Protector

by Larry Niven

  Stop that. I’m thinking like a breeder. One step at a time…

  Phssthpok reached for a handhold and pushed himself down to Brennan. Brennan was limp now, his eyes half closed with the whites showing under the lids, his hand still clutching half of a root. Phssthpok set him rotating to make an examination.

  All right.

  Phssthpok climbed through the hull into vacuum and made his way around to the small end of the egg. There he crawled back inside, emerging in a cubicle just big enough to hold him.

  Now he must find a hiding place.

  No question now of leaving this solar system. He would have to abandon the rest of his ship. Let them chase the monopoles in his empty drive section.

  It would be like hiding all his children in the same cave, but there was no help for that. It could have been worse. Though the instruments in the cargo pod were designed only to drop that section from orbit around some planet, the motor itself—the gravity polarizer—would take him anywhere he wanted to go within GO Target #1’s gravity well. Except that he would have to do everything right the first time. Except that he could only land once. As a ship’s drive, the gravity polarizer had many of the virtues and faults of a paraglider. He could aim it anywhere be wanted to go, even after he’d killed his velocity, provided that he wanted to go down. The polarizer would not lift him against gravity.

  Compared to the fusion drive controls, the controls around him were fiercely complicated. Phssthpok began doing things to them. The line at the small end of the egg separated in a puff of flame. The twing around him became transparent…and slightly porous; in a century it would have lost a dangerous amount of air. Phssthpok’s manlike eyes took on a glassy look. The next moves would take intense concentration. He hadn’t dared tie the captive down; or otherwise restrict him. To avoid crushing him, he would have to keep the internal and external gravities exactly balanced. The hull, which carried the polarizing field, might melt at these accelerations.

  The rest of his ship floated in Phssthpok’s rear screen. He twisted two knobs hard over, and it was gone.

  Where to now?

  He’d need weeks to hide. He couldn’t hope to hide on GO Target #1 - 3, given their technology.

  But space was too open to hide in.

  He could only land once. Where he came down, he’d have to stay, unless he could rig some kind of launching or signaling device.

  Phssthpok began to search the sky for planets. His eyes were good, and planets were big and dim, easy to spot. The ringed gas giant would have been a good one—easy to hide in the rings—except that it was behind him. A gas giant ahead of him, with moons—too far ahead. He’d have to coast for days to reach it. The natives must be after him now. Without a telescope he’d never see them until too late.

  That one. He’d studied it when he had a telescope. Small, with low gravity and a trace of atmosphere. Asteroids all around it, and too much atmosphere for vacuum cementing. With luck, it should make for deep dust pools.

  He should have studied it before. There might be mining industries, or even colonies. Too late now. He had no choice; he had had no real choice in quite some time. That planet was his target. When the time came to leave he would have to hope the native could signal his kind. He didn’t like it much.

  II

  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 speed-reading 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 ho
urs 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 Pitchok, 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 be 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.