Protector

by Larry Niven

  “The base should be there,” said Luke. “At the north edge of that arc. Ah, that must be it, that little crater.”

  “Use the scope.”

  “Mmmmm…Dammit. Ah. There it is. Still inflated, too. See it, Nick?”

  “Yah.”

  The autodoc was built into the back wall, set over one of the three disaster couches. Einar was in that couch. His arm had been inserted into a slot in the wall.

  Tim turned to examine the dial faces on the autodoc. Usually a panel covered those dials; a spaceship has enough gadgets to watch without added distractions. Tim had been looking at those dials every five minutes, for hours. But this time they all showed red.

  “He’s dead,” said Tim. He heard the surprise in his voice and wondered at it.

  Nate squirmed out of the control couch and bent over Einar. “And you just noticed! He must have been dead for an hour!”

  “No, I swear…” Tim gulped against the rising anaesthesia in his veins. His body was water. He was going to faint.

  “Look at his face and tell me that!”

  Tim climbed onto watery legs. He looked down at the ravaged face for a moment. Einar, dead, looked a hundred years old. In sorrow and guilt and repugnance, Tim reached to touch the dead cheek.

  “He’s still warm.”

  “Warm?” Nate touched the corpse. “He’s on fire. Fever. Must have been alive seconds ago. Sorry, buddy, I jumped at conclusions. But doesn’t it look like he’s been dead a week? Hey! Are you all right?”

  The dust rose in churning clouds to meet their drive flame. Nick swore viciously and increased the thrust. By now Luke had caught on to Nick’s vagaries in blasphemy. When he swore by Finagle it was for emphasis or humor. When he blasphemed in Christian fashion, he meant it.

  The LSD4 slowed and hovered. She was above the dust, and then in the dust, and gradually the ochre clouds thinned and backed away. A ring-shaped sandstorm receded toward three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon; and the bedrock lay exposed for the first time in millennia. It was lumpy and brown and worn. In the light of the drive the rounded rock blazed white, with sharp black shadows. Where the drive flame touched it began to melt.

  Nick said, “I’ll have to land in the crater. That dust will flow back in as soon as I turn off the motor.” He angled the ship left and pushed a lever forward. The bottom dropped out, and they fell.

  They fell all the way and touched with hardly a bounce.

  “Beautiful,” said Luke.

  “I do that all the time. Let’s get into our suits.”

  “You’ll have to carry me piggyback until we find a boat.”

  Nick opened both airlock doors, pulled Luke outside, settled him firmly on his shoulders and climbed down the ladder. He had landed near the ring wall, which rose above them in worn, rounded, volcanic-looking stone. Dust dripped back from the rim, running like molasses down the shallow slope to collect in a pool around the ship’s shock legs. The crater was half a mile across. In the approximate center was the dome, surrounded by a shallow lapping sea of dust.

  “Let’s go up the wall,” said Nick. “The boats will be outside.”

  “No. There’s an opening somewhere in the ring wall. Remember? They moored the boats just outside the dome.”

  “Then where are they?”

  “Must be on the other side of the dome. We couldn’t see too well coming down.”

  Nick looked around him, frowning. There seemed no way to reach the dome without crossing the dust, which might not be as shallow as it looked. The crater was ancient; it looked just younger than the planet itself. But it was riddled with younger cracks. Some of the edges were almost sharp; the air and dust were too thin to erode things quickly. There would be bad footing.

  Perhaps the men who built the dome had never needed to reach the ring wall, except by boat.

  He stared around the base of the ring wall, walking slowly and carefully. Luke was light on his shoulders, and his own body was light; but together they were top-heavy, and some of the cracks were concealed by fluid.

  A small, intense sun hung above the crater rim, in a sky the color of veinous blood.

  On the far side of the dome a narrow strip of laser-fused dust led from the dome to the ring wall. The boats were there, moored along the path. Dust had settled over them, leaving only flat, wide shapes the color of everything else. For twelve years they had waited for explorers who had lost interest and gone home.

  It was like seeing ghosts. An Egyptian Pharaoh might find such ghosts waiting for him in the afterworld: rank on rank of dumb, faithful retainers, gone before him, and waiting, waiting.

  “From here they look good,” said Luke. “We’re in luck, Sinbad.”

  “Don’t count your money yet.”

  It was a fifteen-minute walk from the ship to the ring-wall end of the path. Nick sighed as he started across the dust pond toward the dome. “Has it occurred to you that Lacis Solis is more than two thousand miles from here? The UN could make their own boats and still beat us.”

  “They won’t move that fast. Come on.”

  “The path’s slippery. Dust all over it.”

  The boats, four of them, were lined along the west side. Each had four seats and a pair of fans at the stern, below the dust line, with cages for protection from submerged rocks. The boats were so flat that any ocean ripple would have sunk them; but in the heavy dust they rode barely submerged.

  Nick dropped his burden not too gently into one of the seats. “See if she’ll start, Luke. I’m going to the dome for fuel.”

  “It’ll be hydrazine, with compressed Martian air as oxidizer.”

  “I’ll just look for a fuel tank, if it’s okay with you.”

  Luke was able to start the compressor, but the motor wouldn’t fire. Probably drained the tanks, he decided and turned everything off. He found a bubble dome collapsed in the back. After making sure it was meant to be worked manually, he wrestled it into place and sealed it down, holding himself in place with a seat belt to get leverage. His long arms and wide hands had never lost an arm wrestling match. The edges of the bubble probably leaked, he decided, but not seriously. He found the inspection hatch that concealed an air converter for changing the nitric acid outside into breathable nitrogen and oxygen.

  Nick returned with a green tank balanced on one shoulder. He fueled the boat through an injector nozzle. Luke tried the starter again. It worked. The boat tried to take off without Nick. Luke found the neutral setting, then reverse. Nick waited while he backed up.

  “How do I get through the bubble?”

  “I guess you don’t.” Luke collapsed the bubble, unsealed one side for Nick, then sealed it after him. The bubble began to fill, slowly. “Best keep our suits on,” said Luke. “It may be hours before we can breathe in here.”

  “You can collapse it then. We’ve got to get provisions from the ship.”

  It was two hours before they raised the bubble and started for the opening in the ring wall.

  The cliffs that framed the opening were sharp and sheer, clearly dynamite-blasted, as artificial as the glassy path between dome and ring wall. Naked black rock glared down at them as they passed between. Nick was settled comfortably in one of the passenger chairs, his feet up on another, his eyes resting casually on the screen of the deep-radar mounted on the side of the boat.

  “Seems deep enough,” he said.

  “Then I’ll open her up,” said Luke. The fans spun; the boat’s stern dipped far down, then righted. In seconds they were skimming across the dust at forty knots, leaving as a wake only two straight, shallow, regular swells.

  The deep-radar image registered as a contour map. It showed a smooth bottom, regular swells and dips from which millions of years had eliminated all sharp lines and points. There was little volcanic activity on Mars.

  The desert was as flat as a mirror. Rounded dun-colored rocks poked through its surface, incongruous, Daliesque. Craters sat on the dust like badly made clay ash trays. Some were a
few inches across. Others beyond the horizon would measure miles, or tens of miles. The horizon was straight and close and razor sharp, glowing yellow below and artery red above. Nick turned his head to watch the crater recede.

  His eyes widened, then squinted. Something?

  “Damn’t. Hold it!” he shouted. “Turn around! Turn hard left!”

  “Back toward the crater?”

  “Yes!”

  Luke cut the power in one motor. The boat turned its prow to the left but continued to skid sideways across the dust. Then the right fan bit in, and the boat curved around.

  “I see it,” said Luke.

  It was little more than a dot at that distance, but it showed clearly against the calm monochromatic sea around it. And it moved. It jerked, it remained quiescent, it jerked again, rolling sideways. It was several hundred yards from the crater wall.

  As they approached, it grew clearer. It was cylindrical, the shape of a short caterpillar, and translucent; and soft, for they could see it bend as it moved. It was trying to reach the opening in the ring wall.

  Luke throttled down. The dustboat slowed and settled deeper. As they pulled alongside Luke was startled to see that Nick had armed himself with a signal gun, a rocket pistol with an exploding warhead of ultrafine dust. Such a pistol could call for help, but at close range it could also kill.

  “It’s him,” said Nick. He leaned over the side, gun at the ready.

  The caterpillar was a transparent, inflated sack. Inside was something that rolled over and over, slowly and painfully, trying to get closer to the side of the boat. It was as clearly alien as anything created in the days of flat television.

  It was humanoid, as much so as a stick-figure drawing is humanoid. But it was all knobs. Elbows, knees, shoulders, cheek-bones, they stuck out like marbles or grapefruits or bowling balls. The head was a small watermelon swelling and rising like hydrocephalus.

  It stopped trying to roll when it bumped against the boat in its pressurized prison.

  “He looks helpless enough,” Nick said dubiously.

  “Well, here goes our air again.” Luke deflated the bubble. The two men reached over the side, picked up the pressurized sack and dropped it in the bottom of the boat. The alien’s expression did not change and probably could not. But it did a strange thing. With thumb and forefinger of a strangely human, strangely inhuman hand, it made a circle.

  Nick said, “He must have learned that from Brennan.”

  “Look at the joints, Nick. It looks like you could name every one of them.”

  “His arms are too long for human. And his back slopes more.”

  “Yah. Well, we can’t take it back to the ship, and we can’t talk to it the way it is now. We’ll have to wait out here while the bubble inflates.”

  “We seem to spend most of our time waiting,” said Luke.

  Nick nodded. His fingers, drummed against the back of a chair. For half an hour the boat’s small converter had been straining to fill the bubble, using and changing the thin, poisonous mixture outside.

  But the alien hadn’t moved at all. Luke had been watching. The alien lay in its inflated bag in the bottom of the boat, and it waited. Its human eyes watched them from inside pits of tough, leathery wrinkles. No part of it moved except its eyes. Just so, with just such patience, might a dead man wait for Judgment Day.

  “At least we have it at a disadvantage,” said Nick. “It won’t be kidnapping us.”

  “I think he must be insane.”

  “Insane? Its motives may be a little strange—”

  “Look at the evidence. He comes plowing into the system in a ship just adequate to get him here. His air tank was on its last gasp. There was no evidence of fail-safe devices anywhere aboard ship. He made no attempt to contact anyone, as far as we can tell. He kills or kidnaps Brennan. He then proceeds to abandon his interstellar drive and run for Mars, presumably to hide. Now he’s abandoned his re-entry vehicle and whatever’s left of Brennan too; he’s rolled halfway around Mars in a sandwich bag to reach the first place any exploring ship would land! He’s a nut. Too many years between stars in too small a place have stirred his brains with an eggbeater.”

  “You keep saying him. It’s an it. Think of it as an it, and you’ll be ready for it to act odd.”

  “That’s a cop-out. The universe is rational. In order to survive, this thing has to be rational too, wherever he, she or it is from.”

  “Another couple of minutes and we can—”

  The alien moved. Its hand slashed with blurring speed down the length of the sack. Instantly Nick raised the signal gun. Instantly…but the alien reached through a long slit in the sack and took the gun out of Nick’s hand before he could fire. There was no sign of haste. It tossed the gun into the back of the boat and sat up.

  It spoke. Its voice was full of clickings and rustlings and poppings. The flat, hard beak must have been a handicap. But its speech could be understood.

  It said, “Take me to your leader.”

  Nick recovered first. He straightened his shoulders, cleared his throat and said, “That will involve a trip of several days. Meanwhile, may I welcome you to the dominion of humanity?”

  “You may not,” said the monster. “I hate to ruin your whole day. My name’s Jack Brennan, and I’m a Belter. Aren’t you Nick Sohl?”

  IX

  The awful silence rocked to the sound of Luke’s laughter. “You think of it as an it instead of a him, 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 was no less intimidating, than before it had announced itself as Brennan. “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 in Luke’s voice. He may or may not have believed the Brennan-monster, but either way he was enjoying the situation. “Was there really an Outsider, Brennan?”

  “Unless you want to quibble about definitions, yes.”

  Sohl broke in. “For God’s sake, Brennan! What happened to you?”

  “That’s a long story,” said the Brennan-monster. “And I’m going to tell it all, right here. To make it easier for you to understand, I’d like to tell it my own way, so please maintain a respectful silence, remembering that if I hadn’t gotten in the way you’d look just like me.” He looked hard at the two men. “I’m wrong. You wouldn’t. You’re both too old. Well, bear with me. I’m going to tell you about a race of bipeds that lives near the edge of the spherical 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 the age of forty-two, Earth 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. This 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 physical and emotional. But before I go into them, 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. “We call it Peking Man.”

  “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 wicked enjoyment.

  “Peking Man. There was an expedition that landed on Earth som
e five hundred thousand years ago. The bush they needed wouldn’t grow, so there haven’t been any protector stage Paks 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 lower lips grow together and form a hard, flat beak. All hair disappears. Some joints swell enormously, to supply much greater leverage to the muscles. 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 heart forms where the two veins from the legs, whatever the hell they’re called, join to approach the heart. Notice that my armor skin is thicker there? Well, there are less dramatic changes, but they all contribute to make the protector a powerful, intelligent fighting machine.

  “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. Does it occur to you that every change I’ve described is a kind of exaggeration of what happens to men and women when they get old?”

  “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 modem medical care, a normal human heart becomes inadequate. Eventually it stops.”

  “Ah.”

  “About that colony. There’s no need to dwell on it. 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 realized they’d picked the wrong planet. The tree they needed never came up. 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.” The Brennan-monster paused. There was no sign of emotion in voice or masklike face.