Crashlander

by Larry Niven

  Earth smelled good. There was a used flavor to it, a breathed flavor, unlike anything I’ve ever known. It was the difference between spring water and distilled water. Somewhere in each breath I took were molecules breathed by Dante, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Heinlein, Carter, and my own ancestors. Traces of past industries lingered in the air, sensed if not smelled: gasoline, coal fumes, tobacco and burnt cigarette filters, diesel fumes, ale breweries. I left the customs house with inflated lungs and a questing look.

  I could have taken a transfer booth straight to the hotel. I decided to walk a little first.

  Everyone on Earth had made the same decision.

  The pedwalk held a crowd such as I had never imagined. They were all shapes and all colors, and they dressed in strange and eldritch ways. Shifting colors assaulted the eye and sent one reeling. On any world in human space, any world but one, you know immediately who the natives are. Wunderland? Asymmetrical beards mark the nobility, and the common people are the ones who quickly step out of their way. We Made It? The pallor of our skins in summer and winter, in spring and fall, the fact that we all race upstairs, above the buried cities and onto the blooming desert, eager to taste sunlight while the murderous winds are at rest. Jinx? The natives are short, wide, and strong; a sweet little old lady’s handshake can crush steel. Even in the Belt, within the solar system, a Belter strip haircut adorns both men and women. But Earth—!

  No two looked alike. There were reds and blues and greens, yellows and oranges, plaids and stripes. I’m talking about hair, you understand, and skin. All my life I’ve used tannin-secretion pills for protection against ultraviolet, so that my skin color has varied from its normal pinkish-white (I’m an albino) to (under blue-white stars) tuxedo black. But I’d never known that other skin-dye pills existed. I stood rooted to the pedwalk, letting it carry me where it would, watching the incredible crowd swarm around me. They were all knees and elbows. Tomorrow I’d have bruises.

  “Hey!”

  The girl was four or five heads away, and short. I’d never have seen her if everyone else hadn’t been short, too. Flatlanders rarely top six feet. And there was this girl, her hair a topological explosion in swirling orange and silver, her face a faint, subtle green with space-black eyebrows and lipstick, waving something and shouting at me.

  Waving my wallet.

  I forced my way to her until we were close enough to touch, until I could hear what she was saying above the crowd noise.

  “Stupid! Where’s your address? You don’t even have a place for a stamp!”

  “What?”

  She looked startled. “Oh! You’re an offworlder.”

  “Yah!” My voice would give out fast at this noise level.

  “Well, look…” She shoved her way closer to me. “Look, you can’t go around town with an offworlder’s wallet. Next time someone picks your pocket he may not notice till you’re gone.”

  “You picked my pocket?”

  “Sure! Think I found it? Would I risk my precious hand under all those spike heels?”

  “How if I call a cop?”

  “Cop? Oh, a stoneface.” She laughed merrily. “Learn or go under, man. There’s no law against picking pockets. Look around you.”

  I looked around me, then looked back fast, afraid she’d disappear. Not only my cash but my Bank of Jinx draft for forty thousand stars was in that wallet. Everything I owned.

  “See them all? Sixty-four million people in Los Angeles alone. Eighteen billion in the whole world. Suppose there was a law against picking pockets? How would you enforce it?” She deftly extracted the cash from my wallet and handed the wallet back. “Get yourself a new wallet, and fast. It’ll have a place for your address and a window for a tenth-star stamp. Put your address in right away, and a stamp, too. Then the next guy who takes it can pull out the money and drop your wallet in the nearest mailbox—no sweat. Otherwise you lose your credit cards, your ident, everything.” She stuffed two hundred-odd stars in cash between her breasts, flashing me a parting smile as she turned.

  “Thanks,” I called. Yes, I did. I was still bewildered, but she’d obviously stayed to help me. She could just as easily have kept wallet and all.

  “No charge,” she called back, and was gone.

  I stopped off at the first transfer booth I saw, dropped a half star in the coin slot, and dialed Elephant.

  The vestibule was intimidating.

  I’d expected a vestibule. Why put a transfer booth inside your own home, where any burglar can get in just by dialing your number? Anyone who can afford the lease on a private transfer booth can also afford a vestibule with a locked door and an intercom switch.

  There was a vestibule, but it was the size of a living room, furnished with massage chairs and an autovendor. There was an intercom, but it was a flat vidphone, three hundred years old, restored at perhaps a hundred times its original cost. There was a locked door; it was a double door of what looked like polished brass, with two enormous curved handles, and it stood fifteen feet high.

  I’d suspected Elephant was well off, but this was too much. It occurred to me that I’d never seen him completely sober, that I had in fact turned down his offer of guidance, that a simple morning-after treatment might have wiped me from his memory. Shouldn’t I just go away? I had wanted to explore Earth on my own.

  But I didn’t know the rules!

  I stepped out of the booth and glimpsed the back wall. It was all picture window, with nothing outside—just fleecy blue sky. How peculiar, I thought, and stepped closer. And closer.

  Elephant lived halfway up a cliff. A sheer mile-high cliff.

  The phone rang.

  On the third ear-jarring ring I answered, mainly to stop the noise. A supercilious voice asked, “Is somebody out there?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I said. “Does someone named Elephant live here?”

  “I’ll see, sir,” said the voice. The screen had not lit, but I had the feeling someone had seen me quite clearly.

  Seconds crawled by. I was half minded to jump back in the transfer booth and dial at random. But only half; that was the trouble. Then the screen lit, and it was Elephant. “Bey! You changed your mind!”

  “Yah. You didn’t tell me you were rich.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “Well, no, of course not.”

  “How do you expect to learn things if you don’t ask? Don’t answer that. Hang on, I’ll be right down. You did change your mind? You’ll let me show you Earth?”

  “Yes, I will. I’m scared to go out there alone.”

  “Why? Don’t answer. Tell me in person.” He hung up.

  Seconds later the big bronze doors swung back with a bone-shaking boom. They just barely got out of Elephant’s way. He pulled me inside, giving me no time to gape, shoved a drink in my hand, and asked why I was afraid to go outside.

  I told him about the pickpocket, and he laughed, He told me about the time he tried to go outside during a We Made It summer, and I laughed, though I’ve heard of outworlders being blown away and to Hades doing the same thing. Amazingly, we were off again. It was just like it had been on the ship, even to the end of Elephant’s anecdote. “They called me a silly flatlander, of course.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “You said you’d give a lot to do something completely original, so the next time someone called you a flatlander, you could back him into a corner and force him to listen to your story. You said it several times.”

  “I didn’t say just that. But I would like to have some story to tell, something like your neutron star episode. If only to tell myself. The silly offworlder wouldn’t know, but I’d know.”

  I nodded. I’d talked about the neutron star episode over gin cards—a habit I’ve developed for distracting my opponent—and Elephant had been suitably impressed.

  “I’ve thought of a couple of things you could do,” I said.

  “Spill.”


  “One. Visit the puppeteer homeworld. Nobody’s been there, but everyone knows there is one, and everyone knows how difficult it is to find. You could be the first.”

  “Great.” He mused a moment. “Great! And the puppeteers wouldn’t stop me because they’re gone. Where is the puppeteer homeworld?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s your second idea?”

  “Ask the Outsiders.”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s not a system in the galaxy that the Outsiders don’t know all about. We don’t know how far the puppeteer empire extended, though it was way beyond known space, but we do know about the Outsiders. They know the galaxy like the palm of their—uh…And they trade for information; it’s just about the only business they do. Ask them what’s the most unusual world they know of within reach.”

  Elephant was nodding gently. There was a glazed look in his eyes. I had not been sure he was serious about seeking some unique achievement. He was.

  “The problem is,” I said, “That an Outsider’s idea of what is unique may not—” I stopped because Elephant was up and half running to a tridphone.

  I wasn’t sorry. It gave me an opportunity to gape in private.

  I’ve been in bigger homes than Elephant’s. Much bigger. I grew up in one. But I’ve never seen a room that soothed the eye as Elephant’s living room did. It was more than a living room; it was an optical illusion, the opposite of those jittering black-and-white images they show in lectures on how we see. These clinical children of op art give the illusion of motion, but Elephant’s living room gave the illusion of stillness. A physicist would have loved the soundproofing. Some interior decorator had become famous for his work here, if he hadn’t been famous already, in which case he had become rich. How could tall, thin Beowulf Shaeffer fit into a chair designed to the measure of short, wide Elephant? Yet I was bonelessly limp, blissfully relaxed, using only the muscles that held a double-walled glass of an odd-tasting, strangely refreshing soft drink called Tzlotz Beer.

  A glass which would not empty. Somewhere in the crystal was a tiny transfer motor connected to the bar, but the bent light in the crystal hid it. Another optical illusion, and one that must have tricked good men into acute alcoholism. I’d have to watch that.

  Elephant returned. He walked as if he massed tons, as if any kzinti foolish enough to stand in his path would have a short, wide hole in him. “All done,” he said. “Don Cramer’ll find the nearest Outsider ship and make my pitch for me. We should hear in a couple of days.”

  “Okay,” said I, and asked him about the cliff. It turned out that we were in the Rocky Mountains and that he owned every square inch of the nearly vertical cliff face. Why? I remembered Earth’s eighteen billion and wondered if they’d otherwise have surrounded him up, down, and sideways.

  Suddenly Elephant remembered that someone named Dianna must be home by now. I followed him into the transfer booth, watched him dial eleven digits, and waited in a much smaller vestibule while Elephant used the more conventional intercom. Dianna seemed dubious about letting him in until he roared that he had a guest and she should stop fooling around.

  Dianna was a small, pretty woman with skin the deep, uniform red of a Martian sky and hair like flowing quicksilver. Her irises had the same polished-silver luster. She hadn’t wanted to let us in because we were both wearing our own skins, but she never mentioned it again once we were inside.

  Elephant introduced me to Dianna and instantly told her he’d acted to contact the Outsiders.

  “What’s an Outsider?” she asked.

  Elephant gestured with both hands, looked confused, turned helplessly toward me.

  “They’re hard to describe,” I said. “Think of a cat-o’-nine-tails with a big thick handle.”

  “They live on cold worlds,” said Elephant.

  “Small, cold, airless worlds like Nereid. They pay rent to use Nereid as a base, don’t they, Elephant? And they travel over most of the galaxy in big unpressurized ships with fusion drives and no hyperdrives.”

  “They sell information. They can tell me about the world I want to find, the most unusual planet in known space.”

  “They spend most of their time tracking starseeds.”

  Dianna broke in. “Why?”

  Elephant looked at me. I looked at Elephant.

  “Say!” Elephant exclaimed. “Why don’t we get a fourth for bridge?”

  Dianna looked thoughtful. Then she focused her silver eyes on me, examined me from head to foot, and nodded gently to herself. “Sharrol Janss. I’ll call her.”

  While she was phoning, Elephant told me, “That’s a good thought. Sharrol’s got a tendency toward hero worship. She’s a computer analyst at Donovan’s Brains Inc. You’ll like her.”

  “Good,” I said, wondering if we were still talking about a bridge game. It struck me that I was building up a debt to Elephant. “Elephant, when you contact the Outsiders, I’d like to come along.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “You’ll need a pilot. And I’ve dealt with Outsiders before.”

  “Okay, it’s a deal.”

  The intercom rang from the vestibule. Dianna went to the door and came back with our fourth for bridge. “Sharrol, you know Elephant. This is Beowulf Shaeffer, from We Made It. Bey, this is—”

  “You!” I said.

  “You!” she said.

  It was the pickpocket.

  My vacation lasted just four days.

  I hadn’t known how long it would last, though I did know how it would end. Consequently I threw myself into it body and soul. If there was a dull moment anywhere in those four days, I slept through it, and at that I didn’t get enough sleep. Elephant seemed to feel the same way. He was living life to the hilt; he must have suspected, as I did, that the Outsiders would not consider danger a factor in choosing his planet. By their own ethics they were bound not to. The days of Elephant’s life might be running short.

  Buried in those four days were incidents that made me wonder why Elephant was looking for a weird world. Surely Earth was the weirdest of all.

  I remember when we threw in the bridge hands and decided to go out for dinner. This was more complicated than it sounds. Elephant hadn’t had a chance to change to flatlander styles, and neither of us was fit to be seen in public. Dianna had cosmetics for us.

  I succumbed to an odd impulse. I dressed as an albino.

  They were body paints, not pills. When I finished applying them, there in the full-length mirror was my younger self. Blood-red irises, snow-white hair, white skin with a tinge of pink: the teenager who had disappeared ages ago, when I was old enough to use tannin pills. I found my mind wandering far back across the decades, to the days when I was a flatlander myself, my feet firmly beneath the ground, my head never higher than seven feet above the desert sands…They found me there before the mirror and pronounced me fit to be seen in public.

  I remember that evening when Dianna told me she had known Elephant forever. “I was the one who named him Elephant,” she bragged.

  “It’s a nickname?”

  “Sure,” said Sharrol. “His real name is Gregory Pelton.”

  “O-o-oh.” Suddenly all came clear. Gregory Pelton is known among the stars. It is rumored that he owns the thirty-light-year-wide rough sphere called human space, that he earns his income by renting it out. It is rumored that General Products—the all-embracing puppeteer company, now defunct for lack of puppeteers—is a front for Gregory Pelton. It’s a fact that his great-to-the-eighth-grandmother invented the transfer booth and that he is rich, rich, rich.

  I asked, “Why Elephant? Why that particular nickname?”

  Dianna and Sharrol looked demurely at the tablecloth.

  Elephant said, “Use your imagination, Bey.”

  “On what? What’s an elephant, some kind of animal?”

  Three faces registered annoyance. I’d missed a joke.

  “Tomorrow,” said Elephant, “we’ll show you the zoo.”<
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  There are seven transfer booths in the Zoo of Earth. That’ll tell you how big it is. But you’re wrong; you’ve forgotten the two hundred taxis on permanent duty. They’re there because the booths are too far apart for walking.

  We stared down at dusty, compact animals smaller than starseeds or Bandersnatchi but bigger than anything else I’d ever seen. Elephant said, “See?”

  “Yah,” I said, because the animals showed a compactness and a plodding invulnerability very like Elephant’s. And then I found myself watching one of the animals in a muddy pool. It was using a hollow tentacle over its mouth to spray water on its back. I stared at that tentacle…and stared…

  “Hey, look!” Sharrol called, pointing. “Bey’s ears are turning red!”

  I didn’t forgive her till two that morning.

  And I remember reaching over Sharrol to get a tabac stick and seeing her purse lying on her other things. I said, “How if I picked your pocket now?”

  Orange and silver lips parted in a lazy smile. “I’m not wearing a pocket.”

  “Would it be in good taste to sneak the money out of your purse?”

  “Only if you could hide it on you.”

  I found a small flat purse with four hundred stars in it and stuck it in my mouth.

  She made me go through with it. Ever make love to a woman with a purse in your mouth? Unforgettable. Don’t try it if you’ve got asthma.

  I remember Sharrol. I remember smooth, warm blue skin, silver eyes with a wealth of expression, orange and silver hair in a swirling abstract pattern that nothing could mess up. It always sprang back. Her laugh was silver, too, when I gently extracted two handfuls of hair and tied them in a hard double knot, and when I gibbered and jumped up and down at the sight of her hair slowly untying itself like Medusa’s locks. And her voice was a silver croon.

  I remember the freeways.

  They were the first thing that showed coming in on Earth. If we’d landed at night, it would have been the lighted cities, but of course we came in on the day side. Why else would a world have three spaceports? There were the freeways and autostradas and autobahns, strung in an all-enclosing net across the faces of the continents.