by Larry Niven
The novels had an odd flavor, a nest of unspoken assumptions that he couldn’t quite pin down, until he asked Brennan about it.
Brennan had an eidetic memory and a fine grasp of subtleties. “Partly it’s a Belter thing,” he told Roy. “They know they’re in an artificial environment, and they feel protective toward it. This bit in The Shortest Day, where Ingram gets shot for walking on the grass—that’s a direct steal from something that happened early in Home history. You’ll see it in Livermore’s biography. As for their burial customs, that’s probably left over from the early days. Remember, the first hundred people who died on Home knew each other like you knew your brother. Anyone’s death was important in those days, to everyone in the world.”
“Yah, when you put it like that…and they’ve got more room, too. They don’t need crematoriums.”
“Good point. There’s endless useless land, useless until it’s fertilized somehow. The bigger the graveyard grows, the more it shows the human conquest of Home. Especially when trees and grass start growing where nothing ever grew before.”
Roy thought the idea over, and decided he liked it. How could you lose? Until the Pak arrived.
“These Homers don’t seem particularly warlike,” he said. “We’re going to have to get them on a war footing before the Pak scouts find Home. Somehow.”
But Brennan wouldn’t talk about that. “All our information is ten to a hundred years old. I don’t know enough about Home as it is now. We don’t know how the politics have gone. I’ve got some ideas…but mainly we’ll be playing it by ear.” He slapped Roy on the back: a sensation like being hit by a sackful of walnuts. “Cheer up. We may never get there at all.”
Brennan was a wordy bastard when he had the time. More: he was making a clear effort to keep Roy entertained. Perhaps he was entertaining himself as well. It was all very well to talk of a Pak spending eight hundred years sitting in a crash couch; but Brennan had been raised human.
They played games, using analog programs set up in the computer. Brennan always won at chess, checkers, Scrabble and the like. But gin and dominoes were games hard to learn, easy to master. They stuck to those. Brennan still won more than his share, perhaps because he could read Roy’s face.
They held long discussions on philosophy and politics and the paths mankind was taking. They read a great deal. Brennan had stockpiled material on all the inhabited worlds, not just Home and Wunderland. Once he said, “I was never sure where I might wind up steering a crippled ship in search of breathing-air and a chance at repair facilities. I’m still not sure.”
Over many months Roy began exercising more and sleeping less. He was strong now; he no longer felt like a cripple. His muscles were harder than they had ever been in his life.
And the Pak ships came steadily closer.
Through the clear twing they were invisible, black in a black sky. They were still too distant, and not all of their output was visible light. But they showed under magnification: the sparkling of hysteresis in the wide wings of the ram field, and in the center the small steady light of the drive.
Ten months after Roy had emerged from the stasis box, the light of the leading pair went out. Minutes later it came on again, but it was dim and flickering.
“They’ve gone into deceleration mode,” said Brennan.
In an hour the enemy’s drive was producing a steady glow, the red of blue-shifted beryllium emission.
“I’ll have to start my turn too,” said Brennan.
“You want to fight them?”
“That first pair, anyway. And if I turn now it’ll give us a better window.”
“Window?”
“For that right-angle turn.”
“Listen, you can either explain that right-angle turn business or stop bringing it up.”
Brennan chuckled. “I have to keep you interested somehow, don’t I?”
“What are you planning? Close orbit around a black hole?”
“My compliments. That’s a good guess. I’ve found a nonrotating neutron star…almost nonrotating. I wouldn’t dare dive into the radiating gas shell around a pulsar, but this beast seems to have a long rotation period and no gas envelope at all. And it’s nonluminous. It must be an old one. The scouts’ll have trouble finding it, and I can chart a hyperbola through the gravity field that’ll take us straight to Home.”
Casual as Brennan sounded, that sounded dangerous. And the Pak scouts moved steadily closer. Four months later the first pair of ships was naked-eye visible, a blue-green point alone in a black sky.
They watched it grow. Its drive flame made wiggly lines on Brennan’s instruments. “Not too bad,” said Brennan. “Of course you’d be dead if you went outside for awhile.”
“Yah.”
“I wonder if he’s close enough to try the gravity widget.”
Roy watched, but did not understand, as Brennan played his control board. Brennan had never showed him how to use that particular weapon. It was too delicate, too intuitive. But two days later the blue-green light went out.
“Got him,” Brennan said with evident satisfaction. “Got the hind ship, anyway. He probably fell into his own black hole.”
“Is that what your widget does? Collapse somebody else’s gravity generator into a hypermass?”
“That’s what it’s supposed to do. But let’s just see.” He used the spectroscope. “Right. Helium lines only. Hind ship gone, lead ship coming on at about one gee. He’ll be passing me sooner than he expected. He’s got two choices now. Run or ram. I think he’ll try to ram—so to speak.”
“He’ll try to throw his ram field across us. That’d kill us, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. Him too. Well—” Brennan dropped some missiles, then started a turn.
Two days later the lead ship was gone. Brennan swung Protector back on course. It had all seemed very like one of Brennan’s dry runs, except that it took even longer.
The next pass was different.
It was six months before the remaining Pak came close; but one day they were naked-eye visible, two wan yellow dots in the blackness astern. Their speed had dropped to not much above Protector’s own.
From an initial separation of eight light-months the scout pairs had converged over the years, until they were nearly side by side, thirty light-hours behind Protector.
“Time to try the gravity widget again,” said Brennan.
While Brennan played with the controls, Roy looked up at two yellow eyes glowing beyond the black shadow of the drive section. Intellectually he knew that he would see nothing for two and a half days…
And he was wrong. The flare came from below, lighting the interior of the lifesystem sphere. Brennan moved instantly, stabbing out with a stiff forefinger.
For a moment afterward, then, Brennan hovered wire-tense over the dials. Then he was himself again. “Reflexes still in order,” he said.
“What happened?”
“They did it. They built a gravity widget like mine. My own widget collapsed into a hypermass, and the hypermass started eating its way up the cable. If I hadn’t blown the cable in time it would have absorbed the weapons pod. The energy release would have killed us.” Brennan opened the keyboard panel and began closing control elements down against future need. “Now we’ll have to beat them to the neutron star. If they maintain their deceleration, we will.”
“What are they likely to throw at us in the meantime?”
“Lasers for sure. They need heavy lasers anyway, to communicate with the main fleets. I’m going to opaque the twing.” He did. Now they were locked inside a gray shell, the scouts showing only in the telescope screen. “Other than that…we’re all in a bad way for throwing bombs. We’re all decelerating. My missiles would be like going uphill; they couldn’t reach them at this distance. They can reach me, but their bombs are going in the wrong direction. They’ll go right through the ram field from behind.”
“Good.”
“Sure. Unless they’re accurate enough to h
it the ship itself. Well, we’ll see.”
The lasers came in two beams of searing green light, and Protector was blind aft. Part of Protector’s skin boiled away frighteningly. The underskin was mirror-surfaced.
“That won’t hurt us until they get a lot closer,” said Brennan. But he worried about missiles. He began dodging at random, and life became uncomfortable as Brennan played with Protector’s acceleration.
A cluster of small masses approached them. Brennan opened the ram field constriction wide, and they watched the explosions in relative comfort, though some of them shook the ship. Roy watched almost without fear. He was bothered by the growing feeling that Brennan and the Pak protectors were playing an elaborate game whose rules they both understood perfectly: a game like the space war games played by computer programmers. Brennan had known that he would get the first ships, that the others would ruin his widget, that in matching courses for a proper duel they would slow too far to catch him by the time they discovered the neutron star ahead…
A day out from the neutron star, one of the green war beams went out. “They finally saw it,” said Brennan, “They’re lining up for the pass. Otherwise they could wind up being flung off in opposite directions.”
“They’re awfully close,” said Roy. They were, in a relative sense: they were four light-hours behind Protector, closer than Sol is to Pluto. “And you can’t dodge much, can you? It’d foul our course past the star.”
“Let me get this done,” Brennan mumbled, and Roy shut up.
The thrust dropped easily to half a gee. Protector swung left, and the lifesystem pod swung oddly at the end of its cable.
Then Brennan turned the ram field off entirely. “There’s a bit of a gas shell,” he explained. “Now don’t bug me for awhile.”
Protector was in free fall, a sitting duck.
Eight hours later there were missiles. The scouts must have fired as soon as they saw the sparkle of Protector’s ram field go out. Brennan dodged, using the insystem drive. The missiles he’d thrown at the scouts had no apparent effect: the hellish green light from the lead ship continued to bathe Protector.
“He’s cut his ram field,” Brennan said presently. “He’ll have to cut his laser too, when he runs out of battery power.” He looked at Roy for the first time in hours. “Get some sleep. You’re half dead now. What’ll you be like when we round the star?”
“All dead,” Roy sighed. He reclined his chair. “Wake me up if he hits us, will you? I’d hate to miss anything.”
Brennan didn’t answer.
Three hours away, the neutron star was still invisible ahead of them. Brennan said, “Ready?”
“Ready.” Roy was suited up, floating with one hand on the jamb of the airlock. There was still sleep in his eyes. His dreams had been fearsome.
“Go.”
Roy went. The lock would pass only one man. He was at work when Brennan came through. Brennan had cut this close, to reduce radiation exposure from the neutron star’s thin gas envelope, and to reduce the time the Pak had to blast away at unprotected men.
They detached the cable that led to the drive section, then used it to reel the drive section close, coiling the cable as it came. It was thick and heavy. They stowed it against the stern of the drive section.
They did the same with the cable that towed the weapons pod. Roy worked his two-gravity muscles with adrenalin flooding his system. He was well aware of the radiation sleeting through his body. This was war…but with something missing. He could not hate the Pak. He did not understand them well enough. If Brennan could hate them, he could have caught it from Brennan; but Brennan didn’t. No matter that he called it war. What he was playing was high stakes poker.
Now the three main sections of Protector floated end to end. Roy boarded the Belt cargo ship for the first time in years. As he took his place at the controls, green light flooded the cabin. He dropped the sun screens fast.
Brennan came through the airlock shouting, “Foxed ’em! If they’d done that half an hour ago wed have been cooked.”
“I thought they’d used up their stored power.”
“No, that would have been stupid, but they must be pretty low. They thought I’d wait to the last second before I took the ships apart. They don’t know what I am yet!” he exulted. “And they don’t know I have help. All right, we’ve got about an hour before we have to go outside. Get us lined up.”
Roy used attitude jets to put the Belt ship fourth in line, behind Protector’s weapons pod. It felt good to be handling controls, to be doing something constructive in Brennan’s war. Through the sun screens the components of Protector glared green as hell. They were already drifting apart in the reaching tides of the mass ahead.
“Have you named that star yet?”
“No,” said Brennan.
“You discovered it. You have the right.”
“I’ll call it Phssthpok’s Star, then. Bear ye witness. I think we owe him that.”
NAME. Phssthpok’s Star. Later renamed BVS-1, by the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx.
CLASSIFICATION: Neutron star.
MASS: 1.3 times mass of Sol.
COMPOSITION: Eleven miles diameter of neutronium, topped by half a mile of collapsed matter, topped by perhaps twelve feet of normal matter.
SURFACE GRAVITY: 1.7 x 1011 G, Earth standard.
REMARKS: First nonradiating neutron star ever discovered. Atypical compared with many known pulsars; but stars of the BVS type would be difficult to find as compared with pulsars. BVS-1 may have started life as a pulsar, with a radiating gas shell, one hundred million to a billion years ago; then transferred its rotation to the gas shell, dissipating it in the process.
They were going to go past Phssthpok’s Star damn fast.
The four sections of Protector fell separately. Even the Pak cable would not have held them together. Worse: the tidal effect would have pulled the sections into line with the star’s center of mass. The four sections with their snapped cables would have emerged on wildly different orbits.
This way the self-maneuvering cargo ship could be used to link the other sections after perihelion. But he and Brennan could not ride it out here. The Belt ship’s cabin was in the nose of the ship, too far from the center of mass.
Roy knew this intellectually. Before they left the ship he could feel it.
Protector had been three receding green dots before the Pak laser finally went out. Then they were invisible. And the neutron star was a dull red point ahead. Roy felt its tides pulling him forward against the crash webbing.
“Go,” said Brennan.
Roy released the webbing. He stood up on the clear plastic of the nose port, then climbed along the wall. The rungs were made for climbing in the other direction. Maneuvering himself into the airlock was difficult. Minutes from now it would have been impossible. More minutes, and the tides would have crushed him against the nose port, a beetle beneath a heel.
The hull was smooth, without handholds. He couldn’t wait here. He hung from the jamb, then dropped.
The ship fell away. He saw a tiny humanoid figure crouched in the airlock. Then four tiny flashes. Brennan had one of the high-velocity rifles. He was firing at the Pak.
Roy could feel the tides now, the whisper of a tug inside his body. His feet came down to the red dot ahead.
Brennan had dropped after him. He was using backpac jets.
The tug inside was stronger. Gentle hands at his head and feet were trying to pull him apart. The red dot was yellowing, brightening, coming up at him like a fiery bowling ball.
He thought about it for a good hour. Brennan had intimidated him to that extent. He thought it through backward and forward, and then he told Brennan he was crazy.
They were linked by three yards of line. The line was taut, though the neutron star was a tiny red dot behind them. And Brennan still had the gun.
“I’m not doubting your professional opinion,” said Brennan, “But what symptom was it that tipped you off?”
“That gun. Why did you shoot at the Pak ship?”
“I want it wrecked.”
“But you couldn’t hit it. You were aiming right at it. I saw you. The star’s gravity must have pulled the bullets off course.”
“You think about it. If I’m really off my nut, you’d be justified in taking command.”
“Not necessarily. Sometimes crazy is better than stupid. What I’m really afraid of is that shooting at the Pak ships might make sense. Everything else you do makes sense, sooner or later. If that makes sense I’m gonna quit.”
Brennan was hunting for the cargo ship with a pair of binoculars. He said, “Don’t do that. Treat it as a puzzle. If I’m not crazy, why did I fire at a Pak ship?”
“Dammit. The muzzle velocity isn’t anything like good enough…How long have I got?”
“Two hours and fifty minutes.”
“O-o-oh.”
They were back aboard Protector’s isolated lifesystem by then, watching the vision screens and—in Brennan’s case—a score of instruments besides. The second Pak team fell toward the miniature sun in four sections: a drive section like a two-edged ax, then a pillbox-shaped lifesystem section, then a gap of several hundred miles, then a much bigger drive section and another pillbox. The first pillbox was just passing perihelion when the neutron star flared.
A moment ago magnification had showed it as a dim red globe. Now a small blue-white star showed on its surface. The white spot spread, dimming; it spread across the surface without rising in any kind of cloud. Brennan’s counters and needles began to chatter and twitch.
“That should kill him,” Brennan said with satisfaction. “Those Pak pilots probably aren’t too healthy anyway; they must have picked up a certain amount of radiation over thirty-one thousand light years riding behind a Bussard ramjet.”
“I presume that was a bullet?”
“Yah. A steel-jacketed bullet. And we’re moving against the spin of the star. I slowed it enough that the magnetic field would pick it up and slow it further, and keep on slowing it until it hit the star’s surface. There were some uncertainties. I wasn’t sure just when it would hit.”
