The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  Regrettably, there were none.

  Kzanol pushed the panic button.

  Larry Greenberg climbed out of the contact field and stood up. His footsteps echoed in the big dolphin tank room. There were no disorientation effects this time, no trouble with his breathing and no urge to wiggle nonexistent flippers and tail. Which was natural enough, since the “message” had gone the other way.

  The dolphin named Charley was lying on the bottom of the tank. He had sunk from under his own specially designed contact helmet. Larry walked around to where Charley could see him through the glass, but Charley’s eyes weren’t looking at anything. The dolphin was twitching, all over. Larry watched with concern, aware that the two marine biologists had come up beside him and were looking just as worried. Then Charley stopped twitching and surfaced.

  “That wasss willd,” said Charley in his best Donald Duck accent.

  “Are you all right?” one of the seadocs asked anxiously. “We kept the field at lowest power.”

  “Sssure, Billl, I’mm ffine. But that was wild. I feel like I sshould have arms and legs and a long nose overhanging my teeth insstead of a hole in my head.” Whatever accent Charley had, there was nothing wrong with his vocabulary. “And I havvv thiss terrible urge to make love to Larry’s wife.”

  “Me, too,” said Doctor Bill Slater, but under his breath.

  Larry laughed. “You lecherous fish! Don’t you dare! I’ll steal your cows!”

  “We trade wives?” Charley buzzed like an MG taking off, then flipped wildly around the tank. Dolphin laughter. He ended the performance by jetting straight out of the water and landing on his belly. “Has my accent improved?”

  Larry decided there was no point in trying to brush off the water. It had soaked through to his skin. “Come to think of it, yes, it has. It’s much better.”

  Charley switched to dolphinese—or to pidgin dolphinese, which is dolphinese scaled down to the human range of hearing. The rest of his conversation came in a chorus of squeaks, grunts, ear-splitting whistles, and other extremely rude noises. “When’s our next session, mind buddy?”

  Larry was busy squeezing water out of his hair. “I don’t know, exactly, Charley. Probably a few weeks. I’ve been asked to take on another assignment. You’ll have time to talk to your colleagues, pass on whatever you’ve learned about us walkers from reading my mind.”

  “You sure you want me to do that? Seriously, Larrry, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”

  “Squeak on.”

  Charley deliberately speeded up his delivery. Nobody but Larry Greenberg could have followed the rapid chorus of barnyard sounds. “What’s chances of a dolphin getting aboard the Lazy Eight III?”

  “Huh? To Jinx? Jinx’s ocean is a foot deep in scum!”

  “Oh, that’s right. Well, some other world, then.”

  “Why would a dolphin be interested in space travel?”

  “Why would a walker? No, that’s not an honorable question. I think the truth is you’ve given me the space bug, Larrry.”

  A slow grin spread across Larry’s urchin face. He found it curiously hard to answer. “It’s a damn contagious disease, and hard to get rid of.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll think about it, Charley. Eventually you’ll have to contact the UN about it, but give me time first. We’d have to carry a lot of water, you know. Much heavier than air.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Give me some time. I’ve got to go practically right now.”

  “But—”

  “Sorry, Charley. Duty calls. Dr. Jansky made it sound like the opportunity of the decade. Now roll over.”

  “Tyrant,” hissed Charley, which isn’t easy. But he rolled over on his back. The three men spent a few minutes rubbing his belly. Then Larry had to leave. Momentarily he wondered if Charley would have any trouble assimilating his memories. But there was no danger; at the low contact power they’d been using, Charley could forget the whole experience if he had to. Including the conquest of space.

  Which would be a shame.

  That night he and Judy had dinner with Dr. and Mrs. Dorcas Jansky. Dr. Dorcas Jansky was a huge West Berliner with a blond beard and the kind of flamboyant, extrovert personality that had always made Larry slightly uncomfortable. Had he but known it, Larry had a very similar psyche; but it was housed in a much smaller body. It looked different that way. Mrs. Jansky was about Judy’s size and almost as pretty. She was the quiet type, at least when English was being spoken.

  The conversation ranged explosively during dinner. As Larry said later, “It’s fun to meet someone who likes to argue about the same things you do.” They compared Los Angeles’ outward growth to West Berlin’s reaching skyscrapers.

  “The urge to reach the stars,” said Jansky.

  “You’re surrounded by East Germany,” Larry maintained. “There’s nowhere you can go but up.”

  They spent useless time deciding which of the eleven forms of communism most closely resembled Marxism, and finally decided to wait and see which government withered away the fastest. They talked smog—where did it come from, now that there were neither industrial concerns nor hydrocarbon-powered vehicles in the Major Los Angeles Basin? Mainly cooking, thought Judy. Cigarettes, said Jansky, and Larry suggested that electrostatic air conditioning might concentrate impurities in the outside air. They talked about dolphins. Jansky had the nerve to question dolphin intelligence, merely because they’d never built anything. Larry, touched to the quick, stood up and gave the most stirring impromptu lecture of his life. It wasn’t until the coffee hour that business was mentioned.

  “You were not the first man to read a dolphin’s mind, Mr. Greenberg.” Jansky now held a gigantic cigar as if it were a professor’s blackboard pointer. “Am I right in thinking that the dolphin contacts were only training of a sort?”

  Larry nodded vigorously. “Right. Judy and I were trying for a berth on the Lazy Eight III, bound for Jinx. I knew from the standard tests that I had some telepathic aptitude, and when we got the word about the bandersnatchi I knew we were in. Nobody’s gotten anywhere trying to learn the bandersnatchi language, and there aren’t any contact men on Jinx. So I volunteered for the dolphin work and Judy started studying linguistics, and then we put in for the trip as a husband-wife team. I thought our sizes would be the clincher. The dolphin work was just practice for contacting a bandersnatch.” He sighed. “But this fool economic war with the Belt is fouling up the whole space effort. The bastards.”

  Judy reached across and took his hand. “We’ll get there yet,” she promised.

  “Sure we will,” said Larry.

  “You may not need to,” said the doctor, emphasizing his words with jerky gestures of his cigar. “If the mountain will not come to Mahomet—” He paused expectantly.

  “You don’t mean you’ve got a bandersnatch here?” Judy sounded startled, and well she might. Bandersnatchi weighed thirty tons apiece.

  “Am I a magician? No bandersnatchi, but something else. Did I mention that I am a physicist?”

  “No.” Larry wondered what a physicist would want with a contact man.

  “Yes, a physicist. My colleagues and I have been working for some twelve years on a time-retarding field. We knew it was possible, the mathematics are well known, but the engineering techniques were very difficult. It took us years.”

  “But you got it.”

  “Yes. We developed a field that will make six hours of outer, normal time equivalent to one second of time inside the field. The ratio of outer time to inner time moves in large, ahh, quantum jumps. The twenty-one-thousand-to-one ratio is all we have been able to get, and we do not know where the next quantum is.”

  Judy spoke unexpectedly.

  “Then build two machines and put one inside the field of the other.”

  The physicist laughed uproariously. He seemed to shake the room. “Excuse me,” he said when he had finished, “but it is very funny that you should
make that suggestion so quickly. Of course, it was one of the first things we tried.” Judy thought black thoughts, and Larry squeezed her hand warningly. Jansky didn’t notice. “The fact is that one time-retarding field cannot exist inside another. I have worked out a mathematical proof of this.”

  “Too bad,” said Larry.

  “Perhaps not. Mr. Greenberg, have you ever heard of the Sea Statue?”

  Larry tried to remember, but it was Judy who answered. “I have! Lifetimes did a pictorial on it. It’s the one they found off the Brazilian continental shell.”

  “That’s right,” Larry remembered aloud. “The dolphins found it and sold it to the United Nations for some undersea gadgetry. Some anthropologists thought they’d found Atlantis.” He remembered pictures of a misshapen figure four feet tall, with strangely carved arms and legs and a humped back and a featureless globe of a head, surfaced like a highly polished mirror. “It looked like an early rendition of a goblin.”

  “Yes, it certainly does. I have it here.”

  “Here?”

  “Here. The United Nations Comparative Culture Exhibit loaned it to us after we explained what it was for.” He crushed his now tiny cigar butt to smithereens. “As you know, no sociologist has been able to link the statue to any known culture. But I, the doctor of physics, I have solved the mystery. I believe.

  “Tomorrow I will show you why I believe the statue is an alien being in a time-retarder field. You can guess what I want you to do. I want to put you and the statue in the time-retarder field, to cancel out our, er, visitor’s own field, and let you read its mind.”

  They walked down to the corner at ten the next morning, and Judy stayed while Larry pushed the call button and waited for the cab. About two minutes passed before a yellow-and-black-checked flyer dropped to the corner.

  Larry was getting in when he felt Judy grasping his upper arm. “What’s wrong?” he asked, turning half around.

  “I’m frightened,” she said. She looked it. “Are you sure it’s all right? You don’t know anything about him at all!”

  “Who, Jansky? Look—”

  “The statue.”

  “Oh.” He considered. “Look, I’m just going to quickly make a couple of points. All right?” She nodded. “One. The contact gadget isn’t dangerous. I’ve been using it for years. All I get is another person’s memories, and a little insight into how he thinks. Even then they’re damped a little so I have to think hard to remember something that didn’t happen to me personally.

  “Two. My experience with dolphins has given me experience with unhuman minds. Right?”

  “Right. And you always want to play practical jokes after a session with Charley. Remember when you hypnotized Mrs. Grafton and made her—”

  “Nuts. I’ve always liked practical jokes. Third point is that the time field doesn’t matter at all. It’s just to kill the field around the statue. You can forget it.

  “Four. Jansky won’t take any chances with my life. You know that, you can see it. Okay?”

  “All that scuba diving last summer—”

  “That was your idea.”

  “Uh? I guess it was.” She smiled and didn’t mean it. “Okay. I thought you’d be practicing next on bandersnatchi, but I guess this is the acid test. And I’m still worried. You know I’m prescient.”

  “Well—oh, well. I’ll call you as soon as I can.” He got into the cab and dialed the address of the UCLA physics school level.

  “Mark will be back with the coffee in a minute,” said Dorcas Jansky. “Let me show you how the time-retarding field works.” They were in a huge room whose roof contained two of those gigantic electrodes which produce ear-splitting claps of artificial lightning to impress groups of wide-eyed college students. But Jansky didn’t seem concerned with the lightning maker. “We borrowed this part of the building because it has a good power source,” he said, “and it was big enough for our purposes. Do you see that wire construction?”

  “Sure.” It was a cube of very fine wire mesh, with a flap in one side. The wire covered the top and floor as well as the sides. Busy workmen were testing and arranging great and complex-looking masses of machinery, which were not as yet connected to the wire cage.

  “The field follows the surface of that wire. The wire side boundary between slow, inside time and fast, outside time. We had some fun making it, let me tell you!” Jansky ran his fingers through his beard, meditating on the hard work to which he had been put. “We think the field around the alien must be several quantum numbers higher than ours. There is no telling how long he has been in there—except by the method we will use.”

  “Well, he might not know either.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Larry, you will be in the field for six hours of outer time. That will be one second of your time. I understand that the thought transfer is instantaneous?”

  “Not instantaneous, but it does take less than a second. Set things up and turn on the contact machine before you turn on the time field, and I’ll get his thoughts as soon as he comes to life. Until he does that I won’t get anything.” Just like the dolphins, Larry told himself. It’s just like contacting a Tursiops truncatus.

  “Good. I wasn’t sure. Ahh.” Jansky went to tell Mark where to put the coffee. Larry welcomed the interruption, for suddenly he was getting the willies. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been the night before his first session with a dolphin, but it was bad enough. He was remembering that his wife was sometimes uncomfortably psychic. He drank his coffee gratefully.

  “So,” Jansky gasped, having drained his cup at a few gulps. “Larry, when did you first suspect that you were telebaddic?”

  “College,” said Larry. “I was going to Washburn University—it’s in Kansas—and one day a visiting bigwig gave the whole school a test for psi powers. We spent the whole day at it. Telepathy, esper, PK, prescience, even a weird test for teleportation which everybody flunked. Judy came up high on prescience, but erratic, and I topped everyone on telepathy. That’s how we met. When we found out we both wanted to go starhopping…”

  “Surely that wasn’t why you two married?”

  “Not entirely. And it sure as hell isn’t why we haven’t gotten divorced.” Larry grinned a feral grin, then seemed to recollect himself. “Telepathy makes for good marriages, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Jansky smiled.

  “I might have made a good psychologist,” Larry said without regret. “But it’s a little late to start now. I hope they send out the Lazy Eight III,” he said between his teeth. “They can’t desert the colonies anyway. They can’t do that.”

  Jansky refilled both cups. The workmen wheeled something through the huge doorway, something covered by a sheet. Larry watched them as he sipped his coffee. He was feeling completely relaxed. Jansky drained his second cup as fast as he had finished the first. He must either love it, Larry decided, or hate it.

  Unexpectedly Jansky asked, “Do you like dolphins?”

  “Sure. Very much, in fact.”

  “Why?”

  “They have so much fun,” was Larry’s inadequate-sounding reply.

  “You’re glad you entered your profession?”

  “Oh, very. It would have surprised my father, though. He thought I was going to be a pawnbroker. You see, I was born with…” His voice trailed off. “Hey! Is that it?”

  “Um?” Jansky looked where Larry was looking. “Yes, that is the Sea Statue. Shall we go and look at it?”

  “Let’s.”

  The three men carrying the statue took no notice of them. They carried it into the cubical structure of fine wire mesh and set it under one of the crystal-iron helmets of the contact machine. They had to brace its feet with chocks of wood. The other helmet, Larry’s end of the contact link, was fixed at the head of an old psychoanalyst’s couch. The workmen left the cage, single file, and Larry stood in the open flap and peered at the statue.

  The surface was an unbroken, perfect mirror. A crazy mirror. It made th
e statue difficult to see, for all that reached the eye was a distorted view of other parts of the room.

  The statue was less than four feet tall. It looked very much like a faceless hobgoblin. The triangular hump on its back was more stylized than realistic, and the featureless globular head was downright eerie. The legs were strange and bent, and the heels stuck out too far behind the ankle. It could have been an attempt to model a gnome, except for the strange legs and feet and the stranger surface and the short, thick arms with massive Mickey Mouse hands.

  “I notice he’s armed,” was Larry’s first, slightly uneasy comment. “And he seems to be crouching.”

  “Crouching? Take a closer look,” Jansky invited genially. “And look at the feet.”

  A closer look was worse. The crouch was menacing, predatory, as if the supposed alien was about to charge an enemy or a food animal. The gun, a ringed double-barreled shotgun with no handle, was ready to deal death. But—

  “I still don’t see what you’re driving at, but I can see his feet aren’t straight. They don’t lie flat to the ground.”

  “Right!” Jansky waxed enthusiastic. His accent thickened noticeably. “That was the first thing I thought of, when I saw a picture of the statue in the Griffith Park Observatory. I thought, the thing wasn’t made to stand up. Why? Then I saw. He is in free flight!”

  “Yeah!” It was startling how obvious the thing became. The statue was in a weightless spaceman’s crouch, halfway toward fetal position. Of course he was!

  “That was when the archaeologists were still wondering how the artist had gotten that mirror finish. Some of them already thought the statue had been left by visitors from space. But I had already completed my time field, you see, and I thought, suppose he was in space and something went wrong. He might have put himself in slow time to wait for rescue. And rescue never came. So I went to Brasilia Ciudad and persuaded the UNCCE to let me test my t’eory. I aimed a liddle laser beam at one finger…

  “And what happened? The laser couldn’t even mark the surface. Then they were convinced. I took it back here with me.” He beamed happily.