04-Protector

by Larry Niven

  “Uh huh.”

  “He took off headed back toward Sol. We tried to fly formation with him, but he was putting the ship through maneuvers, testing the control sytems. We kept our distance. Then—he just turned around and headed out into interstellar space.”

  “You tried to catch him?”

  Nick yelped, “What tried? We flew alongside him! I didn’t want to make any threatening moves, but he wouldn’t communicate, and we were going to run out of fuel. I ordered Dubchek and Gorton to use their drives as weapons if he didn’t sheer off.”

  “What happened?”

  “I think he must have turned on his Bussard ramjet field. The electromagnetic effects burned out enough of our equipment to leave us dead in space. Were lucky the drives didn’t blow up. A fuel ship finally got to us, and we managed to make some repairs. By that time Brennan was up to ramscoop speed.”

  “All right.”

  “How the bell was I to know? We’ve got his food supplyl That bin of roots was almost empty. Was it just a fancy way to commit suicide? Was he afraid of what we’d do with a manned Bussard ramjet ship?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. You know, that could be it. Nick, do you remember him mashing out my cigarette?”

  Nick chortled. “Sure. He apologized all over the place, but he wouldn’t let you smoke. I thought you were going to hit him.”

  “He’s a protector. Whatever he does, it’s for our own good.” Luke scowled, remembering someone... no, that was all he remembered about her. A high school teacher? “He didn’t want us to have the Pak ship, or something we could learn from it, or from him.”

  “Then why did he spend two months out there beyond Pluto? You don’t stop halfway with a Bussard ramjet! It costs reserve fuel! And there's nothing at all out there—“

  “The cometary belt, they call it. Most comets spend most of their time out there beyond Pluto. It’s thin, but there’s matter out there. There's a tenth planet too.”

  “He never went near Persephone.”

  “But he may have gone near any number of comets.”

  “... Right. Okay, he spent two months out there, at rest as far as our monopole detectors could determine. Last month he started moving again. We followed him that long before we were sure. He’s accelerating toward Alpha Centauri. Wunderland.”

  “How long before he gets there?”

  “Oh, twenty years anyway. It’s a low thrust drive. But we can warn them, and set things up so that our successors warn them again in fifteen years. Just in case.”

  “Okay, we can do that. What else? You knew that we dug up the cargo pod.”

  “That’s all we know. The UN can keep secrets too.”

  “We destroyed the roots and seeds. Nobody really liked the idea, but we did it.”

  It was a long time before Nick answered, “Good.”

  “Good or bad, we did it. We haven’t had any luck at all understanding the gravity polarizer. If that’s what it was. Brennan could have been lying.”

  “It was a gravity polarizer.”

  “Just how do you know that?”

  “We analyzed the record of the Outsider’s course to Mars. His acceleration varies according to local gravitational gradients: not just by thrust but by direction too.”

  “All right, that’ll help. What else can we do?”

  “About Brennan, nothing. Eventually he’ll starve. Meanwhile we’ll always know exactly where he is.”

  “Or where his monopole source is.”

  Nick spoke with dwindling patience. “He doesn’t have a ship without his monopole package. He doesn’t have a food supply, period. He’s dead, Garner.”

  “I keep remembering that he’s smarter than we are. If he can find a way to hibernate, it would get him to Wunderland. A thriving colony... and so what? What does he want with Wunderland?”

  “Something we haven’t thought of.”

  “I’ll never know what it is. I’ll be dead before Brennan reaches Wunderland.” Luke sighed. “Poor Outsider. All this way to bring us the roots that would let us lead a normal life.”

  “His intentions were good. Life is hard on us heroes,” Nick said seriously.

  INTERLUDE

  How to describe a gap of two centuries? Events are the measure of time. A great many things happened in two hundred and twenty years.

  The dry corpse of Phssthpok ended in the Smithsonian Institution. There was some discussion as to whether to class it among the hominids. His story was third hand by now, with Brennan unavailable, but his skeleton matched hominid bone structure, bone for bone.

  Lucas Garner was dead when the Pak ship passed course midpoint. It did not make turnover. Nick Sohl was watching when its magnetic trace passed Wunderland, two years early and still accelerating toward nowhere. And he wondered.

  Olympus Base on Mars was rebuilt to study Phssthpok’s cargo pod in situ, that being easier than trying to lift it against gravity with the gravity polarizer still going. The study group was reluctant to shut it down until they knew how to restart it. They used a hovering singleship to fuse the dust beneath the base, as protection against martians.

  The Belt population increased considerably. Bubble worlds proliferated, some equipped with drives to move them around. Mining was becoming more difficult; the best lodes had been exhausted. Cities spread throughout the larger rocks. A decreasing percentage of Belters flew singleships.

  A large ice asteroid impacted on Mars, causing dust storms and minor quakes to trouble Olympus Base.

  The interstellar colonies prospered and changed. Jinx developed extensive vacuum industries, where the planet’s landscape rises out of the atmosphere at the East End. Society became repressive on Plateau. Wunderland’s population expanded and spread thinly across the major continent, so that cities were long in developing. Civilization developed underground on We Made It, to avoid the hurricane winds of summer and winter. Home was settled, and prospered, benefitting from new techniques and from mistakes made on the earlier colony worlds.

  Laser beams passed between Earth and the colonies, and occasional ramrobots left the linear accelerator on Juno, carrying cargoes of new knowledge. Of late most of the ramrobot “gifts” were advances in biological engineering, seeds and frozen fertilized eggs. News from the colonies was sparse, though Jinx and Home had excellent communications lasers.

  The drug problem on Earth had become a dead issue by Lucas Garnees time. Potential drug addicts tended to become wireheads; the experience was more complete, and current was cheap after the initial expense of the operation. Wireheads bother nobody; the wirehead problem was never serious. By 2340 it had almost solved itself. People had learned to handle it.

  Earth’s population kept itself stable, by force when necessary.

  The gravity polarizer seemed beyond human understanding.

  Improved alloplasty—gadgets instead of organ transplants—went a long way toward solving the problem of organ bank shortages. The UN citizenry even voted to remove the death penalty for certain crimes: income tax evasion, illegal advertising. The heavy authority given the ARM, the United Nations police, was relaxed somewhat.

  War on a major scale had not happened in some time.

  Life within the solar system had become somewhat idyllic...

  VANDERVECKEN

  I. The perversity of the universe tends to a maximum.

  II. If something can go wrong, it will.

  -Finagle’s First and Second Laws

  He woke with the cold burning his nose and cheeks. He woke all at once, and opened his eyes to black night and clear bright stars. He sat upright in vast surprise. This took some effort. He was wrapped like a pupa in his mummy bag.

  The shadows of peaks thrust into the starscape. City light glowed far away beyond a lumpy horizon.

  He had gone hiking in the Pinnacles that morning, after a week of backpacking. He had gone the full route, through the eaves, up miles of narrow trail bordered by manzanita and empty space, up to where crude steps and
metal handrails had had to be set into the rock. He had eaten a late lunch up there at the top of everything. Started down in plenty of time, his legs protesting the renewed work. The Pinnacles’ strange vertical geology reached up like fingers toward the sky. Then... what?

  Apparently he was still here, halfway up a mountain, his mummy bag spread on the path.

  He did not remember going to sleep.

  Concussion? A fall? He snaked an arm from within the mummy bag and felt for bruises. None. He felt fine; he didn’t hurt anywhere. The air chilled his arm now, and he wondered. The day had been so hot.

  And he’d left his backpack in the car. He'd left the car in the Pinnacles parking lot a week ago, and he'd come back to it this morning and left his gear in the trunk, with the mummy bag. How had it gotten up here?

  The trails through the Pinnacles were dangerous enough in bright daylight. Elroy Truesdale was not about to negotiate them in darkness. He made a midnight snack from his backpack—which should have been in the car, and which was sitting near his head, covered with dew—and waited for dawn.

  At dawn he started down. His feet felt fine, and the empty desolate rockscape was a joyful thing to see. He sang loudly as he negotiated the incredible trails. Nobody screamed at him to shut up. His legs did not ache despite the afternoon’s climb. He must be in pretty good shape, he thought. Though only a fool would carry a backpack on these trails, unless it had been wished on him halfway up a mountain.

  The sun was well up when he reached the parking lot.

  The car was locked tight, as he had left it. He was not whistling now. This made no sense. Some Good Samaritan had found him unconscious on the trail, or stunned him there; had not called for help; had broken into Truesdale’s own car and lugged Truesdale’s own backpack halfway up a mountain to slide him into his own mummy bag. What the hell? Had someone wanted Truesdale’s car, to frame him for some crime? When he opened the trunk he half expected to find a murder victim; but there were not even bloodstains. He was relieved and disappointed.

  There was a message spool sitting on his car entertainment set.

  He fitted it in and heard it out.

  Truesdale, this is Vandervecken. By now you may or may not have realized that four months have vanished from your young life. For this I apologize. It was necessary, and you can afford to lose four months, and I intend to pay a fair price for them. Briefly: you will receive five hundred UN marks per quarter for the rest of your life, provided that you make no attempt to find out who I am.

  On your return home you will find a confirming spool from Barrett, Hubbard and Wu, who will supply you with details.

  Believe me, you did nothing criminal during the four months you can’t remember. You did things you would find interesting, but that’s what the money’s for.

  You would find it difficult to learn my identity in any case. A voice pattern would tell you nothing. Barrett, Hubbard and Wu know nothing about me. The effort would be expensive and fruitless, and I hope you won’t make it.

  Elroy did not twitch when acrid smoke curled up from the message spool. He had half expected that. In any case he had recognized the voice. His own. He must have made this tape for... Vandervecken... during the time he couldn’t remember.

  He spoke to the blackened tape. “You wouldn’t lie to yourself, would you, Roy?”

  Under what circumstances?

  He got out of the car and walked to the Tourist Office and bought a morning newstape. His set still worked, though the message spool was a charred lump. He played the tape for the date. January 9, 2341.

  It had been September 8, 2340. He had missed Christmas and New Year’s Day and four months of what? In rising fury he lifted the car phone. Who handled kidnappings? The local police, or the ARMs?

  He held the phone for a long moment. Then he put it down.

  It had come to him that he was not going to call the police.

  While his car flew him back toward San Diego, Elroy Truesdale writhed in a kind of trap.

  He had lost his first and, to date, only wife because of his reluctance to spend money. She had told him often enough that it was a character flaw. Nobody else had it. In a world where nobody starved, a life style was more important than credit security.

  He had not always been like this.

  At birth Truesdale had owned a trust fund intended to keep him, not rich, but comfortable for the rest of his life. It would have done so; but Truesdale wanted more. At age twenty-five he had convinced his father to turn the money over to him. He wanted to make some investments.

  He would have been rich, from the way it sounded. But it had been a complicated con. Somewhere on Earth or in the Belt, a man who might or might not be named Lawrence St. John McGee was living in luxury. He couldn’t possibly have spent it all, not even on his scale of living.

  Possibly Truesdale had overreacted. But he had no real talents; he could not count on himself as security. He knew that now. He was a salesman in a shoe store. Before that it had been a service station, trading batteries on passing cars and checking the motors and fans. He was an ordinary man. He kept himself in shape because everybody did; fat and loose muscles were regarded as personal carelessness. He had given up his beard, a pretty good beard, after Lawrence St. John McGee had walked off with his fortune. A working man did not have the time to keep up a good beard. Two thousand a year for life. He could not turn down the money.

  Now he was in a trap, walled in by his own character flaws. Damn Vandervecken. And he must have cooperated, sold himself out. That had been his voice on the message tape.

  Wait. There might be no money... just a cheap promise to buy “Vandervecken” a few additional hours and send Truesdale a few hundred miles south.

  Truesdale called home. There was four months’ worth of calls waiting in storage in his phone. He keyed it for Barrett, Hubbard and Wu, and waited out the sorting process.

  The message was there. He heard it through. It said about what he had expected it to.

  He called the Better Business Bureau.

  Yes, they had records of Barrett, Hubbard and Wu. It was a reputable firm, as far as they were concerned, specializing in corporate law. He got their number from Information.

  Barrett was a smartly dressed woman in middle age. Her manner was competent and brusk. She was reluctant to tell him anything at all, even after he had identified himself.

  “All I want to know,” he told her, “is whether your firm is sure of your funds. This Vandervecken has promised me five hundred marks quarterly. If he cut off your funds, that would cut me off, wouldn’t it? Regardless of whether I’ve abided by the terms of the agreement.”

  “That’s not true, Mr. TruesdaIe,” she answered severely. “Mr. Vandervecken has bought you an annuity. If you violate the terms of your agreement with him, the annuity passes to, let me see now, to Criminal Rehabilitation Studies for the remainder of your life.”

  “Oh. And the terms are that I shouldn’t try to find out who Mr. Vandervecken is.”

  “Roughly, yes. It’s all spelled out quite fully in a message which—“

  “I have it.”

  He hung up. And pondered. Two thousand a year, for life. And it was real. It was hardly a living, but it would make a nice addition to his salary. Already he had thought of half a dozen ways to use the first few checks. He might try a different job...

  Two thousand a year. It was an exorbitant price to pay for four months of labor. Most kinds of labor. What had he done with those four months?

  And how had Vandervecken known it would be enough?

  I probably told him myself, Truesdale thought bitterly. Self-betrayal. At least he hadn’t lied. Five hundred every three months, to put a touch of luxury in his life... and he would wonder for the rest of his life. But he would not go to the police.

  He could not remember ever having suffered such a case of mixed emotions.

  Presently he began listening to the other messages stored in his phone.

  “But
you did,” said the ARM lieutenant. “You’re here.” He was a square-jawed, brawny man with eyes that did not believe. A close look into those eyes and you, too, would doubt whatever you had been telling him.

  Truesdale shrugged.

  “What changed your mind?”

  “Money again. I started going through the messages in my phone. There was another message from a different legal firm. Do you know the name Mrs. Jacob Randall?”

  “No. Wait a minute. Estelle Randall? President of the Struldbrugs’ Club until—um.”

  “She was my great-to-the-fourth grandmother.”

  “And she died last month. My condolences.”

  “Thanks. I, I—see, I didn’t see Greatly ‘Stelle that often. Maybe twice a year, once at her birthday party, once at a christening or whatever. I remember we had lunch together a few days after I found out I’d lost all my money. She was mad. Oh, boy. She offered to refinance me, but I turned her down.”

  “Pride? It could happen to anyone. Lawrence St. John McGee practices an old and polished profession.”

  “I know.”

  “She was the oldest woman in the world.”

  “I know.” The presidency of the Struldbrugs’ Club went to the oldest living member. It was an honorary title; the Acting President usually did the work. “She was a hundred and seventy-three when I was born. The thing is, none of us ever expected her to die. I suppose that sounds silly?”

  “No. How many people die at two hundred and ten?”

  “Then I played that tape from Becket and Hollingsbrooke and she was dead! And I’ve inherited about half a million marks, out of a fortune that must be unbelievable. She’s got enough great-to-the-Nth grandchildren to take over any nation in the world. You should have seen the birthday parties.”

  “I see.” The ARM’s eyes looked deep into him. “So you don’t need Vandervecken’s money now. Two thousand a year is peanuts now.”