The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  It would take two days of uncomfortable two gee acceleration to get there first, thought Garner, compressed in his chair. His old bones would take a beating. And he was already missing the gadgets in his own chair. This trip wasn’t going to be fun.

  The dolphin named Charley sank to the bottom of the tank to think. The others gathered round, peering in, waiting.

  Judy noticed that Mrs. Jansky was keeping her distance. She must blame Larry for putting those bandages on her husband. Surprisingly, Jansky did not. He was using a travel chair, he had explained, because the pull of the bandages on the exposed meat of his back made it impossible to walk. The chair didn’t seem to hamper him. He used it like a new toy, an indoor motor scooter.

  This was all his fault, Judy thought dispassionately, trying the concept on for size. It didn’t fit. She couldn’t blame Jansky.

  Charley surfaced and blew steam. “Maybe I can tell you something,” he quacked. “I had a couple of days to get used to Larry in my head. He thinks a lot like me…There is some of me in him, but changed. Like he took a few of my jokes, or what I call jokes, translated them into something he can use as himself, on land and with people, then decided not to use them because he might go to prison for it. If he is no longer afraid of arrest he might be tempted to play his jokes.”

  “Thank you, Charley,” said Torrance, the thin, balding marine biologist. “Anything else?”

  “Yes, but I have not had a chance to try it yet. Hypnotism. Larry has studied it thoroughly, and even tried it out. It works for him. It might not work on a swimmer.”

  “He’s already used it,” said Torrance. “If you think of anything else, will you let me know?”

  “Sure. I’ll stick around anyway, to see how this comes out.” Charley wiggled his body and shot out through the underwater pipe.

  Snyder said, “Has anyone got any comments for the tape?” People shook their heads or otherwise declined the honor. “Okay. I’ve got some,” said Snyder. His voice was distorted by the pull of the bandages on his cheeks and lower lip. They left a broad X of free skin across his face. “Garner, I don’t think it’s as simple as Charley would have it, if only because Greenberg thinks he’s an ET. But we’ve got to keep in mind that everything he’s done since he shot us with the disintegrator has been done with Larry’s own memories and learned habits and reflexes. I grant he used ET memories to use that gun, but ever since then, whether he was walking or flying a car or hypnotizing your friend or blinking or sneezing, he was Greenberg. It’s got to have some effect on his actions. Over.” He pushed the sender and turned to the others. “It’ll be seven minutes or so before we get his answer.”

  Luke waited until Snyder had finished, then flicked to ‘transmit’. “Thanks, Dr. Snyder. Thank Charley for me. There’s one thing you don’t know.” He paused to wheeze for breath. “Greenberg and the ET are both looking for the same thing. I believe they’re on their way to Neptune to get an amplifier for the ET’s power to make puppets out of humans.” He had to stop again. “If that’s true, then Greenberg is acting from purely alien motives. Probably he can’t even use the machine himself. So he’s thinking like an alien, not like himself. We can’t count on anything.

  “I’ve got to stop. Over and out.” He turned off the set and let his arm drop back. Even the effort of working the radio had exhausted him.

  Two gravities! Twelve hours ago he would have sneered at himself. Two gravities, lying on his back? He could have done it on his head. But that was twelve hours ago, twelve hours of double weight and throbbing metal and noise and no sleep. The strap-on fission motors, half a century obsolete, roared in pairs outside the hull. Two had been dropped already. Ten remained, burning two at a time. It would be a day and a half before ship weight returned to normal…

  The weight wasn’t bothering Anderson at all.

  Well, it was all in a good cause. The ETs—it was just as well to think of them like that—would have to give him plenty of warning before they reached their destination. They would be ahead of him long enough. Halfway to where they were going—in about six days, if they were really headed for Neptune—they would have to turn around to decelerate. Luke and Anderson had nothing to do until the ET’s told them what to do.

  Luke went to sleep, finally, smiling. He smiled because the gees were pulling on his cheeks. Anderson was sleeping too, letting the autopilot do the work.

  At twenty-one hours the next day, the last strap-on motors burned out and were dropped. Garner scowled ferociously, just to test his facial muscles. The ship went on at one gee.

  It was above the plane of the solar system, avoiding the rocks of the Belt, but there were still a few pebbles to watch for. They were also Belt ships close enough to pick up Anderson’s radar.

  An hour later the radio came to life. The Belt government wanted to know what the hell an Earth ship was doing in its territory. Garner spent ten minutes telling the officer, then an hour and a half adding details. Anderson spent the time keeping the beam fixed and sensibly let Luke do the talking. The officer didn’t believe him. Luke knew that he couldn’t afford to; the propaganda value of the Belt being taken in on such a wild story would be enormous.

  “Do this,” he said finally. “Send a few armed ships to follow me to Neptune. I’m sure that’s where they’re going; they’ve passed most of the asteroids already. It’ll take your men a while to catch us. They may get there in time to help us out, and they may not. If you think I’m a liar, then send your men along to make sure I don’t do any poaching. But arm them anyway. The only other choice you have under the circumstances is to start a war, right? Right. If you want my story confirmed call the Arm office in Los Angeles, then call the UN Comparative Culture Exhibit Office in Brasilia and ask if they’ve still got the Sea Statue. That’s all you can do. So call me back and tell me how many ships you’re sending.” He gestured to Anderson, who turned him off.

  “Jerk.” said Anderson.

  “Not at all,” said Garner. “He did the right thing. His superiors will too. They’ll send a group of ships, including one with antiradar which will have to get there a little later than the others. Then they’ll call Earth and get my story confirmed as well as they can. The worst they can think of me then is that I’m thorough. Then they’ll call us and say they’re sending one less ship than they are, not mentioning the antiradar ship. That ship gives them every chance to catch me red-handed, doing whatever illegal treaty-breaking thing they think I’m doing, especially since I don’t know they’ve discovered antiradar—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “—but if they don’t catch me at anything then they cooperated with me.”

  “Uh-huh. It’s perfect. But will they be able to handle it when we turn out to be telling the truth?”

  “Sure. They’ll be armed for us, and a weapon is a weapon. Besides which, some of them will believe me. Belters, they’re always waiting for the first ET. They’ll be armed for bear.” Garner rubbed his scalp.

  “I wonder what the ET is armed for,” he said.

  XII

  Four and a half days later neither Greenberg nor Kzanol had turned ship. It seemed they were really headed for Neptune. If so they would be turning in eighteen hours.

  It was already time for Anderson to turn ship. He did. “We’ll get there six hours ahead of them,” he told Garner.

  “Good.”

  “Of course, they could be headed for outer space. It could be a coincidence that they’re going in that direction. Then we’ll lose them.”

  “In those ships? Besides, I never doubted they were going to Neptune. I just didn’t want to take chances.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m just hypothesizing. How about some lunch?”

  “Good.” It was high noon. The life-support region didn’t include enough room to walk around in, but it did have a robot kitchen; and one thing the space conquerors had learned early was that caviar is cheaper than corn flakes. Caviar has far more food value per payload ounce. So Garner and Anderson at
e prefrozen Crepes Veronique and wondered how long it would be before they could exercise off the extra pounds.

  While they were feeding the plates back into the food slot, Garner found something else to worry about. “Can we turn our telescope around?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “To follow the other ships. They’re still ahead of us, and we’re moving backward.”

  “We can’t see them now because they’re blocked by the glare of our exhaust. But we’ll be passing them in six hours, and we can watch them from then on.”

  “We’ll never catch them,” said the man in the lead ship. He was a tall, spindly Negro with prematurely white hair. “They’re two days ahead of us all the way. Poachers!”

  “I’ve got something on the scope,” said one of the other ships. Every ship carried one man, as was customary.

  “Like what?”

  “Specks of hydrogen light. Moving almost as fast as the Arm, judging by the red shift. Way ahead of him.”

  “Is it too late to call Ceres?”

  “Direct, yes. Tartov! Call Phoebe and say that there are three ships headed for Neptune. Give their positions. I want ETAs for all of them.”

  “I hear you, Lew.”

  The fleet of five ships looked like a small swarm of fireflies. They were only thousands of miles apart; they stayed that close to avoid irritating message delays. The distance would have hidden them from each other if they had been using chemical fuels, but the searing light of the fusion drives showed brighter than any of the surrounding stars.

  “Lew?”

  “Here.”

  “I think one of them is the honeymoon special. It’s got a strong oxygen line in its spectrum.”

  “Yeah?” There were a couple of surprised whistles. Then the man in the lead ship said, “The Arms are thorough, you’ve got to give them credit.”

  Tartov said, “They must be after something big. Something tremendous.”

  None of the others spoke. Perhaps they were reserving judgment. Behind the swarm, falling farther behind with each second, a lone firefly struggled in pursuit.

  Something went by like a falling comet, if there were such a thing. “There goes Greenberg,” said Anderson, grinning. The blue-white light faded slowly into the background of stars. “The Golden Circle should be by in a few minutes,” he added. “Greenberg’s ship is just a touch faster.”

  Garner didn’t answer.

  Anderson turned to look at him. “Something bugging you?” he asked kindly.

  Garner nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it for days. I just now realized that there isn’t any good answer. It’s like trying to keep a teleport in jail.”

  “What’s?”

  “Trying to keep either of those birds from picking up the amplifier.”

  He slapped his chair absently for the cigarette button, caught himself and scowled. “Look. We can’t get to it first. We don’t know how they plan to find it themselves. Probably they just remember where they put it. We can’t arrest them; at least we can’t arrest the ET because he’d just turn us into spare butlers, and we’ll have trouble with Greenberg because he’s got an armed ship and Masney can use the guns. He may be better than you, son.” Garner looked horribly like a Greek tragic mask, but his voice was that of a very worried man. “It seems to me that the only thing we can do is shoot on sight.”

  “You can’t do that,” Anderson protested. “You’ll kill Greenberg and Masney both!”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone. Give me another choice!”

  “Well, give me a chance to! I haven’t even thought about it yet!” He screwed his face into a smooth semblance of Garner’s. “Hey!” He exclaimed suddenly. “Yeah, I’ve got something. You don’t have to shoot on sight. You can wait to find out if what they’re looking for is really on Neptune.”

  “What good will that do?”

  “They could have left something on one of the moons, or in orbit. But if it’s on Neptune, they can’t get at it! Neither of their ships develops more than one gee. Neptune’s pull is higher than that. They can’t land.”

  “No good. The ET has a winged ship. But that’s good thinking anyway, son.”

  “You bet it is,” said Anderson angrily. “How the hell is he going to get back up?”

  Luke Garner looked like he’d seen a vision. After a moment he asked, “Son, have you ever thought of joining the Arms?”

  “Why—” Anderson began modestly—

  Who are you?

  The two stared at one another.

  WHO ARE YOU?

  “Lucas Launcelot Garner. Arm.”

  “Leroy. George Anderson’s boy. The astronaut.”

  I DON’T WANT YOU FOLLOWING ME. The Mind was blasting, angry. Even when merely “thinking aloud”, it held Garner and Anderson physically and mentally paralyzed. Then It came to a decision. Anderson reached toward the control panel.

  Garner pushed him back with one hand.

  It lashed him. Garner felt it stop his heart, and he gasped, horribly. Right now? he wondered. His sight turned red and went out…

  He came back to life with a singing in his head. Anderson was looking terribly haggard. He had a spray hypo in his hand. “Thank God,” he blurted. “I thought you were gone.”

  “Heart stopped,” Garner wheezed. (Not this time!) “First time it’s ever happened. What did you use?”

  “Adrenalin in the heart. Are you all right?”

  “Sure. Considering.”

  Anderson was still pale. “You know what he told me to do? I was going to turn off the fusion shield! They’d have seen it from Earth.” He shuddered. “In daylight they’d have seen it! Very lucky thing you stopped me. But how did you know?”

  “I knew what he wanted for a result. Never mind. How did you know it was my heart?”

  “I could feel him do it. Well, we won’t have to worry about him until we get to Neptune. He went out of range right after he stopped your heart.”

  “We’ll have to shoot first with that bird.”

  “It’ll be a pleasure,” Anderson said furiously.

  Kzanol strained to hang onto the enemy minds, but it was no use. Not only was distance against him; the difference in velocities was even more of a barrier. A slight relativistic difference in time rates could make communication impossible, even between two thrints.

  He turned his attention back to the cards. The pilot, who was English, called this game Patience. It was a good name. Kzanol was learning patience the hard way. The floor of the lounge was littered with scraps of torn plastic; but this one deck had already survived ten lost games. It was the last deck on board.

  Growling in his throat, like the carnivore he was, Kzanol scraped the cards together and shuffled them. He was learning coordination, too. And he had learned something about himself: he would not let a slave see him cheating at cards. He had cheated once, and the pilot had somehow guessed. He caught a stray impulse. Another would not cheat again.

  Kzanol jumped as his mind caught a stray impulse. Another pursuer! This one was too far to the side to control, but easily close enough to sense. And yet…the image had a fuzziness that had nothing to do with distance. As if the slave were asleep. But…different.

  For half an hour it stayed within reach. In that time Kzanol had satisfied himself that there was no other sentient on board. He did not think of another thrint. He would have recognized the taste of a thrint command…

  At six hours the next morning, Greenberg’s ship turned around. Three minutes later the Golden Circle did the same. Anderson found the prints in the scope camera: two lights which stretched slowly into bright lines, then contracted with equal deliberation into somewhat brighter points.

  The time passed slowly. Garner and Anderson were already deep in a tournament which they played on the viewer screen; a rectangular array of dots to be connected by lines, with victory going to the player who completed the most squares. Almost every day they raised the stakes.

  On the morning of the l
ast day Garner got back to even. At one point he had been almost eleven thousand dollars in debt. “See?” he said. “You don’t give up all your pleasures as you get older.”

  “Just one,” said Anderson.

  “More than that,” Garner admitted. “My taste buds have been wearing out for lo, these many years. But I guess someday someone will find a way to replace them. Just like my spinal cord. That wore out too.”

  “Have you got any better idea of what we do when we get to Neptune? Do we hide on one of the moons and watch?”

  “Right,” said Garner.

  But half an hour later he asked, “Can we reach Earth from here?”

  “Only by maser,” Anderson said dubiously. “Everyone on Earth with a radio will be able to listen in. Have you got any secrets from the man on the slidewalk?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Aim a maser at Earth.”

  It took half an hour for Anderson to center the beam and set it for tracking. “If it’s ‘Love to Mother’, you’re dead,” he warned Garner.

  “My mother passed away some time ago. In fact, it’s been just about a century. And she thought she was an old woman! Hello, ARM Headquarters. This is Lucas Garner calling the United Nations Police.”

  Anderson nudged him with an elbow. “Are you waiting for an answer, shnook?”

  “Of course not!” Habits are hard to break. “This is Garner calling ARM Headquarters, Earth. Please aim your answer at Neptune. We urgently need the following information from Dorcas Jansky. Does his retarder field stop radar completely? Repeat, completely. Would the ET spacesuit do the same?” He put down the mike. “Okay, son, repeat that a few times.”

  “All right, it’s on repeat. Now what was that all about?”

  “I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out,” Garner said smugly. “The ET has been frozen for about two billion years, according to Greenberg. He couldn’t know that there’s something on Neptune unless he put it there two billion years ago. And could he assume that it hasn’t fallen apart or rusted to death or whatever, after that long?”