The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  “Ask a human. He knows what sentients are capable of when someone threatens them with death. First they declaim that the whole thing is horribly immoral, and that it’s unthinkable that such a threat would ever be carried out. Then they reveal that they have similar plans, better in every respect, and have had them for years, decades, centuries. You admit the Big Amplifier would have been technically feasible?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you doubt that a slave race in revolt would settle for nothing less than our total extinction?”

  Tendrils writhed in battle at the corners of Kzanol’s mouth. When he finally spoke, he said, “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Then—”

  “Certainly we’d take them with us into extinction! The sneaky, dishonorable lower-than-whitefoods, using our concessions of freedom to destroy us! I only desire that we got them all.”

  Kzanol/Greenberg grinned. “We must have. How else can we explain that none of our slaves are in evidence except whitefoods? Remember whitefoods are immune to the Power.

  “Now, that other information. Have you looked for your second suit?”

  Kzanol returned to the present. “Yes, on the moons. And you searched Neptune. I’d have known if Masney found it. Still, there’s one more place I’d like to search.”

  “Go ahead. Let me know when you’re finished.”

  Gyros hummed faintly as the Golden Circle swung around. Kzanol looked straight ahead, his Attention in the control room. Kzanol/Greenberg lit a cigarette and got ready for a wait.

  If Kzanol had learned patience, so had his poor man’s imitation. Otherwise he would have done something foolish when the thrint blithely took over Masney, his own personal slave. He could have killed the thrint merely for using his own body—Kzanol/Greenberg’s own stolen body, by every test of memory. And the effort of dealing with Kzanol, face to his own personal face!

  But he had no choice.

  The remarkable thing was that he was succeeding. He faced a full-grown thrint on the thrint’s own territory. He had gone a long way toward making Kzanol accept him as another thrint mind, a ptavv at least. Kzanol still might kill him; he wished that the thrint would pay more attention to the disintegrator! But he had done well so far. And was proud of it, which was all to the good. Kzanol/Greenberg’s self-respect had been very low.

  There was no more to be done now. He had better stay out of Kzanol’s way for a while.

  Kzanol’s first move was to radar Kzanol/Greenberg’s ship. When that failed to turn up the suit, Kzanol took over Masney again and made him search it from radar cone to exhaust cone, checking the assumption that the shielded slave had somehow sneaked the suit aboard and turned off the stasis field. He found nothing.

  But the other seemed so sure of himself! Why, if he didn’t have the suit?

  They searched Triton again. Kzanol/Greenberg could see Kzanol’s uncertainty growing as the search progressed. The suit wasn’t on Neptune, wasn’t on either moon, positively wasn’t on the other ship, couldn’t have stayed in orbit this long. Where was it?

  The drive went off. Kzanol turned to face his tormentor, who suddenly felt as if his brain was being squeezed flat. Kzanol was giving it everything he had: screaming sense and gibberish, orders and rage and raw red hate, and question, question, question. The pilot moaned and covered his head. The copilot squealed, stood up and turned half around, and died with foam on her lips. She stood there beside the gaming table, dead, with only the magnets in her sandals to keep her from floating away. Kzanol/Greenberg faced the thrint as he would have faced a tornado.

  The mental tornado ended. “Where is it?” asked Kzanol.

  “Let’s make a deal.” Kzanol/Greenberg raised his voice so that the pilot could hear. In the corner of his eye he saw that the thrint had gotten the point: the pilot was coming in from the control bubble to take the copilot’s place as translator.

  Kzanol took out his variable-knife. He treated the disintegrator with supreme disregard. Perhaps he didn’t think of it as a weapon. In any case, nothing uses a weapon on a thrint except another thrint. He opened the variable-knife to eight feet and stood ready to wave the invisibly thin blade through the rebellious sentient’s body.

  “I dare you,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. He didn’t bother to raise the disintegrator.

  GET OUT, Kzanol told the pilot. Kzanol/Greenberg could have shouted. He’d won! Slaves may not be present at a battle, or a squabble, between thrint and thrint.

  The pilot moved slowly toward the airlock. Too slowly. Either some motor area had been burned out in the mind fight, or the slave was reluctant to leave. Kzanol probed.

  ALL RIGHT. BUT HURRY.

  Very quickly, the pilot climbed into his spacesuit before leaving. The family of Racarliw had never mistreated a slave…

  The airlock door swung shut. Kzanol asked, “What kind of deal?”

  He couldn’t understand the answer. Feeling disgusted with himself, he said, “We’ll have to turn on the radio. Ah, here it is.” He bent his face against the wall so that a pair of eating tendrils could reach into the recess and flip a switch. Now the pilot could hear Kzanol/Greenberg speaking through his suit radio.

  It never occurred to either that they were circling Robin Hood’s barn. The slave couldn’t be present in person.

  “I repeat,” said Kzanol. “What kind of deal?”

  “I want a partnership share in control of Earth. Our agreement is not to be invalidated if we find other, uh, beings like you, or a government of same. Half to you, half to me, and your full help in building me an amplifier. You’d better have the first helmet; it might not fit my brain. I want your oath, your…Wait a minute, I can’t pronounce it.” He picked up a bridge sheet and wrote, “prtuuvl,” in the dots and curlicues of overspeak. “I want you to swear by that oath that you will protect my half ownership to the best of your ability, and that you will never willingly jeopardize my life or my health, provided that I take you to where you can find the second suit. Swear also that we’ll get humans to build me another amplifier, once we get back.”

  Kzanol thought for a full minute. His mental shield was as solid as the door on a lunar fort, but Kzanol/Greenberg could guess his thoughts well enough. He was stalling for effect. Certainly he had decided to give the oath; for the prtuuvl oath was binding between thrint and thrint. Kzanol need only regard him as a slave…

  “All right,” said Kzanol. And he gave the prtuuvl oath without missing a single syllable.

  “Good,” Kzanol/Greenberg approved. “Now swear to the same conditions, by this oath.” He pulled a bridge sheet from his breast pocket and passed it over. Kzanol took it and looked.

  “You want me to swear a kpitlithtulm oath too?”

  “Yes.” There was no need to spell it out for Kzanol, nor even to repress his dolphin grin. The kpitlithtulm oath was for use between thrint and slave. If he swore the kpitlithtulm oath and the prtuuvl oath he would be committed for keeps, unless he chose to regard Kzanol/Greenberg as a plant or a dumb animal. Which would be dishonorable.

  Kzanol dropped the paper. His mind shield was almost flickering, it was so rigid. Then his jaws opened wide and his lips pulled back from the needle fangs in a smile more terrible than Tyrannosaurus rex chasing a paleontologist, or Lucas Garner hearing a good joke. Seeing Kzanol, who could doubt that this was a carnivore? A ravenous carnivore which intended to be fed at any moment. One might forget that Kzanol was half the weight of a man, and see instead that he was larger than one hundred scorpions or three wildcats or a horde of marching soldier ants or a school of piranha.

  But Kzanol/Greenberg recognized it as a smile of rueful admiration, a laughing surrender to a superior adversary, the smile of a good loser. With his thrint memories he saw further than that. Kzanol’s smile was as phony as a brass transistor.

  Kzanol gave the oath four times, and made four invalidating technical mistakes. The fifth time he gave up and swore according to protocol.

  “All right,” said Kzan
ol/Greenberg. “Have the pilot take us to Pluto.”

  “A-a-all right, everybody turn ship and head for three, eighty-four, twenty-one.” The man in the lead ship sounded wearily patient. “I don’t know what the game is, but we can play just as good as any kid on the block.”

  “Pluto,” said someone. “He’s going to Pluto!” He seemed to take it as a personal affront.

  Old Smoky Petropoulos thumbed the transmitter. “Lew, hadn’t one of us better stop and find out what’s with the other two ships?”

  “Uh. Okay, Smoky, you do it. Can you find us later with a maser?”

  “Sure, boss. No secrets?”

  “Hell, they know we’re following them. Tell us anything we need to know. And find out where Garner is! If he’s in the honeymooner I want to know it. Better beam Woody in Number Six too, and tell him to go wherever Garner is.”

  “Of course, Pluto. Don’t you get it yet?” It was not the first time Kzanol/Greenberg had had doubts about his former self’s intelligence. The doubts were getting hard to ignore. He’d been afraid Kzanol would figure it out for himself. But—?

  “No,” said Kzanol, glowering.

  “The ship hit one of Neptune’s moons,” Kzanol/Greenberg explained patiently, “so hard that the moon was smacked out of orbit. The ship was moving at nearly lightspeed. The moon picked up enough energy to become a planet, but it was left with an eccentric orbit which still takes it inside Neptune at times. Naturally that made it easy to spot.”

  “I was told that Pluto came from another solar system.”

  “So was I. But it doesn’t make sense. If that mass dived into the system from outside, why didn’t it go back out again to complete the hyperbola? What could have stopped it? Well, I’m taking a gamble.

  “There’s only one thing that bothers me. Pluto isn’t very big. Do you suppose the suit may have been blown back into space by the explosion when it hit?”

  “If it was, I’ll kill you,” said Kzanol.

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess,” begged Garner. “Aha! I’ve got it. Smoky Petropoulos. How are you?”

  “Not as good as your memory. It’s been a good twenty-two years.” Smoky stood behind the two seats, in the airlock space, and grinned at the windshield reflection of the two men. There wasn’t room to do much else. “How the hell are you, Garner? Why don’t you turn around and shake hands with an old buddy?”

  “I can’t, Smoky. We’ve been ordered not to move by a BEM that doesn’t take no for an answer. Maybe a good hypnotherapist could get us out of this fix, but we’ll have to wait ’til then. By the way, meet Leroy Anderson.”

  “Hi.”

  “Now give us a couple of cigarettes, Smoky, and put them in the corners of our mouths so we can talk. Are your boys chasing Greenberg and the BEM?”

  “Yeah.” Smoky fumbled with cigarettes and a lighter. “Just what is this game of musical chairs?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Old Smoky put their cigarettes where they belonged. He said, “That honeymoon special took off for Pluto. Why?”

  “Pluto!”

  “Surprised?”

  “It wasn’t here,” said Anderson.

  “Right,” said Garner. “We know what they’re after, and we know now they didn’t find it here. But I can’t imagine why they think it’s on Pluto. Oops! Hold it” Garner puffed furiously at his cigarette: good honest tobacco with the tars and nicotine still in it. He didn’t seem to have any trouble moving his face. “Pluto may have been a moon of Neptune once. Maybe that has something to do with it. How about Greenberg’s ship? Is it going in the same direction?”

  “Uh uh. Wherever it is, its drive is off. We lost sight of it four hours ago.”

  Anderson spoke up. “If your friend is still aboard he could be in trouble.”

  “Right,” said Garner. “Smoky, that ship could be falling into Neptune with Lloyd Masney aboard. You remember him? A big, stocky guy with a mustache.”

  “I think so. Is he paralyzed too?”

  “He’s hypnotized. Plain old garden-variety hypnotized, and if he hasn’t been told to save himself, he won’t. Will you?”

  “Sure. I’ll bring him back here.” Smoky turned to the airlock.

  “Hey!” Garner yelped. “Take the butts out of our mouths before our faces catch fire!”

  From his own ship Smoky called Woody Atwood in Number Six, the radar proof, and told his story. “It looks like the truth, Woody,” he finished. “But there’s no point in taking chances. You get in here and stick close to Garner’s ship; if he makes a single move he’s a bloody liar, so keep an eye open. He’s been known to be tricky. I’ll see if Masney is really in trouble. He shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  “Pluto’s a week and a half away at one gravity,” said Anderson, who could do simple computations in his head. “But we couldn’t follow that gang even if we could move. We don’t have the fuel.”

  “We could refuel on Titan, couldn’t we? Where the hell is Smoky?”

  “Better not expect him back today.”

  Garner growled at him. Space, free fall, paralysis, and defeat were all wearing away at his self-control.

  “Hey,” he whispered suddenly.

  “What?” The word came in an exaggerated stage whisper.

  “I can wiggle my index fingers,” Garner snapped. “This hex may be wearing off. And mind your manners.”

  Smoky was back late the next day. He had inserted the pointed nose of his ship into Masney’s drive tube to push Masney’s ship. When he turned off his own drive the two ships tumbled freely. Smoky moved between ships with a jet pack in the small of his back. By this time Atwood had joined the little group, and was helping Smoky, for it would have been foolish to suspect trickery after finding Masney.

  Not because Masney was still hypnotized. He wasn’t. Kzanol had freed him from hypnosis in the process of taking him over, and had, kindly or thoughtlessly, left him with no orders when he departed for Pluto. But Masney was near starvation. His face bore deep wrinkles of excess skin, and the skin of his torso was a loose, floppy, folded tent over his ribcage. Kzanol/Greenberg had repeatedly forgotten to feed him, remembering only when hunger seemed about to break him out of hypnosis. Kzanol would never have treated a slave that way; but Kzanol, the real Kzanol, was far more telepathic than the false. And Kzanol/Greenberg hadn’t learned to think of daily food intake as a necessity. So much food was a luxury, and a foolish one.

  Masney had started an eating spree as soon as the Golden Circle was gone, but it would be some time before he was “stocky” again. His ship’s fuel was gone, and he was found drifting in a highly eccentric orbit about Triton, an orbit which was gradually narrowing.

  “Couldn’t possibly be faked,” Smoky said when he called the Belt fleet. “A little bit better fakery, and Masney would be dead. As it is, he’s only very sick.”

  Now the four ships fell near Nereid.

  “We’ve got to refuel all these ships,” said Garner. “And there’s a way to do it.” He began to tell them.

  Smoky howled. “I won’t leave my ship!”

  “Sorry, Smoky. See if you can follow this. We’ve got three pilots, right? You, Woody, Masney. Me and Anderson can’t move. But we’ve got four ships to pilot. We have to leave one.”

  “Sure, but why mine?”

  “Five men to carry in three ships. That means we keep both two-man ships. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “We give up your ship, or we give up a radar proof ship. Which would you leave?”

  “You don’t think we’ll get to Pluto in time for the war?”

  “We might as well try. Want to go home?”

  “All right, all right.”

  The fleet moved to Triton without Number Four, and with half of Number Four’s fuel transferred to Masney’s ship, the Iwo Jima. Garner was Masney’s passenger, and Smoky was in the Heinlein with Anderson. The three ships hovered over the big moon’s icy surface while their drives melted through layer afte
r layer of frozen gases, nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide, until they reached the thick water ice layer. They landed on water ice, each in its own shallow cone. Then Woody and Smoky went after Number Four.

  Smoky brought the singleship down with its tank nearly empty. They drained what was left into the Iwo Jima, and followed it with the Heinlein’s supply. Woody turned off the cooling unit in the singleship’s hydrogen tank, dismantled the heater in the cabin and moved it into the tank. He had to cut a hole in the wall to get in.

  The next few hours were spent cutting blocks of water ice. Masney was still convalescing, so the Belters had to do all the work. When they broke off they were exhausted, and two laser cutting tools were near death; but Number Four’s fuel tank was filled with warm, not very clean water.

  They hooked up the battery from Number Six to electrolyze the melted ice. Hydrogen and oxygen, mixed, poured into the Heinlein’s tank. They set the thermostat above the condensation point of hydrogen; but the oxygen fell as snow, and Smoky and Woody alternated positions in the bottom of the tank, shoveling the snow out. Once they had to take Number Six up and fly her around to recharge her batteries. Always there was the flavor of time passing, of the “war” leaving them further behind with each passing minute.

  In two days they had fueled all three ships. The tanks were not full, but they would carry the little secondary fleet to Pluto, driving all the way, with fuel to spare. Number Four was useless, her tank clogged with dirt.

  “We’ll be three days late for whatever happens,” Woody said glumly. “Why go at all?”

  “We can stay close enough for radio contact,” Smoky argued. “I’d like to have Garner close enough to tell the fleet what to do. He knows more about these Bug Eyed Monsters than any of us.”

  Luke said, “Main argument is that it may take the fleet three days to lose. Then we get there and save the day. Or we don’t. Let’s go.”

  Woody Atwood masered the fleet immediately, knowing that the others could not intercept the conversation. If they had moved into the maser beam their radio would have blown sky high.