
“I don’t like that game, Nick. The Outsider was humanity’s business the second you spotted him. You didn’t come to us until he pulled his disappearing act. Why not? Because you thought the aliens would think better of humanity if they met Belters first?”
“No comment.”
“Why tell us now? If the Belt scopes can’t find him, nobody can.”
Nick turned off his massage chair and sat up to study the old man. Garner’s face was the face of Time, a loose mask covering ancient evil. Only the eyes and teeth seemed young; and the teeth were new, white and sharp and incongruous.
But he talked like a Belter, in straight lines. He didn’t waste words and he didn’t play games.
“Lit said you were bright. That’s the trouble, Garner. We’ve found him.”
“I still don’t see the problem.”
“He went through a smuggler trap near the end of his flight. We were looking for a bird who has the habit of coasting through populated regions with his drive off. A heat sensor found the Outsider, and a camera caught a section of his course and stayed on him long enough to give us velocity, position, acceleration. Acceleration was huge, tens of gees. It’s near certain he was on his way to Mars.”
“Mars?”
“Mars, or a Mars orbit, or the moons. If it was an orbit we’d have found him by now. Ditto for the moons; they both have observation stations. Except that they belong to the UN—“
Luke began to laugh. Nick closed his eyes with a pained expression.
Mars was the junkheap of the system. In truth there were few useful planets in the solar system; Earth and Mercury and Jupiter’s atmosphere just filled the list. It was the asteroids that were important. But Mars had proved the bitterest disappointment. A nearly airless desert, covered with craters and with seas of ultrafine dust, the atmosphere almost too thin to be considered poisonous. Somewhere in Lacis Solis was an abandoned base, the remains of Man’s third and last attempt on the rusty planet. Nobody wanted Mars.
When the Free Belt Charter was signed, after the Belt had proven by embargo and propaganda that Earth needed the Belt more than the Belt needed Earth, the UN had been allowed to keep Earth, the Moon, Titan, rights in Saturn’s rings, mining and exploratory rights on Mercury, Mars and its moons.
Mars was just a token. Mars hadn’t counted until now.
“You see the problem,” said Nick. He’d turned the massage unit on again. Little muscles all over his body were giving up under Earth’s unaccustomed strain, stridently proclaiming their existence for the first time in Nick’s life. The massage helped.
Luke nodded. “Considering the way the Belt is constantly telling us to stay off their property, you can’t blame the UN for trying to get a little of its own back. We must have a couple of hundred complaints on file.”
“You exaggerate. Since the Free Belt Charter was signed we’ve registered some sixty violations, most of which were allowed and paid for by the UN.”
“What is it you want the UN to do that they aren’t doing?”
“We want access to Earth’s records on the study of Mars. Hell, Garner, the Phobos cameras might already show where the Outsider came down! We want permission to search Mars from close orbit. We went permission to land.”
“What have you got so far?”
Nick snorted. “There’s only two things they can agree on. We can search all we want to—from space. For letting us examine their silly records they want to charge us a flat million marks!”
“Pay it.”
“It’s robbery.”
“A Belter says that? Why don’t you have records on Mars?”
“We were never interested. What for?”
“What about abstract knowledge?”
“Another word for useless.”
“Then what makes you want useless knowledge enough to pay a million marks for it?”
Slowly Nick matched his grin. “It’s still robbery. How in Finagle’s name did Earth know they’d need to know about Mars?”
“That’s the secret of abstract knowledge. You get in the habit of finding out everything you can about everything. Most of it gets used sooner or later. We’ve spent billions exploring Mars.”
“I’ll authorize payment of a million marks to the UN Universal Library. Now how do we land?” Nick turned off the chair.
“I... have an idea on that.”
A ridiculous idea. Luke would not have considered it for a moment... except for his surroundings. The Struldbrugs’ Club was luxurious and quiet, soundproofed everywhere, rich with draperies. His own jarring laughter had been swallowed the instant it left his lips. People seldom laughed or shouted here. The Club was a place to rest after a lifetime of... not resting?
“Can you fly a two-man ship, Starfire make?”
“Sure. There’s no difference in the control panels. Belt ships use drives bought from Rolls-Royce, England.”
“You’re hired as my pilot at a dollar a year. I can get a ship ready in six hours.”
“You’ve flipped.”
“Not I. Look, Nick. Every so-called diplomat in the UN knows how important it is to find the Outsider. But they can’t get moving. It’s not because they’re getting their own back with the Belt. That’s only part of it. It’s inertia. The UN is a world government. It’s unwieldy by its very nature, having to rule the lives of eighteen billion people. Worse than that, the UN is made up of individual nations. The nations aren’t very powerful nowadays. Someday not too soon, even their names will be forgotten; and I’m not sure that’s a good idea... but today national prestige can get in the way. You’d be weeks getting them to agree on anything.
“Whereas there’s no law against a UN citizen going anywhere he wants to in terrestrial space, or hiring anyone he wants to. A number of our round-the-Moon pilots are Belters.”
Nick shook his head as if to clear it. “Garner, I don’t get you. You can’t think we can find the Outsider in a two man ship. Even I know about the Martian dust. He’s hidden in one of the dust seas, dissecting Jack Brennan, and there’s no way to get at him without searching the deserts inch by inch with deep-radar.”
“Right. But when the politicians realize that you’ve started searching Mars, what do you think they’ll do? You being hired as a pilot is a technicality, obvious to anyone. Suppose we did find the Outsider? The Belt would get the credit.”
Nick closed his eyes and tried to think. He wasn’t used to such circular logic. But it looked like Garner was right. If they thought he was going to Mars, with or without a flatlander for company... Nick Sohl, First Speaker for the Belt, empowered to make treaties. Ominous. They’d send a fleet to start searching first.
“So I need a flatlander to hire me as pilot. Why you?”
“I can get a ship now. I’ve got contacts.”
“Okay. Get the ship, then get a tough explorer-type flatlander. Sell him the ship. Then he hires me as his pilot, right?”
“Right. But I won’t do it.”
“Why?” Nick looked at him. “You aren’t seriously thinking of coming along?”
Luke nodded.
Nick laughed. “How old are you?”
“Too old to waste my remaining years sitting in the Struldbrugs’ Club waiting to die. Shake hands, Nick.”
“Mph? Sure, but—Yipe! All right, dammit, so you’ve got strong hands. All you flatlanders are overmuscled anyway.”
“Hey, now, I didn’t mean to push any buttons. I’m sorry. I wanted to demonstrate that I haven’t gone feeble.”
“Stipulated. Not in the hands, anyway.”
“And we won’t be using our legs. We’d be riding everywhere we went.”
“You’re crazy. Suppose your heart gave out on me?”
“It’s likely to survive me for a good long time. It’s prosthetic.”
“You’re crazy. All of you. It comes from living at the bottom of a gravity well. The gravity pulls the blood from your brains.”
“I’ll show you to a telephone. You’ll have to pay in your million marks before the UN catches on where we’re going.”
Phssthpok dreamed.
He had hidden the cargo pod deep beneath the fluid dust of the Lacis Solis region. It showed as an ochre wall beyond the twing hull. They would be safe here for as long as the life support system held out: a long, long time.
Phssthpok stayed in the cargo hold where he could watch his captive. After landing he had disassembled every machine in the cargo pod to make what repairs and adjustments were needed. Now he only watched his captive.
The native required little care. He was developing almost normally. He would be a monster, but perhaps not a cripple.
Phssthpok rested on his pile of roots and dreamed.
In a few weeks he would have completed his long, long task... or failed. In any case he could stop eating. He had been alive long enough to suit him. Soon he would end as he had nearly ended thirteen hundred shiptime years ago, at the core of the galaxy...
He had seen light flare over the Valley of Pitcbok, and known that he was doomed.
Phssthpok bad been a protector for twenty-six years. His remaining children in the radiation-blasted valley were twenty-six to thirty-five years of age; their own children were of all ages up to twenty-four or so. Now his lifespan would depend on who had survived the bomb. He had returned immediately to the valley to find out.
Not many breeders were left in the valley, but such as were still alive had to te protected. Phssthpok and the rest of the Pitchok families made peace, the terms being that they and their sterile breeders should have the valley until their deaths, at which time the valley would revert to Eastersea Alliance. There were ways to partially neutralize radioactive fallout. The Pitchok families used them. Then, leaving their valley and its survivors in the hands of one of their number, they had scattered.
Of the several surviving breeders, all had been tested and all had been found essentially sterile. “Essentially” being taken to mean that if they did have children, the children would be mutants. They would smell wrong. With no protector to look after their interests, they would quickly die.
To Phssthpok, the most important of his surviving descendants was the youngest, Ttuss, a female of two years.
He was on a time limit. In thirty-two years Ttuss would reach the age of change. She would become an intelligent being, and a heavily armored one, with skin that would turn a copper knife and strength to lift ten times her own weight. She would be ideally designed for the purpose of fighting, but she would have nothing to fight for.
She would stop eating. She would die, and Phssthpok would stop eating. Ttuss’s lifespan was his own.
But sometimes a protector could adopt the entire Pak species as his descendants. At least he would have every opportunity to find a purpose in life. There was always truce for a childless protector, for such had no reason to fight. And there was a place he could go.
The Library was as old as the radioactive desert which surrounded it. That desert would never be recultivated; it was reseeded every thousand years with radiocobalt so that no protector could covet it. Protectors could cross that desert; they had no gonadal genes to be smashed by subatomic particles. Breeders could not.
How old was the Library? Phssthpok never knew, and never wondered. But the section on space travel was three million years old.
He came to the Library with a number of—not friends, but associates in misery, childless former members of the Pitchok families. The Library was huge and rambling, a composite of at least three million years of Pak knowledge, crossfiled into sections according to subject. Naturally the same book often appeared in several sections. The associates divided at the entrance, and Phssthpok didn’t see any of them again for thirty-two years.
He spent that time in one vast room, a floor-to-ceiling labyrinth of bookshelves. At scattered corners there were bins of tree-of-life root kept constantly filled by attendants. There were other foodstuffs brought at seeming random: meats, vegetables, fruits, whatever was available to childless protectors who had chosen to serve the Library rather than die. Tree-of-life root was the perfect food for a protector, but he could eat nearly anything.
And there were books.
They were nearly indestructible, those books. They would have emerged like fluttering meteors from the heart of a hydrogen fusion explosion. All were written more or less in the present language, and all were constantly being recopied by librarians as the language changed. In this room the books all dealt with space and space travel.
There were treatises on the philosophy of space travel. They all seemed to make a fundamental assumption: someday the Pak race must find a new home; hence any contribution to the techniques of spaceflight contributed to the immortality of the species. Phssthpok could discount that assumption, knowing that a protector who did not believe it would never write a book on the subject. There were records of interstellar and interplanetary flights, tens of thousands of them, starting with a fantastic trip some group had made almost three million years ago, riding a hollowed-out asteroidal rock into the galactic arms in search of yellow dwarf suns. There were technical texts on anything that could possibly bear on space: spacecraft, astrogation, ecology, miniaturization, nuclear and subnuclear physics, plastics, gravity and how to use it, astronomy, astrophysics, records of the mining of worlds in this and nearby systems, diagrams for a hypothetical Bussard ramjet (in an unfinished work by a protector who had lost his appetite halfway through), ion drive diagrams, plasma theory, light-sails...
He started at the left and began working his way around.
He’d chosen the section on space travel more or less at random; it had looked less crowded than the others. The romance of space was not in Phssthpok’s soul. He kept with it rather than start over elsewhere. He might need every minute of his thirty-four years of grace no matter where be chose to work. In twenty-eight years he read every book in the Astronautics section, and still he had found nothing that drastically needed doing.
Start a migration project? It simply wasn’t that urgent. The Pak sun had at least hundreds of millions of years to live... longer than the Pak species, probably, given the constant state of war. And the chance of disaster would be high. Yellow suns were scarce in the galactic core; they would have to travel far... with the protector crew constantly fighting for control of the ship. Come to that, the cores of galaxies could sometimes explode in a chain reaction of supernovae. A migration project really should travel into the arms.
The first expedition to try that had met a horrible fate.
So. Join the Library staff? He’d thought of it many times, but the answer always came out the same. No matter what phase of the Library he concerned himself with, his life would depend on others. To retain his will to live he would need to know that all Pak would benefit from his aspect of Library work. Let there be a dry spell in new discoveries, let his faith flag, and he would find himself no longer hungry.
It was frightening not to be hungry. During the last few decades it had happened several times. Each time he would force himself to reread the communications from the Valley of Pitchok. The latest communication always told him that Ttuss bad been alive when it was sent. Gradually his appetite would come back. Without Ttuss he would be dead.
He had investigated the librarians. Their lives were usually short. Joining the staff was no answer.
Find a way to keep Ttuss alive? If he could do that he would have used the method on himself.
Study theoretical astronomy? He had some ideas, but they would not help the Pak species. The Pak did not seek abstract knowledge. Mine the asteroids? The asteroids of this and nearby stars were as thoroughly mined out as the surface of the planet had often been, with the difference that convection currents in the planet’s interior eventually replaced worked-out mines. He should have gone in for metal reclamation. Now it was too late to change studies. Put plastic-bubble cities in orbit to provide more living room for breeders? Nonsense: too vulnerable to capture or accidental destruction.
One day Phssthpok’s appetite was gone. The letters from the Valley of Pitchok did not help; he didn’t believe them. He thought of returning to the valley, but he knew he would starve to death on the way. When he was sure, he sat down against a wall, the last in a line of protectors who also did not eat, who were waiting to die.
A week passed. The librarians found that two at the head of the line were dead. They picked them up, a pair of skeletons clothed in dry, wrinkled leather armor, and carried them away.
Phssthpok remembered a book.
He still had the strength to reach it.
He read carefully, with the book in one hand and a root in the other. Presently he ate the root...
The ship had been a roughly cylindrical asteroid, reasonably pure nickel-iron with stony strata running through it, about six miles long and four through. A group of childless protectors had carved it out with solar mirrors and built into it a small life-support and controls system, a larger frozen-sleep chamber, a breeder atomic pile and generator, a dirigible ion drive, and an enormous cesium tank. They had found it necessary to exterminate the protectors of a large family in order to get control of a thousand breeders. With two protectors as pilots and seventy more in frozen sleep with the thousand breeders, with a careful selection of the beneficial lifeforms of the Pak world, they set out into one arm of the galaxy.
Though their knowledge was three million years scantier than Phssthpok’s, they had good reason for choosing the galaxy’s outer reaches. They’d have a better chance of finding yellow suns out there, and a better chance to find a double planet at the right distance. Perturbations from stars an average of half a light year apart made double planets scarce in the galactic core; and there was reason to think that only an oversized moon could give any world an atmosphere capable of supporting Paklike life.
An ion drive and a certain amount of cesium... They expected to move slowly, and they did. At twelve thousand miles per second relative to the Pak sun, they coasted. They fired a laser message back at the Pak sun to tell the Library that the ion drive had worked. The blueprints were somewhere in the Library, with a list of suggested design changes.
Phssthpok was not interested. He moved on to the last section, which was nearly half a million years more recent.
It was a record of a laser message that had come plowing through the Pak system, torn and attenuated and garbled by dust clouds and distance, in a language no longer spoken. The librarians had translated it and filed it here. It must have been retranslated hundreds of times since then. Hundreds of searchers like Phssthpok must have read it, and wondered about the part of the story they could never know, and passed on...
But Phssthpok read it very carefully.
They had traveled deep into the galactic arms. Half the protectors had been gone at journey’s end, dying not of starvation or violence but of age. This was so unusual that a detailed medical description had been included as part of the message. They had passed yellow suns with no planets, others whose worlds were all gas giants. Yellow suns had gone by carrying worlds that might have been habitable; but all were too far off course to be reached on the maneuvering reserve of cesium. Galactic dust and the galaxy’s gravity had slowed their strange craft, increasing their maneuver reserve. The sky had darkened around them as suns became rare.
They had found a planet.
They had braked the ship. They had transferred what was left of the plutonium to the motors of landing craft, and gone down. The decision was not final; but if the planet failed to measure up they would have to work for decades to make their rockship spaceworthy again.
It had life. Some was inimical, but none that could not be handled. There was soil. The remaining protectors woke the breeders and turned them loose in the forests to be fruitful and multiply. They planted crops, dug mines, made machines to dig more mines, made machines to tend crops...
The black, nearly starless night sky bothered some, but they got used to it. The frequent rains bothered others, but did not hurt the breeders, so that was all right. There was room for all; the protectors did not even fight. None stopped eating. There were predators and bacteria to exterminate, there was a civilization to build, there was much to do.
With spring and summer came crops—and disaster. There was something wrong with the tree-of-life.
The colonists themselves did not understand what had gone wrong with the crop. Something had come up. It looked and tasted like tree-of-life, though the smell was wrong, somehow. But for all its effect on breeders and protectors alike, they might as well have been eating weeds.
They could not return to space. Their scant remaining store of roots represented an inflexible number of protector work-hours. They might refuel their cesium tanks, they might even build a plutonium-producing technology in the time they had left, but to find and reach another Pak-like world—no. And if they reached it, what guarantee had they that it would grow tree-of-life?
They had spent their last years building a laser beam powerful enough to pierce the dust clouds that hid them from the galactic core. They did not know that they had succeeded. They did not know what was wrong with the crop; they suspected the sparsity of a particular wavelength of starlight, or of starlight in general, though their experiments along those lines had produced nothing. They gave detailed information on the blood lines of their breeder passengers, in the hope that some of the lines might survive. And they asked for help.
Two and a half million years ago.
Phssthpok sat by the root bin, eating and reading. He would have smiled if his face had been built that way. Already he could see that his mission would involve every childless protector in the world.
For two and a half million years those breeders had been living without tree-of-life. Without any way to make the change to the protector stage. Dumb animals.
And Phssthpok alone knew how to find them.
You’re flying from New York, USA, to Piquetsburg, North Africa. Suddenly you become aware that New York is flying in one direction, Piquetsburg in another, and a hurricane wind is blowing your plane off course in still a third...
Nightmare? Well, yes. But travel in the solar system is different from travel on a planet. Each individual rock moves at its own pace, like flecks of butter in a churn.
Mars moved in a nearly circular path. Asteroids moved nearby in orbits more elliptical, catching up to the red planet or falling behind. Some carried telescopes. Their operators would report to Ceres if they saw purposeful action on the surface.
The abandoned Bussard ramjet crossed over the sun and curved inward, following a shallow hyperbola which would take it through the plane of the planets.
The Blue Ox followed an accelerating higher-order curve, a J whose upright would eventually match the Ox’s velocity and position to the Outsidees.
U Thant rose from Earth on a ram-and-wing rented from Death Valley Port. There was a lovely scenic ride up and out over the Pacific. One hundred and fifty miles up and orbiting, as required by law, Nick switched to fusion power and headed outward. He left the ram-and-wing to find its own way home.
The Earth wrapped itself around itself and dropped away. It was four days to Mars at one gee, with Ceres to tell them which asteroids to dodge.
Nick put the ship on autopilot. He was not entirely displeased with the U Thant. It was a flatlander navy job, its functions compromised by streamlining; but the equipment seemed adequate and the controls were elegantly simple. And the kitchen was excellent.
Luke said, “Okay to smoke?”
“Why not? You can’t be worried about dying young.”
“Does the UN have its money yet?”
“Sure. They must have got it transferred hours ago.”
“Fine. Call them, identify yourself, and ask for everything they’ve got on Mars. Tell them to put it on the screen, and you’ll pay for the laser. That’ll kill two birds with one stone.”
“How?”
“It’ll tell them where were going.”
“Right... Luke, do you really think this will get them moving? I know how unwieldy the UN is. There was the Mller case.”
“Look at it from another direction, Nick. How did you come to represent the Belt?”
“Aptitude tests said I had a high IQ and liked ordering people around. From there I worked my way up.”
“We go by the vote.”
“Popularity contests.”
“It works. But it does have drawbacks. What govemment doesn’t?” Garner shrugged. “Every speaker in the UN represents one nation—one section of the world. He thinks it’s the best section, filled with the best people. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been elected. So maybe twenty representatives each think they know just what to do about the Outsider, and no one of them will knuckle down to the others. Prestige. Eventually they’d work out a compromise. But if they get the idea that a civilian and a Belter could beat them to the Outsider, they’ll get off their thumbs faster. See?”
“No.”
“Oh, make your call.”
A message beam found them some time later. They began to skim Earth’s stored information on Mars.
There was quite a lot of it. It covered centuries. At one point Nick said, “I’m ready for summer vacation. Why do we have to watch all this? According to you we’re just running a bluff.”
“According to me we’re running a search, unless you have something better to do. The best time to bluff is with four aces.”
Nick switched off the screen. The lecture was on tape now; they wouldn’t miss anything. “Come, let us reason together. I paid a million marks in Belt funds for this stuff, plus additional charges for the message beam. Thrifty Sohl that I am, I feel almost compelled to use it. But we’ve been studying the Mller case for the past hour, and it all came out of Belt files!”
Eleven years ago a Belt miner named Mller had tried to use the mass of Mars to make a drastic course change. He had come too close; had been forced to land. There would have been no problem. The goldskin cops would have picked him up as soon as they had clearance from the UN. No hurry... until Mller was murdered by martians.
Martians had been a myth until then. Mller must have been amazed. But, strangling in near-vacuum, he had managed to kill half a dozen of them, using a water tank to spray death in all directions.
“Not all of it. We were the ones who studied the martian corpses you recovered,” said Garner. “We may need that information. I’m still wondering why the Outsider picked Mars. Maybe he knows about martians. Maybe he wants to contact them.”
“Much good may it do him.”
“They use spears. By me that makes them intelligent. We don’t know how intelligent, because nobody’s ever tried to talk to a martian. They could have any kind of civilization you can imagine, down there under the dust.”
“A civilized people, are they?” Nick’s voice turned savage. “They slashed Mller’s tent! They let his air out!” In the Belt there is no worse crime.
“I didn’t say they were friendly.”
The Blue Ox coasted. Behind her the alien ship was naked-eye visible and closing. It made Tina nervous to be unable to watch it. But that could work two ways; and this was the Outsider’s blind side, where three Belters worked to free Einar Nilsson’s singleship from its vast metal uterus.
“Clamps free back here,” said Tina. She was sweating. She felt the breeze on her face, as the air system worked to keep her faceplate from fogging.
Nate’s voice spoke behind her ear. “Good, Tina.”
Einar’s said, “We could have carried a fourth crewman in the singleshifs lifesystem. Damn! I wish I’d thought of it. There’d be two of us to meet the Outsider.”
“It probably won’t matter. The Outsider’s gone. That’s a dead ship.” Nonetheless Nate sounded uneasy.
“And how many crew got left behind? I never much believed the Outsider would come riding between the stars alone in a singleship. Too poetic. Never mind. Tina, give us five seconds of thrust under the fusion tube.”
Tina set her shoulders and fired her backpac jets. Other flames sprouted forward under the lifesystem hull. The old singleship drifted slowly up between the great doors.
“Okay, Nate, get aboard fhst. Make sure you keep the Ox between you and the Outsider at all times. We’ll have to assume he doesn’t have deep-radar.”
There was no way either of them could see Tina’s puzzled frown.
Belter women averaged around six feet tall; but Belter women tended to be willowy, slender. Tina Jordan was six feet tall and built to scale: flatlander scale. She was in good trim and proud of it. She found it annoying that Belters still took her for a flatlander.
She had left Earth at twenty-one. She had been fourteen years in the Belt, on Ceres, Juno, Mercury, at Hera Station in close orbit around Jupiter, and in the Trailing Trojans. She regarded the Belt and the solar system as her home. It did not bother her that she had never flown a singleship. Many Belters had not. The singleship miners were only one aspect of Belt industry, which included chemists, nuclear physicists, astrophysicists, politicians, astronomers, file clerks, merchants... and computer programmers.
She had heard, long ago, that there was no prejudice against women in the Belt. And it was true! On Earth women still held lower-paying jobs. Employers claimed that physical strength was needed for certain jobs, or that a woman would quit to get married at the most crucial time, or even that her family suffered when a woman worked. Things were different in the Belt; and Tina had been more surprised than elated. She had expected to be disappointed.
And now a woman and a computer programmer was the most crucial Ox’s personnel. Fear and delight. The fear was for Nate, who was too young to take such a risk; for one Belter had already met the Outsider, and nothing had been heard of him since.
But what was Nate doing aboard the singleship?
She helped Einar out of his suit—he was a mountain of flesh; he could never have lifted himself against Earth’s gravity—then let him do the same for her. She said, “I thought Nate would be the one to board the Outsider.”
Einar looked surprised. “What? No. You.”
“But—“ She searched for words, and found them, to her horror. But I’m a girl. She said nothing.
“Think it through,” Einar said with forced patience. “The ship might not be empty. Boarding it could be dangerous.”
“Right.” With emphasis.
“So we give whoever boards it all the protection we’ve got. The Ox is part of that protection. I’ll keep the drive warm; it should vaporize the bastard if he tries anything, and the com laser should punch holes in him at this range. But theres a chance the Ox will be blasted too.”
“So the singleship stands guard.” Tina made a dismissing gesture. “I worked it out that far. I thought I’d—“
“No, don’t be silly. You’ve never flown a singleship in your life. I don’t have much free choice here. I thought of leaving Nate to fly the Ox, but hell, she’s my ship, and he knows singleships. I couldn’t put you in either job.”
“I suppose not.” She was outwardly calm, but a cold lump of fear grew in her belly.
“You’d be the best choice anyway. You’re the one who will make contact with the Outsider, try to learn his language. Aside from that, you’re a flatlander. You’re physically the strongest of us.”
Tina nodded jerkily.
“You could have stayed behind, you know.”
“Oh, it’s not that. I hope you don’t think I was trying to chicken out. I just—hadn’t—“
“No, you just hadn’t bothered to think it through. You’ll get used to doing that, living in the Belt,” Einar said kindly. Damn him.
The dust of Mars is unique.
Its uniqueness is the result of vacuum cementing. Once vacuum cementing was the bugaboo of the space industries. Small space probe components which would slide easily over one another in air would weld solidly in vacuum, just as soon as the gas absorbed by their surfaces could evaporate away. Vacuum cementing fused parts in the first American satellites and in the first Soviet interplanetary probes. Vacuum cementing keeps the Moon from being fathoms deep in meteor dust. The particles weld into crunchy rock, into natural cement, under the same molecular attraction that fuses Johanssen blocks and turns the mud of sea bottoms to sedimentary rock.
But on Mars there is just enough atmosphere to stop that process, and not nearly enough to stop a meteor. Meteor dust covers most of the planet. Meteors can fuse the dust into craters, but it does not cement, though it is fine enough to flow like viscous oil.
“That dust is going to be our biggest problem,” said Luke. “The Outsider didn’t even have to dig a hole for himself. He could have sunk anywhere on Mars.”
Nick turned off the laser transmitter. It was hot from two days of use in blasting a locator beam at Earth. “He could have hidden anywhere in the system, but he picked Mars. He must have had a reason. Maybe it’s something he couldn’t do under the dust. That puts him in a crater or on a hill.”
“He’d have been spotted.” Luke keyed a photograph from the autopilot memory. It was one of a group from the smuggler trap. It showed a dimly shining metal egg with the small end pointed. The egg moved big-end first, and it moved as if rocket-propelled. But there was no exhaust, at least none that any instrument could detect.
“It’s big enough to see from space,” said Luke, “and easy to recognize, with that silver hull.”
“Yab. All right, he’s under the dust. It’ll take a lot of ships with deep-radar to find him, and even then there’s no guarantee.” Nick ran his hands back along his depilated scalp. “We could quit now. Your flatlander government has finally picked up its feet and sent us some ships. I got the impression they aren’t too happy about us joining their search.” His tone was noncommittal.
“I’d like to go on. How do you feel?”
“I’m game. Hunting strange things is what I do on my vacation.”
“Where would you start looking?”
“I don’t know. The deepest dust on the planet is in Tractus Albus.”
“He’d have been stupid to pick the deepest. He’d have picked his place at random.”
“You’ve got other ideas?”
“Lacis Solis.”
“—Oh. The old flatlander base. That’s good thinking. He might need a life support system for Brennan.”
“I wasn’t even thinking that. If he needs anything there—human technology, water, anything—there’s only one place on the planet he can go. If he’s not there we can at least pick up some dustboats—“
“Blue Ox calling U Thant. This is Blue Ox calling U Thant out of Death Valley Port.”
There would be a directional signal in that message. Nick set the autopilot to aiming his own com laser. “It’ll take a few minutes,” he said. Then, “I wonder what’s happening to Brennan.
“Can we take the deep-radar out of this heap?”
“Let’s hope. I don’t know what else we can use for a finder.”
“A metal detector. There must be one aboard.”
“This is Nicholas Brewster Sohl aboard U Thant calling any or all aboard Blue Ox. What’s new? Repeating. This is Nicholas—“
Einar flicked to transmit. “Einar Nilsson commanding Blue Ox. We have matched with the Outsider ship. Tina Jordan is preparing to board. I will switch you to TIna.” He did.
And settled back to wait.
He liked Tina. He was half certain she would find a way to get herself killed. Nate had protested mightily, but Einar’s own arguments had no holes to crawl through. He sat watching the picture transmitted from Tina’s helmet camera.
The Outsider ship looked deserted, with its attitude skewed and its tow lines slack and beginning to loop. Tina could see no motion in the lens of the big eyeball. She brought herself to a stop several yards from the port, and was pleased to note that her hands were steady on the jet firing keys.
“Tina speaking. I am outside what seems to be a control module. I can see an acceleration couch through the glass—if it’s glass—and controls around it. The Outsider must be roughly hominid.
“The drive module is too hot to get near. The control modulo is a smooth sphere with a big porthole, and cables trailing off in both directions. You should be able to see all this, U Thant.”
She did a slow loop around the big eyeball. Taking her time. Belters only hurried when there was need. “I can find no sign of an airlock. I’ll have to burn my way through.”
“Through the porthole. You don’t want to burn through anything explosive,” said Einar’s voice behind her ear.
The transparent stuff had a two-thousand Kelvin melting point, and a laser was obviously out of the question. Tina used a hot point, tracing a circle over and over. Gradually she wore it down. “I’m getting fog through the cracks,” she reported. “Ah, I’m through.”
A three-foot transparent disc puffed away on the last of the air, with a breath of white mist playing around it. Tina caught it and sent it gliding toward the Ox for later recovery.
Einaes voice crackled. “Don’t try to enter yet!”
“I wasn’t.” She waited for the edges to cool. Fifteen minutes, while nothing happened. They must be getting restless aboard U Thant, she thought. Still no sign of motion inside. They had found nothing when they probed this module with the deep-radar; but the walls were thick, and something as tenuous as water, for instance, might not have shown up.
Time enough. She ducked through the hole.
“I’m in a small control cabin,” she said, and turned at the waist to give the camera a full view. Tendrils of icy fog drifted toward the hole in the porthole. “Very small. The control bank is almost primitively complex, so complex that I’m inclined to think the Outsider had no autopilot. No man could handle all these controls and adjustments. I see no more that one couch, and no aliens present but me.
“There’s a bin full of sweet potatoes, it looks like, right beside the control couch. It’s the only sign of kitchen facilities in this section. I think I’ll move on.” She tried to open the door in the back of the control room. Pressure forced it shut. She used her hot point. The door cut easily, must more so than the porthole material. She waited while the room filled with thick fog, then pushed her way in. More fog.
“This room is about as big as the control room. Sorry about the view. The place seems to be a free-fall gymnasium.” She swept her camera around the room, then crossed to one of the machines and tried to work it. It looked as though you were supposed to stand up inside it against the force of springs. Tina couldn’t budge it.
She dismounted the camera and fixed it to a wall, aimed at the exercise machine. She tried it again. “Either I’m doing this wrong,” she told her audience, “or the Outsider could pick his teeth with me. Let’s see what else there is.” She looked around. “That’s funny,” she said presently.
There was nothing else. Only the door to the control room.
A two hour search by Tina and Nate La Pan only confirmed her find. The lifesystem consisted of:
One control room the size of a singleship control room.
One free-fall gymnasium, same size.
A bin of roots.
An enormous air tank. There were no safeties to stop the flow in case of puncture. The tank was empty. It must have been nearly empty when the ship reached the solar system.
Vastly complex air cleaning machinery, apparently designed to remove even the faintest, rarest trace of biochemical waste. It had all been many times repaired.
Equally complex equipment for conversion of fluid and solid waste.
It was incredible. The single Outsider had apparently spent his time in two small rooms, eating just one kind of food, with no ship’s library to keep him entertained, and no computer-autopilot to keep him pointed right and guard his fuel supply and steer him clear of meteors. Yet the trip had taken decades, at least. In view of the complexity of the cleaning and renewal plant, the huge air tank must have been included solely to replace air lost by osmosis through the walls!
“That’s it,” Einar said finally. “Come on back, you two. We’ll take a break, and I’ll ask U Thant for instructions. Nate, put some of those roots in a pressure bag. We can analyze them.”
“Search the ship again,” Nick told them. “You may find a simplified autopilot: not a computer, just a widget for keeping the ship on course. Could you have overlooked a bolthole of some kind, anyplace where an Outsider could have hidden? In particular, try to get into the air tank. It might make a very nice emergency bolthole.” He turned the volume down and faced Luke. “They won’t find anything, of course. Can you think of anything else?”
“I’d like to see them analyze the air. Have they got the facilities?”
“Yah.”
“And the porthole glass, and the chemistry of that root.”
“They’ll finish with the root by the time this reaches them.” He turned up the volume. “After you finish analyzing what you’ve got, you might start thinking about how to tow that ship home. Stay with the ship, and keep your drive warm. If an emergency comes up, use the fusion flame immediately. Sohl out.”
He looked at the screen for some time after it had gone dark. Presently he said, “A super-singleship. Finagle’s Eyesl I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“Flown by a kind of super-Belter,” said Luke. “Solitary. Doesn’t need entertainment. Doesn’t care what he eats. Strong as King Kong. Roughly humanoid.”
Nick smiled. “Wouldn’t that make him a superior species?”
“I wouldn’t deny it. And I’m deadly serious on that. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Brennan shifted.
He hadn’t moved in hours. He lay on his back in the root bin, his eyes closed, his body folded into near-foetal position around his swollen belly, his fists clenched. But now he moved one arm, and Phssthpok came suddenly alert.
Brennan reached for a root, put it in his mouth, bit and swallowed. Bit and swallowed. Bit and swallowed, under Phssthpok’s watchful eye. His own eyes stayed closed.
Brennan’s hand released the last inch or so of root, and he turned over and stopped moving.
Phssthpok relaxed. Presently he dreamed.
Days ago he had stopped eating. He told himself it was too early, but his belly didn’t believe it. He would live just long enough. Meanwhile, be dreamed.
...He sat on the floor of the Library with a piece of root in his jaws and an ancient book balanced on one cantaloupe knee and a map spread before him on the floor. It was a map of the galaxy, but it was graded for time. The Core stars showed in positions three million years old, but the outer arms were half a million years younger. The Library staff had spent most of a year preparing it for him.
Assume they went a distance X, he told himself. Their average velocity must have been .06748 lightspeed, considering dust friction and the galaxy’s gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Their laser returned at lightspeed; figure for space curvature. Give them a century to build the laser; they’d use all the time they had for that. Then X = 33,210 light years.
Phssthpok set his compass and drew an arc, using the Pak sun as a center. Margin of error: .001, thirty light years. They’re an that arc!
Now assume they went straight outward from the galactic hub. It was a good assumption: there were stars in that direction, and the Pak sun was well off-center from the hub. Phssthpok drew a radial line. Greater margin of error here. Original error, course alterations... And the straight line would have curved by now, while the galaxy turned like curdled milk. They would have stayed flat in the galactic plane. And they’re near this point. I’ve found them...
Phssthpok’s minions pouring like army ants through the Library. Every protector in reach had joined his quest. It’s in the Astronautics section, Phwee. Find it! We need those ramscoop diagram. Ttuss, I need to know what happens when a protector gets old, and when it happens, and any contributing factors. There’s probably a copy of that report in the Medical section. It may have been added to. Hratchp, we have to learn what could stop a tree-of-life from growing right in the galactic arm. You need agronomists, medical researchers, chemists, astrophysicists. Use the Valley of Pitchok for your experiments, and remember the environment was habitable. Try experimenting with the soil, reduced starlight, reduced radiation. You of the Physics and Engineering sections: I need a fusion drive for insystem maneuvers. I need launching vehicles for everything we build. Design them! Every childless protector on the planet was looking for a purpose in living, a Cause. And Phssthpok gave it to them...
... The ship, finally completed, standing in three parts on the sand not far from the Library. Phssthpok’s army assembling. We need monopoles, we need tree-of-life roots and seeds, we need enormous quantities of hydrogen fuel. The scoop won’t work below a certain speed. Meteor Bay has everything we need. We can take them! For the first time in twenty thousand years, the childless protectors of Pak assembled for war...
... His own Virus QQ used on breeders, with mopup squads to hunt the survivors. Newly childless protectors switching sides, joining his army. Hratchp reporting in with the strange, complex secret of the tree-of-life root...
Something thumped three times on the hull.
For an instant he thought it was a memory. He was that far gone. Then he was on his feet, staring up at a point high on the curved wall of the hold. His mind racing.
He had known that there was some kind of non-organic photosynthetic process going on on the surface of the dust. Now his mind extrapolated: currents in the dust, photosynthesis going on on the top, currents bringing food down to larger forms of life. He should have guessed before, and checked. He was far gone, was Phssthpok. Age and dwindling motivation were switching him off too early.
Three measured thumps came from almost beneath his feet.
He crossed the hold in one leap, landed softly, silently. Picked up the flat-nosed softener key. Waited.
Hypothesis: something intelligent was sounding the cargo hold for echoes. Size: unknown. Intelligence: unknown. Sophistication: probably low due to their environment. They would be blind down here, if they had eyes at all. A feel for sound could compensate. The echoes from this thumping could tell them a good deal about what was inside. And then?
They would try to break in. Intelligent beings were curious.
Twing was tough, but not invulnerable.
Phssthpok leapt straight upward, through the hatch and into the control cubby. He hated to leave the captive, but there was no choice. He closed the door to the cargo hold, tested it to be sure it was locked. He climbed rapidly into his pressure suit.
Three measured thumps from somewhere below him. Pause.
Something thumped next to his right arm. Phssthpok applied the softener key to the twing. Thump—and a foot of crude glass rod slammed through the twing. Phssthpok yanked hard on it, reached through the wall and had something softer. He pulled.
He had something roughly Pak-shaped, both smaller and denser than a Pak. It was clutching a reversed spear. Phssthpok hit it savagely where its head joined its shoulders. Something broke, and it went limp. Phssthpok probed its body for soft spots. There was a spot in the middle of its body where bone did not protect. Phssthpok pushed hard into it and clutched with his fingers until he felt something give. Presumably it was dead.
It began to smoke.
Phssthpok watched.
Something in the pod’s atmosphere was causing it to give off fumes. That seemed promising. The spear did not speak for a high civilization. Probably they would have nothing that could penetrate twing. He did not like to risk it—but the alternative was to leak his own breathing-air into the surrounding dust, to poison it.
He opened his helmet for a moment and sniffed. Closed it fast. But he’d smelled chemicals he was familiar with...
He got a squeeze of water, trickled it on the alien’s leg. The result was a fireball. Phssthpok leapt away. From across the room he watched the alien burn.
That seemed straightforward enough.
He went to work rigging a hose from the pod’s water supply to the hull. His last moves he made in haste: using the softener key, running the hose through the hull, removing the key to harden the twing, then running water. There was frantic thumping from all over the hull. It stopped rather suddenly.
He ran most of his reserve of water out into the dust.
He waited several hours, until the whine of the air system dropped to normal. Then he doffed his pressure suit and rejoined Brennan. The captive had noticed nothing.
The water should hold off the natives for awhile. But Phssthpok’s reserves were dwindling almost ludicrously. His ship was abandoned, his remaining drive system was useless, his environment bordered by a spherical shell of dust. Now his water reserve was gone. His life story was almost visibly coming to a close.
Presently he dreamed.
The Blue Ox had circled the sun and was now on the other side of the system, headed for interstellar space. Between Ox and U Thant there was a communications gap of thirty minutes. Sohl and Garner waited, knowing that any information would be half-an-hour late.
Mars was three-quarters fall and impressively large in their rear view camera.
They had asked all the questions, made guesses at the answers, mapped out their search pattern of the Lacis Solis region. Luke was bored. He missed the conveniences built into his travel chair. He thought Nick was bored too, but he was wrong. In space Nick was silent by habit.
The screen flashed on: a woman’s face. The radio cleared its throat and spoke.
“U Thant, this is Tina Jordan aboard Blue Ox.” Luke sensed the woman’s barely repressed panic. Tina caught on her own voice, then blurted, “We’re in trouble. We were testing that alien root in the lab and Einar took a bite out of it! The damn thing was like asbestos from vacuum exposure, but he chewed a piece off and swallowed if before we could stop him. I can’t understand why he did it. It smelled awful!
“Einar’s sick, very sick. He tried to kill me when I took the root away from him. Now he’s gone into coma. We’ve hooked him into the ship’s ‘doc. The ‘doc says Insufficient Data.” They heard a ragged intake of breath. Luke thought he could see bruises beginning to form on the woman’s throat. “We’d like permission to get him to a human doctor.”
Nick cursed and keyed Transmit. “Nick Sohl speaking. Pick a route and get on it. Then finish analyzing that root. Did the smell remind you of anything? Sohl over.” He turned it off. “What the blazes got into him?”
Luke shrugged. “He was hungry?”
“Einar Nilsson, for Finagle’s sake! He was my boss for a year before he quit politics. Why would he try a suicidal trick like that? He’s not stupid.” Nick drummed on the arm of his chair, then began looking for Ceres with the com laser.
In the half hour that passed before the Blue Ox called again, he got dossiers on all three of her crew. “Tina Jordan’s a flatlander. That explains why they waited for orders,” he said.
“Does that need an explanation?”
“Most Belters would have turned around the moment Einar came down sick. The Outsider ship’s empty, and there’s no problem tracking it. No real point in staying. But Jordan’s still a flatlander, still used to being told when to breathe, and La Pan probably didn’t trust his own judgment enough to overide her.”
“Age,” said Luke. “Nilsson was the oldest.”
“What would that have to do with it?”
“I don’t know. He was also the biggest. Maybe he was after a new taste thrill... no, dammit, I don’t believe it either—“
“Blue Ox calling U Thant. We’re on our way home. Course plotted for Vesta. The root analyzes almost normal. High in carbohydrates, including right-hand sugars. The proteins look ordinary. No vitamins at all. We found two compounds Nate says are brand new. One resembles a hormone, testosterone, but it definitely isn’t testosterone.
“The root doesn’t smell like anything I can name, except possibly sour milk or sour cream. The air in the Outsider ship was thin, with an adequate partial pressure of oxygen, no poisonous compounds, at least two percent helium. We spectroanalyzed the porthole material, and—“ She listed a spectrum of elements, high in silicone. “The ‘doc still reports Einar’s illness as Insufficient Data, but now there’s an emergency light. Whatever it is, it’s not good. Any further questions?”
“Not at the moment,” said Nick. “Don’t call back, because we’re going to be too busy landing.” He signed off. He sat drumming on the console with long, tapering fingers. “Helium. That ought to tell us something.”
“A small world with no moon,” Luke speculated. “Big moons tend to skim away a planet’s atmosphere. The Earth would look like Venus without her oversized moon. The helium would be the first to go, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe. It would also be the first to leave a small planet. Think about the Outsider’s strength. It was no small planet be came from.”
Nick and Luke were men who would stop to think before speaking. Conversation aboard U Thant would lapse for minutes, then take up just where it had left off.
“What then?”
“From somewhere in a gas cloud, with lots of helium. The galactic core is in the direction he came from. Plenty of gas clouds and dust clouds in that direction.”
“But thaes an unholy distance away. Will you stop that drumming?”
“It helps me think. Like your smoking.”
“Drum then.”
“Theres no limit to how far he could have come. The faster a Bussard ramjet ship moves, the more fuel it would pick up.”
“There has to be a limit at which the exhaust velocity equals the velocity at which the gas hits the ramscoop field.”
“Possible. But it must be way the Finagle up there. That air tank was huge. The Outsider is a long way from home.”
The autodoc was built into the back wall, set over one of the three disaster couches. Einar was in that couch. His arm was in the ‘doc almost to the shoulder.
Tina watched his face. He had been getting progressively worse. It did not look like sickness; it looked like age. Einar had aged decades in the past hour. He urgently needed a human doctor... but a higher thrust than the Ox’s would have killed him, and the Ox was all they had.
Could they have stopped him? If she’d yelled at once—but then Einn had his hands on her throat, and it was too late. Where had Einar got such strength? He would have killed her.
His chest stopped moving.
Tina looked up at the dial faces on the ‘doc. Usually a panel covered those dials; a spaceship has enough gadgets to watch without added distractions. Tina had been looking at those dials every five minutes, for hours. This time they all showed red.
“He’s dead,” she said. She heard the surprise in her voice, and wondered at it. The cabin walls began to blur and recede.
Nate squirmed out of the control couch and bent over Einar. “And you just noticed! He must have been dead for an hour!”
“No, I swear...” Tina gulped against the rising anaesthesia in her veins. Her body was water. She was going to faint.
“Look at his face and tell me that!”
Tina climbed onto watery legs. She looked down at the ravaged face. Einar, dead, looked hundreds of years old. In sorrow and guilt and repugnance, she reached to touch the dead cheek.
“He’s still warm.”
“Warm?” Nate touched the corpse. “He’s on fire. Fever. Must have been alive seconds ago. Sorry, Tina, I jumped at conclusions. Hey! Are you all right?”
“How dangerous are these approaches?”
“Get that brave little quiver out of your voice,” said Nick. It was pure slander; Luke was nothing but interested. “I’ve made a couple of hundred of these in my life. For sheer thrills I’ve never found anything to beat letting you fly me to Death Valley Port.”
“You said you were in a hurry.”
“So I did. Luke, I’d like to request an admiring silence for the next few minutes.”
“Aha! Ah HA!”
The red planet reached for them, unfolding like a wargod’s fist. Nick’s bantering mood drained away. His face took on a set, stony look. He had not been quite candid with Luke. He had made several hundred powered approaches in his life; true. But those had been asteroid approaches, with gravity negligible or nearly so.
Diemos went by in the direction technically known as “ship’s upward.” Nick inched a lever toward him. Mars was flattening out and simultaneously sliding away as they moved north.
“The base should be there,” said Luke. “At the north edge of that arc. Ah, that must be it, that little crater.”
“Use the scope.”
“Mmmmm... dammit. Ah. There it is. Deflated, of course. See it, Nick?”
“Yah.”
It looked like the abandoned shred of a sky-blue toy balloon.
Dust rose in churning clouds to meet their drive flame. Nick swore viciously and increased thrust. By now Luke had caught on to Nick’s vagaries in blasphemy. When he swore by Finagle it was for humor or emphasis. When he blasphemed in Christian fashion, he meant it.
U Thant slowed and hovered. She was above the dust, then in the dust, and gradually the ochre clouds thinned and backed away. A ring shaped sandstorm receded toward three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon. Thle bedrock lay exposed for the first time in millennia. It was lumpy and brown and worn. In the light of the drive the rounded rock blazed white, with sharp black shadows. Where the drive flame touched it melted.
Nick said, “I’ll have to land in the crater. That dust will flow back in as soon as I turn off the motor.” He angled the ship left and killed the drive. The bottom dropped out. They fell.
They fell all the way on attitude jets, and touched with hardly a bounce.
“Beautiful,” said Luke.
“I do that all the time. I’m going to search the base. You monitor me on helmet camera.”
The ring wall rose above him in worn, rounded, volc4nic-looking stone. Dust dripped back from the rim, ran like molasses down the shallow slope to collect in a pool around the ship’s shock legs. The crater was half a mile across. In the approximate center was the dome, surrounded by a lapping sea of dust.
Nick looked about him, frowning. There seemed no way to reach the dome without crossing the dust, which might not be as shallow as it looked. The crater was ancient; it looked just younger than the planet itself. But it was criss-crossed with younger cracks. Some of the edges were almost sharp; the air and dust were too thin to erode things quickly. There would be bad footing.
He started around the base of the ring wall, walking with care. Dust concealed some of the cracks.
A small, intense sun hung above the crater rim, in a deep purple sky.
On the far side of the dome a narrow path of laser-fused dust led from the dome to the ring wall. It must have been made with the base’s communications laser. The boats were there, moored along the path. Nick did not pause to study them.
There must have been dozens of slits in the dome material. Nick found twelve dried bodies within. Martians had murdered the base personnel over a century ago. They had killed Mller the same way, after Miller had reinflated the dome.
Nick searched each of the small buildings in turn. At some places he had to crawl beneath the transparent folds of the dome. There was no Outsider to meet him. There was no sign of tampering since Mller’s forced visit.
“Dead end,” he reported. “Next step?”
“You’ll have to carry me piggyback until we can find a sand boat.”
Dust had settled over the boats, leaving only flat, wide shapes the color of everything else. For twelve years they had waited for another wave of explorers—explorers who had lost interest and gone home.
It was like seeing ghosts. An Egyptian pharaoh might find such ghosts waiting for him in the afterworld: rank on rank of dumb, faithful retainers, gone before him, and waiting, waiting.
“From here they look good,” said Luke. He settled himself more comfortably on Nick’s shoulders. “We’re in luck, Sinbad.”
“Don’t count your money yet.” Nick started across the dust pond toward the dome. Luke was light on his shoulders, and his own body was light here; but together they were top-heavy. “If I start falling I’ll try to fall sideways. That dust won’t hurt either of us.”
“Don’t fall.”
“The UN fleet will probably be coming here too. To get the boats.”
“They’re days behind us. Come on.”
“The path’s slippery. Dust all over it.”
The boats, three of them, were lined along the west side. Each had four seats and a pair of fans at the stern, below the dust line, caged for protection against submerged rocks. The boats were so flat that any ocean ripple would have sunk them; but in the heavy dust they rode high.
Nick settled his burden not too gently into one of the seats. “See if she’ll start, Luke. I’m going to the dome for fuel.”
“It’ll be hydrazine, with compressed martian air as oxidizer.”
“I’ll just look for something labeled Fuel.”
Luke was able to slart the compressor, but the motor wouldn’t fire. Probably drained the tanks, he decided, and turned everything off. He found a bubble dome collapsed in the back. After making sure it was meant to be worked manually, he wrestled it into place and sealed it down, holding himself in place with a seat belt to get leverage. His long arms and wide hands had never lost an arm wrestling match. The edges of the bubble would probably leak, he decided, but not seriously. He found the inspection hatch that hid an air converter for changing the nitric oxides outside into breathable nitrogen and oxygen.
Nick returned with a green tank balanced on one shoulder. He fueled the boat through an injector nozzle. Luke tried the starter again. It worked. The boat tried to take off without Nick. Luke found the neutral setting, then reverse. Nick waited while he backed up.
“How do I get through the bubble?”
“I guess you don’t.” Luke collapsed the bubble, unsealed one side for Nick, then sealed it after him. The bubble began to fill, slowly. “Best keep our suits on,” said Luke. “It may be an hour before we can breathe in here.”
“You can collapse it then. We’ve got to got provisions from the ship.”
It was two hours before they raised the bubble and started for the opening in the ring wall.
The dark sandstone cliffs that framed the opening were sharp and clear, clearly dynamite-blasted, as artificial as the glassy path between dome and ring wall. Nick was settled comfortably in one of the passenger chairs, his feet propped on another, his eyes on the screen of the dismounted deep-radar.
“Seems deep enough now,” he said.
“Then I’ll open her up,” said Luke. The fans spun; the stern dipped far down, then righted. They skunmed across the dust at ten knots, leaving two straight, shallow, regwlar swells as a wake.
The deep-radar screen regktered a density pattern in three dimensions. It showed a smooth bottom, regular swells and dips from which millions of years had eliminated all sharp lines and points. There was little volcanic activity on Mars.
Thle desert was as flat as a mirror. Rounded dun rocks poked through its surface, incongruous, Daliesque. Craters sat on the dust like badly made clay ash trays. Some were a few inches across. Some were so large that they had to be seen from orbit. The horizon was straight and close and razor sharp, glowing yellow below and artery red above. Nick turned his head to watch the crater recede.
His eyes widened, then squinted. Something?
“Damn’t. Hold itl” he shouted. “Turn around! Turn hard left!”
“Back toward the crater?”
“Yes!”
Luke cut the power in one motor. The boat turned its prow to the left but continued to skid sideways across the dust. Then the right fan bit in, and the boat curved around.
“I see it,” said Luke.
It was little more than a dot at that distance, but it showed clearly against the calm monochrome sea around it. And it moved. It jerked, it paused to rest, it jerked again, rolling sideways. It was several hundred yards from the crater wall.
As they approached, it grew clearer. It was cylindrical, the shape of a short caterpillar, and translucent; and soft, for they saw it bend as it moved. It was trying to reach the opening in the ring wall.
Luke throttled down. The dustboat slowed and settled deeper. As they pulled alongside Luke saw that Nick had armed himself with a signal gun.
“It’s him,” said Nick. He sounded awed. He leaned over the side, gun at the ready.
The caterpillar was a transparent, inflated sack. Inside was something that rolled over and over, slowly, painfully, trying to get closer to the side of the boat. It was as clearly alien as anything created in the days of flat television.
It was humanoid, as much so as a stick-figure drawing is humanoid. It was all knobs. Elbows, knees, shoulders, cheekbones, they stuck out like marbles or grapefruit or bowling balls. The bald head swelled and rose behind like hydrocephalus.
It stopped trying to roll when it bumped against the boat.
“It looks helpless enough,” Nick said dubiously.
“Well, here goes our air again.” Luke deflated the bubble. The two men reached over the side, picked up the pressurized sack and dropped it in the bottom of the boat. The alien’s expression did not change, and probably could not. That face looked hard. But it did a strange thing. With thumb and forefinger of a hand like a score of black walnuts strung together, it made a circle.
Nick said, “It must have learned that from Brennan.”
“Look at the bones, Nick. The bones correspond to a human skeleton.”
“Its arms are too long for human. And its back slopes more.”
“Yah. Well, we can’t take him back to the ship, and we can’t talk to him the way he is now. Well have to wait out here while the bubble inflates.”
“We seem to spend most of our time waiting,” said Luke.
Nick nodded. His fingers drummed against the back of a chair. For twenty minutes the boat’s small converter had been straining to fill the bubble, using and changing the thin, poisonous mixture outside.
But the alien hadn’t moved at all. Luke had been watching. Ile alien lay in its inflated bag in the bottom of the boat, and it waited. Its human eyes watched them from inside pits of tough, leathery wrinkles. Just so, with just such patience, might a dead man wait for Judgment Day.
“At least we have it at a disadvantage,” said Nick. “It won’t be kidnapping us.”
“I think he must be insane.”
“Insane? Its motives may be a little strange—“
“Look at the evidence. He came plowing into the System in a ship just adequate to get him here. His air tank was on its last gasp. There was no evidence of failsafe devices anywhere aboard. He made no attempt to contact anyone, as far as we can tell. He killed or kidnapped Brennan. He then proceeded to abandon his interstellar drive and ran for Mars, presumably to hide. Now he’s abandoned his reentry vehicle, and whatever’s left of Brennan too; he’s rolled across a martian desert in a sandwich bag to reach the first place any exploring ship would land! He’s a nut. He’s escaped from some interstellar mental institution.”
“You keep saying him. It’s an it. Think of it as an it and you’ll be ready for it to act peculiar.”
“That’s a cop-out. The universe is rational. In order to survive, this thing has to be rational too, he, she, or it.”
“Another couple of minutes and we can—“
The alien moved. Its hand slashed down the length of the sack. Instantly Nick raised the signal gun. Instantly... but the alien reached through a long gap in the sack and took the gun out of Nick’s hand before Nick could react. There was no sign of haste. It placed the gun in the back of the boat and sat up.
It spoke. Its speech was full of clickings and rustlings and poppings. The flat, hard beak must have been a handicap. But it could be understood.
It said, “Take me to your leader.”
Nick recovered first. He straightened his shoulders, cleared his throat and said, “That will involve a trip of several days. Meanwhile, we welcome you to human space.”
“I’m afraid not,” said the monster. “I hate to ruin your day. My name’s Jack Brennan, and I’m a Belter. Aren’t you Nick Sohl?”