04-Protector

by Larry Niven

  “Okay, Nate, get aboard first. Make sure you keep the Ox between you and the Outsider at all times. We’ll have to assume he doesn’t have deep-radar.”

  There was no way either of them could see Tina’s puzzled frown.

  Belter women averaged around six feet tall; but Belter women tended to be willowy, slender. Tina Jordan was six feet tall and built to scale: flatlander scale. She was in good trim and proud of it. She found it annoying that Belters still took her for a flatlander.

  She had left Earth at twenty-one. She had been fourteen years in the Belt, on Ceres, Juno, Mercury, at Hera Station in close orbit around Jupiter, and in the Trailing Trojans. She regarded the Belt and the solar system as her home. It did not bother her that she had never flown a singleship. Many Belters had not. The singleship miners were only one aspect of Belt industry, which included chemists, nuclear physicists, astrophysicists, politicians, astronomers, file clerks, merchants... and computer programmers.

  She had heard, long ago, that there was no prejudice against women in the Belt. And it was true! On Earth women still held lower-paying jobs. Employers claimed that physical strength was needed for certain jobs, or that a woman would quit to get married at the most crucial time, or even that her family suffered when a woman worked. Things were different in the Belt; and Tina had been more surprised than elated. She had expected to be disappointed.

  And now a woman and a computer programmer was the most crucial Ox’s personnel. Fear and delight. The fear was for Nate, who was too young to take such a risk; for one Belter had already met the Outsider, and nothing had been heard of him since.

  But what was Nate doing aboard the singleship?

  She helped Einar out of his suit—he was a mountain of flesh; he could never have lifted himself against Earth’s gravity—then let him do the same for her. She said, “I thought Nate would be the one to board the Outsider.”

  Einar looked surprised. “What? No. You.”

  “But—“ She searched for words, and found them, to her horror. But I’m a girl. She said nothing.

  “Think it through,” Einar said with forced patience. “The ship might not be empty. Boarding it could be dangerous.”

  “Right.” With emphasis.

  “So we give whoever boards it all the protection we’ve got. The Ox is part of that protection. I’ll keep the drive warm; it should vaporize the bastard if he tries anything, and the com laser should punch holes in him at this range. But there's a chance the Ox will be blasted too.”

  “So the singleship stands guard.” Tina made a dismissing gesture. “I worked it out that far. I thought I’d—“

  “No, don’t be silly. You’ve never flown a singleship in your life. I don’t have much free choice here. I thought of leaving Nate to fly the Ox, but hell, she’s my ship, and he knows singleships. I couldn’t put you in either job.”

  “I suppose not.” She was outwardly calm, but a cold lump of fear grew in her belly.

  “You’d be the best choice anyway. You’re the one who will make contact with the Outsider, try to learn his language. Aside from that, you’re a flatlander. You’re physically the strongest of us.”

  Tina nodded jerkily.

  “You could have stayed behind, you know.”

  “Oh, it’s not that. I hope you don’t think I was trying to chicken out. I just—hadn’t—“

  “No, you just hadn’t bothered to think it through. You’ll get used to doing that, living in the Belt,” Einar said kindly. Damn him.

  The dust of Mars is unique.

  Its uniqueness is the result of vacuum cementing. Once vacuum cementing was the bugaboo of the space industries. Small space probe components which would slide easily over one another in air would weld solidly in vacuum, just as soon as the gas absorbed by their surfaces could evaporate away. Vacuum cementing fused parts in the first American satellites and in the first Soviet interplanetary probes. Vacuum cementing keeps the Moon from being fathoms deep in meteor dust. The particles weld into crunchy rock, into natural cement, under the same molecular attraction that fuses Johanssen blocks and turns the mud of sea bottoms to sedimentary rock.

  But on Mars there is just enough atmosphere to stop that process, and not nearly enough to stop a meteor. Meteor dust covers most of the planet. Meteors can fuse the dust into craters, but it does not cement, though it is fine enough to flow like viscous oil.

  “That dust is going to be our biggest problem,” said Luke. “The Outsider didn’t even have to dig a hole for himself. He could have sunk anywhere on Mars.”

  Nick turned off the laser transmitter. It was hot from two days of use in blasting a locator beam at Earth. “He could have hidden anywhere in the system, but he picked Mars. He must have had a reason. Maybe it’s something he couldn’t do under the dust. That puts him in a crater or on a hill.”

  “He’d have been spotted.” Luke keyed a photograph from the autopilot memory. It was one of a group from the smuggler trap. It showed a dimly shining metal egg with the small end pointed. The egg moved big-end first, and it moved as if rocket-propelled. But there was no exhaust, at least none that any instrument could detect.

  “It’s big enough to see from space,” said Luke, “and easy to recognize, with that silver hull.”

  “Yab. All right, he’s under the dust. It’ll take a lot of ships with deep-radar to find him, and even then there’s no guarantee.” Nick ran his hands back along his depilated scalp. “We could quit now. Your flatlander government has finally picked up its feet and sent us some ships. I got the impression they aren’t too happy about us joining their search.” His tone was noncommittal.

  “I’d like to go on. How do you feel?”

  “I’m game. Hunting strange things is what I do on my vacation.”

  “Where would you start looking?”

  “I don’t know. The deepest dust on the planet is in Tractus Albus.”

  “He’d have been stupid to pick the deepest. He’d have picked his place at random.”

  “You’ve got other ideas?”

  “Lacis Solis.”

  “—Oh. The old flatlander base. That’s good thinking. He might need a life support system for Brennan.”

  “I wasn’t even thinking that. If he needs anything there—human technology, water, anything—there’s only one place on the planet he can go. If he’s not there we can at least pick up some dustboats—“

  “Blue Ox calling U Thant. This is Blue Ox calling U Thant out of Death Valley Port.”

  There would be a directional signal in that message. Nick set the autopilot to aiming his own com laser. “It’ll take a few minutes,” he said. Then, “I wonder what’s happening to Brennan.

  “Can we take the deep-radar out of this heap?”

  “Let’s hope. I don’t know what else we can use for a finder.”

  “A metal detector. There must be one aboard.”

  “This is Nicholas Brewster Sohl aboard U Thant calling any or all aboard Blue Ox. What’s new? Repeating. This is Nicholas—“

  Einar flicked to transmit. “Einar Nilsson commanding Blue Ox. We have matched with the Outsider ship. Tina Jordan is preparing to board. I will switch you to Tina.” He did.

  And settled back to wait.

  He liked Tina. He was half certain she would find a way to get herself killed. Nate had protested mightily, but Einar’s own arguments had no holes to crawl through. He sat watching the picture transmitted from Tina’s helmet camera.

  The Outsider ship looked deserted, with its attitude skewed and its tow lines slack and beginning to loop. Tina could see no motion in the lens of the big eyeball. She brought herself to a stop several yards from the port, and was pleased to note that her hands were steady on the jet firing keys.

  “Tina speaking. I am outside what seems to be a control module. I can see an acceleration couch through the glass—if it’s glass—and controls around it. The Outsider must be roughly hominid.

  “The drive module is too hot to get near
. The control module is a smooth sphere with a big porthole, and cables trailing off in both directions. You should be able to see all this, U Thant.”

  She did a slow loop around the big eyeball. Taking her time. Belters only hurried when there was need. “I can find no sign of an airlock. I’ll have to burn my way through.”

  “Through the porthole. You don’t want to burn through anything explosive,” said Einar’s voice behind her ear.

  The transparent stuff had a two-thousand Kelvin melting point, and a laser was obviously out of the question. Tina used a hot point, tracing a circle over and over. Gradually she wore it down. “I’m getting fog through the cracks,” she reported. “Ah, I’m through.”

  A three-foot transparent disc puffed away on the last of the air, with a breath of white mist playing around it. Tina caught it and sent it gliding toward the Ox for later recovery.

  Einar's voice crackled. “Don’t try to enter yet!”

  “I wasn’t.” She waited for the edges to cool. Fifteen minutes, while nothing happened. They must be getting restless aboard U Thant, she thought. Still no sign of motion inside. They had found nothing when they probed this module with the deep-radar; but the walls were thick, and something as tenuous as water, for instance, might not have shown up.

  Time enough. She ducked through the hole.

  “I’m in a small control cabin,” she said, and turned at the waist to give the camera a full view. Tendrils of icy fog drifted toward the hole in the porthole. “Very small. The control bank is almost primitively complex, so complex that I’m inclined to think the Outsider had no autopilot. No man could handle all these controls and adjustments. I see no more that one couch, and no aliens present but me.

  “There’s a bin full of sweet potatoes, it looks like, right beside the control couch. It’s the only sign of kitchen facilities in this section. I think I’ll move on.” She tried to open the door in the back of the control room. Pressure forced it shut. She used her hot point. The door cut easily, must more so than the porthole material. She waited while the room filled with thick fog, then pushed her way in. More fog.

  “This room is about as big as the control room. Sorry about the view. The place seems to be a free-fall gymnasium.” She swept her camera around the room, then crossed to one of the machines and tried to work it. It looked as though you were supposed to stand up inside it against the force of springs. Tina couldn’t budge it.

  She dismounted the camera and fixed it to a wall, aimed at the exercise machine. She tried it again. “Either I’m doing this wrong,” she told her audience, “or the Outsider could pick his teeth with me. Let’s see what else there is.” She looked around. “That’s funny,” she said presently.

  There was nothing else. Only the door to the control room.

  A two hour search by Tina and Nate La Pan only confirmed her find. The lifesystem consisted of:

  One control room the size of a singleship control room.

  One free-fall gymnasium, same size.

  A bin of roots.

  An enormous air tank. There were no safeties to stop the flow in case of puncture. The tank was empty. It must have been nearly empty when the ship reached the solar system.

  Vastly complex air cleaning machinery, apparently designed to remove even the faintest, rarest trace of biochemical waste. It had all been many times repaired.

  Equally complex equipment for conversion of fluid and solid waste.

  It was incredible. The single Outsider had apparently spent his time in two small rooms, eating just one kind of food, with no ship’s library to keep him entertained, and no computer-autopilot to keep him pointed right and guard his fuel supply and steer him clear of meteors. Yet the trip had taken decades, at least. In view of the complexity of the cleaning and renewal plant, the huge air tank must have been included solely to replace air lost by osmosis through the walls!

  “That’s it,” Einar said finally. “Come on back, you two. We’ll take a break, and I’ll ask U Thant for instructions. Nate, put some of those roots in a pressure bag. We can analyze them.”

  “Search the ship again,” Nick told them. “You may find a simplified autopilot: not a computer, just a widget for keeping the ship on course. Could you have overlooked a bolthole of some kind, anyplace where an Outsider could have hidden? In particular, try to get into the air tank. It might make a very nice emergency bolthole.” He turned the volume down and faced Luke. “They won’t find anything, of course. Can you think of anything else?”

  “I’d like to see them analyze the air. Have they got the facilities?”

  “Yah.”

  “And the porthole glass, and the chemistry of that root.”

  “They’ll finish with the root by the time this reaches them.” He turned up the volume. “After you finish analyzing what you’ve got, you might start thinking about how to tow that ship home. Stay with the ship, and keep your drive warm. If an emergency comes up, use the fusion flame immediately. Sohl out.”

  He looked at the screen for some time after it had gone dark. Presently he said, “A super-singleship. Finagle’s Eyes! I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  “Flown by a kind of super-Belter,” said Luke. “Solitary. Doesn’t need entertainment. Doesn’t care what he eats. Strong as King Kong. Roughly humanoid.”

  Nick smiled. “Wouldn’t that make him a superior species?”

  “I wouldn’t deny it. And I’m deadly serious on that. We’ll have to wait and see.”

  Brennan shifted.

  He hadn’t moved in hours. He lay on his back in the root bin, his eyes closed, his body folded into near-foetal position around his swollen belly, his fists clenched. But now he moved one arm, and Phssthpok came suddenly alert.

  Brennan reached for a root, put it in his mouth, bit and swallowed. Bit and swallowed. Bit and swallowed, under Phssthpok’s watchful eye. His own eyes stayed closed.

  Brennan’s hand released the last inch or so of root, and he turned over and stopped moving.

  Phssthpok relaxed. Presently he dreamed.

  Days ago he had stopped eating. He told himself it was too early, but his belly didn’t believe it. He would live just long enough. Meanwhile, be dreamed.

  ...He sat on the floor of the Library with a piece of root in his jaws and an ancient book balanced on one cantaloupe knee and a map spread before him on the floor. It was a map of the galaxy, but it was graded for time. The Core stars showed in positions three million years old, but the outer arms were half a million years younger. The Library staff had spent most of a year preparing it for him.

  Assume they went a distance X, he told himself. Their average velocity must have been .06748 lightspeed, considering dust friction and the galaxy’s gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Their laser returned at lightspeed; figure for space curvature. Give them a century to build the laser; they’d use all the time they had for that. Then X = 33,210 light years.

  Phssthpok set his compass and drew an arc, using the Pak sun as a center. Margin of error: .001, thirty light years. They’re on that arc!

  Now assume they went straight outward from the galactic hub. It was a good assumption: there were stars in that direction, and the Pak sun was well off-center from the hub. Phssthpok drew a radial line. Greater margin of error here. Original error, course alterations... And the straight line would have curved by now, while the galaxy turned like curdled milk. They would have stayed flat in the galactic plane. And they’re near this point. I’ve found them...

  Phssthpok’s minions pouring like army ants through the Library. Every protector in reach had joined his quest. It’s in the Astronautics section, Phwee. Find it! We need those ramscoop diagram. Ttuss, I need to know what happens when a protector gets old, and when it happens, and any contributing factors. There’s probably a copy of that report in the Medical section. It may have been added to. Hratchp, we have to learn what could stop a tree-of-life from growing right in the galactic arm. You need agronomists, medical researchers, chem
ists, astrophysicists. Use the Valley of Pitchok for your experiments, and remember the environment was habitable. Try experimenting with the soil, reduced starlight, reduced radiation. You of the Physics and Engineering sections: I need a fusion drive for insystem maneuvers. I need launching vehicles for everything we build. Design them! Every childless protector on the planet was looking for a purpose in living, a Cause. And Phssthpok gave it to them...

  ... The ship, finally completed, standing in three parts on the sand not far from the Library. Phssthpok’s army assembling. We need monopoles, we need tree-of-life roots and seeds, we need enormous quantities of hydrogen fuel. The scoop won’t work below a certain speed. Meteor Bay has everything we need. We can take them! For the first time in twenty thousand years, the childless protectors of Pak assembled for war...

  ... His own Virus QQ used on breeders, with mopup squads to hunt the survivors. Newly childless protectors switching sides, joining his army. Hratchp reporting in with the strange, complex secret of the tree-of-life root...

  Something thumped three times on the hull.

  For an instant he thought it was a memory. He was that far gone. Then he was on his feet, staring up at a point high on the curved wall of the hold. His mind racing.

  He had known that there was some kind of non-organic photosynthetic process going on on the surface of the dust. Now his mind extrapolated: currents in the dust, photosynthesis going on on the top, currents bringing food down to larger forms of life. He should have guessed before, and checked. He was far gone, was Phssthpok. Age and dwindling motivation were switching him off too early.

  Three measured thumps came from almost beneath his feet.

  He crossed the hold in one leap, landed softly, silently. Picked up the flat-nosed softener key. Waited.

  Hypothesis: something intelligent was sounding the cargo hold for echoes. Size: unknown. Intelligence: unknown. Sophistication: probably low due to their environment. They would be blind down here, if they had eyes at all. A feel for sound could compensate. The echoes from this thumping could tell them a good deal about what was inside. And then?