04-Protector

by Larry Niven

  He fielded it with his left hand and finished his turn.

  Brennan was poised like a pitcher on the mound. He held a soft carbon lubrication disc the size of a hockey puck.

  Roy shifted his grip on the laser. Why didn’t Brennan throw? Now he had the trigger. Why didn’t Brennan throw? He fired.

  Brennan leapt to the side, incredibly fast, but not as fast as light. Roy swung the beam after him. It crossed Brennan’s body just below the waist.

  Brennan dropped, cut in half.

  His arm wasn’t hurting him at all, but the sound of Brennan’s fall hurt Roy sickeningly in the guts. He looked down at his arm. It dangled, swollen like a melon and running blood where a fragment of bone poked through. He looked back at Brennan.

  What was left of Brennan rose up on its hands and came for him.

  Roy sagged against the wall. The cabin was going round and round. Shock. He smiled as Brennan came near. He said, “Touch’, Monsieur.”

  Brennan said, “You’re hurt.”

  Things were graying out, losing color. Roy was aware of Brennan ripping his shirt to tie a tourniquet below his shoulder. Brennan talked in a steady monotone, whether or not he expected Roy to hear. “I could have killed you if you weren’t a relative. Stupid, stupid. May the ceiling fall on you, Roy. Roy, listen, you’ve got to live. They might not believe what’s in the computer. Roy? Dammit, listen!”

  Roy fainted.

  He was delirious during most of what followed. He did manage to swing the cargo ship around toward Home, but his technique was sloppy, and he wound up in an escape orbit. The ships that came after him were designed for exploring the inner system. They managed to retrieve him, and Brennan’s body, and the computer aboard Protector. Protector itself they had to abandon.

  The injury to his arm seemed sufficient explanation for the state of coma in which they found him. It was some time before they realized that he was sick with something else. By then two of the pilots were down with it.

  PROTECTOR

  “A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg.”

  -Samuel Butler.

  Every human protector must wake this way. A Pak wakes sentient for the first time. A human protector has human memories. He wakes clear-headed, and remembers, and thinks with a certain amount of embarrassment: I’ve been stupid.

  White ceiling, clean coarse sheets over soft mattress. Mobile pastel screens on both sides of me. Window before me; a view of small, twisted trees on a somewhat patchy lawn, all bathed in sunlight that was a bit orange for Earth. Primitive facilities and lots of room: I was in a Home hospital, and I’d been stupid. If Brennan had only—but he shouldn’t have had to tell me anything. That close to Home, of course he’d infected himself. In a pinch he need only see to it that he or his corpse reached Home. And he’d let me catch it: same reasoning.

  He’d told me most of it. What he’d really been after, out there beyond the edge of the Solar system with his tree-of-life supply left behind on Mars, was a variant of the tree-of-life virus that would grow in an apple or a pomegranate or something. What he’d gotten was a variant that would live in a yam grown with thalium oxide. But somewhere in there, he’d found or created a variety that would grow in a human being.

  That was what he’d been planning to seed on Home.

  A mean trick to play on a defenseless colony. Such a virus probably would not restrict itself to the right age limit. It would kill anyone who wasn’t between—assuming broad limits—forty and sixty. Home would have ended as a world of childless protectors, and Brennan would have had his army.

  I got up, and startled a nurse. She was on the other side of a flexible plastic wall. We were sealed in with our infection. There were two rows of beds, and on each a half-changed protector showing signs of starvation. Probably all the proto-protectors on Home were right in this big room. Twenty-six of us.

  Now what?

  I thought it through, while the nurse was getting a doctor and the doctor was donning a pressure suit. Plenty of time. My thoughts moved so fast! Most problems were not problems long enough to be interesting. I checked Brennan’s chain of logic, then started over. For the moment I must believe what Brennan had said about the Pak themselves. There were no inconsistencies in his picture; he'd lied brilliantly, if he’d lied at all, and I couldn’t see a motive. I’d observed the Pak ships directly... via Brennan’s instruments. Well, I could check those by designing the induced gravity generator independently.

  A blond young woman came in through a makeshift airlock. I frightened her by being both ugly and mobile. She politely tried to conceal it.

  “We need food,” I told her. “All of us. I’d be dead now if I hadn’t been carrying a lot of superfluous muscle weight when I caught the infection.” She nodded and spoke to the nurse via a pen-sized mike.

  She gave me a physical. It told her just enough to upset her badly. I should have been dead, or crippled by arthritis, by most of the rules of medicine. I did some calisthenics for her to prove that I was healthy, and held back so that she wouldn’t know how healthy. “It’s not a crippling disease,” I told her. “We’ll be able to lead normal lives once the infection has run its course. It only affects our appearance. Or had you noticed?”

  She blushed. I watched her debate with herself as to whether to tell me that I had lost all hope of normal sexual relations. She decided I couldn’t handle it yet. “You will have to make some adjustments,” she said delicately.

  “I suppose so.”

  “This disease, is it from Earth?”

  “No, from the Belt, fortunately. Made it a lot easier to control. In fact, we thought it was extinct. If I’d thought there was the slightest chance... well.”

  “I hope you can tell us something about treatment. We haven’t been able to cure any of you,” she said, “Everything we tried made things worse. Even antibiotics! We lost three of you. The others didn’t seem to be getting any worse, so we just left you alone.”

  “A good thing you stopped before you got to me.”

  She thought that was callous. Had she but known. I was the only man on Home who had so much as heard the word Pak.

  I spent the next few days force-feeding the other patients. They would not eat of themselves; there was no taste of tree-of-life root in normal food. They were all near death. Brennan had known what he was doing when he let me put on all that extra muscle weight.

  Between times I learned what I could about the industries of Home. I used the hospital library tapes. I set up possible defenses against a Pak attack, using a probable two million breeders—we’d have to set up a dictatorship, there just wasn’t time for anything else, and we’d lose some of the population that way—and exactly twenty-six protectors. I set up alternate lines of defense using twenty-four and twenty-two protectors, in case we didn’t all make it through transition. But these were just thought problems. Twenty-six wasn’t enough, not nearly enough, not from what I could learn of Home’s level of civilization.

  When the other patients woke I could put it to them. They knew more of Home. They might get answers different from mine. I waited. There was time. The Pak scouts were nine months away.

  I worked out ways to destroy Home, using a Pak scout pair. I redesigned Protector, using what we’d learned of Pak scouts since Brennan built Protector.

  In six days they started waking up. Twenty-four of us. Doctors Martin and Cowles had caught the infection from their patients; they were still changing.

  It was a joyful thing, talking to men whose minds matched my own. Poor Brennan. I talked fast, knowing that that and my flatlander accent would make me incomprehensible to any breeder who might be listening. As I talked they moved about the room, testing their muscles and their new bodies; yet I could know that they were missing not a word. When I had finished we spent several hours discussing the situation.

  We had to learn if Brennan could have faked the sightings of the Pak fleet and the Pak scouts. We were lucky. Len Bester was a fusion drive re
pairman; he was able to design an induced gravity generator. He said it would work, and gave us enough theory to convince us, and told us how it could be made to behave. We decided to accept Brennan’s gravity telescope, and the Pak fleet. Otherwise there were ways he could have faked what I had seen of the Pak scouts. We would get no more verification of Brennan’s story, aside from its internal consistency, which we also verified.

  We made our plans accordingly.

  We smashed our way through the plastic airlock and swarmed through the hospital. It was all over before the hospital personnel knew what had happened. We confined them until the tree-of-life virus should render them dormant. Many wanted to continue to care for their patients. This we let them do; but we had to destroy all of the medical supplies. There was danger that when people started collapsing with tree-of-life virus, others would screw up their physiology trying to treat them.

  The Claytown police presently surrounded the hospital; but by then we could assume that everyone in the hospital was infected. In the night we scattered.

  In the days that followed we attacked hospitals, drug stores, the single pharmaceutical plant. We destroyed television stations to slow the spread of news. People would panic if they learned of a new disease that took the minds of its victims and started spreading itself intelligently. They would find the truth no less horrible.

  We found panic enough. Home’s populace fought us as they would have fought devils out of Hell. Ten of us died that way, trapped and bound not to kill potential protectors.

  And six of us were caught trying to save their families, equipping them with pressure suits or pressure tents to keep out the virus, and hiding them where they could. It wasn’t necessary to kill them. We confined them until the breeders in question were dead or in transition.

  In a week it was over.

  In three weeks they started to wake up.

  We began building our defenses.

  It has seemed only reasonable to novelize this report. So much of it is conjecture. I never knew Lucas Garner, Nick Sohl, Phssthpok, Einar Nilsson et al. You may take Truesdale as true to life, on the theory that I wouldn’t lie without a reason. The rest are probably accurate enough.

  Still, Brennan said it first: I’m not sure I’m still entitled to the name I was born with. Roy Truesdale was someone else. Roy Truesdale would have died, and expected to die, trying to prevent what I have done to Home.

  We have good reason for not beaming this back to human space, not just yet. Brennan was right: the existence of protectors would alter the development of human civilization. Better you should think of Home as a failed colony, wiped out by disease. If the disease should catch more explorers, why, either they will die in transition or they will wake as protectors, look about them, and reach the same conclusions we did. There is little of free will for a protector.

  But the Pak fleet remains ahead of us, though the Pak scouts are gone. (That was fun. We set up mock-cities all over Home, just city lights and lines of highways and fusion sources to stand for power plants. It never occurred to the Pak that we might consider Home expendable.) Almost certainly we can wipe out this fleet; but how many followed them? Were the ships of the second fleet redesigned, improved? If we survive that long, we’ll have to follow their trail right back into the Core explosion. If we lose one or another battle, why, some survivor will beam this back at every world in human space.

  In which case:

  Brennan must have hidden flasks of virus, labeled, where they could be found. Check the duplicate Stonehenge. Look for a package orbiting a blob of neutronium. Failing that, the cargo hold from Phssthpok’s ship is available on Mars. Check the walls for scrapings of root with dormant tree-of-life virus in them. Failing that, Home is in rotten shape for colonization, but the atmosphere is still thick with tree-of-life virus. Do not convert anyone to protector if he or she has children.

  You’ll be smarter than they are. You can whip them. But don’t wait. If this reaches you, then a Pak fleet that was tough enough to destroy us is following just behind this laser pulse, at near lightspeed. Now move!

  Goodbye and good luck. I love you.