by Larry Niven
"Remember, it's the most successful ones that are spreading. They infringe on other groups. The genes start to mix. The quality of the mix goes up, partly because of hybrid vigor. If they're going to develop intelligence, this is where it starts."
"Hah! They'd start inventing ways around the fences," said an older kid. Short blond hair, pale fringe of mustache, knitted sailing cap surgically attached to his head; I forget his name. "Bridges across the rivers, canteens for the deserts-"
"And camels."
"Passes across the mountains. Ways to tell each other how to find them."
"Ships!"
"Right," said Findlay, his blue eyes glowing with pleasure. "Now notice that the most intelligent groups are the ones that spread their genes around the most, because they're the ones that do all the traveling. Also, the more inventions you get, the easier it is to mix; the more mixing you get, the higher the intelligence goes; and that makes for more inventions, like paved roads and better rigging for the ships and better breeds of horses. Eventually you get airplanes, buses, guided tours and printed language guides and international credit organizations."
"And tourist traps."
"And multilingual whores."
"Not to put a damper on any of this fun stuff," said Hal Grant, the dark youth with the very adult vocabulary, "but eventually they'll be coming back to see how we're doing."
"How would they know when we're ready?" Someone wondered.
"Just stop by for a look every thousand years?"
Hal said, "Not good enough. Look how far we've come in the last five hundred years. Give us another five hundred and we'll be competitors, not slaves."
"Or dead of pollution."
"But they wouldn't have to check. They just wait until-"
"Project Ozma!"
"But how could they be sure we'd signal them?"
"They must be in one of the nearby stellar systems. Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti-"
"Or they left signal devices in all the likely systems-"
"Wouldn't it depend on how intelligent they want us? Maybe we're supposed to be repairmen for a starship motor. Then they-"
"They'd damn well wait for us to come to them, wouldn't they? To prove we can build a starship!"
Jack Keenan tapped me on the shoulder. He was still wearing his clerical collar. He spoke low, near my ear. "There's a place at the poker table. They sent me to tell you."
My cake was gone, and the conversation here was turning chaotic. I got up. Behind me Tom Findlay was saying, "But they'd have to find our starships some way. Maybe a large metallic mass moving faster than light would put out heavy Cherenkov radiation...
I played for an hour and lost a dollar twenty. Presently Carol put her head around the corner, caught my eye, showed her teeth and snapped them at me several times in rapid succession. I nodded and cashed in.
It means, "I'm starving. Let's collect some people and go eat." There was still a group around Tom Findlay. I caught bits and pieces of sentences. They were talking about the things you could do with neutronium, if you could get it in four-foot globs and had the technology to move it around. I broke in to ask if anyone was hungry, and got Hal Grant that way.
We looked up our host (our hostess had gone home with her date), thanked him for a great party, told him we might be back in an hour or so, and asked if he'd like to come along. The guests could take care of themselves, and he knew it, but he declined anyway.
Joy Benjamin was outside sitting on the wall, breathing. There was precious little oxygen left inside. She joined us too. We drove off to find a place we knew of, an all-night pizza place.
Sometimes they get forgotten instantly. Sometimes they go on and on. This latest of Findlay's brainstorms was one of Those. I came back from the counter carrying a tremendous deluxe pizza, and Hal Grant was saying, "See, that way you wouldn't need a Project Ozma, or an FTL spacecraft detector either." And both women were nodding, rapt.
Joy Benjamin was young and pretty and a bit pudgy, and her front teeth showed when she smiled. It all gave her a cuddly, innocent look that I had never found occasion to mention to my wife; but if she had been in the group around Findlay I would have noticed her. She must have gotten her details at second hand. She looked up as I set the pizza down, and said, "He's got a point. You know about Tom Findlay's Multiple Eden Hypothesis?"
"Yes."
"This planet puts out as much radio flux as a small star," she said seriously. "The overlords could put a detector on the Moon and then just wait for us to invent radios."
"That means they must be on their way here now," my wife put in.
Hal smiled sardonically, an effect he couldn't have managed without the beard. "Maybe they're already here. There were flying saucers all over the place when radio was really popular, before everybody had two television sets.''
"It's been done, that bit about a detector on the Moon. In 2001. Put it on Mars."
"Okay, it's on Mars. The point is, with the radio detector they can get here after we develop as much intelligence as we're going to, but before we can pollute ourselves to death or bomb ourselves to death. After all, they probably weren't trying to develop anything supremely intelligent. Just bright enough to take orders."
"How young you are, to be so cynical."
It took him a moment to decide I was kidding. He said, "Someday, Howards," and shook his head sorrowfully, contemplating awful carnage. He went to work on the pizza.
It was delicious. I wish I'd paid more attention, because it was the last time I ever tasted pizza. We ate on a wooden bench, and used up an inch-high stack of paper napkins. Off in one corner, a man with garters on his sleeves played a player piano.
"So we can expect them any minute." Joy made whirring noises and moved her hands expressively. "Big ships in the sky, coming down to ssscoop us up."
"Or little ships to take samples."
"If they were the flying saucers, they must have rejected us already," Hal put in. "They've been here too long. They'd have started major scooping operations long ago."
And if we'd dropped it there, we'd be home now.
There are tunes that go round and round in your head, driving you nuts, driving others nuts because you're humming under your breath. There are ideas you can't leave alone. You toy with them, or they toy with you...I got my fair share of the pizza and a bit more. While we were waiting for Carol to finish, I said, "Suppose they did reject us. Suppose we didn't meet their presumably exacting standards. What then?"
"They'd destroy the Earth," Joy said instantly.
"Typical bloodthirsty female."
Hal said, "Maybe they'd start us over. Give us IQ tests. Pick a thousand off the top. Settle us on a new planet."
"Then destroy the Earth."
"Maybe. Maybe even settle us back on Earth, after clearing it for us." Grant's "us" had not escaped me. He would be one of the thousand, and so would his friends. I let it pass. Truth to tell, I was flattered.
The pizza was gone, and much of the cardboard disc beneath it. We piled in the car and started back to George's place.
Carol ended a reflective silence. "Does it seem to anyone that there are more written tests around than there used to be? Army IQ tests, motivational research, testing for jobs, even the forms for computer dating. Now-"
We started laughing. Hal said, "Are you still on that?"
"Well, they have to test us some way."
"It's a lovely idea, but I can't bring myself to trust those IQ tests. I know too much psychology. There's not a printed test that's good for anything, especially at the top of the scale."
"What, then?"
"There Are Aliens Among Us," Hal Grant intoned. "Or their agents. And they choose by intuition and superior judgment. You, and you-"
"Hey," I said, hit by a lovely idea. "Hey. You know who would make a great intelligence tester?"
"Who?"
"Tom Findlay! He's a walking, talking intelligence test. Remember what he was talking about just before we
left? Blobs of neutron star matter-"
"That's lovely stuff, neutronium. It's unreasonably heavy. If you just let it sit, it's got to be a shiny sphere. The surface gravity would flatten any surface roughness, see? If you toss a glob of the stuff at an enemy spaceship, it'll just drift through the hull and leave a gaping hole and come out a fraction of an inch thicker. Spin it and you don't get an ellipsoid, you get like a flying saucer, a ball with a rim around it. It's all theoretical, of course."
"See what I mean?"
Behind me in the darkened car, Hal Grant said, "I guess so. Findlay makes you think. If you can't think, you go away. After awhile there's nobody left talking to Findlay except people who like playing with ideas. He's a filter. Then I suppose he tags the best of us and off we go, right?"
"Right. Well, nobody's disappeared yet."
"Nobody that was noticed. How many of us do you know, away from these parties? Sometimes I run across Jack Keenan in the supermarket, but that's it. All we know for sure is, we haven't been picked yet." Grant laughed uneasily. "Maybe we'd better not go back to George's."
The feel of the car changed drastically. I hit the brake fast, but it was hardly necessary; we were only starting to move from a dead stop. A moment ago we'd been doing seventy.
I heard the sea before I saw it: breakers crunching ahead of us, flashing white in the headlights. If I'd kept the throttle down we'd have driven right into them. The freeway lighting had become a pale pink glow far across the sea; dawn or dusk, I couldn't tell. We were in soft dry sand. It might have been a California beach, and our car sitting mired in sand might have been a television commercial or a practical joke, except that it wasn't.
"S-s-sonofabitch took me at my word," said Hal Grant. Then, "This can't be real. Can it?"
Joy was furious. "He was listening to us! That-eavesdropper!"
I got out.
It felt like sand. It crunched beneath my feet, like sand. How could it be part of another world? But the sinking feeling in my belly felt like an elevator starting down. Terror? Or low gravity?
I threw back my head and screamed, "Findlay!"
And he was there, grinning out of a metal cagework affair. "Figured it out, did you?"
"Christ no, Findlay! What's going on here? We're terribly confused! One minute we were driving along the freeway, and the next we're here at Hermosa Beach!"
First he was flabbergasted. Then he burst out laughing. Well, it had been worth a try.
So was my next move. His head was thrown back and his beard was raised, and I stepped forward fast and hit him in the throat, putting all my weight behind it.
Not murder. Justice. And we needed that cage affair to get home.
It was like hitting a padded pillar. My head snapped forward, my teeth came together with a sharp click, and something gave agonizingly in my shoulder. Tom Findlay must have weighed over a ton.
He stopped laughing, gradually. "Very good. Nobody's ever adjusted quite that fast. Let's say you pass with honors," he said. "And here's your diploma."
It appeared beside him in the cage: a black disc on edge, two feet high. He caught it before it could topple, and he sent it rolling out. I let it go past me.
Grant had come up behind me. In resignation he said, "Where are we?"
"A lot of use you'll get out of that! I'll tell you anyway. It's the second planet out from Alpha Centauri A. If you were hoping for double suns and wild new constellations, you can forget it. We used the closest available water world."
"Gonna be dull," said Hal. He'd given up.
So had I. I inhaled; the air smelled incredibly clean. A door slammed behind me. The women. God, don't let them beg. I said, "So they came and sampled us and found us wanting. So they're doing it over with another five hundred Edens. So where do you come in, Findlay? They aren't human, are they?"
"Not by a long way," said Findlay, with reverence. "Neither am I. I'm a robot. I'm also the ideal they're aiming for, in case you were wondering."
"I wasn't."
"Now, now."
"If you're just what they want, why do they need us?"
"I'm expensive. Robots don't breed. You can forget about genetic engineering, too. It's immoral. I don't know why. It's enough that they think so. Anything else?"
"We were doing seventy on the freeway," said Hal. "What happened to the momentum?"
"You were also doing about twenty miles per second with respect to this beach. We just took it all in one vector sum. What else? Oh, you won't be separated. This Eden will hold all four of you. We did it that way last time, too. The Eden story is only a myth."
"Are there any others?" Carol cried. "What direction are they."
But he was gone, and the metal frame around him. We were alone on a beach, four of us and a car, in the growing light of dawn.
"This thing is sticky," Hal said suddenly. He was holding the black disc that Findlay had rolled past me. He looked at his hand, then licked a finger. "Right. It's a memento, his signature, as it were. What can you say about chocolate covered manhole covers?"
"Don't get it sandy," my wife said briskly. "We can eat the chocolate. It's the only thing on this world that we know we can eat."
BECALMED IN HELL
I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright and dry and cool, almost too cool, like a modern office building in the dead of the summer. Beyond the two small windows it was as black as it ever gets in the solar system, and hot enough to melt lead, at a pressure equivalent to three hundred feet beneath the ocean.
"There goes a fish," I said, just to break the monotony.
"So how's it cooked?"
"Can't tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.
"Fried? Imagine that, Eric! A fried jellyfish."
Eric sighed noisily. "Do I have to?"
"You have to. Only way you'll see anything worthwhile in this..this.." Soup? Fog? Boiling maple syrup?
"Searing black calm."
"Right."
"Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just after the news of the Mariner II probe. An eternal searing black calm, hot as a kiln, under an atmosphere thick enough to keep any light or any breath of wind from ever reaching the surface."
I shivered. "What's the outside temperature now?"
"You'd rather not know. You've always had too much imagination, Howie."
"I can take it, Doc."
"Six hundred and twelve degrees."
"I can't take it, Doc!"
This was Venus, Planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction writers of three decades ago. Our ship hung below the Earth- to-Venus hydrogen fuel tank, twenty miles up and all but motionless in the syrupy air. The tank, nearly empty now, made an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft as long as the internal pressure matched the external. That was Eric's job, to regulate the tank's pressure by regulating the temperature of the hydrogen gas. We had collected air samples after each ten mile drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter intervals, and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had gotten from the surface merely confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest world in the solar system.
"Temperature just went up to six-thirteen," said Eric. "Look, are you through hitching?"
"For the moment."
"Good. Strap down. We're taking off."
"Oh fabulous day!" I started untangling the crash webbing over my couch.
"We've done everything we came to do. Haven't we?"
"Am I arguing? Look, I'm strapped down."
"Yeah."
I knew why he was reluctant to leave. I felt a touch of it myself. We'd spent four months getting to Venus in order to spend a week circling her and less than two days in her upper atmosphere, and it seemed a terrible waste of time.
But he was taking too long. "What's the trouble, Eric?"
"You'd rather not know."
He meant it. His voice was a mechanical, inhuman monotone; he wasn't making the extra ef
fort to get human expression out of his "prosthetic" vocal apparatus. Only a severe shock would affect him that way.
"I can take it," I said.
"Okay. I can't feel anything in the ramjet controls. Feels like I've just had a spinal anaesthetic."
The cold in the cabin drained into me, all of it. "See if you can send motor impulses the other way. You could run the rams by guess-and-hope even if you can't feel them."
"Okay." One split second later, "They don't. Nothing happens. Good thinking though."
I tried to think of something to say while I untied myself from the couch. What came out was, "It's been a pleasure knowing you, Eric. I've liked being half of this team, and I still do."
"Get maudlin later. Right now, start checking my attachments.
Carefully."
I swallowed my comments and went to open the access door in the cabin's forward wall. The floor swayed ever so gently beneath my feet.
Beyond the four-foot-square access door was Eric. Eric's central nervous system, with the brain perched at the top and the spinal cord coiled in a loose spiral to fit more compactly into the transparent glass-and-sponge-plastic housing. Hundreds of wires from all over the ship led to the glass walls, where they were joined to selected nerves which spread like an electrical network from the central coil of nervous tissue and fatty protective membrane.
Space leaves no cripples; and don't call Eric a cripple, because he doesn't like it. In a way he's the ideal spaceman. His life support system weighs only half of what mine does, and takes up a twelfth as much room. But his other prosthetic aids take up most of the ship. The ramjets were hooked into the last pair of nerve trunks, the nerves which once moved his legs, and dozens of finer nerves in those trunks sensed and regulated fuel feed, ram temperature, differential acceleration, intake aperture dilation, and spark pulse.
These connections were intact. I checked them four different ways without finding the slightest reason why they shouldn't be working.
"Test the others," said Eric.
It took a good two hours to check every trunk nerve connection. They were all solid. The blood pump was chugging along, and the fluid was rich enough, which killed the idea that the ram nerves might have "gone to sleep" from lack of nutrients or oxygen. Since the lab is one of his prosthetic aids, I let Eric analyse his own blood sugar, hoping that the "liver" had goofed and was producing some other form of sugar. The conclusions were appalling. There was nothing wrong with Eric inside the cabin.
