Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven

by Larry Niven

  He held the coin as if trying to choose. Stalling. Those gas jets seemed to be attitude jets, but maybe not. Suppose he won? Would he win only the chance to be murdered?

  But they'd both die if his heart stopped. No alien could have guessed what kind of weapon would render him helpless without killing him.

  "I choose the planet. You flip first."

  The alien tossed the coin in the direction of Louis's ship. Louis' eyes followed it down, and he took two steps to retrieve it. The alien stood beside him when he rose.

  "Hand," he said.

  "My turn." He was one down. He tossed the coin. As it spun gleaming, he saw for the first time that the alien ship was gone.

  "What gives?" he demanded.

  "There's no need for us to die," said the alien. It held something that had hung in a loop from its chest.

  "This is a weapon, but both will die if I use it. Please do not try to reach your ship."

  Louis touched the button that would blow his power plant.

  "My ship lifted when you turned your head to follow the screee. By now my ship is beyond range of any possible explosion you can bring to bear. There is no need for us to die, provided you do not try to reach your ship."

  "Wrong. I can leave your ship without a pilot." He left his hand where it was. Rather than be cheated by an alien in a gambling game—

  "The pilot is still on board, with the astrogator and the screee. I am only the communications officer. Why did you assume I was alone?"

  Louis sighed and let his arm fall. "Because I'm stupid," he said bitterly. "Because you used the singular pronoun, or my computer did. Because I thought you were a gambler."

  "I gambled that you would not see my ship take off, that you would be distracted by the coin, that you could see only from the front of your head. The risks seemed better than one-half."

  Louis nodded. It all seemed clear.

  "There was also the chance that you had lured me down to destroy me." The computer was still translating into the first person singular. "I have lost at least one exploring ship that flew in this direction."

  "Not guilty. So have we." A thought struck him and he said, "Prove that you hold a weapon."

  The alien obliged. No beam showed, but sand exploded to Louis's left, with a vicious crack! and a flash the color of lightning. The alien held something that made holes.

  So much for that. Louis bent and picked up the coin. "As long as we're here, shall we finish the game?"

  "To what purpose?"

  "To see who would have won. Doesn't your species gamble for pleasure?"

  "To what purpose? We gamble for survival."

  "Then Finagle take your whole breed!" he snarled and flung himself to the sand. His chance for glory was gone, tricked away from him. There is a tide that governs men's affairs…and there went the ebb, carrying statues to Louis Wu, history books naming Louis Wu, jetsam on the tide.

  "Your attitude is puzzling. One gambles only when gambling is necessary."

  "Nuts."

  "My translator will not translate that comment."

  "Do you know what that artifact is?"

  "I know of the species who built that artifact. They traveled far."

  "We've never found a stasis box that big. It must be a vault of some kind."

  "It is thought that that species used a single weapon to end their war and all its participants."

  The two looked at each other. Possibly each was thinking the same thing. What a disaster, if any but my own species should take this ultimate weapon!

  But that was anthropomorphic thinking. Louis knew that a Kzin would have been saying: Now I can conquer the universe, as is my right.

  "Finagle take my luck!" said Louis Wu between his teeth. "Why did you have to show at the same time I did?"

  "That was not entirely chance. My instruments found your craft as you backed into the system. To reach the vicinity of the artifact in time, it was necessary to use thrust that damaged my ship and killed one of my crew. I earned possession of the artifact."

  "By cheating, damn you!" Louis stood up…

  And something meshed between his brain and his semicircular canals.

  IV

  One gravity.

  The density of a planet's atmosphere depended on its gravity, and on its moon. A big moon would skim away most of the atmosphere, over the billions of years of a world's evolution. A moonless world the size and mass of Earth should have unbreathable air, impossibly dense, worse than Venus.

  But this planet had no moon. Except—

  The alien said something, a startled ejaculation that the computer refused to translate.

  "Screee! Where did the water go?"

  Louis looked. What he saw puzzled him only a moment. The ocean had receded, slipped imperceptibly away, until what showed now was half a mile of level, slickly shinning sea bottom.

  "Where did the water go? I do not understand."

  "I do."

  "Where did it go? Without a moon, there can be no tides. Tides are not this quick in any case. Explain, please."

  "It'd be easier if we use the telescope in my ship."

  "In your ship there may be weapons."

  "Now pay attention," said Louis. "Your ship is very close to total destruction. Nothing can save your crew but the comm laser in my ship."

  The alien dithered, then capitulated. "If you have weapons, you would have used them earlier. You cannot stop my ship now. Let us enter your ship. Remember that I hold my weapon."

  The alien stood beside him in the small cabin, his mouth working disturbingly around the serrated edges of his teeth as Louis activated the scope and screen. Shortly a starfield appeared. So did a conical spacecraft, painted green with darker green markings. Along the bottom of the screen was the blur of thick atmosphere.

  "You see? The artifact must be nearly to the horizon. It moves fast."

  "That fact is obvious even to low intelligence."

  "Yah. Is it obvious to you that this world must have a massive satellite?"

  "But it does not, unless the satellite is invisible."

  "Not invisible. Just too small to notice. But then, it must be very dense."

  The alien didn't answer.

  "Why did we assume the sphere was a Slaver stasis box? Its shape was wrong; its size was wrong. But it was shiny, like the surface of a stasis field, and spherical, like an artifact. Planets are spheres too, but gravity wouldn't ordinarily pull something ten feet wide into a sphere. Either it would have to be very fluid, or it would have to be very dense. Do you understand me?"

  "No."

  "I don't know how your equipment works. My deepradar uses a hyperwave pulse to find stasis boxes. When something stops a hyperwave pulse, it's either a stasis box, or it's something denser than degenerate matter, the matter inside a normal star. And this object is dense enough to cause tides."

  A tiny silver bead had drifted into view ahead of the cone. Telescopic foreshortening seemed to bring it right alongside the ship. Louis reached to scratch at his beard and was stopped by his faceplate.

  "I believe I understand you. But how could it happen?"

  "That's guesswork. Well?"

  "Call my ship. They would be killed. We must save them!"

  "I had to be sure you wouldn't stop me." Louis Wu went to work. Presently a light glowed; the computer had found the alien ship with its comm laser.

  He spoke without preliminaries. "You must leave the spherical object immediately. It is not an artifact. It is ten feet of nearly solid neutronium, probably torn loose from a neutron star."

  There was no answer, of course. The alien stood behind him but did not speak. Probably his own ship's computer could not have handled the double translation. But the alien was making one two-armed gesture, over and over.

  The green cone swung sharply around, broadside to the telescope.

  "Good, they're firing lateral," said Louis to himself. "Maybe they can do a hyperbolic past it." He raised his voice. "Use all the
power available. You must pull away."

  The two objects seemed to be pulling apart. Louis suspected that that was illusion, for the two objects were almost in line-of-sight. "Don't let the small mass fool you," he said, unnecessarily now. "Computer, what's the mass of a ten-foot neutronium sphere?—Around two times ten to the minus six times the mass of this world, which is pretty tiny, but if you get too close…Computer, what's the surface gravity?—I don't believe it."

  The two objects seemed to be pulling together again. Damn, thought Louis. If they hadn't come along, that'd be me.

  He kept talking. It wouldn't matter now, except to relieve his own tension. "My computer says ten million gravities at the surface. That may be off. Newton's formula for gravity. Can you hear me?"

  "They are too close," said the alien. "By now it is too late to save their lives." It was happening as he spoke. The ship began to crumble a fraction of a second before impact. Impact looked no more dangerous than a cannonball striking the wall of a fort. The tiny silver bead simply swept through the side of the ship. But the ship closed instantly, all in a moment, like tinsel paper in a strong man's fist. Closed into a bead glowing yellow with heat. A tiny sphere ten feet through or a bit more.

  "I mourn," said the alien.

  "Now I get it," said Louis. "I wondered what was fouling our laser messages. That chunk of neutronium was right between our ships, bending the light beams."

  "Why was this trap set for us?" cried the alien. "Have we enemies so powerful that they can play with such masses?"

  A touch of paranoia? Louis wondered. Maybe the whole species had it. "Just a touch of coincidence. A smashed neutron star."

  For a time the alien did not speak. The telescope, for want of a better target, remained focused on the bead. Its glow had died.

  The alien said, "My pressure suit will not keep me alive long."

  "We'll make a run for it. I can reach Margrave in a couple of weeks. If you can hold out that long, we'll set up a tailored environment box to hold you until we think of something better. It only takes a couple of hours to set one up. I'll call ahead."

  The alien's triple gaze converged on him. "Can you send messages faster than light?"

  "Sure."

  "You have knowledge worth trading for. I'll come with you."

  "Thanks a whole lot." Louis Wu started punching buttons. "Margrave. Civilization. People. Faces. Voices. Bah." The ship leapt upward, ripping atmosphere apart. Cabin, gravity wavered a little, then settled down.

  "Well," he told himself. "I can always come back."

  "You will return here?"

  "I think so," he decided.

  "I hope you will be armed."

  "What? More paranoia?"

  "Your species is insufficiently suspicious," said the alien. "I wonder that you have survived. Consider this neutronium object as a defense. Its mass pulls anything that touches it into smooth and reflective spherical surface. Should any vehicle approach this world, its crew would find this object quickly. They would assume it is an artifact. What other assumption could they make? They would draw alongside for a closer examination."

  "True enough, but that planet's empty. Nobody to defend."

  "Perhaps."

  The planet was dwindling below. Louis Wu swung his ship toward deep space.

  Safe at any Speed

  In the two hundred years between Beowulf Shaeffer and Louis Wu, little had changed on the surface. Known Space was somewhat larger. Most ships used a reactionless drive, the "thruster." The birthright lotteries had been in use on Earth almost since Shaeffer's time.

  It was the birthright lotteries, which made being born a matter of sheer luck, that eventually created the Teela Brown gene. Teela Brown's story is chronicled in Ringworld. There were other teelas on Earth, and their effect was catastrophic, at least for a writer. Stories about infinitely lucky people tend to be dull.

  One tale survives from the golden age that followed.....LN

  ~ ~ o 0 o ~ ~

  But how, you ask, could a car have managed to fail me?

  Already I can see the terror in your eyes at the thought that your car, too, might fail. Here you are with an indefinite lifespan, a potentially immortal being, taking every possible precaution against the abrupt termination of your godhead; and all for nothing. The disruptor field in your kitchen dispose-all could suddenly expand to engulf you. Your transfer booth could make you disappear at the transmitter and forget to deliver you at the receiver. A slidewalk could accelerate to one hundred miles per hour, then slew sideways to throw you against a building. Every boosterspice plant in the Thousand Worlds could die overnight, leaving you to grow old and grey and wrinkled and arthritic. No, its never happened in human history; but if a man can't trust his car, fa' Pete's sake, what can he trust?

  Rest assured, reader, it wasn't that bad.

  For one thing, it all happened on Margrave, a world in the first stages of colonisation. I was twenty minutes out of Triangle Lake on my way to the Wiggly River logging region, flying at an altitude of a thousand feet. For several days the logging machines had been cutting trees which were too young, and a mechanic was needed to alter a few settings in the boss brain. I was cruising along on autopilot, playing double-deck complex solitaire in the back seat, with the camera going so that just in case I won one I'd have a film to back up my bragging.

  Then a roc swooped down on me, wrapped ten huge talons around my car, and swallowed it.

  Right away your see that it couldn't happen anywhere but Margrave. In the first place, I wouldn't have been using a car for a two-hour trip on any civilized world. I'd have taken a transfer booth. In the second place, where else can you find rocs?

  Anyway, this big damn bird caught me and ate me, and everything went dark. The car flew blithely on, ignoring the roc, but the ride became turbulent as the roc tried to fly away and couldn't. I heard grinding sounds from outside. I tried my radio and got nothing. Either it couldn't reach through all that meat around me, or the trip through the bird's gullet had brushed away my antennas.

  There didn't seem to be anything else I could do. I turned on the cabin lights and went on with the game. The grinding noises continued, and now I could see what was causing them. At some time the roc had swallowed several boulders, for the same reason a chicken swallows grit: to help digestion. The rocks were rubbing against the car under peristalsis, trying to break it down into smaller pieces for the murky digestive juices to work on.

  I wondered how smart the boss brain was. When it saw a roc glide in for a landing at the logging camp, and when it realized that the bird was incapable of leaving no matter how it shrieked and flapped its wings, would the master computer draw the correct conclusion? Would it realize the bird had swallowed a car? I was afraid not. If the boss brain were that smart it would have been in business for itself.

  I never found out. All of a sudden my seat cocoon wrapped itself around me like an overprotective mother, and there was a meaty three-hundred-mile-per-hour Smack!

  The cocoon unwrapped itself. My cabin lights still showed red-lit fluid around me, but it was getting redder. The boulders had stopped rolling around. My cards were all over the cabin, like a snowstorm.

  Obviously I'd forgotten one teensy little mountain when I programmed the autopilot. The roc had been blocking the radar and sonar, with predictable results. A little experimenting showed that my drive had failed under the impact, my radio still wouldn't work, and my emergency flares refused to try to fire through a roc's belly.

  There was no way to get out, not without opening my door to a flood of digestive juices. I could have done that if I'd had a vac suit, but how was I to know I'd need one on a two-hour car trip?

  There was only one thing to do.

  I collected my cards, shuffled, and started a new game.

  It was half a year before the roc's corpus decomposed enough to let me out. In that time I won five games of double complex solitaire. I've only got films for four; the camera ran out. I'm happy
to say that the emergency food-maker worked beautifully if a little monotonously, the air-maker never failed, and the clock TV kept perfect time as a clock. As a TV it showed only technicolour ripples of static. The washroom went out along about August, but I got it fixed without much trouble. At 2:00 P.M. on October 24 I forced the door open, hacked my way through the mummified skin and flesh between a couple of roc ribs, and took a deep breath of real air. It smelled of roc. I'd left the cabin door open, and I could hear the airmaker whine crazily as it tried to absorb the smell.

  I fired off a few flares, and fifteen minutes later a car dropped to take me home. They say I was the hairiest human being they'd ever seen. I've since asked Mr. Dickson, the president of General Transportation, why he didn't include a depil tube in the emergency stores.

  "A castaway is supposed to look like a castaway," he tells me.

  "If you're wearing a year's growth of hair, your rescuer will know immediately that you've been lost for some time and will take the appropriate steps."

  General Transportation has paid me a more than adequate sum in a compensation for the fact that my car was unable to handle a roc. (I've heard that they're changing the guarantees for next year's model.) They've promised me an equal sum for writing this article. It seems there are strange and possibly damaging rumors going around concerning my delayed arrival at Wiggly River.

  Rest assured, reader. I not only lived through the accident without harm, but came out of it with a substantial profit. Your car is perfectly safe, provided it was built later than 3100 A.D.

  Magazine artwork

  A Relic of the Empire

  Worlds of If, December 1966

  (illustrated by Burns)

  The Soft Weapon

  Worlds of If, February 1967

  (illustrated by Jack Gaughan)