Crashlander

by Larry Niven

  Margo was giving us a slow telescopic expansion. The bright dot grew to a disk bright enough to make your eyes water, and then no brighter. The eyes on a ship’s hull won’t transmit more than a certain amount of light. The disk swelled to fill the window, and now dark areas showed beneath the surface, splitting and disappearing and changing shape and size, growing darker and clearer as they rode the shock wave toward space. The core of CY Aquarii exploded every eighty-nine minutes. Each time the star grew whiter and brighter, while shock waves rode the explosion to the surface. Men and instruments watched to learn about stars.

  The view swung. A curved edge of space showed, with curling hydrogen flames tracing arcs bigger than some suns. The star slid out of sight, and a dully glowing dot came into view. Still the view expanded, until we saw an egg-shaped object in dead center of the window.

  “The starseed,” said Margo via intercom. There was cool authority in her public-speaking voice. “This one appears to be returning to the galactic core, having presumably left its fertilized egg near the tip of this galactic arm. When the egg hatches, the infant starseed will make its own way home across fifty thousand light-years of space…”

  The starseed was moving fast, straight at the sensing eye, with an immediacy that jarred strangely against Margo’s dry lecture voice. Suddenly I knew what she’d done. She’d placed us directly in the path of the starseed. If this one was typical of its brethren, it would be moving at about point eight lights. The starseed’s light image was moving only one-fifth faster than the starseed itself, and both were coming toward us. Margo had set it up so that we watched it five times as fast as it actually happened.

  Quite a showman, Margo.

  “…believe that at least some eggs are launched straight outward, toward the Clouds of Magellan or toward the globular clusters or toward Andromeda. Thus, the starseeds could colonize other galaxies and could also prevent a population explosion in this galaxy.” There were pinpoints of blue light around the starseed now: newsmen from Down, come to Gummidgy to cover the event, darting about in fusion ships. “This specimen is over a mile in thickness and about a mile and a half in length…”

  Suddenly it hit me.

  Whatinhell was the Kdatlyno watching? With nothing resembling eyes, with only his radar sense to give form to his surroundings, he was seeing nothing but a blank wall!

  I turned. Lloobee was watching me.

  Naturally. Lloobee was an artist, subsidized by his own world government, selling his touch sculptures to humans and kzinti so that his species would acquire interstellar money. Finagle knew they didn’t have much else to sell—yet. They’d been propertyless slaves before we took their world from the kzinti, but now they were building industries.

  He didn’t look like an artist. He looked like a monster. That brown dragon skin would have stopped a knife. Curved silver-tipped horns marked his knees and elbows, and his huge hands, human in design, nonetheless showed eight retractile claws at the knuckles. No silver there. They were filed sharp and then buffed to a polished glow. The hands were strangler’s hands, not sculptor’s hands. His arms were huge even in proportion to his ten-foot height. They brushed his knees when he stood up.

  But his face gave the true nightmare touch. Eyeless, noseless, marked only by a gash of a mouth and by a goggle-shaped region above it where the skin was stretched drumhead taut. That tympanum was turned toward me. Lloobee was memorizing my face.

  I turned back as the starseed began to unfold.

  It seemed to take forever. The big egg fluttered; its surface grew dull and crinkly and began to expand. It was rounding the sun now, lighted on one side, black on the other. It grew still bigger, became lopsided…and slowly, slowly the sail came free. It streamed away like a comet’s tail, and then it filled, a silver parachute with four threadlike shrouds pointing at the sun. Where the shrouds met was a tiny knob.

  This is how they travel. A starseed spends most of its time folded into a compact egg shape, falling through the galaxy on its own momentum. But inevitably there come times when it must change course. Then the sail unfolds, a silver mirror thinner than the paint on a cheap car but thousands of miles across. A cross-shaped thickening in the material of the sail is the living body of the starseed itself. In the knob that hangs from the shrouds is more living matter. There are the muscles to control the shrouds and set the attitude of the sail, and there is the egg, fertilized at the Core, launched near the galactic rim.

  The sail came free, and nobody breathed. The sail expanded, filled the screen, and swung toward us. A blue-white point crossed in front of it, a newsman’s ship, a candle so tiny as to be barely visible. Now the sail was fully inflated by the light from behind, belling outward, crimped along one side for attitude control.

  The intercom said, “And that’s it, ladies and gentlemen and other guests. We will make one short hyperspace hop into the system of Gummidgy and will proceed from there in normal space. We will be landing in sixteen hours.”

  There was a collective sigh. The Kdatlyno sculptor took his horn out of my sleeve and stood up, improbably erect.

  And what would his next work be like? I thought of human faces set in expressions of sheer wonder and grinning incredulity, muscles bunched and backs arched forward for a better view of a flat wall. Had Lloobee known of the starseed in advance? I thought he had.

  Most of the spectators were drifting away, though the starseed still showed. My tea was icy. We’d been watching for nearly an hour, though it felt like ten minutes.

  Emil said, “How are you doing with Captain Tellefsen?”

  I looked blank.

  “You called her Margo a while back.”

  “Oh, that. I’m not really trying, Emil. What would she see in a crashlander?”

  “That girl must have hurt you pretty bad.”

  “What girl?”

  “It shows through your skull, Bey. None of my business, though.” He looked me up and down, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that my skull really was transparent. “What would she see? She’d see a crashlander, yes. Height seven feet, weight one sixty pounds—close enough? White hair, eyes blood-red. Skin darkened with tannin pills, just like the rest of us. But you must take more tannin pills than anybody.”

  “I do. Not, as you said, that it’s any of your business.”

  “Was it a secret?”

  I had to grin at that. How do you hide the fact that you’re an albino? “No, but it’s half my problem. Do you know that the Fertility Board of Earth won’t accept albinos as potential fathers?”

  “Earth is hardly the place to raise children, anyway. Once a flatlander, always a flatlander.”

  “I fell in love with a flatlander.”

  “Sorry.”

  “She loved me, too. Still does, I hope. But she couldn’t leave Earth.”

  “A lot of flatlanders can’t stand space. Some of them never know it. Did you want children?”

  “Yah.”

  In silent sympathy Emil dialed two Bloody Marriages. In silent thanks I raised the bulb in toast and drank.

  It was as neat a cleft stick as had ever caught man and woman. Sharrol couldn’t leave Earth. On Earth she was born, on Earth she would die, and on Earth she would have her children.

  But Earth wouldn’t let me have children. No matter that forty percent of We Made It is albino. No matter that albinism can be cured by a simple supply of tannin pills, which anyone but a full-blooded Maori has to take anyway if he’s visiting a world with a brighter than average star. Earth has to restrict its population, to keep it down to a comfortable eighteen billion. To a flatlander that’s comfortable. So…prevent the useless ones from having children—the liabilities, such as paranoia prones, mental deficients, criminals, uglies, and Beowulf Shaeffer.

  Emil said, “Shouldn’t we be in hyperspace by now?”

  “Up to the captain,” I told him.

  Most of the passengers who had watched the starseed were now at tables. Sleeping cubicles induce claustro
phobia. Bridge games were forming, reading screens were being folded out of the walls, drinks were being served. I reached for my Bloody Marriage and found, to my amazement, that it was too heavy to pick up.

  Then I fainted.

  I woke up thinking, It wasn’t that strong!

  And everyone else was waking, too.

  Something had knocked us all out at once. Which might mean the ship had an unconscious captain! I left the lounge at full speed, which was a wobbly walk.

  The control-room door was open, which is bad practice. I reached to close it and changed my mind because the lock and doorknob were gone, replaced by a smooth hole nine inches across.

  Margo drooped in her chair. I patted her cheeks until she stirred.

  “What happened?” she wanted to know.

  “We all went to sleep together. My guess is gas. Stun guns don’t work across a vacuum.”

  “Oh!” It was a gasp of outrage. She’d spotted the gaping hole in her control board, as smooth and rounded as the hole in the door. The gap where the hyperwave radio ought to be.

  “Right,” I said. “We’ve been boarded, and we can’t tell anyone about it. Now what?”

  “That hole…” She touched the rounded metal with her fingertips.

  “Slaver disintegrator, I think. A digging tool. It projects a beam that suppresses the charge on the electron, so that matter tears itself apart. If that’s what it was, we’ll find the dust in the air filters.”

  “There was a ship,” said Margo. “A big one. I noticed it just after I ended the show. By then it was inside the mass limit. I couldn’t go into hyperspace until it left.”

  “I wonder how they found us.” I thought of some other good questions but let them pass. One I let out. “What’s missing? We’d better check.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand. We aren’t carrying anything salable! Valuable, yes. Instruments for the base. But hardly black-market stuff.” She stood up. “I’ll have to go through the cargo hold.”

  “Waste of time. Where’s the cargo mass meter on this hulk?”

  “Oh, of course.” She found it somewhere among the dials. “No change. Nothing missing there, unless they replaced whatever they took with equivalent masses.”

  “Why, so we wouldn’t know they were here? Nuts.”

  “Then they didn’t take anything.”

  “Or they took personal luggage. The lifesystem mass meter won’t tell us. Passengers move around so. You’d think they’d have the courtesy to stay put just in case some pirates should—ung.”

  “What?”

  I tasted the idea and found it reasonable. More. “Ten to one Lloobee’s missing.”

  “Who?”

  “Our famous, valuable Kdatlyno sculptor. The third Kdatlyno in history to leave his home planet.”

  “One of the ET passengers?”

  Oh, brother. I left, running.

  Because Lloobee was the perfect theft. As a well-known alien artist who had been under the protection of Earth, the ransom he could command was huge. As a hostage his value would be equal. No special equipment would be needed; Lloobee could breathe Earth-normal air. His body could even use certain human food proteins and certain gaseous human anesthetics.

  Lloobee wasn’t in the lounge. And his cabin was empty.

  With Lloobee missing and with the hyperwave smashed, the Argos proceeded to Gummidgy at normal speed. Normal speed was top speed; there are few good reasons to dawdle in space. It took us six hours in hyperdrive to reach the edge of CY Aquarii’s gravity well. From there we had to proceed on reaction drive and gravity drag.

  Margo called Gummidgy with a com laser as soon as we were out of hyperspace. By the time we landed, the news would be ten hours old. We would land at three in the morning, ship’s time, and at roughly noon Gummidgy time.

  Most of us, including me, went to our cabins to get some sleep. An hour before planetfall I was back in the lounge, watching us come in.

  Emil didn’t want to watch. He wanted to talk.

  “Have you heard? The kidnappers called the base a couple of hours ago.”

  “What’d they have to say?”

  “They want ten million stars and a contract before they turn the Kdatlyno loose. They also—” Emil was outraged at their effrontery. “—reminded the base that Kdatlyno don’t eat what humans eat. And they don’t have any Kdat foodstuffs!”

  “They must be crazy. Where would the base get ten million stars in time?”

  “Oh, that’s not the problem. If the base doesn’t have funds, they can borrow money from the hunting parties, I’m sure. There’s a group down there with their own private yacht. It’s the contract that bothers me.”

  Gummidgy was blue on blue under a broken layer of white, with a diminutive moon showing behind an arc of horizon. Very Earthlike but with none of the signs that mark Earth: no yellow glow of sprawling cities on the dark side, no tracery of broken freeways across the day. A nice-looking world, from up here. Unspoiled. No transfer booths, no good nightclubs, no tridee except old tapes and those only on one channel. Unspoiled.

  With only half my mind working on conversation, I said, “Be glad we’ve got contracts. Otherwise we might get him back dead.”

  “Obviously you don’t know much about Kdatlyno.”

  “Obviously.” I was nettled.

  “They’ll do it, you know. They’ll pay the kidnappers ten million stars to give Lloobee back, and they’ll tape an immunity contract, too. Total immunity for the kidnappers. No reprisals, no publicity. Do you know what the Kdatlyno will think about that?”

  “They’ll be glad to have their second-best sculptor back.”

  “Best.”

  “Hrodenu is the best.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What they’ll think is, they’ll wonder why we haven’t taken revenge for the insult to Lloobee. They’ll wonder what we’re doing about getting revenge. And when they finally realize we aren’t doing anything at all…”

  “Go on.”

  “They’ll blame the whole human race. You know what the kzinti will think?”

  “Who cares what the kzinti think?”

  He snorted. Great. Now he had me pegged as a chauvinist.

  “Why don’t you drop it?” I suggested. “We can’t do anything about it. It’s up to the base MPs.”

  “It’s up to nobody. The base MPs don’t have ships.”

  Right about then I should have accidentally bitten my tongue off. I didn’t have that much sense. I never do. Instead I said, “They don’t need ships. Whoever took Lloobee has to land somewhere.”

  “The message came in on hyperwave. Whoever sent it is circling outside the system’s gravity well.”

  “Whoever sent it may well be.” I was showing off. “But whoever took Lloobee landed. A Kdatlyno needs lots of room, room he can feel. He sends out a supersonic whistle—one tone—all his life, and when the echoes hit the tympanum above his mouth, he knows what’s around him. On a liner he can feel corridors leading all around the ship. He can sense the access tubes behind walls and the rooms and closets behind doors. Nothing smaller than a liner is big enough for him. You don’t seriously suggest that the kidnappers borrowed a liner for the job, do you?”

  “I apologize. You do seem to know something about Kdatlyno.”

  “I accept your apology. Now, the kidnappers have definitely landed. Where?”

  “Have to be some rock. Gummidgy’s the only planet-sized body in the system. Look down there.”

  I looked out the window. One of Gummidgy’s oceans was passing beneath us. The biggest ocean Gummidgy had, it covered a third of the planet.

  “Circle Sea. Round as a ten-star piece. A whale of a big asteroid must have hit there when Gummidgy was passing through the system. Stopped it cold, or almost. All the other rocks in the system are close enough to the star to be half-molten.”

  “Okay. Could they have built their own space station? Or borrowed one? Doubtful. So they must have landed on Gummidgy,” I conc
luded happily, and waited for the applause.

  Emil was slowly nodding his head, up, down, up, down. Suddenly he stood up. “Let’s ask Captain Tellefsen.”

  “Hold it! Ask her what?”

  “Ask her how big the ship was. She saw it, didn’t she? She’ll know whether it was a liner.”

  “Sit down. Let’s wait till we’re aground, then tell the MPs. Let them ask Margo.”

  “What for?”

  Belatedly, I was getting cautious. “Just take my word for it, will you. Assume I’m a genius.”

  He gave me a peculiar look, but he did sit down.

  Later, after we landed, we favored the police with our suggestions. They’d already asked Margo about the ship. It was a hell of a lot smaller than the Argos…about the size of a big yacht.

  “They aren’t trying,” Emil said as we emerged from city hall.

  “You can’t blame them,” I told him. “Suppose we knew exactly where Lloobee was. Suppose that. Then what? Should we charge in with lasers blazing and risk Lloobee catching a stray beam?”

  “Yes, we should. That’s the way Kdatlyno think.”

  “I know, but it’s not the way I think.”

  I couldn’t see Emil’s face, which was bent in thought two feet below eye level. But his words came slowly, as if he had picked them with care. “We could find the ship that brought him down. You can’t hide a spaceship landing. The gravity drag makes waves on a spaceport indicator.”

  “Granted.”

  “He could be right here in the base. So many ships go in and out.”

  “Most of the base ships don’t have hyperdrive.”

  “Good. Then we can find them wherever they landed.” He looked up. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go look at the spaceport records!”

  It was a waste of time, but there was no talking him out of it. I tagged along.

  The timing was a problem.

  From where the kidnapping took place, any ship in known space would take six hours to reach the breakout point. If it tried to go farther in hyperspace, CY Aquarii’s gee well would drop it permanently into the Blind Spot.

  From breakout it had taken us ten hours to reach Gummidgy. That was at five-gee acceleration, fusion drive and gravity drag, with four gees compensated by the internal gee field. CY Aquarii was a hot star, and if Gummidgy hadn’t been near the edge of the system, it would have been boiling rock. Now, the fastest ship I’d ever heard of could make twenty gees…