The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  “So? Assume I’d brought Masney. How would you feel watching me operate your former slave?”

  “Lousy,” In point of fact, he now realized, Kzanol had shown rare tact in leaving Lloyd behind. Lloyd was a used slave, one who had been owned by another. Tradition almost demanded his death, and certainly demanded that he never be used by a thrint with self-respect, though he might be given to a beggar.

  “Five stud,” said the pilot. He sat where he could see either hand, ready to wrap his human tongue around human, untranslatable poker slang when Kzanol wished to speak, and ready to translate for Kzanol/ Greenberg. Kzanol dealt one up, one down.

  “That’s funny,” said Kzanol/ Greenberg. “I almost remembered something, but then it slipped away.”

  “Open your mind and I’ll tell you what it was.”

  “No. It’s in English anyway. From the Greenberg memories.” He clutched his head. “What is it? It seemed so damned appropriate. Something about Masney.”

  “Play.”

  “Five people.”

  “Raise five.”

  “Up ten.”

  “Call. Greenberg, why is it that you win more than I do even though you fold more often?”

  Kzanol/Greenberg snapped his fingers. “Got it! ‘When I am grown to man’s estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.’” He laughed. “Now what made me…”

  “Deuce for you, queen for me,” said the pilot. Kzanol continued in thrintun, “If men had telepathic recorders they wouldn’t have to meddle with sounds that way. It has a nice beat, though.”

  “Sure,” Kzanol/Greenberg said absently. He lost that hand, betting almost two hundred people on a pair of fours.

  Somewhat later Kzanol looked up from the game. “Communicator,” he said. He got up and went to the pilot room. Kzanol/Greenberg followed. They took seats next to the pilot room door and the pilot turned up the volume.

  “…Atwood in Number Six. I hope you’re listening, Lew. There is definitely an ET on the honeymooner, and he definitely has wild talents. There’s nothing phony about any of this. The alien paralyzed the Arm and his chauffeur from a distance of around a million miles. He’s pretty callous, too. The man in the second ship was left drifting near Triton, half starved and without fuel, after the alien was through with him. Garner says that one of the men, human, on the honeymooner also thinks he’s an alien, though I’m not too clear on that, and he was the one who starved Masney. There are two other humans on the honeymooner, the pilot and copilot. Garner says shoot on sight, don’t even come near him. I leave that to you. We’re two days behind you, but we’re coming anyway. Number Four is on Triton, with no fuel, and we can’t use it until we clean the mud out of it. Only three of us can fly. Garner and his chauffeur are still paralyzed, though it’s wearing off a little. We should have a hypno-psychiatrist for these Earthies, or they may never walk again.

  “I’m putting this on repeat.

  “Lew, this is Atwood in Number Six. Repeat, this is Atwood…”

  Kzanol/Greenberg pulled a cigarette and lit it. The honeymooner had a wide selection; this one was double filtered, mentholated, and made from de-nicotined tobaccos. It smelled like gently burning leaves and fasted like menthol. “Shoot on sight,” he repeated. “That’s not good.”

  The thrint looked at him with undisguised contempt. To fear a slave—! But then, it was only a ptavv itself.

  Kzanol/Greenberg glared. He knew more about people than Kzanol did, after all.

  “We can’t shoot yet,” said the man in the lead ship. “We’ll have to wait ’til they turn around.”

  Nobody asked a question. They had just watched, through a camera in its nose, as a test missile approached the Gold Circle. They had seen the glare of the honeymooner’s drive become blinding, even with the camera picture turned all the way down. Then the screens had gone blank. The fusing hydrogen turned missiles to molten slag before they could get close enough to be effective.

  Kzanol/Greenberg reached a decision. “Hold the fort,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Kzanol watched him get up and pull on his spacesuit. “What are you doing?”

  “Slowing down the opposition, if I’m lucky.” The near-ptavv went up the ladder into the airlock.

  Kzanol sighed, pocketed the one-man matchsticks of the ant, and shuffled for solitaire. He knew that the slave with the ptavv mind was making a tremendous fuss over nothing. Perhaps it had brooded too long on the hypothetical tnuctip revolt, until all slaves looked dangerous.

  Kzanol/Greenberg emerged on the dorsal surface of the hull. There were a number of good reasons for putting the airlock there, the best being that the drive could be left on while men walked on the hull. He put his magnet sandals on, because it would be a long fall if he slipped, and walked quickly aft to the tail. A switch buried in the vertical fin released a line of steps leading down the curve of the hull to the wing. He climbed down. The hydrogen light was terribly bright; even with his eyes covered he could feel the heat falling on his face. When he knelt on the trailing edge he was shielded from the light.

  He peered over the edge. If he leaned too far he would be blinded, but he had to go far enough to see…Yes, there they were. Five points of light, equally bright, all the same color. Kzanol/Greenberg dropped the nose of the disintegrator over the edge and fired.

  If the disintegrator had had a maser type of beam, it could have done some real damage. But then, he could never have hit any of those tiny targets with such a narrow beam. Still, the cone spread too rapidly. Kzanol/Greenberg couldn’t see any effect. He hadn’t really expected to. He held the digger pointed as best he could at the five stars. The minutes ticked by.

  “What the hell…Lew! Are we in a dust cloud?”

  “No.” The man in the lead ship looked anxiously at the frosted quartz of his windshield. “Not that our instruments can tell. This may be the weapon Garner told us about. Does everyone have a messed-up windshield?”

  A chorus of affirmatives.

  “Huh! Okay. We don’t know how much power there is in that machine, but it may have a limit. Here’s what we’ll do. First, we let the instruments carry us for awhile. Second, we’re eventually going to break our windshields so we can see out, so we’ll be going the rest of the way in closed suits. But we can’t do that yet! Otherwise our faceplates will frost up. Third point.” He glared around for emphasis, though nobody saw him. “Nobody go outside for any reason! For all we know, that gun can peel our suits off our backs in ten seconds. Any other suggestions?”

  There were.

  “Call Garner and ask him for ideas.” Mabel Griffin in Number Two did that.

  “Withdraw our radar antennae for a few hours. Otherwise they’ll disappear.” The ships flew blind.

  “We need something to tell us how far this gun has dug into our ship.” But nobody could think of anything better than Go Look Later.

  Every minute someone tested the barrage with a piece of quartz stuck out the airlock. The barrage stopped sixteen minutes after it started. Two minutes later it started again.

  Kzanol looked up to see his ‘partner’ climbing wearily down through the airlock. “Very good,” he said. “Has it occurred to you that we may need the disintegrator to dig up the spare suit?”

  “Yeah, it has. That’s why I didn’t use it any longer than I did.” In fact he’d quit because he was tired, but he knew Kzanol was right. Twenty-five minutes of almost continuous operation was a heavy drain on the battery. “I thought I could do them some damage. I don’t know whether I did or not.”

  “Will you relax? If they get too close I’ll take them and get us some extra ships and body servants.”

  “I’m sure of that. But they don’t have to get that close to kill us.”

  XVII

  The gap between the Circle and the Belt fleet closed slowly. They would reach Pluto at about the same time, eleven days after the honeymooner had left Neptune.

 
“There she goes,” said somebody.

  “Right,” said Lew. “Everyone ready to fire?”

  Nobody answered. The flame of the honeymooner’s drive stretched miles into space, a long, thin line of bluish white fire. Slowly it began to contract.

  “Fire,” said Lew, and pushed a red button. It had a tiny protective hatch over it, now unlocked. With a key.

  Five missiles streaked away, dwindling match flames. The honeymooner’s fire had contracted to a point.

  Minutes passed. An hour. Two.

  The radio beeped. “Garner calling. You haven’t called. Hasn’t anything happened yet?”

  “No,” said Lew into the separate maser mike. “They should have hit by now.”

  Minutes dragging by. The white star of the honeymoon special burned serenely.

  “Then something’s gone wrong.” Garner’s voice had crossed the light minutes between him and the fleet. “Maybe the disintegrator burned off the radar antennae on your missiles.”

  “God damn! Sure, that’s exactly, what happened. Now what?”

  Minutes.

  “Our missiles are okay. If we can get close enough we can use them. But that gives them two days to find the amplifier. Can you think of any way to hold them off for two days?”

  “Yeah.” Lew was grim. “I’ve an idea they won’t be landing on Pluto.” He gnawled his lip, wondering if he could avoid giving Garner this information. Well, it wasn’t exactly top secret, and the Arm would probably find out anyway. “The Belt has made two trips to Pluto, but we never tried to land there. Not after the first ship took a close-up spectroscopic reading…”

  They played at a table just outside the pilot room door. Kzanol/Greenberg had insisted; he played with one ear cocked at the radio. Which was all right with Kzanol. It affected the other’s playing.

  Garner’s voice came, scratchy and slightly distorted, after minutes of silence.

  “It sounds to me as if it all depends on where they land. We can’t control that. We’d better think of something else, just in case. What have you got besides missiles?” he asked.

  The radio buzzed gently with star static.

  “I wish we could hear both sides,” growled Kzanol. “Can you make any sense of that?”

  Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head. “We won’t. They must know we’re in Garner’s maser beam. But it sounds like they know something we don’t.”

  “Four cards.”

  “I’m taking two. Anyway, it’s nice to know they can’t shoot us.”

  “Yes. Well done.” Kzanol spoke with absent-minded authority, using the overspeak phrase for congratulating a slave who shows proper initiative. Kzanol/Greenberg’s self-control fought his fury until it turned cold; and Kzanol never knew how close he had come to a death-battle.

  Ten days, twenty-one hours since takeoff. The icy planet hung overhead, huge and dirty white, with the glaring highlight which had fooled early astronomers. From Earth only that bright highlight is visible, actually evidence of Pluto’s flat, almost polished surface, making the planet look very small and very dense.

  “Pretty puny,” said Kzanol.

  “What did you expect of a moon?”

  “There was F-28. Too heavy even for whitefoods.”

  “True. Mmph. Look at that big circle. Looks like a tremendous meteor, doesn’t it?”

  “Where? Oh, I see it.” He listened. “That’s it! Radar’s got it cold. Powerloss,” he added, looking at the scope through the pilot’s eyes, “you can almost see the shape of it. But we’ll have to wait for the next circuit before we can land.”

  Slowly the ship turned until its motor faced forward in its orbit.

  The Belt fleet stayed a respectful distance away. Very respectful; four million miles respectful. Without the telescopes Pluto barely showed a disk.

  “Everybody guess a number,” said Lew. “Between one and one hundred. When I get yours I’ll tell you mine. Then we call Garner and let him pick. Whoever gets closest to Garner’s number is It.”

  “Three.” “Twenty-eight.” “Seventy.”

  “Fifty. Okay. I’ll call Garner.” Lew changed to maser. “One calling Garner. One calling Garner. Garner, we’ve about decided what to do if he doesn’t go down. None of our ship radars are damaged, so we’ll just program one ship to aim for the honeymooner at top speed. We watch with telescopes. When our ship gets close enough we blow the drive. We want you to pick a number between one and one hundred.”

  Seconds passing. The other fleet was closer now, nearing the end of the trip.

  “This is Number Three. He’s going down.”

  “Garner here. I suggest we wait and use the radar-proof, if we can. We may be able to fit in an extra man until we can get back to Triton. You still want a number? Fifty-five.”

  Lew swallowed. “Thanks, Garner.” He turned off his maser/finder.

  “Three again. You’re saved by the bell, Lew. He’s going down on the night side. In the predawn area. Couldn’t be better. He may even land in the Crescent!”

  Lew watched, his face pale, as the tiny light burned above Pluto’s dim white surface. He did not relish the idea of spending several weeks riding on the outside of a spaceship.

  Kzanol/Greenberg swallowed, swallowed again. The low acceleration bothered him; he blamed it on his human body. He sat in a window seat with the crash web tightly fastened, looking out and down.

  There was little to see. The ship had circled half the world, falling ever lower, but the only feature on an unchanging cue-ball surface had been the slow creep of the planetary shadow. Now the ship flew over the night side, and the only light was the dim light of the drive, dim at least from this height. And there was nothing to see at all…until now.

  Something was rising on the eastern horizon, something a shade lighter than the black plain. An irregular line against the stars. Kzanol/Greenberg leaned forward as he began to realize just how big the range was; for it couldn’t be anything but a mountain range. “What’s that?” he wondered aloud.

  “One hundredth-diltun.” Kzanol probed the pilots mind. The pilot said, “Cott’s Crescent. Frozen hydrogen piled up along the dawn side of the planet. As it rotates into daylight the hydrogen boils and then re-freezes on the night side. Eventually it winds up back here.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  Evanescent mountains of hydrogen snow, smooth and low, like a tray of different-sized snowballs dropped from a height. They rose gently before the slowing ship, rank behind rank, showing the tremendous breadth of the range. But they couldn’t show its length. Kzanol/ Greenberg could see only that the mountains stretched half around the horizon; but he could imagine them marching from pole to pole around the curve of the world. As they must. As they did.

  The ship was almost down, hovering motionless a few miles west of the beginning of the Crescent. A pillar of fire licked a mile down to touch the surface. Where it touched, the surface disappeared. A wide, shallow crater formed below the descending ship. It became rapidly deeper. A ring of fog formed, soft and white and opaque, closing in on the ship. Then there was nothing but the lit fog and the crater and the licking fusion fire.

  This was the most alien place. He had been wasting his life searching out the inhabited worlds of the galaxy; for never had they given him such a flavor of strangeness as came from this icy world, colder than…than the bottom of Dante’s Hell.

  “We’ll be landing on the water-ice layer,” explained the pilot, just as if he’d been asked. He had. “The gas layers wouldn’t hold us. But first we have to dig down.”

  The crater looked like an open pit mine, with a sloping ring wall and then an almost flat rim and then another, deeper ring wall and…

  Kzanol/Greenberg looked down, grinning and squinting against the glare, trying to guess which layer was which gas. They had been drilling through a very thick blanket of ice, hundreds or thousands of feet thick. Perhaps it was nitrogen? Then the next layer, appearing now, would be oxygen.

  The plain and the space
above it exploded in flame.

  “She blows!” Lew crowed, like a felon reprieved. A towering, twisting pillar of yellow and blue flame roared straight up out of the telescope, out of the pale plain where there had been the small white star of the Golden Circle. For a moment the star shone brightly through the flames. Then it was swamped, and the whole scope was fire. Lew dropped the magnification by a ten-factor to watch the fire spread. Then he had to drop it again. And again.

  Pluto was on fire!

  For billions of years a thick blanket of relatively inert nitrogen ice had protected the highly reactive layers below. There had been no combustion on Pluto since Kzanol’s spaceship smashed down from the stars. But now there was hydrogen vapor mixing with oxygen vapor, and they burned. Other elements burned too.

  The fire spread outward in a circle. A strong, hot wind blew out and up into vacuum, fanning great sheets of flame over the boiling ices until the raw oxygen was exposed. Then the fire dug deeper. There were raw materials below the thin sheet of water ice; and the sheet was thin, nonexistent in some places, for it had all formed when the spaceship struck, billions of years ago. Sodium and calcium veins; even iron burns furiously in the presence of oxygen and enough heat. Or chlorine, or fluorine; both halogens were present, blowing off the top of Pluto’s frozen atmosphere, some burning with hydrogen in the first sheets of flame. Raise the temperature enough and even oxygen and nitrogen will unite.

  The Belters watched like men mesmerized. They were spacemen, and used to strange sights, but they would never again see anything as strange as a world burning. The ring of fire was almost a great circle now, more than a hundred miles broad. When it contracted on the other side of the world there would be an explosion such as could only be imagined.

  The coldest spot within the ring was the point where the fire had started.

  The Golden Circle had gone straight up, ringing and shivering from the blast, with sheets of fire rushing past the wing and hull. Kzanol/Greenberg had the wind knocked out of him. Kzanol was unconscious. The ship was not yet harmed. It certainly hadn’t been harmed by the heat of combustion. It was built to withstand extreme fusion heat for weeks at a time.