The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  On the other side of the world, Kzanol stepped out of the Golden Circle.

  He turned once to look back. The honeymoon ship was flat on her belly. Her landing gear was retracted, and a wide, smooth crater was centered under the drive exhaust cone. Star-hot hydrogen had leaked from the fusion tube for some time after its fuel was cut off. The fuselage was twisted, though not broken. Her forward wings had been jarred open, and now hung broken from their sockets. One tip of the triangular major wing curled up where it had stabbed against rock-hard ice.

  She was doomed, she was useless. Kzanol walked on.

  The thrintun space suit was a marvelous assemblage of tools. No changes had been made in it for centuries before Kzanol’s time, for the design had long been perfect, but for an unsuspected flaw in the emergency systems, and the naïve thrintun had never reached that level of sophistication which produces planned obsolescence. The temperature inside the suit was perfect, even a little warmer than in the ship.

  But the suit could not compensate for the wearer’s imagination. Kzanol felt the outer chill as his ship fell behind. Miles-thick blankets of nitrogen and oxygen snow had boiled away here, leaving bubbly permafrost which showed dark and deep green in the light of his helmet lamp. There was fog, too, not dense but very deep, a single bank that stretched halfway around the world. The fog narrowed his universe to a circular patch of bubbly ice.

  Moving in great, easy flying hops, he reached the first rise of the crescent in forty minutes. It was six miles from the ship. The crescent was now a slightly higher rise of permafrost, scarred and pitted from the fire that had crossed it. Kzanol’s portable radar, borrowed from the Circle’s lockers, showed his goal straight ahead at the limit of its range. About a mile ahead, and almost a thousand feet deep in permafrost.

  Kzanol began to climb the slope.

  “We’re out of arrows,” the man in Number Two ship said gloomily. He meant missiles. “How do we protect ourselves?”

  Lew said, “We’ll be on our way home before Garner comes within sniffing distance of Pluto. The best he can do is shoot at us as we pass. His arrows aren’t good enough to hit us when we’re moving that fast, except by accident. He knows it. He won’t even try, because it might start the Last War.”

  “He may decide the stakes are high enough.”

  “Dammit, Tartov, what choice have we got? Garner must not be allowed to leave here with that amplifier! If he does, we’ll see a period of slavery such as nobody has even dreamed of up to now,” Lew exhaled noisily through his nostrils. “We’ve got to go down and destroy the thing by hand. Land on the dawn side and mount an expedition. Hexter, can you dismount a ship’s radar so it’ll still work?”

  “Sure, Lew. But it’ll take two men to carry it.”

  Tartov said, “You miss my point. Of course we’ve got to wreck the damn amplifier. But how can we prove to Garner that we did wreck it? Why should he trust us?”

  Lew ran spatulate fingers through tangled cotton hair. “My apologies, Tartov. That’s a damn good question. Comments?”

  Kzanol aimed the disintegrator thirty degrees downward and flipped the firing switch.

  The tunnel formed fast. Kzanol couldn’t see how fast for there was nothing but darkness inside after the first second. A minor hurricane blew out of the tunnel. He leaned against the wind as against a wall. In the narrow cone of the beam the “wind” was clear, but beyond the edge it was a dust storm. The wind was dust, too, icy dust torn to particles of two and three molecules each by the mutual repulsion of the nuclei.

  After ten minutes Kzanol decided the tunnel must be getting too wide. The opening was less than a foot across; he used the disintegrator to enlarge it. Even when he turned off the digging tool he couldn’t see very far into it.

  After a moment he walked into the darkness.

  With his left hand Larry reached out and shook the pilot’s shoulder. Nothing. It was like a wax figure. He would probably have felt the same way. But the man’s cheek was cool. He was not paralyzed, but dead.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind was Judy. It was different from the way it had been in the past. Now, he believed it. Even when separated by over three billion miles, he and Judy were somehow aware of each other. But no more than that.

  He couldn’t tell her anything. He couldn’t warn her that the Bug Eyed Whoosis was hours or minutes from owning the Earth.

  The pilot couldn’t help him. He had had an instant to make a choice, that professional hauler of millionaires, and he had made first a right choice and then a wrong one. He had decided to die, killing everyone aboard ship, and that was right. But he should have turned off the fusion shield, not the fuel feed! Now he was dead, and Kzanol was loose.

  It was his fault. Without Larry Greenberg, Kzanol would have been blasted to gas when he made turnover for Pluto. He’d never have known the suit was on Pluto! The knowledge was galling.

  Where was his mind shield? Two hours ago he had held an impenetrable telepathic wall, a shield that had stood up to Kzanol’s most furious efforts. Now he couldn’t remember how he’d done it. He was capable of it, he knew that, and if he could—hold it.

  No, it was gone. Some memory, some thrintun memory.

  Well, let’s see. He’d been in Masney’s office when the thrint had screamed at everybody to shut off their minds. His mind shield had—but it had already been there. Somehow he had already known how to use it. He had known ever since.

  Sunflowers eight feet across. They turned round and round, following the sun as it circled the plantation at Kzathit’s pole. Great silver paraboloid platters sending concentrated sunlight to their dark green photosynthetic nodes. Flexible mirrors mounted on thick bulging stalks, mirrors that could ripple gently to put the deadly focus wherever they wanted it: on a rebellious slave or a wild animal or an attacking enemy thrint. That focus was as deadly as a laser cannon, and the sunflowers never missed. For some reason they never attacked members of the House they protected.

  In the grounded luxury liner, Larry Greenberg tingled. Fish on fire! The sunflowers must have been controlled by the tnuctipun house slaves! He had not the slightest proof, but he knew. On a day in the past, every sunflower in the galaxy must have turned on its owner…He thought, We thrintun—those thrintun really set themselves up. Suckers!

  Remembering again, he saw that the sunflowers weren’t as big as they looked. He was seeing them from Kzanol’s viewpoint, Kzanol one and a half feet tall, a child of eight thrintun years. Kzanol half grown.

  The maser beam reached for Pluto, spreading itself wide, dropping ever so slightly in frequency as it climbed out of the Sun’s gravitational well. By the time it reached its target more than five hours had passed, and the wave front was a quarter of a million miles across.

  Pluto didn’t stop it. Pluto barely left a noticeable hole. There was enormous power behind this beam. The beam went on into the void, moving almost straight toward the galactic center, thinned by dust clouds and distance. It was picked up centuries later by beings who did not resemble humanity in the least. They were able to determine the shape of the conical beam, and to determine its apex. But not accurately enough.

  In its wake—

  Tartov said, “You were right, Lew. There’s no fire where we’re going.”

  “That’s that, then. You three go on down. I’ll warp into an orbit.”

  “We really ought to draw again, you know.”

  “Nuts, Mabe. Think how much I’ll win at poker after using up all my bad luck out here. Got my orbit, Tartov?”

  “Hook in your idiot savant and I’ll give it the data direct.”

  “Autopilot on.”

  BEEP.

  Lew felt his ship turning as the sound of the beep ended. The spears of fusion light alongside him began to dwindle in size. Could they manage without him? Sure, they were Belters. If danger came it would come here, in orbit. He said, “All ships. Good luck. Don’t take any stupid chances.”

  “Hexter calling. Something on the
Earth channel, Lew.”

  Lew used his frequency dial. “Can’t find it.”

  “It’s a little low.”

  “Oh. Typical…Dammit, it’s in code. Why should it be in code?”

  “Maybe they’ve got little secrets,” Tartov suggested. “Whatever it is, it’s bound to be a good reason to finish this fast.”

  “Yeah. Look, you go ahead and land. I’ll send this to Ceres for decoding. It’ll take twelve hours to get an answer, but what the hell.”

  Why should it be in code?

  Lit Shaeffer would have known.

  Even now, sitting in his office deep in the rock of Ceres, with the bubble of Confinement winding its snail-slow orbit thirty miles overhead, Lit was preparing a note of apology to the United Nations. It was the hardest work he’d ever done! But there seemed, no way out.

  A week and a half ago there had been a maser message from Neptune. Garner’s story was true: he had gone to Neptune in pursuit of a wildly dangerous ET. Lit had scowled and ordered an immediate end to the harassment of Earth shipping.

  But the damage was done. For two weeks the Belt had persecuted Earth’s meager shipping; had used codes in maser transmissions, even in solar weather forecasts, in violation of a century’s tradition; had used their espionage network so heavily that its existence became insultingly obvious. Secretiveness and suspicion were the rule as never before. Earth had retaliated in kind.

  Now the Belt had stopped using codes, but Earth had not.

  Did the coded messages contain vital information? Almost certainly not, Lit would have guessed. Certain messages decoded at random bore him out. But the Belt couldn’t be sure, which, of course, was the whole point.

  And Belt ships were searched at Earth’s ports, with insulting thoroughness.

  This mistrust had to be stopped now. Lit gritted his teeth and continued writing.

  The message started to repeat, and Lloyd switched it off with a decisive click.

  “She felt him die,” said Luke. “She didn’t know it, but she felt him die.”

  His thoughts ran on without him…She’d felt him die. What was it that let some people know things they couldn’t possibly know? There seemed to be more and more of them lately. Luke had never been remotely psychic, and he’d envied the lucky few who could find lost rings or lost criminals without the slightest effort, with no more explanation than, “I thought you might have dropped it in the mayonnaise,” or, “I had a hunch he was hiding in the subway, living off the tenth-mark peanut machines.” Parapsychologists with their special cards had proven that psy powers exist; and had gone no further than that, in close to two hundred years, except for psionics devices like the contact machine. “Psionics,” to Luke, meant “I don’t know how the damn thing works.”

  How did Judy know that the Golden Circle had crashed? You couldn’t know the answer, so you hung a tag on it. Telepathy.

  “And even then,” said Luke, not knowing that he spoke. “she managed to fool herself. Marvelous!”

  “Did she?”

  Luke’s head jerked up and around. Lloyd was scared and not trying to hide it. He said, “The Golden Circle was a tough ship. Her drive was in her belly, remember? Her belly was built to stand fusion heat. And the explosion was below her.”

  Luke felt his own nerves thrill in sympathetic fear. “We’ll find out right now,” he said, and touched the control panel. “All ships, listen in. Anderson, what do you know about the Golden Circle?”

  “Yeah, I heard it too. It could be; it just could be. The people who built the honeymooners knew damn well that one accident or one breakdown could ruin a billion-mark business. They built the ships to stand up to anything. The Golden Circle’s life system is smaller in proportion than the life system of any ship here, just because they put so much extra weight in the walls and in the failsafe systems.”

  In a dull voice, Smoky said, “And we’re out of it.”

  “Hell we are. That message was in code. Lloyd, get the maser pointed at Pluto. We’ve got to warn the Belters. Smoky, is there a Mayday signal we can use?”

  “No need. They’ll hear you. It’s too late anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re going down.”

  Kzanol walked slowly through a tunnel which gleamed dull white where the light fell. With practice he had learned to stay the right distance behind the disappearing far wall, following his disintegrator beam, so that he walked in a sloppy cylinder six feet in diameter. The wind roared past him and ceased to be wind; it was flying dust and ice particles, flying in vacuum and low gravity, and it packed the tunnel solidly behind him.

  The other suit was two hundred feet beyond the end of the sloping tube.

  Kzanol looked up. He turned off the disintegrator and stood, stiffly furious, waiting. They had dared! They were just beyond control range, too far away and moving in fast, but they were decelerating as they closed in. He waited, ready to kill.

  Mature consideration stopped him. He needed a ship in which to leave Pluto; his own was shot to heat death. Those above him were single seaters, useless to him, but he knew that other ships were coming. He must not frighten them away.

  He would let these ships land.

  Lew’s singleship hung nose down over the surface of Pluto. He’d set the gyros that way. The ship would be nose down for a long time, perhaps until the gyros wore out. Yet he could see nothing. The planetary surface was hidden beneath a curtain of boiling storm clouds.

  He knew that he had passed Cott’s Crescent some minutes ago. He had heard the hum of an open intership circuit. Now, coming toward him over the curved horizon, was a storm within a storm: the titanic whirling hurricane he had passed over twice already. Pluto takes months to rotate. Only a monumental flow of air, air newly created, rushing around from the other side of the planet, could have carried enough lateral velocity to build such a sky whirlpool from mere Coriolis effects. Flames flickered in its roiling rim; but the center was a wide circle of calm, clear near-vacuum all the way down to the icy plateau.

  Over the radio came the sound of Garner’s voice.

  “…Please answer at once so we’ll know you’re all right. There is a real chance that the ET survived the crash, in which case—”

  “Now you’re telling me, you know-it-all son of a bitch!” Lew couldn’t talk. His tongue and his lips were as frozen as the rest of his voluntary muscles. He heard the message all the way through, and he heard it repeated, and repeated. Garner sounded more urgent than he had ten minutes ago.

  The hurricane was almost below him now. He looked straight down into the eye.

  From one of the murky fires in the rim of the eye, a tongue reached inward.

  It was like the first explosion, the one he’d watched through the telescope. But this wasn’t the telescope! The whole plateau was lost in multicolored flame in the first twenty seconds. With the leisurely torpor of a sleepy ground sloth on a cold morning, the fire stood up and reached for him. It was fire and ice, chunks of ice big enough to see, ice burning as it rose in the clutch of the height and might, a blazing carnivore reaching to swallow him.

  Viprin race. Bowed skeletal shapes like great albino whippets seemed to skim the dirt surface of the track, their jet nacelle nostrils flaring, their skins shining like oil, racing round and round the audience standing breathless in the center of the circle. The air was thick with Power: thousands of thrintun desperately hurling orders at their favorites, knowing perfectly well that the mutant viprin didn’t have the brains to hear. Kzanol on one of the too-expensive seats, clutching a lavender plastic cord, knowing that this race, this race meant the difference between life as a prospector and life as a superintendent of cleaning machinery. He would leave here with commercials to buy a ship, or with none.

  Larry dropped it. It was too late in Kzanol’s life. He wanted to remember much earlier. But his brain seemed filled with fog, and the thrintun memories were fuzzy and hard to grasp. As Kzanol/Greenberg he had had no trouble wi
th his memory, but as Larry he found it infuriatingly vague.

  The earliest thing he could remember was that scene of the sunflowers.

  He was out of cigarettes. The pilot might have some in his pocket, but Larry couldn’t quite reach it. And he was hungry; he hadn’t eaten in some ten hours. A gnal might help. Definitely one would help, for it would probably kill him in seconds. Larry tore a button from his shirt and put it in his mouth. It was round and smooth, very like a gnal.

  He sucked it and let his mind dissolve.

  Three ships rested on the other side of what remained of Cott’s Crescent. In the control bubbles the pilots sat motionless, waiting for instructions and thinking furious, futile thoughts. In the fourth…Kzanol’s eating tendrils stood away from his mouth as he probed.

  It was rather like probing his own memory of the crash. A brightly burning wind, a universe of roaring, tearing flame and crushing shocks.

  Well, it wasn’t as if he needed Lew. Kzanol turned his disintegrator on and began walking. Something bright glimmered through the dark ice wall.

  “They don’t answer,” said Lloyd.

  Luke let himself sag against the constant one-gee deceleration. Too little, too late…the Belt was beaten. And then his eyes narrowed and he said, “They’re bluffing.”

  Masney turned inquiringly.

  “Sure. They’re bluffing, Lloyd. They’d be fools not to. We handed them such a perfect chance! Like four spades up in a five stud hand. The perfect opportunity to get us fighting the wrong enemy.”

  “But we’d be getting this same scary silence if they were really caught.”

  Luke spoke jerky phrases as the answers came. “Right. We get quiet radios either way. But we get the same answer either way, too. Shoot to kill. Either the fleet is on its way back with amplifier, or the ET has it and is on its way to conquer the Earth. Either way, we have to attack.”

  “You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “Tell me.”

  “We’ll have to kill Atwood and Smoky first. And Anderson.”

  “O-o-oh. Right, about Atwood. He’d never let us shoot at his friends, whether they’re slaves or not. But we can hope Anderson can control Smoky.”