The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  “It’s in a retarder field?”

  “Right.”

  Anderson looked at the chron. “You’ll be getting your answer in a little over eight hours, not counting the time it takes them to get What’s-his-name. Figure an hour, they’ll be calling around nineteen-thirty. So let’s get some sleep. We’ll be coming in about three tomorrow morning.”

  “Okay. Sleeping pills?”

  “Uh-huh.” Anderson punched buttons on the medicine box. “Luke, I still think you were waiting for Earth to answer.”

  “You can’t prove it, son.”

  Nineteen forty-five. Garner studied the board for a moment, then drew one short line between two dots of light. The scanner, set to follow the movements of the tip of his stylus, reproduced the line on the board.

  The radio boomed to life.

  “This is ARM Headquarters calling spaceship Heinlein. ARM Headquarters calling Lucas Garner, spaceship Heinlein. A retarder field does, repeat does reflect one hundred per cent of energy of any frequency, including radar, and including everything so far tried. Visible, ultraviolet, infrared, radio, X rays. Is there anything else we can help you with?”

  “You can help me with this game,” Luke muttered. But Anderson had erased it, along with the six-inch curve Luke had drawn when he jerked his arm at the sound of the radio.

  The man in the lead ship scratched his head like a man sorely puzzled. He barely had room in the tiny chamber. “All ships,” he said. “What the hell did he mean by that?”

  After a few moments someone suggested, “Code message.” Others chorused agreement. Then someone asked, “Lew, does Earth have something called a retarder field?”

  “I don’t know. And we’re beyond range of the Belt, except for masers.” He sighed, for masers are always a chore to use. “Someone ask the Belt Coordinator about retarder fields.”

  XIII

  With the first jarring clang of the alarm Garner was awake. He saw Anderson groan and open his eyes, but the eyes weren’t seeing anything. “Meteor strike!” Garner bawled.

  Anderson’s eyes became aware. “Not funny,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No. Are you the type who yells ‘Red Alert’ on a crowded slidewalk? What time is it?”

  “Three hours four minutes.” Garner looked out the window. “No Neptune. Why?”

  “Just a sec.” Anderson fooled with the attitude jets. The ship swung around…Neptune was a blue-green ball, dim in the faint light. Usually a planet that close is awe-inspiring, if not blinding. This world only looked terribly cold. “There it is. What’ll I do with it?”

  “Put us in a search orbit and start scanning with the radar. Can you set it to search for something as dense as dwarf star matter?”

  “You mean, set it to search below the crust? Will do, Captain.”

  “Anderson?”

  “Uh-huh?” He was already at work on the instrument board.

  “You will remember that we have a time limit?”

  Anderson grinned at him. “I can put this thing in a forced orbit and finish the search in five hours. Okay?”

  “Great.” Luke started punching for breakfast.

  “There’s just one thing. We’ll be in free fall some of the time. Can you take it?”

  “Sure.”

  Anderson moved in. When he finished the ship balanced nose down, one thousand miles above the surface, driving straight at the planet with a force of more or less one gee. The ‘more or less’ came from Anderson’s constant readjustment.

  “Now don’t worry,” Anderson told him. “I’m trying to keep us out of the atmosphere, but if I do happen to land us in the soup all I have to do is turn off the motor. The motor is all that’s holding us in this tight orbit. We’d fall straight up into outer space.”

  “So that’s what a forced orbit is. How are you working the search?”

  “Well, on a map it would look like I’m following the lines of longitude. I’ll turn the ship sideways for a few minutes every time we cross a pole, so we can keep changing our line of search. We can’t just let the planet turn under us. It would take almost sixteen hours.”

  The world rolled beneath them, one thousand miles below—more or less. There was faint banding of the atmosphere, but the predominant color was bluish white. Anderson kept the radar sweeping at and below the forward horizon, which on the radar screen looked like thin, banded air. It was solid rock.

  “Understand, this is just to find out if it’s there,” Anderson said an hour later. “If we see a blob, we’ll have it pinned within five hundred miles. That’s all.”

  “That’s all we need.”

  At nine hours Anderson turned the ship around, facing outward. He ached from shoulders to fingertips. “It’s not there,” he said wearily. “Now what?”

  “Now we get ready for a fight. Get us headed for Nereid and turn off the drive.”

  The bright stars that were two fusion-drive space ships were too close to the tiny Sun to be easily the Golden Circle. But Greenberg’s ship came steadily on. Garner and Anderson were on a ten-hour path to Nereid, Neptune’s outermost moon. They watched as Greenberg’s light grew brighter.

  At nine thirty the light began to wiggle. Greenberg was maneuvering. “Do we start shooting?” Anderson wanted to know.

  “I think not. Let’s see where he’s going.”

  They were on the night side of the planet. Greenberg was diving toward Neptune at a point near the twilight line. He was clearly visible.

  “He’s not coming to Nereid,” said Anderson. They were both whispering, for some reason.

  “Right. Either he left it on Triton, or it’s in orbit. Could it be in orbit after that long?”

  “Missile’s tracking,” Anderson whispered.

  Greenberg was past Triton before he started to decelerate. “In orbit?” wondered Garner. “He must have been nuts.”

  Twenty minutes later Greenberg had put himself in a forced orbit around Neptune, and was covering a search pattern of the surface. “Now what?” Anderson asked.

  “We wait and see. I give up, Anderson. I can’t understand it.”

  “I swear it’s not on Neptune.”

  “Uh, oh.” Garner pointed. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.” A tiny spear of light was going by on the near side of the planet.

  The blue-green ball was larger than he had anticipated. For the first time, he regretted his carelessness in not finding out more about the eighth planet when he had the chance, two billion years ago. He asked the pilot and copilot, who remembered that Neptune had 1.23 gee at surface. Earth gee, of course. For Kzanol it would be about one and a half.

  The pilot was jockeying the ship into a search pattern.

  Someone was already there.

  It was the half-asleep free slave he’d passed at the halfway point. He was almost around the curve of the world, but he would be back in eighteen diltun or so. Kzanol had the pilot put the Golden Circle in orbit and turn off the motor. Let the slave do the searching.

  The ship went by underneath, spitting fire at the stars. The slave was indeed marking out a search pattern. Kzanol let him go on.

  And he wondered. How was he going to get down, on a motor which didn’t have the power?

  He let the pilot think about it, and the pilot told him. On rockets, wings and rams, all going at once. But even the pilot couldn’t think of a way back up.

  Kzanol/Greenberg, of course, had no warning at all. At its present setting his radar would have shown Kzanol’s ship as more transparent than air. Even the planet itself was translucent. Kzanol/ Greenberg kept watch over the radar screen, sure that if Masney missed the suit, he wouldn’t.

  “Why isn’t the other ship searching too?” Anderson wondered. “It’s just floating.”

  “Ordinarily,” said Garner, thinking out loud, “I’d think they were in cahoots. There’d be no need for them both to search. But how—? Oh. I get it. The ET has taken control of Masney and Greenberg. Either that or he’s letting
them do his job for him without their knowing it.”

  “Wouldn’t the job get done quicker if they both searched?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder if this alien isn’t the aristocrat’s aristocrat. Maybe he thinks that anyone who works is a slave. Since he’s a master…But the real question is, what are they searching for, and where is it?

  “Look, son, why don’t you warm up the radio and point the maser at our fleet of Beltmen? I might as well fill them in.”

  One thing about the Belt ships: at least the air plant could handle pipe tobacco smoke. The man in the third ship was the only man in the fleet who took advantage of the fact, one of exactly six in the entire Belt. He was known, not too affectionately, as Old Smoky.

  Once he had been an Earthman. Now he was the only man in the fleet who could recognize Lucas Garner’s voice. When the radio burst to life he listened carefully to the message, then called Lew to report that it really was Garner.

  For Smoky, the broadcast removed all doubt. It was Garner himself. The old man was not above a judicious lie, but he was not prone to risk his life. If he was near Neptune in a leaky Terran boat, he must have an outstanding reason for being there.

  Thoughtfully Old Smoky checked through his arsenal of two radar missiles, one heat seeker, and a short-range laser “cannon”. The war of the worlds was here at last…

  Kzanol was baffled. After six hours of searching, the slave Masney had covered the entire planet. The suit wasn’t there!

  He let the slave begin his second search, for the sake of thoroughness. He took his own ship to Triton.

  The Brain could not compute the course of moons; one of them might have gotten in the way of the ship as it dove toward Neptune. Very likely it had been Triton. That moon was not only closer than Nereid, it was far bigger: 2500 miles thick as compared to 200.

  A nerve-racking hour later, an hour of flying upside down over Triton’s surface with the jet firing moon showing flat overhead, Kzanol admitted defeat. No white flash had shown itself on the radar screen, though Neptune itself had shown through the transparent image of the big moon. He turned his attention to the small moon.

  “So that’s it!” Anderson’s face glowed. “They thought it was on the surface and it wasn’t. Now they don’t know where it is!” He thought a moment. “Shouldn’t we get out of here? The honeymooner’s aiming itself at Nereid, and we’re too close for comfort.”

  “Right,” said Garner. “But first turn the missile loose. The one that’s homed on the alien. We can worry about Greenberg later.”

  “I hate to do it. There’re two other people on the Golden Circle.” A moment passed. Lengthened. “I can’t move,” said Anderson. “It’s that third button under the blue light.”

  But Garner couldn’t move either.

  “Who’d have thought he could reach this far?” he wondered bitterly. Anderson couldn’t help but agree. The ship continued to fall toward Nereid.

  To the Power, distance was of little importance. What mattered was numbers.

  Nereid was a bust. The deep radar went through it as through a warped window pane, and showed nothing. Kzanol gave it up and watched the half-asleep slave for awhile. His tiny flame burned bravely against the Neptunian night.

  Kzanol was in a bad state of mind. It seemed now that his ship had missed not only Neptune but both its moons. What could have gone wrong with the Brain? Well, it probably had never been intended to last three hundred years. The ship must have hurtled through the solar system and gone on into interstellar space, at .97 light. It would be beyond Andromeda by now. He shivered.

  All in all, the only pleasure he had was to watch the last ship searching Neptune for the third time—and to see its bright flame suddenly lengthen, then shorten again. The sleepy slave had given up.

  After a few minutes Kzanol knew that he too was going to Triton. A feeling of noble pity came over him, and he remembered the tradition that the family of Racarliw had never mistreated a slave. Kzanol went to meet the sleeper at Triton.

  “One…two…I can’t see Garner’s ship. He must have landed somewhere, or turned off his drive. The others are just milling around.”

  “Funny he hasn’t called us. I hope nothing’s happened to him.”

  “We’d have seen the explosion, Smoky. Anyway, he was going for Nereid when his drive stopped. If it failed, we can find him later.”

  XIV

  When Kzanol was close enough, he told the sleeper to turn ship and join him. In an hour he and the sleeper were alongside.

  Kzanol’s pilot and co-pilot were worried about the fuel situation, so as soon as the sleeper’s ship was close enough Kzanol told him to transfer his fuel to the Golden Circle. He waited while various clanking and banging sounds rang through the ships. Fortunately the cards were magnetized, and there was webbing to hold him in his seat. He followed the movements of his three personal slaves with the back of his mind: the sleeper near the tail, the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit. Naturally he jumped like a terrified gazelle when his airlock door swung open and a slave walked in.

  A slave with a mind shield.

  “Hi!” it said, incomprehensibly in English. “I guess we’ll need a translator.” And it coolly walked forward to the control room. At the door it stopped and gestured—with Kzanol’s disintegrator.

  The co-pilot sat motionless listening to Kzanol/Greenberg’s side of the conversation. He couldn’t understand overtalk, but Kzanol/Greenberg could; and Kzanol listened to the shielded slave through the mind of the co-pilot.

  “I ought to get rid of you right away,” Kzanol mused. “A slave which can’t be controlled can’t be trusted.”

  “That’s truer than you know, but you can’t kill me yet. I happen to have some information that you need.”

  “So? Like what?”

  “I know where the spare suit is. I also know why we weren’t picked up, and I know where the rrgh—where our race is now.”

  Kzanol said, “I think I also know where the second suit is. But for whatever else you may know, I won’t kill you.”

  “Big of you.” Kzanol/Greenberg waved the disintegrator negligently. “I’ll tell you something you can’t use for first. Did you know the whitefoods are intelligent?”

  “Whitefood droppings! Nonsense.”

  “Humans have found them on Sirius III-A. They’re definitely whitefoods. They’re also definitely sentient. Can you think of any way they could have developed intelligence?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not. If any form of life has ever been mutation-proof, it’s the whitefoods. Besides, what does a herbivore with no manipulatory appendages, and no national defenses except sentient herders to kill off natural enemies, want with intelligence? No, the tnuctipun must have made them sentient in the first place. Making the brains a delicacy was just an excuse for making them large.”

  Kzanol sat down. His mouth tendrils stood straight out, as if he were smelling with them. “Why should they do that?”

  He was hooked.

  “Let me give it to you all in one bundle,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. He took off his helmet and sat, found and lighted a cigarette, taking his time, while Kzanol grew silently but visibly enraged. There was no reason why he shouldn’t get angry, Kzanol/Greenberg thought, as long as he didn’t get too angry.

  “All right,” Kzanol/Greenberg began. “First point is the sentient whitefoods. Second point. You remember that there was a depression when Plorn’s tnuctipun came up with antigravity.”

  “Powerloss, yes?” said Kzanol fervently—and untactfully. “He should have been assassinated.”

  “Not him. His tnuctipun. Don’t you see? They were fighting an undeclared war even then. The free tnuctipun must have been behind it all the time, the tnuctip fleet that fled into space when Thrintun found the tnuctipun system. A few civilized tnuctipun took their orders. The whitefoods were their spies; half the nobles in the galaxy, everyone who could afford it, used to keep whitefoods on their land.”


  “You’re a ptavv fool! You’re basing all these suppositions on the silly idea that whitefoods are intelligent. That’s nonsense. We’d have sensed it”

  “No. Check with Masney if you don’t believe me. Somehow the tnuctipun must have designed a whitefood brain that was immune to the Power. And that one fact makes it certain that the whole ploy was deliberate. The whitefood spies. The antigravity, released to cause a depression. Maybe there were other ideas, too. Mutated racing viprin were introduced right after antigravity; it put all the legitimate viprin ranches out of business, made the depression worse. The sunflowers were usually the only defense for a plantation, and everyone who had land had a sunflower border. It got the landowners used to isolation, so that they might not cooperate in wartime. I’d give odds the tnuctipun had a spray to kill sunflowers. When the depression was in full swing they struck.”

  Kzanol didn’t speak. His expression was hard to read.

  “This isn’t all supposition. I’ve got solid facts. First, the bandersnatchi, whitefoods to us, are sentient. Humans aren’t stupid; they wouldn’t make a mistake like that. Second, it’s a fact that you weren’t picked up when you hit Earth. Why?”

  “That is an ingesting good question. Why?”

  This was the starting point, the hurt that had rankled in Kzanol/ Greenberg’s breast for sixteen days during which he had had nothing to do but supervise Masney and brood on his bad luck. He could have been spared all of this, the lostness and the loneliness and the deadly danger, if only that fool of a caretaker had seen the flash. But he hadn’t, and there could be only one reason.

  “Because there wasn’t anyone on the moon! Either the caretaker was killed in the revolt, or he was off fighting somewhere. Probably he was dead. The tnuctipun would have moved to cut off our food.”