Protector

by Larry Niven

  Truesdale was nodding. “I know. That’s got to be the most expensive practical joke ever pulled.”

  “We don’t really know which is the real Stonehenge, either. Suppose the joker moved both Stonehenges? He had the power to move all the rocks in the duplicate. All he had to do was move the rocks in the real Stonehenge and put the duplicate in its place.”

  “Don’t tell anyone.”

  The ARM laughed.

  “Did you get anything from the Belt?”

  Robinson lost his smile. “Yah. Half a dozen known cases, kidnapping and amnesia, and all unsolved. I still think we’re looking for a struldbrug.”

  All unsolved. It boded ill for Truesdale’s case.

  “An old struldbrug,” said the ARM. “Someone who was already old enough a hundred and twenty years ago, to think he’d learned enough to solve the problems of humanity. Or maybe to write a definitive book on human progress. So he started taking samples.”

  “And he’s still at it?”

  “Or a grandson took over the business.” Robinson sighed. “Don’t worry about it. Well get him.”

  “Sure. You’ve only had a hundred and twenty years.”

  “Don’t noodge,” said Robinson.

  And that did it.

  The center of goldskin police activity was the center of government: Ceres. Police headquarters on Pallas, Juno, Vesta, and Astraea were redundant, in a sense, but very necessary. Five asteroids would cover the main Belt. It had happened that they were all on the same side of the sun at the same time; but it was rare.

  Vesta was the smallest of the five. Her cities were on the surface, under four big double domes.

  Thrice in history a dome had been holed. It was not the kind of event that would be forgotten. All of Vesta’s buildings were pressure-tight. Several had airlock tubes that led out through the dome.

  Alice Jordan entered the Waring City police airlock after a routine smuggler patrol. There were two chambers, and then a hallway lined with pressure suits. She doffed her own suit and hung it. The chest bore a fluorescent she-dragon, breathing fire.

  She reported to her superior, Vinnie Garcia. “No luck.”

  Vinnie grinned at her. She was dark and willowy, her fingers long and slender: far more the Belter stereotype than Alice Jordan. “You had some luck on Earth.”

  “Finagle’s Jest I did. You have my report.” Alice had gone to Earth in hope of solving a growing social problem. A flatlander sin—wireheading, the practice of running current into the center of the brain—had been spreading through the Belt. Unfortunately Earth’s solution had been to wait it out. In three hundred years it would solve itself…but that was hardly satisfactory to Alice Jordan.

  “That’s not what I meant. You made a conquest.” Vinnie paused. “There’s a flatlander waiting for you in your office.”

  “A flatlander?” She had shared a bed with one man on Earth, to nobody’s satisfaction. Gravity, and lack of practice. He’d been polite about it, but they had not seen each other again.

  She stood up. “Do you need me for anything else?”

  “Nope. Have fun,” said Vinnie.

  He tried to stand up when she came in. He botched it a bit in the low gravity, but managed to get his feet to the floor and keep the rest of him upright. “Hello. Roy Truesdale,” he said, before she could fumble for the name.

  “Welcome to Vesta,” she said. “So you came after all. Still hunting for the Snatcher?”

  “Yes.”

  She took a seat behind her desk. “Tell me about it. Did you finish the backpacking trip?”

  He nodded. “I think the Rockies were the best, and there’s no trouble getting in. You ought to try it. The Rockies aren’t a national park, but not many people want to build there either.”

  “I’ll try it, if I ever get to Earth again.”

  “I saw the other Outsiders…I know, they aren’t really Outsiders, but sure as hell, they’re alien. If the real Outsider is like those…”

  “You’d rather think Vandervecken is human.”

  “I guess I would.”

  “You’re putting a lot of effort into finding him.” She considered the idea that Truesdale had come chasing a certain Belter woman. A flattering thought…

  “The law didn’t seem to be getting anywhere,” he said. “Worse than that. It looks like they’ve been hunting Vandervecken or someone like him for a hundred and twenty years. I got mad and signed up for a ship to Vesta. I was going to find Vandervecken myself. That’s a hassle, you know?”

  “I know. Too many flatlanders want to see the asteroids. We have to restrict them.”

  “I had to wait three months for crash couch space. I still wasn’t sure I wanted to go. After all, I could always cancel…Then something else happened.” Truesdale’s jaw clamped in retrospective anger.

  “Lawrence St. John McGee. He took me for just about everything I owned, ten years ago. A swindle.”

  “It happens. I’m sorry.”

  “They caught him. He was calling himself Ellery Jones from St. Louis. He was running a whole new game, in Topeka, Kansas, but someone tipped off the marks and they got him. He had new fingerprints, new retina prints, a new face. They had to do a brain wave analysis before they were sure it was him. I may even get some of my money back.”

  She smiled. “Why, that’s wonderful!”

  “Vandervecken tipped him. It was another bribe.”

  “Are you sure? Did he use that name?”

  “No. Damn him for playing games with my head! He must have decided I was hunting him because he robbed me. He took four months of my life. He threw me Lawrence St. John McGee, so I should stop worrying about my missing four months.”

  “You don’t like being that predictable.”

  “No. I do not.” He wasn’t looking at her. His hands were closed hard on the arms of her pest chair. Muscles bunched and swelled in his arms when he did that. Some Belters affected to hold flatlander muscles in contempt…

  She said, “Vandervecken may be too big for us.”

  His response was interesting. “Now you’re talking. What have you found out?”

  “Well…I’ve been hunting Vandervecken too. You know that there have been other disappearances.”

  “Yah.”

  Her desk, like Robinson’s, had a computer terminal in it. She used it. “Half a dozen names. And dates: 2150, 2191, 2230, 2250, 2270, 2331. You can see our records go back further than yours. I talked to this Lawrence Jennifer, the latest one, but he can’t remember anything more than you can. He was taking a fast orbit to the lead Trojans with some small machine parts, when…blackout. Next thing he knew he was in orbit around Hector.” She smiled. “He didn’t take it the way you did. He’s just glad he was put back.”

  “Are any of the others alive and available?”

  “Dandridge Sukarno and Norma Stier, disappeared 2270 and 2230, respectively. They wouldn’t give me the local time of day. They took their fees and that’s that. We traced the fees to two different names—George Olduvai and C. Cretemaster—and no faces to go with the names.”

  “You have been busy.”

  She shrugged. “A lot of goldskins get interested in the Snatcher at one time or another. Vinnie sort of puts up with it.”

  “It sounds like he takes a sample every ten years. Alternating between Earth and Belt.” Truesdale whistled uneasily. He was remembering those dates. “Twenty-one fifty is almost two hundred years ago. No wonder he called himself Vandervecken.”

  She looked at him sharply. “Is there some significance—?”

  “Vandervecken was the captain of the Flying Dutchman. I looked it up. You know the Flying Dutchman legend?”

  “No.”

  “There used to be commercial sailing ships—sailing on the ocean, by wind power. Vandervecken was trying to round the Cape of Good Hope during a heavy storm. He swore a blasphemous oath that he would round the Cape if he had to beat against the wind until the last day. In stormy weather passing s
hips can still see him, still trying to round the Cape. Sometimes he stops ships and asks them to take letters to home.”

  Her laugh was shaky. “Letters to who?”

  “The Wandering Jew, maybe. There are variations. One says Vandervecken murdered his wife and sailed away from the police. One says there was a murder on board. Writers seem to like this legend. It turns up in novels, and there was an old flat movie, and an even older opera, and—have you heard that old song the backpackers sing around the campfires? I’m the only tar that e’er jumped ship from Vandervecken’s crew…”

  “The Bragging Song.”

  “All the legends have that one thing in common: an immortal man sailing under a curse, forever.”

  Alice Jordan’s eyes went big and round.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Jack Brennan.”

  “…Brennan. I remember. The man who ate the roots aboard the Pak ship. Jack Brennan. He’s supposed to be dead.”

  “Supposed to be.” She was looking down at her desk. Gradually her eyes focused on coils of printout. “Roy, I’ve got to get some work done. Where are you staying, the Palace?”

  “Sure, it’s the only hotel in Waring City.”

  “I’ll pick you up there, eighteen hundred. You’ll need a guide to the restaurants anyway.”

  For a monopoly, the Palace was an excellent hotel. Human service was spotty, but the machinery—bathroom facilities, cleaning widgetry, waiters—all ran to perfection. Belters seemed to treat their machines as if their lives depended on them.

  The east wall was three meters from the dome itself, and featured picture windows guarded by big rectangular screens that swung automatically to shut out raw sunlight. The screens were open now. Truesdale looked out through a wall of glass, over the shallow bulge of the Anderson City dome, past a horizon so jagged and close that he felt he was on a mountain peak. But the stars were not this vivid from any mountain on Earth. He saw the universe, close enough to touch.

  And the room was costing him plenty. He was going to have to learn to spend money again without wincing.

  He took a shower. It was fun. The shower delivered great slow volumes of hot water that tended to stay on his body as if jellied. There were side jets, and a needle spray. A far cry from the old days, he supposed, when the deep cavity that now housed Anderson City had been carved by the extensive, expensive mining of hydrate-bearing rock. But fusion was cheap, and water once made could be distilled over and over, indefinitely.

  When he left the shower he found that there had been a delivery. The information terminal beside his desk had delivered several books’ worth of information, printing it into a book the size of the San Diego telephone book, with pages that could be wiped after the departure of a guest. Alice Jordan must have sent this. He leafed through it until he found Nicholas Sohl’s memoirs, and started there. The section on the Pak ship was near the end.

  There was a chill on him when be finished. Nicholas Sohl, once First Speaker for the Belt…not a fool. The thing to remember, Sohl had written, is that he’s brighter than we are. Maybe he’s thought of something I haven’t.

  But how bright would a man have to be to make up for the lack of a food source?

  He read on…

  Alice Jordan arrived ten minutes early. At the door she glanced past him at the, information terminal. “You got it. Good. How far did you get?”

  “Nick Sohl’s memoirs. A textbook on the physiology of the Pak. I skimmed Graves’s book on evolution. He claims a dozen plants that could have been imported from the Pak world.”

  “You’re a flatlander. What do you think?”

  “I’m not a biologist. And I skipped the proceedings of Olympus Base. I don’t really care why a gravity polarizer doesn’t work yet.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. She was wearing loose slacks and a blouse: not dressed for dinner, in Truesdale’s view. But he hadn’t expected skirts in Vesta’s gravity.

  She said, “I think it’s Brennan.”

  “So do I.”

  “But he’s got to be dead. He didn’t have a food source.”

  “He had his own singleship on a tow line. Even two hundred years ago, a singleship kitchen would feed him for a long time, wouldn’t it? It was the roots he was missing. Maybe he had a few he took from the cargo pod, and there were more aboard the Pak ship. But when he ate those he’d be finished.”

  “But you still think he’s alive. So do I. Let’s hear your reasons.”

  Truesdale took a minute to get his thoughts organized. “The Flying Dutchman. Vandervecken. A man immortalized by a curse. It fits too well.”

  She nodded. “What else?”

  “Oh, the kidnappings…and the fact that he puts us back. Even with the chance that he’ll get caught, he puts us back. He’s too considerate for an alien and he’s too powerful for a human. What’s left?”

  “Brennan.”

  “Then there’s the duplicate Stonehenge.” He had to tell her about that. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since you mentioned Brennan. You know what it sounds like to me? Brennan had plenty of time with the gravity polarizer in the Pak cargo pod. He must have solved the principle, and improved it into a gravity generator. Then he had to play games with it.”

  “Games. Right again. This superintelligence must have been like a new toy to him.”

  “He may have pulled some other practical jokes.”

  “Yes,” she said with too much emphasis.

  “What? Another practical joke?”

  Alice laughed. “Ever hear of the Mahmed Asteroid? It was in those excerpts I sent you.”

  “I guess I didn’t get to it.”

  “An asteroid a couple of miles in diameter, mainly ice. The Belt telescopes spotted it fairly early, in…2183, I think. It was still outside Jupiter’s orbit. Mahmed was the first man to land on it. He was also the man who plotted its orbit and found out that it was going to hit Mars.”

  “Did it?”

  “Yah. It probably could have been stopped, even with the technology of the day, but I suppose nobody was really interested. It was going to hit well away from Olympus Base. They did carve off a hefty chunk of ice and move it into a new orbit. Nearly pure water, valuable stuff.”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with—”

  “It killed the martians. Every martian on the planet, as far as we can tell. The water vapor content of the atmosphere went way up.”

  “Oh,” said Truesdale. “Genocide. Some practical joke.”

  “I told you, Vandervecken may be too big for us.”

  “Yah.” From a recorded voice on a self-destructing spool Vandervecken had grown in all dimensions. Now he was two hundred and twenty years long, and the realm of his activities blanketed the solar system. In physical strength he had grown too. The Brennan-monster could have slung an unconscious Elroy Truesdale over his shoulder and carried him down off the Pinnacles. “He’s big, all right. And we’re the only ones who know it. What do we do now?”

  “Let’s get dinner,” she said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” Alice said gently. “But let’s get dinner.”

  The top of the Palace Hotel was a four-sided dome that showed two views of reality. For the east and West quadrants looked out on Vesta, but the north and south quadrants were holograph projections of some mountainous part of Earth. “It’s a looped tape, several days long,” Alice told him. “Taken from a car cruising at ground level. This looks like morning in Switzerland.”

  “It does,” he agreed. The vodka martini was hitting him hard. He’d skipped lunch, and now his belly was a yawning vacuum. “Tell me about Belter foods.”

  “Well, the Palace is mainly french flatlander cooking.”

  “I’d like to try Belter cooking. Tomorrow?”

  “Honestly, Roy, I got spoiled on Earth. I’ll take you to a Belter place tomorrow, but I don’t think you’ll find any new taste thrills. Food’s too expensiv
e here to do much experimental cooking.”

  “Too bad.” He glanced at the menu on a waiter’s chest, and recoiled. “Ye gods. The prices!”

  “This is as expensive as it gets. At the other end is dole yeast, which is free—”

  “Free?”

  “—and barely worth it. If you’re down and out it’ll keep you fed, and it practically grows itself. Normal Belter cooking is almost vegetarian except for chicken and eggs. We grow chickens in most of the larger domes. Beef and pork we have to grow in the bubble-formed worlds, and seafood—well, we have to ship it up. Some comes freeze-dried; that’s cheaper.”

  They punched their orders into a waiter’s keyboard. On Earth a restaurant this expensive would at least have featured human waiters…but Roy somehow couldn’t imagine a Belter playing the role of waiter.

  The steaks Diane were too small, the vegetables varied and plentiful. Alice tore in with a gusto he admired. “I missed this,” she said. “On Earth I had to take up backpacking to work off all I was eating.”

  Roy put his fork down. “I can’t figure out what he ate.”

  “Drop it for awhile.”

  “All right. Tell me about yourself.”

  She told him about a childhood in Confinement asteroid, and the thick basement windows from which she could see the stars: stars that hadn’t meant anything to her until her first trip outside. The years of training in flying spacecraft—not mandatory, but your friends would think you were funny if you dropped out. Her first smuggling run, and the goldskin pilot who hung on her course like a leech, laughing at her out of her com screen. Three years hauling foodstuffs and hydroponics machinery to the Trojans before she’d tried it again, and then it had been the same laughing face, and when she’d bitched about it he’d lectured her on economics all the way to Hector.

  They were down to coffee (freeze-dried) and brandy (a Belt product, and excellent). He told her about the cousins and the part-cousins and the generations of uncles and part-uncles and great-uncles and -aunts to match, all spread across the world, so that there were relatives anywhere he chose to go. He told her about Greatly ’Stelle.

  She said, “So he was right.”

  He knew just what she meant. “I wouldn’t have gone to the law. I couldn’t have turned down the money. Alice, he thinks of the whole human race that way. On wires. And he’s the only one who can see the wires.”