The awful silence erupted in the sound of Luke’s laughter. “You think of it as an alien and you’ll be ready for s-strange—h-hahaha...”
Nick felt panic close around his throat. “You. You’re Brennan?”
“Yah. And you’re Nick Sohl. I saw you once in Confinement. But I don’t recognize your friend.”
“Lucas Garner.” Luke had himself under control. “Your photographs don’t do you justice, Brennan.”
“I did something stupid,” said the Brennan-monster. Its voice was no more human, its appearance no less intimidating. “I went to meet the Outsider. You were trying to do the same, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” There was a sardonic amusement in Luke’s eyes and Luke’s voice. Whether or not he believed the Brennan-monster, he was enjoying the situation. “Was there really an Outsider, Brennan?”
“Unless you want to quibble about definitions.”
Sohl broke in. “For God’s sake, Brennan! What happened to you?”
“That’s a long story. Are we pressed for time? Of course not, you’d have started the motor. All right, I’d like to tell this my own way, so please maintain a respectful silence, remembering that if I hadn’t gotten in the way you’d look just like this, and serve you right, too.” He looked hard at the two men. “I’m wrong. You wouldn’t. You’re both past the age.
“Well, bear with me. There exists a race of bipeds that live near the edge of the globe of close-packed suns at the core of the galaxy...
“The most important thing about them is that they live in three stages of maturity. There is childhood, which is self-explanatory. There is the breeder stage, a biped just short of intelligence, whose purpose is to create more children. And there is the protector.
“At around age forty-two, our time, the breeder stage gets the urge to eat the root of a certain bush. Up to then he stayed away from it, because its smell was repugnant to him. Suddenly it smells delicious. The bush grows all over the planet; there’s no real chance that the root won’t be available to any breeder who lives long enough to want it.
“The root initiates certain changes, both physiological and emotional. Before I go into detail, I’ll let you in on the big secret. The race I speak of calls itself—“ The Brennan-monster clicked its horny beak sharply together. Pak. “But we call it Homo habilis.”
“What?” Nick seemed forced into the position of straight man, and he didn’t like it. But Luke sat hugging his useless legs to his chest, grinning with huge enjoyment.
“There was an expedition that landed on Earth some two and a half million years ago. The bush they brought wouldn’t grow right, so there haven’t been any protector stage Pak on Earth. I’ll get to that.
“When a breeder eats the root, these changes take place. His or her gonads and obvious sexual characteristics disappear. His skull softens and his brain begins to grow, until it is comfortably larger and more complex than yours, gentlemen. The skull then hardens and develops a bony crest. The teeth fall out, whatever teeth are left; the gums and lips grow together and form a hard, almost flat beak. My face is too flat; it works better with Homo habilis. All hair disappears. Some joints swell enormously, to supply much greater leverage to the muscle. The moment arm increases, you follow? The skin hardens and wrinkles to form a kind of armor. Fingernails become claws, retractile, so that a protector’s fingertips are actually more sensitive than before, and better toolmakers. A simple two-chamber heart forms where the two veins from the legs, whatever the hell they’re called, join to approach the heart. Notice that my skin is thicker there? Well, there are less dramatic changes, but they all contribute to make the protector a powerful, intelligent fighting machine. Garner, you no longer seem amused.”
“It all sounds awfully familiar.”
“I wondered if you’d spot that. The emotional changes are drastic. A protector who has bred true feels no urge except the urge to protect those of his blood line. He recognizes them by smell. His increased intelligence does him no good here, because his hormones rule his motives. Nick, has it occurred to you that all of these changes are a kind of exaggeration of what happens to men and women as they get older? Garner saw it right away.”
“Yes, but—“
“The extra heart,” Luke broke in. “What about that?”
“Like the expanded brain, it doesn’t form without tree-of-life. After fifty, without modern medical care, a normal human heart becomes inadequate. Eventually it stops.”
“Ah.”
“Do you two find this convincing?”
Luke was reserving judgment. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m really more interested in convincing Nick. My Belt citizenship depends on my convincing you I’m Brennan. Not to mention my bank account and my ship and cargo. Nick, I’ve got an abandoned fuel tank from the Mariner XX attached to my ship, which I last left falling across the solar system at high speed.”
“It’s still doing that,” said Nick. “Likewise the Outsider ship. We ought to be doing something about recovering it.”
“Finagle’s eyes, yes! It’s not that good a design, I could improve it blindfold, but you could buy Ceres with the monopoles!”
“First things first,” Garner said mildly.
“That ship is receding, Garner. Oh, I see what you mean; you’re afraid to put an alien monster near a working spacecraft.” The Brennan-monster glanced back at the flare gun, flickeringly, then apparently abandoned the idea of hijacking the dustboat. “We’ll stay out here until you’re convinced. Is that a deal? Could you get a better deal anywhere?”
“Not from a Belter. Brennan, there is considerable evidence that man is related to the other primates of Earth.”
“I don’t doubt it. I’ve got some theories.”
“Say on.”
“About that lost colony. A big ship arrived here, and four landing craft went down with some thirty protectors and a lot of breeders. A year later the protectors knew they’d picked the wrong planet. The bush they needed grew wrong. They sent a message for help, by laser, and then they died. Starvation is a normal death for a protector, but it’s usually voluntary. These starved against their will.” There was no emotion in the Brennan-monster’s voice or mask-like face.
“They died. The breeders were breeding without check. There was endless room, and the protectors must have wiped out any dangerous life forms. What happened next has to be speculation. The protectors were dead, but the breeders were used to their helping out, and they stayed around the ships.”
“And?”
“And the piles got hot without the protectors to keep them balanced. They had to be fission piles, given the state of the art. Maybe they exploded. Maybe not. The radiation caused mutations resulting in everything from lemurs to apes and chimpanzees to ancient and modern man.
“Thaes one theory,” said the Brennan-monster. “Another is that the protectors deliberately started breeding mutations, so that breeders would have a chance to survive in some form until help came. The results would be the same.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Nick.
“You will. You should now. There’s enough evidence, particularly in religions and folk tales. What percentage of humanity genuinely expects to live forever? Why do so many religions include a race of immortal beings who are constantly battling one another? What’s the justification for ancestor worship? You know what happens to a man without modern geriatrics: as he ages his brain cells start to die. Yet people tend to respect him, to listen to him. Where do guardian angels come from?”
“Race memory?”
“Probably. It’s hard to believe a tradition could survive that long.”
“South Africa,” said Luke. “They must have landed in South Africa, somewhere near Olduvai Gorge National Park. All the primates are there.”
“Not quite. Maybe one ship landed in Australia, for the metals. You know, the protectors may have just scattered radioactive dust around and left it at that. The breeders would breed like rabbits without natural enemies, and the radiation would help them change. With all the protectors dead, they’d have to develop new shticks. Some got strength, some got agility, some got intelligence. Most got dead, of course. Mutations do.”
“I seem to remember,” said Luke, “that the aging process in man can be compared to the program running out in a space probe. Once the probe has done its work it doesn’t matter what happens to it. Similarly, once we pass the age at which we can have children—“
“—Evolution is through with you. You’re moving on inertia only, following your course with no corrective mechanisms.” The Brennan-monster nodded. “Of course the root supplies the program for the third stage. Good comparison.”
Nick said, “Any idea what went wrong with the root?”
“Oh, that’s no mystery. Though it had the protectors of Pak going crazy for awhile. No wonder a small colony couldn’t solve it. There’s a virus that lives in the root. It carries the genes for the change from breeder to protector. It can’t live outside the root, so a protector has to eat more root every so often. If there’s no thalium in the soil, the root still grows, but it won’t support the virus.”
“That sounds pretty complicated.”
“Ever work with a hydroponics garden? The relationships in a stable ecology can be complicated. There was no problem on the Pak world. Thalium is a rare earth, but it must be common enough among all those Population H stars. And the root grows everywhere.”
Nick said, “Where does the Outsider come in?”
A hiss and snap of beak: Phssth-pok. “Phssthpok found old records, including the call for help. He was the first protector in two and a half million years to realize that there was a way to find Sol, or at least to narrow the search. And he had no children, so he had to find a Cause quick, before the urge to eat left him. That’s what happens to a protector when his blood line is dead. More lack of programming. Incidentally, you might note the heavy protection against mutation in the Pak species. A mutation doesn’t smell right. That could be important in the galactic core, where radiation is heavy.”
“So he came barreling out here with a hold full of seeds?”
“And bags of thalium oxide. The oxide was easiest to carry. I wondered about the construction of his ship, but you can see why he trailed his cargo section behind his lifesystem. Radiation doesn’t bother him, in small amounts. He can’t have children.”
“Where is he now?”
“I had to kill him.”
“What?” Garner was shocked. “Did he attack you?”
“No.”
“Then—I don’t understand.”
The Brennan-monster seemed to hesitate. It said, “Garner, Sohl, listen to me. Twelve miles from here, some fifty feet under the sand, is part of an alien spacecraft filled with roots and seeds and bags of thalium oxide. The roots I can grow from those seeds can make a man nearly immortal. Now what? What are we going to do with them?”
The two men looked at each other. Luke seemed about to speak, closed his mouth.
“That’s a tough one, right? But you can guess what Phssthpok expected, can’t you?”
Phssthpok dreamed.
He knew to within a day just how long it would take for Brennan to wake up. He could have been wrong, of course. But if he were, then Brennan’s kind would have mutated too far from the Pak form.
Knowing how long he had, Phssthpok could time his dreaming. The martians were no threat now, though something would have to be done about them eventually. Dreaming was a fine art to a protector. He had about ten days. For a week he dreamed the past, up until the day he left the Pak planet. Sensory stimulation had been skimpy during the voyage. He moved on into the future.
Phssthpok dreamed...
It would begin when his captive woke. From the looks of him, the captive’s brain would be larger than Phssthpok’s; there was that frontal bulge, ruining the slope of the face. He would learn fast. Phssthpok would teach him how to be a protector, and what to do with the roots and seeds of tree-of-life.
Did the breeder have children? If so, he would take the secret for his own, using tree-of-life to make protectors of his own descendants. That was all right. If he had sense enough to spread his family around, avoiding inbreeding, his blood line should reach out to include most of this system’s Pak race.
Probably he would kill Phssthpok to keep the secret. That was all right too.
There was a nightmare tinge to Phssthpok’s dreaming. For the captive didn’t look right. His fingernails were developing wrong. His head was certainly not the right shape. That frontal bulge... and his beak was as flat as his face had been. His back wasn’t arched, his legs were wrong, his arms were too short. His kind had had too much time to mutate.
But he’d reacted correctly to the roots.
The future was uncertain... except for Phssthpok. Let the captive learn what he needed to know, if he could; let him carry on the work, if he could. There would come a day when Earth was a second Pak world. Phssthpok had done his best. He would teach, and die.
Brennan stirred. He unfolded his curled body, stretched wide and opened his eyes. He stared unwinking at Phssthpok, stared as if he were reading the protector’s mind. All new protectors did that: orienting themselves through memories they were only now beginning to understand.
“I wonder if I can make you understand how fast it all was,” said the Brennan-monster. He gazed at the two old men, one twice the age of the other but both past the transition age, and wondered that they should be his judges.
“In two days we learned each other’s language. His is much faster than mine and fits my mouth better, so we used it. He told me his life story. We discussed the martians, working out the most efficient way to exterminate them—“
“*What*?”
“To exterminate them, Garner. Hell, they’ve killed thirteen men already! We talked practically nonstop, with Phssthpok doing most of the talking, and all the time we were hard at work: calisthenics to build me up, fins for Phssthpok’s suit so he could swim the dust, widgets to get every atom of air and water out of the life support system and take it to the base. I’ve never seen the base; we had to extrapolate the design so we’d know how to re-inflate it and protect it.
“The third day he told me how to get a tree-of-life crop growing. He had the box open and was telling me how to unfreeze the seeds safely. He was giving me orders just as if I were a voice-box computer. I was about to ask, ‘Don’t I get any choices at all?’ And I didn’t.”
“I don’t follow,” said Garner.
“I didn’t get any choices. I was too intelligent. It’s been that way ever since I woke up. I get answers before I can finish formulating the question. If I always see the best answer, then where’s my choice? Where’s my free will? You can’t believe how fast this all was. I saw the whole chain of logic in one flash. I slammed Phssthpok’s head hard against the edge of the freezer. It stunned him long enough so that I could break his throat against the edge. Then I jumped back in case he attacked. I figured I could hold him off until he strangled. But he didn’t attack. He hadn’t figured it out, not yet.”
“It sounds like murder, Brennan. He didn’t want to kill you?”
“Not yet. I was his shining hope. He couldn’t even defend himself for fear of bruising me. He was older than me, and he knew how to fight. He could have killed me if hed wanted to, but he couldn’t want to. It took him thirty-two thousand years of real time to bring us those roots. I was supposed to finish the job.
“I think he died believing he’d succeeded. He half-expected me to kill him.”
“Brennan. Why?”
The Brennan-monster shrugged cantaloupe shoulders. “He was wrong. I killed him because he would have tried to wipe out humanity when he learned the truth.” He reached into the slit balloon that had brought him across twelve miles of fluid dust. He pulled out a jury-rigged something that hummed softly—his air renewal setup, made from parts of Phssthpok’s control board—and dropped it in the boat. Next he pulled out half of a yellow root like a raw sweet potato. He hold it under Garnees nose. “Smell.”
Luke sniffed. “Pleasant enough. Like a liqueur.”
“Sohl?”
“Nice. How’s it taste?”
“If you knew it would turn you into something like me, would you take a bite of it? Garner?”
“This instant. I’d like to live forever, and I’m afraid of going senile.”
“Sohl?”
“NO. I’m not ready to give up sex yet.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventy-four. Birthday two months from now.”
“You’re already too old. You were too old at fifty; It would have killed you. Would you have volunteered at forty-five?”
Sohl laughed. “Not likely.”
“Well, that’s half the answer. From Phssthpok’s point of view we’re a failure. The other half is that no sane man would turn the root loose on Earth or Belt or anywhere else.”
“I should hope not. But let’s hear your reasons.”
“War. The Pak world has never been free from war at any time in its history. Naturally not, with every protector acting to expand and protect his blood line at the expense of all the others. Knowledge keeps getting lost. The race can’t cooperate for a minute beyond the point where one protector sees an advantage in betraying the others. They can’t make any kind of progress because of that continual state of war.
“And I’m to turn that loose on Earth? Can you imagine a thousand protectors deciding their grandchildren need more room? Your eighteen billion flatlanders live too close to the edge already; you can’t afford the resources.
“Besides which, we don’t really need tree-of-life. Garner, when were you born? Nineteen forty or thereabouts?”
“Thirty-nine.”
“Geriatrics is getting so good so fast that my kids could live a thousand years. We’ll get longevity without tree-of-life, without sacrificing anything at all.
“Now look at it from Phssthpok’s viewpoint,” the Brennan-monster continued. “We’re a mutation. We’ve settled the solar system and started some interstellar colonies. We will and must refuse the root, and even when it’s forced on us, the resulting mutated protectors are atypical. Phssthpok thought in terms of the long view. We’re not Pak, we’re no use to the Pak, and it’s conceivable that someday we’ll reach the core suns. The Pak will attack us the moment they see us, and we’ll fight back.” He shrugged. “And we’ll win. The Pak don’t unite effectively. We do. We’ll have a better technology than theirs.”
“We will?”
“I told you, they can’t keep their technology. Whatever can’t be used immediately, gets lost until someone files it in the Library. Military knowledge never gets filed; the families keep it a deep, dark secret. And the only ones to use the Library are childless protectors. There aren’t many of them, and they aren’t highly motivated.”
“Couldn’t you have tried to talk to him?”
“Garner, I’m not getting through to you. He’d have killed me the moment he figured it out! He was trained to fight protectors. I wouldn’t have had a chance. Then he’d have tried to wipe out the human species. We’d have been much worse to him than hostile aliens. We’re a corruption of the Pak form itself.”
“But he couldn’t do it. He was all alone.”
“I’ve thought of half a dozen things he could have tried. None of them sure things, but I couldn’t risk it.”
“Name one.”
“Plant tree-of-life all through Congo National Park. Organize the monkey and chimpanzee protectors.”
“He was marooned here.”
“He could have commandeered your ship. He’d have had your silly flare gun as fast as I did. Gentlemen, may I point out that it’s near sunset? I don’t think we want to navigate the ring wall in darkness.”
Luke started the motor.
“This is Martin Shaeffer at Ceres calling Nick Sohl aboard U Thant. Nick, I don’t know how your hunting goes, but Phobos reports that you’ve landed safely at Olympus Base, and they’re tracking your dustboat wake. Presumably you’ll find this on tape when you get back.
“We’ve sent the Blue Ox to meet you, on the theory that you may need the computer package as a translating device. Eisaku Ikeda commanding. The Ox should reach Olympus Base a day behind the UN fleet.
“Einar Nilsson is dead. We’ll have an autopsy report shortly.
“We’ve sent fuel ships and construction facilities to rendezvous with the Outsider ship. There are two singleships falling alongside already, and the Outsider ship has a tested tow line of its own. We may be able to rig the singleships for towing. Still, it’s all going to be very sticky and time consuming. We may not get it home to the Belt for a couple of years.
“Nick, when the Ox gets there, be careful of Tina Jordan. Don’t shake her up. She’s had a bad shock. I think she blames herself for what happened to Einar.
“Repeating...”
Luke docked the dustboat in near-darkness. He said, “You’ll have to wait in the boat, Brennan. Nick can’t carry us both.”
“I’ll roll,” said the Brennan-monster.
Nick’s walk down the path and around the rim of the dust pool was made in unseemly haste. “Take it easy,” Luke complained. “You can’t trot in this light. You’ll fall and crack both our helmets.”
“He’s going to beat us to the ship,” Nick said edgily.
Brennan was taking the short cut, rolling directly across the dust.
“Slow down. You can’t beat him, and he can’t get up the ladder.”
“Maybe he’s thought of a way. If he does... oh, hell.” Nick slowed down. Brennan had rolled uphill to the foot of U Thant’s ladder. He waited for them there like a translucent sausage.
“Nick? Do you trust him?”
It was seconds before he answered. “I think his story’s straight. He’s a Belter. Or an ex-Belter.”
“He swore by damn instead of by Finagle.”
“So do I. And he recognized me. No, I’ll tell you what really convinced me. He didn’t ask about his wife, because she can take care of herself. He asked about his cargo. He’s a Belter.”
“We accept his story, then. Anthropology and all. Wow.”
“His story, yes. Luke, I’ll take you up, then come back for Brennan. But I won’t come down until you’re talking to Ceres. I want all of this on record before I let him in the ship. I’m still wondering about his motives.”
“Ah.”
“He said it himself. Motives change for a protector.” Garner was already signing off when Brennan climbed out of his zippered balloon. Brennan made no mention of the delay. He said, “If you’re worried about accommodations, I can get along without an acceleration couch. In fact, I can ride outside in a cargo net if you’ll give me a radio link. If my patchwork air plant breaks down I’d want to get inside fast.”
“That won’t be necessary. It’ll be cramped, but not that cramped,” said Nick. He squeezed past Brennan, wincing inside himself from the dry leathery touch, and into the control chair. “We seem to have a message.”
They listened in silence to the recorded voice of Lit Shaeffer.
“Too bad about Nilsson,” Brennan said afterward. “There wasn’t much chance they’d let him eat enough of the root, even if he wasn’t past the age.”
Nobody answered.
“Shaeffer’s right, you know. Doing it that way, it’ll take you a couple of years to drag Phssthpok’s ship home.”
“Have you got a better idea?”’
“Of course I’ve got a better idea, Nick, you idiot. I can fly that ship home myself.”
“You?” Nick stared. “When did the Outsider ever let you operate the controls?”
“He never did. But I saw them, and they didn’t look cryptic. Just complicated. I’m sure I can figure out how to fly it. All you’ve got to do is fuel the ship and fly me to it.”
“Uh huh. What do we do about the cargo pod? Leave it where it is?”
“No. Theres a gravity polarizer in that pod.”
“Oh?”
“Not to mention the supply of roots, which I need, even if you don’t. The seeds count too. Gentlemen, when you have finally grasped the extent of my magnificent intelligence, youll see what those seeds represent. They’re a failsafe for the human race. If we ever really need a leader, we can make one. Just pick a forty-two-year-old childless volunteer and turn him or her loose in the tree-of-life patch.”
“I’m not sure how well I like that,” said Garner.
“Well, the gravity polarizer’s important enough. You and the UN fleet can retrieve it while Nick and I go after Phssthpok’s ship—“
Nick said, “Just a—“
“—You won’t have to worry about the martians for awhile. I dumped Phssthpok’s share of the water into the dust, just before I left. Don’t let anyone into the pod without a pressure suit. Need I elaborate?”
“No,” said Garner. He felt like an amateur on skis. Somewhere he had lost control, and now events were moving too fast.
Nick spoke with a certain amount of anger. “Hold it. What makes you think we’d trust you to fly the Outsider ship?”
“Take your time. Think it through,” said Brennan. “You’ll have my supply of root for hostage. And where would I go with a Bussard ramjet? Where would I sell it? Where would I hide, with my face?”
Nick’s face wore a trapped look. Where was his own free will?
“It’s probably the most valuable artifact in human space,” said Brennan. “It’s falling outward at several hundred miles per second. Each minute you take to make up your mind now is going to cost us a couple of hours hauling it back from interstellar space. You’ll pay for that in extra fuel and provisions and man-hours and delays. But take your time. Think it through.”
The Brennan-monster had the ability to relax. Sometime in the future there would be periods of furious activity...
They left Lucas Garner on Phobos, refueled there, and took off. Garner did not see Nick again for seven months. He did not see Brennan ever again.
For the rest of his life he remembered that cramped conversation. Brennan—on his back with his knees up, in a position of acute discomfort—was a blurred half-alien voice behind his control couch. Brennan had trouble with his V’s and W’s, but he could be understood. His voice was full of clickings.
An indefinite tension went out of Nick once they were in free fall. Mars converged slowly on itself, a bright varied landscape reddening as it lost detail.
“Children. You’ve got children,” Luke remembered suddenly.
“I’m aware of that. But fear not. I don’t intend to hover over them. They’ll have a better chance for happiness without that.”
“The hormone changes didn’t work?”
“I’m as neuter as a bumblebee. They must have worked to some extent. I think most of a Protector’s urge to die after his blood line is dead must be cultural. Training. I don’t have that training, that conviction that a breeder can’t be happy or safe without his ancestors constantly telling him what to do. Nick, can you give it out that the Outsider killed me?”
“What? What for?”
“Best for the children. I couldn’t keep seeing them without affecting their lives. Best for Charlotte too. I don’t intend to rejoin society as such. There’s nothing there for me.”
“The Belt doesn’t look down on cripples, Brennan.”
“No,” Brennan said with finality. “Give me an asteroid I can bubble-form and I’ll raise tree-of-life. Set me up a monthly liaison with Ceres so I can keep abreast of current developments. I’ll be able to pay for all this with new inventions. I think I can design a manned ramrobot. Better than Phssthpok’s.”
Garner said, “You called it tree-of-life?”
“It’s a good name. You remember that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. According to Genesis, the reason they were kicked out was that they might also have eaten from the Tree of Life, to live forever. ‘And be as one of us’—it would have made them equivalent to angels. Now it looks like both trees were the same.”
Luke found a cigarette. “I don’t know that I like the idea of you producing tree-of-life crops.”
“I don’t much like the idea of a State secret,” said Nick. “The Belt has never had State secrets.”
“I hope I can convince you. I can’t protect my children, but I can try to protect the human race. If I was needed, I’d be there. If more were needed, there would be the root.”
“The cure would be worse than the disease, most likely.” Luke used his lighter. “Wha—“ A knotted hand had reached around the crash couch and taken the cigarette from his mouth and stubbed it out against the hull.
It had been a shock. He remembered it with a shiver as he traversed the double airlocks at the axis of Farmer’s Asteroid.
Long ago, Farmer’s Asteroid had been an approximate cylinder of nickel-iron orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Then Belt industry had bubble-formed it: set it rotating, heated the metal nearly to melting and inflated it, via exploding bags of water, into a cylindrical bubble five miles in radius. Its rotation produced half a gravity. Much of the Belt’s food supply was grown here.
Luke had been in Farmer’s Asteroid once before. He enjoyed the landscaped interior, the wedding-ring lake, the checkered farmlands that rolled out and away and up and over, to where tiny tractors plowed furrows ten miles overhead.
The airlock let him out at the axis. It was cold here behind the sunshield, where the rays of the axial fusion tube never fell. Icebergs condensed out of the air here; and eventually broke loose and slid downslope, and melted into rivers that flowed in carved beds to the wedding-ring lake that girdled Farmer’s Asteroid. Nick Sohl met him here, and helped him tow himself downslope to where a travel chair waited.
“I can guess why you’re here,” Nick told him.
“Officially, I’m here at the request of the Joint Interstellar Colony Authority. They got your request to send a warning message to Wunderland. They weren’t at all clear on what the situation was, and I couldn’t give them much help.”
“You had my report,” Nick said a bit stiffly.
“It wasn’t much of a report, Nick.”
After a bit Nick nodded. “My fault. I just didn’t want to talk about it—and don’t now, for the matter of that—and it was too bloody late. We didn’t just give up, you know. We’ve been tracking him.”
“What happened, Nick?”
“They’d done considerable work when I got there with Brennan. The idea was to rig two singleships together with their drive tubes aimed about ten degrees apart, then moor the framework to the cable from the Pak ship. There was eight miles of it behind the lifesystem section. We could have hauled them home at low thrust. But Brennan said that the Pak drive section would produce ten times the thrust.
“So we boarded the Pak lifesystem sphere and Brennan played around with the controls. I spent a couple of days in there watching him. It turns out you can make the whole hull transparent, or just part of it, the way it was when we found it. We widened the hole Tina Jordan left and fitted an airlock into it.
“Two days of fiddling, and then Brennan said he had it figured out and all we had to do was refuel the drive section. He said that if we tried to tow it backward we’d set off all kinds of failsafe systems. Garner, how the hell was I to know—“
“You couldn’t. It still doesn’t make sense.”
Nick ran a hand backward through his white wool crest. “They’d already rigged up a mating plug to match the fuel plug on the Pak ship. Brennan insisted on doing all the work himself, and even he had to use a radiation suit and shield. We moored his own singleship to the tow line, just in case something failed on the way home. That was my idea, Garner.”
“Uh huh.”
“He took off headed back toward Sol. We tried to fly formation with him, but he was putting the ship through maneuvers, testing the control sytems. We kept our distance. Then—he just turned around and headed out into interstellar space.”
“You tried to catch him?”
Nick yelped, “What tried? We flew alongside him! I didn’t want to make any threatening moves, but he wouldn’t communicate, and we were going to run out of fuel. I ordered Dubchek and Gorton to use their drives as weapons if he didn’t sheer off.”
“What happened?”
“I think he must have turned on his Bussard ramjet field. The electromagnetic effects burned out enough of our equipment to leave us dead in space. Were lucky the drives didn’t blow up. A fuel ship finally got to us, and we managed to make some repairs. By that time Brennan was up to ramscoop speed.”
“All right.”
“How the bell was I to know? We’ve got his food supplyl That bin of roots was almost empty. Was it just a fancy way to commit suicide? Was he afraid of what we’d do with a manned Bussard ramjet ship?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. You know, that could be it. Nick, do you remember him mashing out my cigarette?”
Nick chortled. “Sure. He apologized all over the place, but he wouldn’t let you smoke. I thought you were going to hit him.”
“He’s a protector. Whatever he does, it’s for our own good.” Luke scowled, remembering someone... no, that was all he remembered about her. A high school teacher? “He didn’t want us to have the Pak ship, or something we could learn from it, or from him.”
“Then why did he spend two months out there beyond Pluto? You don’t stop halfway with a Bussard ramjet! It costs reserve fuel! And theres nothing at all out there—“
“The cometary belt, they call it. Most comets spend most of their time out there beyond Pluto. It’s thin, but there’s matter out there. Theres a tenth planet too.”
“He never went near Persephone.”
“But he may have gone near any number of comets.”
“... Right. Okay, he spent two months out there, at rest as far as our monopole detectors could determine. Last month he started moving again. We followed him that long before we were sure. He’s accelerating toward Alpha Centauri. Wunderland.”
“How long before he gets there?”
“Oh, twenty years anyway. It’s a low thrust drive. But we can warn them, and set things up so that our successors warn them again in fifteen years. Just in case.”
“Okay, we can do that. What else? You knew that we dug up the cargo pod.”
“That’s all we know. The UN can keep secrets too.”
“We destroyed the roots and seeds. Nobody really liked the idea, but we did it.”
It was a long time before Nick answered, “Good.”
“Good or bad, we did it. We haven’t had any luck at all understanding the gravity polarizer. If that’s what it was. Brennan could have been lying.”
“It was a gravity polarizer.”
“Just how do you know that?”
“We analyzed the record of the Outsider’s course to Mars. His acceleration varies according to local gravitational gradients: not just by thrust but by direction too.”
“All right, that’ll help. What else can we do?”
“About Brennan, nothing. Eventually he’ll starve. Meanwhile we’ll always know exactly where he is.”
“Or where his monopole source is.”
Nick spoke with dwindling patience. “He doesn’t have a ship without his monopole package. He doesn’t have a food supply, period. He’s dead, Garner.”
“I keep remembering that he’s smarter than we are. If he can find a way to hibernate, it would get him to Wunderland. A thriving colony... and so what? What does he want with Wunderland?”
“Something we haven’t thought of.”
“I’ll never know what it is. I’ll be dead before Brennan reaches Wunderland.” Luke sighed. “Poor Outsider. All this way to bring us the roots that would let us lead a normal life.”
“His intentions were good. Life is hard on us heroes,” Nick said seriously.
How to describe a gap of two centuries? Events are the measure of time. A great many things happened in two hundred and twenty years.
The dry corpse of Phssthpok ended in the Smithsonian Institution. There was some discussion as to whether to class it among the hominids. His story was third hand by now, with Brennan unavailable, but his skeleton matched hominid bone structure, bone for bone.
Lucas Garner was dead when the Pak ship passed course midpoint. It did not make turnover. Nick Sohl was watching when its magnetic trace passed Wunderland, two years early and still accelerating toward nowhere. And he wondered.
Olympus Base on Mars was rebuilt to study Phssthpok’s cargo pod in situ, that being easier than trying to lift it against gravity with the gravity polarizer still going. The study group was reluctant to shut it down until they knew how to restart it. They used a hovering singleship to fuse the dust beneath the base, as protection against martians.
The Belt population increased considerably. Bubble worlds proliferated, some equipped with drives to move them around. Mining was becoming more difficult; the best lodes had been exhausted. Cities spread throughout the larger rocks. A decreasing percentage of Belters flew singleships.
A large ice asteroid impacted on Mars, causing dust storms and minor quakes to trouble Olympus Base.
The interstellar colonies prospered and changed. Jinx developed extensive vacuum industries, where the planet’s landscape rises out of the atmosphere at the East End. Society became repressive on Plateau. Wunderland’s population expanded and spread thinly across the major continent, so that cities were long in developing. Civilization developed underground on We Made It, to avoid the hurricane winds of summer and winter. Home was settled, and prospered, benefitting from new techniques and from mistakes made on the earlier colony worlds.
Laser beams passed between Earth and the colonies, and occasional ramrobots left the linear accelerator on Juno, carrying cargoes of new knowledge. Of late most of the ramrobot “gifts” were advances in biological engineering, seeds and frozen fertilized eggs. News from the colonies was sparse, though Jinx and Home had excellent communications lasers.
The drug problem on Earth had become a dead issue by Lucas Garnees time. Potential drug addicts tended to become wireheads; the experience was more complete, and current was cheap after the initial expense of the operation. Wireheads bother nobody; the wirehead problem was never serious. By 2340 it had almost solved itself. People had learned to handle it.
Earth’s population kept itself stable, by force when necessary.
The gravity polarizer seemed beyond human understanding.
Improved alloplasty—gadgets instead of organ transplants—went a long way toward solving the problem of organ bank shortages. The UN citizenry even voted to remove the death penalty for certain crimes: income tax evasion, illegal advertising. The heavy authority given the ARM, the United Nations police, was relaxed somewhat.
War on a major scale had not happened in some time.
Life within the solar system had become somewhat idyllic...