04-Protector

by Larry Niven

  Section two was a sphere some sixty feet across. When the ship finally stopped moving, this section was immediately opposite Brennan. A large circular window stared out of the sphere, so that the sphere looked like a great eyeball. It turned to follow Brennan as it moved past. Brennan found it difficult to return that uncanny stare.

  He was having second thoughts. Surely the Belt government could have organized a better meeting than this...

  The trailing pod—he’d had a good look as it eased past. It was egg shaped, perhaps sixty feet long by forty feet through. The big end, facing away from the drive section, was so uniformly pitted with dust grains that it looked sandblasted. The small end was pointed and smooth, almost shiny. Brennan nodded to himself. A rarnscoop field would have protected the forward end from micro-meteoroids during acceleration. During deceleration its training position would have done the same.

  There were no breaks in the egg.

  There was motion within the bulging iris of the center section. Brennan strained, trying to see more... but nothing more happened.

  It was a peculiar way to build a ship, he thought. The center pod must be the life support system, if only because it had a porthole and the trailing pod did not. And the drive was dangerously radioactive; otherwise why string the ship out like this? But that meant that the lifesystem was positioned to protect the trailing pod from the drive radiation. Whatever was in that trailing pod must be more important than the pilot, in the opinion of the pilot.

  Either that, or the pilot and the designer had both been inept or insane.

  The Outsider ship was motionless now, its drive going cold, its lifesystem section a few hundred feet away. Brennan waited.

  I’m being chauvinistic, he told himself. I can’t judge an alien’s sanity by Belt standards, can I?

  His lip curled. Sure I can. That ship is badly designed.

  The alien stepped out onto its hull.

  Every muscle in Brennan jerked as he saw it. The alien was a biped; it looked human enough from here. But it had stepped through the porthole. It stood on its own hull, motionless, waiting.

  It had two arms, one head, two legs. It used a pressure suit. It carried a weapon—or a reaction pistol; there was no way to tell. But Brennan saw no backpac. A reaction pistol takes a deal more skill than a jet backpac. Who would use one in open spare?

  What the Finagle was it waiting for?

  Of course. For Brennan.

  For a wild moment he considered starting the drive now, get out of here before it was too late! Cursing his fear, Brennan moved deliberately to the door. The men who built singleships built as cheaply as possible. His ship had no airlock; there was just the door, and pumps to evacuate the lifesystem. Brennan’s suit was tight. All he had to do was open the door.

  He stepped outside on sandal magnets.

  The seconds stretched away as Brennan and the Outsider examined each other. It looks human enough, Brennan thought. Biped. Head on top. But if it’s human, and if it’s been in space long enough to build a starship, it can’t be as inept as this ship says it is.

  Have to find out what it’s carrying. Maybe it’s right. Maybe its cargo is worth more than its life.

  The Outsider jumped.

  It fell toward him like a falcon diving. Brennan stood his ground, frightened, but admiring the alien’s skill. The alien didn’t use its reaction pistol. Its jump had been perfect. It would land right next to Brennan.

  The Outsider hit the hull on springy limbs, absorbing its momentum like any Belter. It was smaller than Brennan: no more than five feet tall. Brennan saw dimly through its faceplate. He recoiled, a long step backward. The thing was hideously ugly. Chauvinism be damned: the Outsider’s face would stop a computer.

  The one backward step didn’t save him.

  The Outsider was too close. It reached out, wrapped a pressurized mitten around Brennan’s wrist, and jumped.

  Brennan gasped and, too late, tried to jerk away. The Outsider’s grip was like spring steel inside its glove. They were spinning away through space toward the eyeball-shaped life support system, and not a thing Brennan could do about it.

  “Nick,” said the intercom.

  “Here,” said Nick. He’d left it open.

  “The dossier you want is labeled ‘Jack Brennan.’”

  “How do you know?”

  “We called his woman. He has only one, a Charlotte Wiggs, and two kids. We convinced her it was urgent. She finally told us he was off searching the Uranus Trojan points.”

  “Uranus... that sounds right. Cutter, do me a favor.”

  “Sure. Official?”

  “Yes. See to it that Hummingbird is fueled and provisioned and kept that way until further notice. Fit it with strap-on boosters. Then get a com laser focused on ARM Headquarters, New York, and keep it there. You’ll need three, of course.” For relays as the Earth rotated.

  “Okay. No message yet?”

  “No, just hold a laser ready in case we need it.”

  The situation was so damn fluid. If he needed help from Earth he’d need it quickly and badly. The surest way to convince the flatlanders would be to go himself. No First Speaker had ever touched Earth... and he didn’t expect to now; but The Perversity of the Universe Tends Toward a Maximum.

  Nick began to skim Brennan’s dossier. Too bad the man had children.

  Phssthpok’s first clear memories dated from the day he woke to the fact that he was a protector. He could conjure blurred memories from before: of pain, fighting, discovering new foods, experiences in sex and affection and hate and tree climbing in the valley of Pitchok; watching curiously, half a dozen times, as various female breeders bore children he could smell were his. But his mind had been vague then.

  As a protector he thought sharply and clearly. At first it had been unpleasant. He had had to get used to it. There had been others to help him, teachers and such.

  There was a war, and he had graduated into it. Because he had had to develop the habit of asking questions, it had been years before he understood its history:

  Three hundred years earlier several hundred major Pak families had allied to refertilize a wide desert area of the Pak world. Erosion and overgrazing had produced that desert, not war, though there were mildly radioactive patches all across it. No place on the Pak world was entirely free from war.

  The heartbreakingly difficult task of reforesting had been completed a generation ago. Immediately and predictably the alliance had split into several smaller alliances, each determined to secure the land for its own descendants. By now most of the earlier alliances were gone. A number of families had been exterminated, and the surviving groups changed sides whenever expedient to protect their blood lines. Phssthpok’s blood line now held with South Coast.

  Phssthpok enjoyed war. Not because of the fighting. As a breeder he’d had fights, and war was less a matter of fighting than of outwitting the enemy. At its start it had been a fusion bomb war. Many of the families had died during that phase, and part of the reclaimed desert was desert once more. Then South Coast had found a damper field to prevent fissionables from fissioning. Others had swiftly copied it. Since then the war had been artillery, poison gas, bacteria, psychology, infantry, even freelance assassination. It was a war of wits. Could South Coast counteract propaganda designed to split off the Meteor Bay region? If Eastersea Alliance had an antidote to river poison Iota, would it be easier to steal it from them or invent our own? If Circle Mountains should find an innoculation for bacterial strain Zeta-Three, how likely was it that they’d turn a mutated strain against us? Should we stick with South Coast, or could we do better with Eastersea? It was fun.

  As Phssthpok learned more the game grew more complex. His own Virus QQ would kill all but eight percent of breeders but would leave their protectors unharmed... unharmed and fighting with doubled fury to salvage a smaller and less vulnerable group of strain-resistant hostages. He agreed to suppress it. Aak(pop) Family had too many breeders for the local food
supply; he rejected their offer of alliance but blocked their path toward Eastersea.

  Then Eastersea Alliance built a pinch field generator which could set off a fusion reaction without previous fission.

  Phssthpok had been a protector for twenty-six years.

  The war ended within a week. Eastersea had the recultivated desert, the part that wasn’t bare and sterile from seventy years of war. And there had been a mighty flash over the Valley of Pitchok.

  The infants and breeders of Phssthpok’s line had lived in the Valley of Pitchok for unremembered generations. He had seen that awful light on the horizon and known that all his descendants were dead or sterile, that he had no blood line left to protect, that all he could do was to stop eating until he was dead.

  He hadn’t felt that way since. Not until now.

  But even then, thirteen centuries ago in biological time, he hadn’t felt this awful confusion. What was this pressure-suited thing at the end of his arm? Its faceplate was darkened against sunlight. It looked like a breeder, as far as he could tell from the shape of the suit. But they couldn’t have built spacecraft or pressure suits.

  Phssthpok’s sense of mission had held steady for more than twelve centuries. Now it was drowning in pure confusion. Now he could regret that the Pak knew nothing of other intelligent species. The biped form might not be unique to Pak. Why should it be? Phssthpok’s shape was good designing. If he could see this native without his suit... if he could smell it! That would tell the tale.

  They landed next to the porthole. The Outsider’s aim was inhumanly accurate. Brennan didn’t try to fight as the Outsider reached through the curved surface, grasped something, and pulled them both inside. The transparent material resisted movement, like invisible taffy.

  In quick, jerky movements, the alien stripped off its pressure suit. The suit was flexible fabric, including the transparent bubble. There were drawstrings at the joints. With its suit off, but still maintaining its iron grip on Brennan, the alien turned to look at him.

  Brennan wanted to scream.

  The thing was all knobs. Its arms were longer than human, with a single elbow joint in something like the right place; but the elbow was a ball seven inches across. The hands were like strings of walnuts. The shoulders and the knees and the hips bulged like cantaloupes. The head was a tilted melon on a nonexistent neck. Brennan could find no forehead, no chin. The alien’s mouth was a flat black beak, hard but not shiny, which faded into wrinkled skin halfway between mouth and eyes. Two slits in the beak were the nose. Two human looking eyes were protected by not at all human looking masses of deeply convoluted skin, and by a projecting shelf of brow. From the beak the head sloped backward as if streamlined. A bony ridge rose from the swelling skull, adding to the impression of streamlining.

  It wore nothing more than a vest with big pockets, a human-seeming garment as inappropriate as a snap-brim Fedora on Frankenstein’s monster. The swollen joints on its five-fingered hand felt like a score of ball bearings pressing into Brennan’s arm.

  Thus, the Outsider. Not merely an obvious alien. A dolphin was an obvious alien, but a dolphin was not horrible. The Outsider was horrible. It looked like a cross between human and... something else. Man’s monsters have always been that. Grendel. The Minotaur. Mermaids were once considered horrors: all lovely enticing woman above, all scaly monster below. And that fitted too, for the Outsider was apparently sexless, with nothing but folds of armor-like skin between its legs.

  The inset eyes, human as an octopus eye, looked deep into Brennan’s own.

  Abruptly, before Brennan could make a move to fight back, the Outsider took two handfuls of Brennan’s rubberized suit and pulled them apart. The suit held, stretched, then ripped from crotch to chin. Air puffed. Brennan felt his ears pop.

  No point in holding his breath. Several hundred feet of vacuum separated him from his own ship’s breathing air. Brennan sniffed cautiously.

  The air was thin, and it carried a strange scent.

  “You son of a bitch,” said Brennan. “I could have died.”

  The Outsider didn't answer. It stripped off Brennan’s suit like peeling an orange, without unnecessary roughness but without excessive care. Brennan fought. One wrist was still manacled by the alien’s grip, but Brennan braised his free fist against the alien’s face without causing it to do more than blink. Its skin was like leather armor. It finished stripping away the suit and held Brennan out for inspection. Brennan kicked it where its groin ought to be. The alien noticed and looked down, watched as Brennan kicked twice more, then returned to its inspection.

  Its gaze moved over Brennan, head to feet, feet to head, insultingly familiar. In regions of the Belt where air and temperature were controlled, the Belters practiced nudity all their lives. Never before had Brennan felt naked. Not nude; naked. Defenseless. Alien fingers reached to probe his scalp along the sides of the Belter crest; massaged the knuckles of his hand, testing the joints beneath the skin. At first Brennan continued to fight. He couldn’t even distract the alien’s attention.

  Then he waited, limp with embarrassment, enduring the examination.

  Abruptly it was over. The knobby alien jumped across the room, dug briefly into a bin along one wall, came up with a folded rectangle of clear plastic. Brennan thought of escape; but his suit was in ribbons. The alien shook the thing open, ran fingers along one edge. The bag popped open as if he’d used a zipper.

  The alien jumped at Brennan, and Brennan jumped away. It bought him a few seconds of relative freedom. Then knobby steel fingers closed on him and pushed him into the sack.

  Brennan found that he couldn’t open it from inside. “I’ll suffocate!” he screamed. The alien made no response. It wouldn’t have understood him anyway. It was climbing back into its suit.

  Oh, no. Brennan struggled to rip the sack.

  The alien tucked him under an arm and moved out through the porthole. Brennan felt the clear plastic puff out around him, thinning the air inside even further. He felt ice-picks in his ears. He stopped struggling instantly. He waited with the fatalism of despair while the alien moved through vacuum, around the eyeball-shaped hull to where an inch-thick tow line stretched away toward the trailing pod.

  There are few big cargo ships in the Belt. Most miners prefer to haul their own ore. The ships that haul large cargoes from asteroid to asteroid are not large; rather, they are furnished with a great many attachments. The crew string their payload out on spars and rigging, in nets or on lightweight grids. They spray foam plastic to protect fragile items, spread reflective foil underneath to ward off hot back-lighting from the drive flame, and take off on low power.

  The Blue Ox was a special case. She carried fluids and fine dusts; refined quicksilver and mined water, grain, seeds, impure tin scooped molten from lakes on dayside Mercury, mixed and dangerous chemicals from Jupiter’s atmosphere. Such loads were not always available for hauling. So the Ox was a huge tank with a small three-man lifesystem and a fusion tube running through her long axis; but since her tank must sometimes become a cargo hold for bulky objects, it had been designed with mooring gear and a big lid.

  Einar Nilsson stood at the rim of the hold, looking in. He was seven feet tall, and overweight for a Belter; and that was overweight for anyone, for the fat had gone into his belly and the great round curve of second chin. He was all curves; there were no sharp edges on him anywhere. It had been a long time since he rode a singleship. He did not like the high gravity.

  The device on his suit was a Viking ship with snarling dragon prow, floating half-submerged in the bright, milky swirl of a spiral galaxy.

  Nilsson’s own small, ancient mining ship bad become the Ox’s lifeboat. The slender length of its fusion tube, flared at the end, stretched almost the length of the hold. There was an Adzhubei 4-4 computer, almost new; there were machines intended to serve as the computer’s senses and speakers, radar and radio and sonics and monochromatic lights and hi-fi equipment. Each item was tethered separately,
half a dozen ways, to hooks on the inner wall.

  Nilsson nodded, satisfied, his graying blond Belter crest brushing the crown of his helmet. “Go ahead, Nate.”

  Nathan La Pan began spraying fluid into the tank. In thirty seconds the tank was filled with foam which was already hardening.

  “Close ‘er up.”

  Perhaps the foam crunched as the great lid swung down. The sound did not carry. Patroclus Port was in vacuum, open beneath the black sky.

  “How much time we got, Nate?”

  “Another twenty minutes to catch the optimum course,” said the young voice.

  “Okay, get aboard. You too, Tina.”

  “Sold.” The voice clicked off. Nathan was young, but he had already learned not to waste words over a phone. Einar had taken him on at the request of his father, an old friend.

  The computer programmer was something else again. Einar watched her slender figure arcing toward the Ox’s airlock. Not a bad jump. Perhaps a touch too much muscle?

  Tina Jordan was an expatriate flatlander. She was thirty-four years old, old enough to know what she was doing, and she loved ships. Probably she had sense enough to stay out of the way. But she had never flown a singleship. Einar tended to distrust people who did not trust themselves enough to fly alone. Well, there was no help for it; nobody else at Patroclus Base could run an Adzhubei 4-4.

  The Ox would make a lateral run to put her in the path of the alien ship, then curve inward toward the sun. Einar looked away into diamond-studded darkness, in a direction almost opposite the sun. The sparse, dim points of the Trailing Trojans did not block his view. He did not expect to see the Outsider, and he didn’t. But it was there, falling to meet the Ox’s J-shaped orbit.