The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

Too bad about the racarliw.

  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.

  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 that on skiing trips, and loved it.

  Suddenly 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.

  Half an hour later, an hour since he’d left the ship, he began to see powdery snow. It was light and fluffy, very different from the falling ice bullets. It was the residue of Kzanol’s digging. He could use it as 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! If Kzanol got to the statue 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 burnt and cooling atmosphere, pelted through the drifting fountain and plated themselves 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 spacesuit which weighed nearly as much. Kzanol was very tired.

  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 say, 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 somewhere around. 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.

  XX

  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 craps 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 icy sheath over the top of the ship was twenty feet thick. He had managed to burn his way through it the hard way, with a welder in his suit kit, but his fingers and toes were frostbitten before he had uncovered the airlock. Two days later somebody arrived to treat him.

  Smoky Petropoulos and Woody Atwood had located the Golden Circle’s distress signal and hovered over its point of origin until they had boiled the ship out of its icy tomb. Then, necessarily one at a time, they had moved the paralyzed Belt fleet to the Golden Circle in the two-man ships. The four were still unable to move except for their eyes and voice. Fortunately they had all been wearing spacesuits when the second fleet tracked them down.

  Garner and Anderson was 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. “We kept hearing your calls but we couldn’t answer. Not even when you delivered the ultimatum. It was pretty frightening.” He blinked and tightened his lips, dismissing the memory. “So what’ll we do with the second 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.”

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

  “Dump it on Jupiter,” advised Masney. “Put it in the cargo hold of a two-man job and let me and Woody 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 objections, kept them to himself.

  “Okay.” Lew stood up. “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; 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 the expressionless mirror of a head, even lying on its side, 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 that had been 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 returns to the U. N. 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 Farside, 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, started to laugh. He had a rumbling, helpless kind of laughter, 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 souvenir—

  But that was nonsense.

  So only Larry would ever know. If the second suit were opened it could start a war. With controlled hydrogen fusion as common today as electrical 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? Larry plus dolphin plus thrint, it wasn’t even difficult.

  Just a slave, whispered Kzanol. 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 things.

  What was he thinking? Garner wo
ndered. 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.

  He never got it; though.

  END