Protector

by Larry Niven

  “We’re moving at about twenty-two thousand miles per second now. I haven’t got it exactly—that’ll take hours—but as it stands we’ve got almost enough fuel to bring us to a complete stop.”

  “Out in the cometary belt?”

  “Out in the ass end of nowhere, right.”

  —that there was something dreadfully wrong in making plans against Brennan. Brennan was beyond planning.

  His mind planned anyway. There were old stories…men had survived emergencies in space…Apollo Thirteen, and the voyage of Four Gee Jennison, and Eric the Cyborg…“We could blast laterally to reach Persephone, then whip around the planet in a hyperbola. At least it’d send us back into the solar system.”

  “We might have enough fuel for that. I’ll do a course analysis. Meanwhile—” She played with the controls.

  The feel of gravity slowly died away.

  The vibration of the drive was gone. It left a silence in his head.

  Elroy Truesdale is less predictable than Brennan. Of the several choices that face him now, one is clearly best; but how can Brennan count on his following it? Breeders often don’t. Worse, he may have a companion aboard that big ship. Female and Belter: Truesdale is at least that predictable. But how can Brennan predict the whims of a girl he never met?

  It’s like that with Truesdale’s weaponry. Lasers, of course. Lasers are too useful as an all-purpose tool to leave behind. He’d pick lasers, and one other weapon. Grenades, bullets, sonic stunners, plastic explosive? There are about four good choices. One best choice, except that Brennan might anticipate it. Truesdale’s logical move is to flip a coin, twice. Brennan knows that he is bright enough to realize it.

  So he flipped a coin twice before takeoff. Which way did it fall, Brennan? Brennan laughs inside his head, though his face does not move. When Truesdale is clever, Brennan is pleased.

  And what will he do now? Brennan mulls the point. Fortunately it does not matter. Nothing Truesdale can do will take him out of range of Brennan’s oddball telescope…the same instrument he used to alter Truesdale’s course. Brennan turns to other things. In a few days…

  “If we didn’t have to worry about Brennan, I know just what we’d be doing,” said Alice. “We’d be decelerating, and blasting out a help call. In a few months someone would mount an expedition and pick us up.”

  They were in Roy’s hammock, loosely moored against free fall. They had spent more and more time in the hammocks these last few days. They slept more. They had sex more often, for love or for reassurance or to end the occasional snappish quarrels, or because there was nothing constructive to be done.

  “Why should anyone come for us?” Roy asked. “If we were damn fools enough to come—”

  “Money. Rescue fees. It would cost us everything we own, of course.”

  “Oh.”

  “Including the ship. Which would you rather be, Roy? Broke or dead?”

  “Broke,” he said immediately. “But I’d rather not have the choice. And I don’t. You’re the Captain, as per agreement. What are we going to do, Captain?”

  Alice shifted against him, and reached around him to tickle the small of his back with her fingernails. “I don’t know. What do you want to do, my loyal crew?”

  “Count on Brennan. But I hate it.”

  “Do you think he’ll put you back twice?”

  “Brennan’s got a pretty good record for…humanitarianism. When I turned down his bribe it went to Criminal Rehabilitation Studies. Before that it was going to medical research in prosthetics and alloplasty.”

  “I don’t see the connection.”

  “You wouldn’t. Belter. On Earth there was this thing going with organ banks. Everyone wanted to live forever, I guess, and the easiest way to get enough transplants for all the sick people was to use condemned criminals. They were imposing the death penalty for anything and everything, including too many traffic violations. That was when Brennan was plowing money into other kinds of medical research.”

  “We never had that problem,” Alice said with dignity, “because we decided not to. We never turned our criminals into donors.”

  “Granted. You got through that period on pure moral fiber.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “We got through it because medical research found better ways of doing things. Brennan was backing that research. Now we’ve got live felons again, and they’ve got to be returned to society somehow.”

  “And Brennan’s backing that. And this is the same soft-hearted Snatcher who’s bound to put us back on Earth if we don’t do anything in our own behalf.”

  “You asked my opinion, my Captain. You have no reason to treat my answer as mutiny.”

  “At ease, my loyal crew. I just—” Her hand clenched into a fist. He felt it against his back. “—don’t mucking like to depend on someone—”

  “Neither do I.”

  “—someone with as much arrogance as the Brennan-monster. Maybe he really does see us as animals. Maybe he just—threw us away because we were coming to bother him.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I still haven’t seen anything ahead of us.”

  “Well, wherever we’re going, we’re going a hell of a lot faster than we planned.”

  She laughed. Her fingernails drew circles on the small of his back.

  There was something ahead of them. It was invisible to telescope and radar, but it registered, barely, on the mass detector. It might have been a stray comet, or a flaw in the mass detector, or—something else.

  They had been falling for six days. Now they were 7 x 109 miles from Sol—as far as Persephone. Now the mass indicator showed a tiny, distinct image. It was smaller than any moon a gas giant ought to have. But matter was so thin out here—almost as thin as interstellar space—that by long odds they should have been falling toward nothing at all.

  They thought it was Brennan. They took hope, and fear.

  And the telescope showed nothing.

  He wasn’t sure what had wakened him. He listened to the silence, he looked about him in the half-light…

  Alice was sagging forward against the restraining straps around her hammock, hanging toward the ship’s nose. As was he.

  He had learned his lesson well. He had his pressure suit in hand before he released the straps. He clutched them as an anchor and donned the suit one-handed. The pull was a few pounds, no more. Alice was ahead of him again, drifting down the ladder toward the nose.

  The mass detector was going crazy. Beyond the porthole was a wilderness of fixed stars.

  “I can’t do a course estimate out here,” said Alice. “There aren’t any reference points. It was bad enough back there, two days out from Sol.”

  “Okay.”

  She slammed a fist into the porthole glass. “It’s not okay. I can’t find out where we are. What does he want with us?”

  “Easy, easy. We came to him.”

  “I can do a Doppler shift on the sun. At least it’ll give us our radial velocity. I can’t do that with Persephone, it’s too goddamn dim—” She turned away suddenly, her face convulsed.

  “Take it easy, Captain.”

  She was crying. When he put his arms around her she beat gently on his shoulders with her fists. “I don’t like this. I hate depending on someone—” She sobbed rackingly.

  She had more responsibility than he. More stress.

  And—he knew it was true—she couldn’t make herself depend on anyone. Within his big family Roy had always had someone to run to in an emergency. He’d felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have such a failsafe in his life.

  Love was an interdependence kind of thing, he thought. What he and Alice had wouldn’t ever quite be love. Too bad.

  —Which was a silly thing to be thinking while they waited the whim of Brennan, or the Snatcher, or Vandervecken, or whatever was out there: a flimsy chain of reasoning, and something that moved spacecraft about like toys on a nursery floor. And Alice, who had her head buried in his shoulder a
s if trying to blot out the world, still had them anchored to a wall by one hand. He hadn’t thought of it.

  She felt him stiffen and turned too. A moment she looked, then moved to the telescope controls.

  It looked like a distant asteroid.

  It was not where the mass indicator had been pointing, but behind that point. When Alice threw the image on the screen, Roy couldn’t believe his eyes. It was like a sunlit landscape in fairyland, all grass and trees and growing things, and a few small buildings in soft organic shapes; but it was as if a piece of such a landscape had been picked up and molded by the hands of a playful topologist.

  It was small, much too small to hold the film of atmosphere he could see around it or the blue pond gleaming across one side. A modeling-clay donut with depressions and bulges on its surface, and a small grass-green sphere floating in the hole, and a single tree growing out of the sphere. He could see the sphere quite clearly. It must have been huge.

  And the near side of the structure was all bathed in sunlight. Where was the sunlight coming from?

  “We’re coming up on it.” Alice was tense, but there were no tears in her voice. She’d recovered fast.

  “What do we do now? Land ourselves, or wait for him to land us?”

  “I’d better warm up the drive,” she said. “His gravity generator might kick up storms in that artificial atmosphere.”

  He didn’t ask, How do you know? She was guessing, of course. He said, “Weapons?”

  Her hands paused on the keys. “He wouldn’t—I don’t know.”

  He pondered the question. Thus he lost his chance.

  When he woke he thought he was on Earth. Bright sunlight, blue sky, the tickling of grass against his back and legs, the touch and sound and smell of a cool and pollinated breeze…had he been abandoned in another national park, then? He rolled on his side and saw Brennan.

  Brennan sat on the grass, hugging his knobby knees, watching him. Brennan was naked but for a long vest. The vest was all pockets: big pockets, little pockets, loops for tools, pockets on pockets and within pockets; and most of the pockets were full. He must have been carrying his own weight in widgetry.

  Where the vest didn’t cover him, Brennan’s skin was all loose brown wrinkles like soft leather. He looked like the Pak mummy in the Smithsonian, but he was bigger and even uglier. The bulge of chin and forehead marred the smooth lines of the Pak head. His eyes were brown and thoughtful, and human.

  He said, “Hello, Roy.”

  Roy sat up convulsively. There was Alice, on her back, eyes closed. She still wore her pressure suit, but the hood was open. There was the ship, resting belly-down on…on…

  Vertigo.

  “She’ll be all right,” Brennan was saying. His voice was dry, faintly alien. “So will you. I didn’t want you coming out with weapons blazing. This ecosystem isn’t easy to maintain.”

  Roy looked again. Uphill across a rounded green slope, to where an impossible mass floated ready to fall on them. A grass-covered spheroid with a single gigantic tree growing out of one side. The ship rested beside its trunk. It should have fallen too.

  Alice Jordan sat up. Roy wondered if she’d panic…but she studied the Brennan-monster for a moment, then said, “So we were right.”

  “Pretty close,” Brennan agreed. “You wouldn’t have found anything at Persephone, though.”

  “And now we’re caught,” she said bitterly.

  “No. You’re guests.”

  Her expression didn’t change.

  “You think I’m playing euphemisms. I’m not. When I leave here I’m going to give you this place. My work here is almost finished. I’ll have to instruct you in how not to kill yourselves by pushing the wrong buttons, and I’ll give you a deed to Kobold. We’ll have time for that.”

  Give? Roy thought of being marooned out here, unreachably far from home. A pleasant enough prison. Did Brennan think he was setting up a new Garden of Eden? But Brennan was still speaking—

  “I have my own ship, of course. I’ll leave you yours. You intelligently saved the fuel. You should become very rich from this, Roy. You too, Miss.”

  “Alice Jordan,” she said. She was taking it well, but she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. They fluttered.

  “Call me Jack, or Brennan, or the Brennan-monster. I’m not sure I’m still entitled to the name I was born with.”

  Roy said one word. “Why?”

  Brennan understood. “Because my job here is over. What do you think I’ve been doing out here for two hundred and twenty years?”

  “Using generated gravity as an art form,” said Alice.

  “That too. Mainly I’ve been watching for high-energy lithium radicals in Sagittarius.” He looked at them through the mask of his face. “I’m not being cryptic. I’m trying to explain so you won’t be so nervous. I’ve had a purpose out here. Over the past few weeks I’ve found what I was looking for. Now I’ll be leaving. I never dreamed they’d take so long.”

  “Who?”

  “The Pak. Let’s see, you must have studied the Phssthpok incident in detail, or you wouldn’t have gotten this far. Did you think to ask yourselves what the childless protectors of Pak would do after Phssthpok was gone?”

  Clearly they hadn’t.

  “I did. Phssthpok established a space industry on Pak. He found out how to grow tree-of-life in the worlds of the galactic arms. He built a ship, and it worked for as far as any Pak could detect it. Now what?

  “All those childless protectors seeking a mission in life. A space industry to build ships designed for one job. Something could happen to Phssthpok, you know. An accident. Or he might lose the will to live, halfway here.”

  Roy saw it then. “They’d send another ship.”

  “That they would. Even if he got here, Phssthpok could use some help searching a volume thirty light years in radius. Whoever followed Phssthpok wouldn’t aim directly for Sol; Phssthpok would have searched Sol by the time he got here. He would aim to the side, away from Phssthpok’s obvious area of search. I figured that would give me a few extra years,” said Brennan. “I thought they’d send another ship almost immediately. I was afraid I wouldn’t be ready.”

  “Why would it take them so long?”

  “I don’t know.” Brennan made it sound like an admission of guilt. “A heavier cargo pod, maybe. Breeders in suspended animation, in case we died out over two and a half million years.”

  Alice said, “You said you’d been watching—”

  “Yah. A sun doesn’t burn fuel quite like a Bussard ramjet. There’s a constriction and a hell of a lot of heat, then the gas expands into space while it’s still fusing. A Bussard ramjet will put out a lot of funny chemicals: high-energy hydrogen and helium, lithium radicals, some borates, even lithium hydride, which is generally an impossible chemical. In deceleration mode those all go out in a high-energy stream at nearly lightspeed.

  “Phssthpok’s ship worked that way, and I didn’t expect they’d fool with his design. Not just because it worked, but because it was the best design they could get. When you’re as bright as a Pak, there’s only one right answer for a given set of tools. I wonder if something happened to their technology after Phssthpok left. Something like a war.” He pondered. “Anyway, I’ve found funny chemicals in Sagittarius. Something’s coming.”

  Roy dreaded to ask. “How many ships?”

  “One, of course. I haven’t actually found the image, but they’d have sent the second ship off as soon as they built it. Why wait? And maybe another ship behind it, and another behind that. I’ll search them out from here, while I’ve still got my quote telescope unquote.”

  “Then what?”

  “Men I’ll destroy as many ships as there are.”

  “Just like that?”

  “I keep getting that reaction,” Brennan said with some bitterness. “Look: If a Pak knew what the human race was like, he’d try to exterminate us. What am I supposed to do? Send him a message, ask for truce? Th
at information alone would tell him enough.”

  Alice said, “You might convince him you were Phssthpok.”

  “Probably could at that. Then what? He’d stop eating, of course. But first he’d want to deliver his ship. He’d never believe we’ve already developed the technology to make artificial monopoles, and his ship is the second of its kind in this system, and we might need the thalium oxide too.”

  “Um.”

  “Um,” Brennan mimicked her. “Do you think I like the idea of murdering someone who came thirty-one thousand light years to save us from ourselves? I’ve been thinking this through for a long time. There’s no other answer. But don’t let that stop you.” Brennan stood up. “Think it through. While you’re at it, you might as well explore Kobold too. You’ll own it eventually. All of the dangerous things are behind doors. Have a ball, swim where you find water, play golf if you like. But don’t eat anything, and don’t open any doors. Roy, tell her about the Bluebeard legend.” Brennan pointed over a low hill. “That way, and through the garden, and you come to my laboratory. I’ll be there when you want me. Take your time.” And he went, not strolling, but running.

  They looked at each other.

  Alice said, “Do you think he really meant it?”

  “I’d like to,” said Roy. “Generated gravity. And this place. Kobold. With gravity generators we could move it into the solar system, maybe, and set it up as a disneyland.”

  “What did he mean about—Bluebeard?”

  “He meant, ‘Really don’t open any doors.’”

  “Oh.”

  Given an unlimited choice of direction, they chose to follow Brennan over the hill. They did not catch sight of him again. Kobold had the sharply curved horizon of any small asteroid, at least from the outer curve of the toroid.

  But they found the garden. Here were fruit trees and nut trees and vegetable patches in all stages of bloom. Roy pulled up a carrot, and it brought back a memory: he and some cousins, all about ten years old, walking with Greatly ’Stelle in the small vegetable garden on her estate. They’d pulled carrots, and washed them under a faucet…

  He dropped the carrot without tasting it. He and Alice walked beneath the orange trees without touching them. In fairyland one does not lightly ignore the command of the resident warlock…especially as Roy was not sure that Brennan understood the power of the temptation to disobey.