The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  “Several hundred miles east of the shore, we found other forms of native—”

  Mayor Herkimer was cut off in midsentence. The slender brunette’s voice came from a blank screen: “Mr. Garner, there is another section of the report listed under ‘bandersnatchi.’ Do you want it?”

  “Yes, but just a minute.” Garner turned to face Kzanol/Greenberg. “Greenberg, were those whitefoods?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they telepathic?”

  “No. And I’ve never heard of them avoiding a meat packer’s ship. They just go on eating until they’re dead.”

  “Okay, miss, we’re ready.”

  Again there was the square, bearded face of the mayor. “We returned to Sirius Mater five Jinx days after our departure. We found that Frumious bandersnatch had preceded us. A single specimen. It must have traveled three thousand miles without yeast, and without any other food source that it could use, just to visit our settlement. To do this it must have gorged itself for months, maybe years, in order to build up enough fat for the trip.

  “The colonists let it alone, which was goddam sensible of them, and the bandersnatch didn’t come too close. By this time its skin, or its cell wall, was light blue, possibly for protection from sunlight. It went straight to Northwest Cultivation Area, spent two hours running tracks across it in what Vicemayor Tays claims was the damnedest dance he ever saw, then moved off toward the ocean.

  “Since we had both copters, we were the first to see the tracks from above. These are films of the tracks. I am convinced that this is a form of writing. Doheny says it can’t be. He believes that a bandersnatch could have no use for intelligence, hence would not develop it. I have to admit the sonofabitch has a good argument. The bandersnatch makes a beached dolphin look like a miracle of dexterity. Would you please analyze this and let us know whether we share this world with an intelligent species?”

  “The machines couldn’t make anything out of this,” Garner put in. “Concepts were too alien, maybe.”

  From the phone screen came kaleidoscopic color static, then a fuzzy picture. Curved lines, like snail tracks, on brown earth. The earth was plowed in mathematically straight furrows, but the lines were broader and deeper. Hillocks and tree stumps distorted them. A helicopter had landed among the wavy tracks; it looked like a fly on a printed page.

  Kzanol/Greenberg choked, gurgled, and said, “‘Leave our planet at once or be obliterated, in accordance with the treaty of—’ I can’t read the rest. But it’s tnuctip science language. Could I have some water?”

  “Sure,” Masney said kindly. He jerked a thumb at the cooler. After a moment Kzanol/Greenberg got up and poured his own water.

  Lloyd went over to Garner’s chair and began talking in a low voice. “Luke, what was that all about? What are you doing?”

  “Just satisfying curiosity. Relax, Lloyd. Dr. Snyder will be here in an hour, then he can take over. Meanwhile there are a lot of things Greenberg can tell us. This isn’t just a man with hallucinations, Lloyd.

  “Why would the ET’s race have thought that the bandersnatch was just a dumb animal? Why does he react so violently when we suggest that the thing might be sentient? Greenberg thinks he’s the prisoner of aliens, he thinks his race is billions of years dead and his home lost forever, yet what is it that really interests him? Frumious bandersnatch. Did you see the way he looked when the dissection was going on?”

  “No. I was too interested myself.”

  “I get almost scared when I think of what’s in Greenberg’s brain—the information he’s carrying. Do you realize that Dr. Snyder may have to permanently repress those memories to cure him?

  “Why would a race as sophisticated as the tnuctipun must have been”—he pronounced the word as Kzanol/Greenberg had, badly—“have worked for Greenberg’s adapted race? Was it because of the telepathy? I’m just—”

  “I can tell you that,” Kzanol/Greenberg said bitterly. He had drunk five cups of water, practically without a breath. Now he was panting a little.

  “You’ve got good ears,” said Masney.

  “No. I’m a little telepathic; just enough to get by on. It’s Greenberg’s talent, but he didn’t really believe in it so he couldn’t use it. I can. Much good may it do me.”

  “So why did the tnuctipun work for you?” Masney messed up the word even worse than Garner had.

  The question answered itself.

  Everyone in the room jerked like hooked fish.

  There was no fall. An instant after he put out his arms, Kzanol was resting on his six fingertips like a man doing pushups. He stayed there a moment, then got to his feet. The gravity was a little heavy.

  Where was everybody? Where was the thrint or slave who had released him?

  He was in an empty, hideously alien building, the kind that happen only on free slave worlds, before the caretakers move in. But…how had he gotten here, when he was aimed at a deserted food planet? The next sight he had expected was the inside of a caretaker’s palace. And where was everybody? He badly needed someone to tell him what was going on.

  He Listened.

  For some reason, neither human nor thrintun beings have flaps over their ears resembling the flaps over their eyes. The thrintun Power faculty is better protected. Kzanol was not forced to lower his mental shield all at once. He chose to do so, and he paid for it. It was like looking into an arc lamp from a foot away. Nowhere in the thrintun universe would the telepathic noise have been that intense. The slave worlds never held this heavy an overpopulation; and the teeming masses of the thrintun worlds kept their mind shields up in public.

  Kzanol reeled from the pain. His reaction was immediate and automatic.

  STOP TRINKING AT ME! he roared at the bellowing minds of Topeka Kansas.

  In the complex of mental hospitals still called Menninger’s, thousands of doctors and nurses and patients heard the command. Hundreds of patients eagerly took it as literal and permanent. Some became stupid and cured. Others went catatonic. A few who had been harmlessly irresponsible became dangerously so. A handful of doctors became patients, a mere handful, but the loss of their services compounded the emergency when the casualties began pouring in from downtown. Menninger’s was miles from Topeka Police Headquarters.

  In the little room, everyone jerked like hooked fish. Then, all but Kzanol/Greenberg, they stopped moving. Their faces were empty. They were idiots.

  In the first instant of the mental blast, Kzanol/Greenberg’s mental shield went up with an almost audible clang. A roaring noise reverberated through his mind for minutes. When, he could think again, he still didn’t dare drop the mind shield.

  There was a thrint on Earth.

  The guards at the door now squatted or sat like rag dolls. Kzanol/Greenberg pulled cigarettes from a dark blue shirt pocket and lit one, from the burning butt between Masney’s lips, incidentally saving Masney a nasty burn. He sat and smoked while he thought about the other thrint.

  Item: That thrint would see him as a slave.

  Item: He, Kzanol, had a working mind shield. That might convince the thrint, whoever he was, that he, Kzanol, was a thrint in a human body. Or it might not. If it did, would the other thrint help? Or would he regard Kzanol/Greenberg as a mere ptavv, a Powerless thrint?

  In ugly fact, Kzanol/Greenberg was a ptavv. He had to get his body back before the other found him.

  And with that, incredibly, he stopped thinking about the other thrint. There was every reason to wonder about him. What was he doing on Earth? Would he claim Earth as his property? Would he help Kzanol/Greenberg reach Thrintun (or whatever new planet passed for Thrintun these days)? Did he still look thrintish, or had two billion years of evolution turned thrintun into monsters? But Kzanol/Greenberg dropped the subject and began to think about reaching Neptune. Perhaps he knew who the other thrint was, but wasn’t ready to face the fact.

  Cautiously he Listened. The thrint had left the building. He could find out nothing more, for the other’s mind shield
was up. He turned his Attention, such as it was, to the men in the room.

  They were recovering, but very slowly. He had to Listen with excruciating concentration because of the limitations of Greenberg’s brain, but he could feel their personalities reintegrating. The most advanced seemed to be Garner. Next was Masney.

  Another part of the Greenberg memory was about to become useful. Greenberg had not lied about his dolphin-like sense of the practical joke. To implement it he had spent weeks learning a technique for what we shall charitably call a party trick.

  Kzanol/Greenberg bent over Lloyd Masney. “Lloyd,” he said, in a distinct, calm, authoritative voice. “Concentrate on the sound of my voice. You will hear only the sound of my voice. Your eyelids are getting heavy. So heavy. Your fingers are becoming tired. So tired. Let them go limp. Your eyes wish to close; you can hardly keep them open…”

  He could feel the Masney personality responding beautifully. It gave no resistance at all.

  The gravity was irritating. It was barely enough to notice at first, but after a few minutes it was exhausting. Kzanol gave up the idea of walking after he had gone less than a block, though he didn’t like the idea of riding in a slave cart.

  I’m not proud, he told himself. He climbed into a parked Cadillac and ordered the slack-lipped driver to take him to the nearest spaceport. There was a fang-jarring vibration, and the car took off with a wholly unnecessary jerk.

  These slaves were much larger than the average land-bound sentient being. Kzanol had plenty of head room. After a moment he cautiously took off his helmet. The air was a little thin, which was puzzling considering the heavy gravity. Otherwise it was good enough. He dropped the helmet on the seat and swung his legs over beside it; the seat was too wide for comfort.

  The city was amazing. Huge and grotesque! The eye was faced with nothing but rectangular prisms, with here and there a yellow rectangular field or a flattish building with a strangely curved roof. The streets couldn’t decide whether to be crooked or straight. Cars zipped by, buzzing like flying pests. The drone from the fans of his own car rasped on his nerves, until he learned to ignore it.

  But where was he? He must have missed F124 somehow, and hit here. The driver knew that his planet—Earth?—had space travel, and therefore might know how to find F124. And the eighth planet of its system.

  For it was already obvious that he would need the second suit. These slaves outnumbered him seventeen billion to one. They could destroy him at any time. And would, when they knew what he was. He had to get the control helmet to make himself safe. Then he would have to find a thrintun planet; and he might need a better spaceship than the humans had produced so far. They must be made to produce better ships.

  The buildings were getting lower, and there were even gaps between them. Had poor transportation made these slaves crowd together in clumps? Someday he must spend the time to find out more about them. After all, they were his now.

  But what a story this would make someday! How his grandchildren would listen and admire! When the time came he must buy balladeers; pruntaquilun balladeers, for only these had the proper gift of language…

  The spaceport was drawing near.

  There was no apparent need to be subtle. Once Kzanol/Greenberg had Masney fully under, he simply ordered Masney to take him to the spaceport. It took about fifteen minutes to reach the gate.

  At first he couldn’t guess why Masney was landing. Shouldn’t he simply fly over the fence? Masney wasn’t giving away information. His mind would have been nearly normal by now, and it was normal for a hypnotized person. Masney “knew” that he wasn’t really hypnotized; he was only going along with it for a joke. Any time now he would snap out of it and surprise Greenberg. Meanwhile he was calm and happy and free from the necessity for making decisions. He had been told to go to the spaceport. Here he was at the spaceport. His passenger let him lead.

  Not until they were down did Kzanol/Greenberg realize that Masney was waiting to be passed through by the guards. He asked, “Will the guards let us through?”

  “No,” said Masney.

  Coosth, another setback. “Would they have let me through with—” he thought, “Garner?”

  “Yes. Garner’s an Arm.”

  “Well, turn around and go back for Garner.”

  The car whirred. “Wait a minute,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “Sleep.” Where were the guards?

  Across a tremendous flat expanse of concrete, painted with large red targets in a hexagonal array, he could see the spaceships. There were twenty or thirty ramjet-rocket orbital craft, some fitted out to lift other spacecraft to orbit. A linear accelerator ran down the entire south side of the field: a quarter mile of wide, closely set metal hoops. Fusion-drive military rockets lay on their sides in docks, ready to be loaded onto the flat triangular ramjet-rockets. They all looked like motor scooters beside two truly gigantic craft.

  One thing like a monstrous tin of tuna, a circular flying wing resting on its blunt trailing edge, was the re-entry, cargo, and life-support system of the Lazy Eight III. Anyone would have recognized her, even without the blue human’s sign of infinity on her flank. She was 320 feet in diameter, 360 in height. The other, far to the right, was a passenger ship as big as the ancient Queen Mary, one of the twin luxury transports which served the Titan Hotel. And—even at this distance it was apparent that everybody, everybody was clustered around her entrance port.

  Listening as hard as he could, Kzanol/Greenberg still couldn’t find out what they were doing there; but he recognized the flavor of those far-too-calm thoughts. Those were tame slaves, slaves under orders.

  The other thrint was here. But why wasn’t he taking his own ship? Or had he landed here? Or—was the spawn of a ptavv making a leisurely inspection of his new property?

  He told Masney, “The guard has told us to go ahead. Take the car over to that honeymoon special.”

  The car skimmed across the concrete.

  Garner shook his head, let it fall back into place. His mind was as the mind of a sleeping child. Across that mind flitted thoughts as ephemeral as dreams. They could not stay. Garner had been ordered not to think.

  I must look terribly senile, he thought once. The idea slipped away…and returned. Senile. I’m old but not senile. No? There is drool on my chin.

  He shook his head, hard. He slapped his face with one hand. Garner was beginning to think again, but not fast enough to suit him. He fumbled at the controls of his chair, and it lurched over to the coffee faucet. When he poured a cup his hand shook so that hot coffee spilled on his hand and wrist. Enraged, he hurled the cup at the wall.

  His mind went back to white dullness.

  A few minutes later Judy Greenberg wobbled through the door. She looked dazed, but her mind was functioning again. She saw Garner slumped in his travel chair wearing the face of a decrepit moron, and she poured cold water over his head until he came to life.

  “Where is he?” Garner demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Judy told him. “I saw him walk out, but it didn’t seem to matter to me. Chief Masney was with him. What happened to us?”

  “Something I should have expected.” Garner was no longer a decrepit old man, but an angry Jehovah. “It means things have gone from worse to terrible. That alien statue—I knew there was something wrong with it the moment I saw it, but I couldn’t see what it was. Oh, nuts.

  “It had both arms out, like it was turning chicken halfway through a swan dive. I saw a little projection on his chest, too. Look. The alien put himself into a freeze field to avoid some disaster. After that the button that turned on the field was in the field, and so was the alien’s finger pushing it in. So the button wouldn’t need a catch to hold it in. It wouldn’t have one.

  “But the alien had both arms out when I saw it. When Jansky put his own field around the statue, the alien dropped Greenberg’s ‘digging instrument’ and the button too. The button must have popped out. Why he didn’t come to life right then I don’t know
, unless the freeze field has inertia like hysteresis in an electric current. But he’s alive now, and that was him we heard.”

  “Well, it’s quite a monster,” said Judy. “Is that what Larry thinks he is?”

  “Right.” Garner’s chair rose and made a wind in the room. The chair slid out the door, picking up speed. Judy stared after it.

  “Then if he sees that he isn’t who he thinks he is…” she began hopefully. Then she gave it up.

  One of the policemen got to his feet, moving like a sleepwalker.

  Kzanol took the guards with him on his tour of the spaceport. He also took all the repairmen, dispatchers, spacemen, and even passengers he happened to meet while moving around. The man who owned the Cadillac seemed to regard even a trip to Mars as a hazardous journey! If that was the state of Earth’s space technology, Kzanol wanted a bundleful of expert opinions.

  A couple of dispatchers were sent back to the office to try to find F124 on the star maps. The rest of the group came with Kzanol, growing as it moved. Just two men had the sense to hide when they saw the mob coming. By the time he reached the passenger liner Kzanol was towing everyone at the spaceport but Masney, Kzanol/Greenberg, and those two cautious men.

  He had already chosen the Lazy Eight III, the only interstellar ship on the field. While he was getting the rescue switch on his back repaired, slaves could finish building and orbiting the ship’s drive and fuel tanks. It would be at least a year before he was ready to leave Earth. Then he would take a large crew and pass the journey in stasis, with his slaves to wake him whenever a new child became old enough to take orders. Their descendants would wake him at journey’s end.

  Kzanol had stood beneath the blunt ring which was the ship’s trailing edge and looked up into the gaping mouth of a solid fuel landing motor. He had probed an engineer’s mind to find how the spin of a ship could substitute for artificial gravity. He had walked on the after wall of the central corridor and peered through doors above his head and beneath his feet, into the Garden whose rows of hydroponic tanks served in place of his own tnuctip-bred air plant, and into the huge control room with three walls covered in nightmare profusion with dials and screens and switchboards. His own ship had needed only a screen and a brain board. Everywhere he saw ingenuity replacing true knowledge, complex makeshifts replacing the compact, simple machines Kzanol had known. Dared he trust his life to this jury-rigged monster?