The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  “How’s your coordination?”

  “My—?” Luke pondered his uncertain, shaky hands and newly clumsy fingers, his lack of control over his sphincter muscles. Paralysis hangover. “Right again. Smoky’d make mincemeat of Anderson.” A gusty sigh. “We’ll have to blow both ships.”

  “Luke, I want a promise.” Masney looked like Death. He was an old man in his own right, and he had been starved for some time. “I want you to swear that the first smell we get of the thought amplifier, we destroy it. Not capture, Luke. Destroy!”

  “All right, Lloyd. I swear.”

  “If you try to take it home, I’ll kill you. I mean it.”

  His finger, an oversized finger in an oversized mouth with tiny needle teeth. He was on his side, more a lump of flesh than anything else, and he sucked his finger because he was hungry. He would always be hungry.

  Something huge came in, blocking light. Mother? Father. His own arm moved, jerking the finger contemptuously away, scraping it painfully on the new teeth. He tried to put it back, but it wouldn’t move. Something forceful and heavy told him never to do that again. He never did.

  No mind shield there. Funny, how sharp that picture was, the memory of early frustration.

  Something…

  The room was full of guests. He was four thrintun years old, and he was being allowed out for the first time. Shown proudly by his father. But the noise, the telepathic noise, was too loud. He was trying to think like everybody at once. It frightened him. Something terrible happened. A stream of dark brown semiliquid material shot out of his mouth and spread over the wall. He had defecated in public.

  Rage, red and sharp. Suddenly he had no control over his limbs; he was running, stumbling toward the door. Rage from his father and shame from himself—or from his father? He couldn’t tell. But it hurt, and he fought it, closed his mind to it. Father went like a blown flame, and the guests too, and everybody was gone. He was all alone in an empty world. He stopped, frightened. The other minds came back.

  His father was proud, proud! At the age of four little Kzanol already had the Power!

  Larry grinned a predatory grin and got up. His vac suit—? In the lounge, on one of the seats. He got it and screwed it down and went out.

  Kzanol tugged at the great bright bulk until it came out of the ice. It looked like a great rippled goblin lying on its back.

  The ice had packed the tunnel solidly behind him; air tight, in fact. That was fortunate. Kzanol had used compressed air from his own suit to pressurize his icy chamber. He frowned at the dials on his upper chest, then took his helmet off.

  The air was cold and thin. But now he needn’t carry the amplifier helmet back to the ship. He could put it on here.

  He looked down at the suit and realized that he’d want help getting it back. Kzanol turned his Attention to Larry Greenberg. He found a blank.

  Greenberg was nowhere.

  Had he died? No, surely Kzanol would have sensed that.

  This wasn’t good, not even a little bit good. Greenberg had warned him that he would try to stop him. The slave must be on his way now, with his mind shield in full working order. Fortunately the amplifier would stop him. It would control a full-grown thrint.

  Kzanol reached down to turn the suit on its face. It was…not heavy, but massive…but it moved.

  It was snowing. In the thin air the snow fell like gravel thrown by an explosion. It fell hard enough to kill an unprotected man. Where it hit it packed itself into a hard surface, just crunchy enough for good walking.

  Luckily Greenberg didn’t have to see. He could sense exactly where Kzanol was and he walked confidently in that direction. His suit wasn’t as good as Kzanol’s. The cold seeped gently through his gauntlets and boots. He’d suffered worse than this on skiing trips, and loved it.

  Then the Power came lashing at his brain. His mind shield went up hard. The wave was gone in a moment. But now he couldn’t find Kzanol. The thrint had put up his mind shield. Larry stopped, bewildered, then went on. He had a compass, so he would not walk in circles. But Kzanol must now know he was coming.

  Gradually the afterimage pushed into his mind. In every sense, in eye and ears and touch and kinesthetic nerves, he felt what Kzanol had been doing when his Power lashed out.

  He’d been bending over the second suit.

  It was too late.

  He couldn’t run; the vac suit wasn’t built for it. He looked around in a rising tide of desperation, and then, because there was no help for it, he walked on.

  Walk. Knock the ice off your faceplate, and walk.

  Walk until you’re Told to stop.

  Half an hour later, an hour after he’d left the ship, he began to see powdery snow. It was light and fluffy, very different from the falling icy bullets. It was the residue of Kzanol’s digging. He could use it as a guide.

  The powder snow grew deeper and deeper, until suddenly it reared as a towering mountain of packed snow. When he tried to climb it Larry kept slipping down the side in a flurry of snow. But he had to get up there! When Kzanol opened the suit it would be all over. He kept climbing.

  He was halfway up, and nearly exhausted, when the top began to move. Snow shot out in a steady stream and fell in a slow fountain. Larry slid hastily down for fear of being buried alive.

  The snow continued to pour out. Kzanol was digging his way back…but why wasn’t he wearing the helmet?

  The fountain rose higher. Particles of ice, frozen miles up in Pluto’s burned and cooling atmosphere, pelted through the drifting fountain and plated itself on Larry’s suit. He kept moving to keep his joints free. Now he wore a sheath of translucent ice, shattered and cracked at the joints.

  And suddenly he guessed the answer. His lips pulled back in a smile of gentle happiness, and his dolphin sense of humor rose joyfully to the surface.

  Kzanol climbed out of the tunnel, tugging the useless spare suit behind him. He’d had to use the disintegrator to clear away the snow in the tunnel, and he’d had to climb it at a thirty-degree rise, dragging a bulk as heavy as himself and wearing a space suit which weighed nearly as much. Kzanol was very tired. Had he been human, he would have wept.

  The sight of the slope down was almost too much. Plow his feet through that stuff—? But he sighed and sent the spare suit rolling down the mountainside. He watched it hit the bottom and stay, half buried. And he followed it down.

  The ice fell faster than ever, hundreds of thousands of tons of brand new water freezing and falling as the planet tried to regain its equilibrium state, forty degrees above absolute zero. Kzanol stumbled blind, putting one big chicken foot in front of the other and bracing for the jar as it fell, keeping his mind closed because he remembered that Greenberg was around somewhere. His mind was numb with fatigue and vicarious cold.

  He was halfway down when the snow rose up and stood before him like a thrintun giant. He gasped and stopped moving. The figure slapped one mitten against its faceplate and the thick ice shattered and fell. Greenberg! Kzanol raised the disintegrator.

  Almost casually, with a smile that was purest dolphin, Larry reached out a stiff forefinger and planted it in Kzanol’s chest.

  For thirty-four hours the singleship had circled Pluto, and it was too long by far. Garner and Masney had been taking turns sleeping so that they could watch the scope screen for the actinic streak of a singleship taking off. There had been little talk between the ships. What talk there was was a strain for all, for every one of the five men knew that battle was very close, and not one was willing even to hint at the possibility. Now Lew’s singleship showed in the scope screen even with its drive off. Now Luke, watching although it was his off watch, watching though he knew he should sleep, watching through lids that felt like heavy sandpaper, Luke finally said the magic words.

  “They’re not bluffing.”

  “Why the sudden decision?”

  “It’s no good, Lloyd. Bluff or no bluff, the fleet would have taken off as soon as they found the amplifier.
The longer they wait, the closer we get to their velocity, and the more accurate our arrows get. They’ve been down too long. The ET has them.”

  “I thought so all along. But why hasn’t he taken off?”

  “In what? There’s nothing on Pluto but singleships. He can’t fly. He’s waiting for us.”

  The conference was a vast relief to all. It also produced results. One result was that Woody Atwood spent a full thirty hours standing up in the airlock of the Iwo Jima.

  Four million miles respectful had been good enough for the Belter fleet. It would have to do for Garner. His ship and one other came to an easy one-gee stop in mid-space. The third had taken a divergent path, and was now several hundred miles above the still-shrouded surface.

  “It’s funny,” said Smoky. “Every time you decide one of our ships is expendable, it turns out to be a Belt ship.”

  “Which ship would you have used, Old Smoky?”

  “Don’t confuse me with logic.”

  “Listen,” said Masney.

  Faintly but clearly, the radio gave forth a rising and falling scream like an air raid siren.

  “It’s the Lazy Eight’s distress signal,” said Anderson.

  Number Six was now a robot. The Heinlein’s drive controls now operated the singleship’s drive, and Anderson pushed attitude jet buttons and pulled on the fuel throttle as he watched the Heinlein’s screen—which now looked through Number Six’s telescope. They had had to use the singleship, of course. A two-man Earth ship must be just what the ET desperately needed.

  “Well, shall we take her down?”

  Woody said, “Let’s see if Lew’s all right.”

  Anderson guided the singleship over to where the lead ship circled Pluto, turned off the drive and used attitude jets to get even closer. At last he and four others looked directly through the frosted, jagged fragments of Lew’s control bubble. There were heat stains on the metal rim. Lew was there, a figure in a tall, narrow metal armor spacesuit; but he wasn’t moving. He was dead or paralyzed.

  “We can’t do anything for him now,” said Smoky.

  “Right,” said Luke. “No sense postponing the dreadful moment. Take ’er down.”

  The distress signal was coming out of a field of unbroken snow.

  Anderson had never worked harder in his life. Muttering ceaselessly under his breath, he held the ship motionless a mile over the distress signal while snow boiled and gave him way. Mist formed on the Heinlein’s screen, then fog. He turned on an infrared spotlight, and it helped, but not much. Smoky winced at some of the things young Anderson was saying. Suddenly Anderson was silent, and all five craned forward to see better.

  The Golden Circle came out of the ice.

  Anderson brought the singleship down as gently as he knew how. At the moment of contact the whole ship rang like a brass bell. The picture in the screen trembled wildly.

  In the ensuing silence, a biped form climbed painfully through the topside airlock in the Golden Circle. It climbed down and moved toward them across the snow.

  The honeymooner was no longer a spaceship, but she made an adequate meeting hall and hospital. Especially hospital, for of the ten men who faced each other around the crap table, only two were in good health.

  Larry Greenberg, carrying a thrintun spacesuit on each shoulder, had returned to find the Golden Circle nearly buried in ice. The glassy sheathing over the top of the ship was twenty feet thick. He had managed to burn his way through the hard way, with a welder in his suit kit, but his fingers and toes were frostbitten when he uncovered the airlock. For nearly three days he had waited for treatment. He was very little pleased to find Number Six empty, but he had gotten his message across by showing the watchers at her scope screen. All’s safe; come down.

  Smoky Petropoulos and Woody Atwood, doing all the work because they were still the only ones able, had moved the paralyzed Belters to the Golden Circle in the two-man ships. The four were still unable to use anything but their eyes and, now, their voices. Lew’s hands and wrists and feet and neck all had a roasted look where the skin showed through the blisters. His suit cooling system had been unable to cope with the heat during those seconds of immersion in flaming gases. If the gas hadn’t been so extremely thin, some plastic connection in his air pack or his cooling system would surely have melted—as he would tell eager listeners again and again in the years to come. But that was for later. Later, the others would remember that they had all been wearing suits because they’d been forced to break their windshields, and that if Smoky and Woody hadn’t found them that way they’d have starved in their ships. For now, they were safe.

  Garner and Anderson were nearly over their induced paralysis, which now showed only in an embarrassing lack of coordination.

  “So we all made it,” said Luke, beaming around at the company. “I was afraid the Last War would start on Pluto.”

  “Me too,” said Lew. His voice was barely slurred. “We were afraid you wouldn’t take the hint when we couldn’t answer your calls. You might have decided that was some stupid piece of indirection.” He blinked and tightened his lips, dismissing the memory. “So what’ll we do with the spare suit?”

  Now he had everybody’s attention. This was a meeting hall, and the suit was the main order of business.

  “We can’t let Earth have it,” said Smoky. “They could open it. We don’t have their time stopper.” Without looking at Luke, he added, “Some inventions do have to be suppressed.”

  “You could get it with a little research,” said Garner. “So—”

  “Dump it on Jupiter,” Masney advised. “Strap it to the Heinlein’s hull and let Woody and me fly it. If we both come back alive you know it got dumped on schedule. Right?”

  “Right,” said Lew. Garner nodded. Others in the lounge tasted the idea and found it good, despite the loss of knowledge which must be buried with the suit. Larry Greenberg, who had other objections, kept them to himself.

  “All agreed?” Lew swept his eyes around the main lounge. “Okay. Now, which one is the amplifier?”

  There was a full two seconds of dismayed silence.

  Greenberg pointed. “The wrinkled one with both hands empty.”

  Once it had been pointed out, the difference was obvious. The second suit had wrinkles and bumps and bulges; the limbs were twisted; it had no more personality than a sack. But the suit that was Kzanol—

  It lay in one corner of the lounge, knees bent, disintegrator half raised. Even in the curious shape of arms and legs, and in the expressionless mirror of its face, one could read the surprise and consternation which must have been the thrint’s last emotions. There must have been fury too, frustrated fury that had been mounting since Kzanol first saw the fused, discolored spot which was the rescue switch on his second suit.

  Garner tossed off his champagne, part of the stock from the honeymooner’s food stores. “So it’s settled. The Sea Statue goes back to the UN Comparative Cultures Exhibit. The treasure suit goes to Jupiter. I submit the Sun might be safer, but what the hell. Greenberg, where do you go?”

  “Home. And then Jinx, I think.” Larry Greenberg wore what Lucas Garner decided was a bittersweet smile, though even he never guessed what it meant. “They’ll never keep Judy and me away now. I’m the only man in the universe who can read bandersnatchi handwriting.”

  Masney shook his head and started to laugh. He had a rumbling, helpless kind of laugh, as infectious as mumps. “Better not read their minds, Greenberg. You’ll end up as a whole space menagerie if you aren’t careful.”

  Others took up the laughter, and Larry smiled with them, though only he knew how true were Masney’s words.

  Or had Garner guessed? The old man was looking at him very strangely. If Garner guessed that, two billion years ago, Kzanol had taken a racarliw slave as a pet and souvenir—

  Nonsense.

  So only Larry would ever know. If the suit were opened it could start a war. With controlled hydrogen fusion as common today as electr
ical generators had been a century and a half back, any war might be the very last. So the suit had to go to Jupiter; and the doomed racarliw slave had to go with it, buried in dead, silent stasis for eternity.

  Could Larry Greenberg have sacrificed an innocent sentient, even for such a purpose? To Larry plus dolphin plus thrint, it wasn’t even difficult.

  Just a slave, whispered Kzanol. Small, stupid, ugly: worth half a commercial at best.

  Can’t defend himself, thought Charley. He has no rights.

  Larry made a mental note never to tell Judy, even by accident, and then went on to more pleasant thoughts.

  What was he thinking? Garner wondered. He’s dropped it now; I might as well stop watching him.

  But I’d give my soul if I could read minds for an hour, if I could pick the hour.

  BONUS

  Following is the original World of Ptavvs short-story, as first published in Worlds of Tomorrow March, 1965.

  WORLD

  OF PTAVVS

  by LARRY NIVEN

  Illustrated by GAUGHAN

  The planet was ripe for plundering.

  How could those quaint, weak humans

  stand against the Power of a thrint?

  I

  The moment was so short that it could not be measured. Yet it was far too long. It seemed that every mind in the universe, every mind that had ever been or that would ever be, was screaming its deepest emotions at him.

  Then it was over. The stars had changed again.

  Even for Kzanol, who was a good astrogator, there was no point in trying to guess where the ship was now. At .93 lights, the speed at which the average mass of the universe becomes great enough to permit entry into hyperspace, the stars become unrecognizable. Ahead they flared blue, behind they were dull red, and to the sides they were compressed and flattened into tiny lenses. So Kzanol sucked a gnal until the ship’s brain board made a thudding sound, then went to look.