Red Tide

by Larry Niven

  Ralph’s eyes got bigger than they’d been so far. “You’d never get me into one of those things. Hell, I wouldn’t stand next to someone carrying one of those things.”

  “Yah.”

  ***

  She’d been working on the power source problem. For fun.

  “It’s the Bacardi reaction. Got to be. Protons and lithium.” This was named for the original Cockcroft-Walton experiment, which produced 151 times as much energy as it took to accomplish.

  It wasn’t in use for power plants, because there was a problem: “Lithium’s awfully fussy to work with,” Sam said. “How about proton-boron-beryllium?”

  She shook her head. “Limit to how small you can make the shielding. And beryllium’s hellishly poisonous stuff even if you catch all the neutrons coming off. And you have to clean out the carbon waste—”

  “But stray alpha is helium and comes out on its own, I got it. That it on his back?” They had the record running in a loop.

  “Nope.” She grinned. “That’s his recycler. The power source is on that belly plate. See how it gives off some IR just before he goes?”

  “That recycler’s tiny.”

  “Don’t be too impressed. Probably just air and water. I doubt he’s supposed to use it very long.”

  “Oh, good point.” He’d expected to get home immediately, of course.

  “That power plant is smaller than we could build, though,” she said. “If I had an unlimited budget I might be able to fit one into a motorcycle fridge. Might not. I would really like to see the insides of that thing.”

  “How big is a motorcycle fridge?” He’d never even heard of them.

  She held up her hands to indicate opposing corners of a cube about ten inches on a side. “Runs off the engine. You’ve never been club camping? Everybody brings one thing.”

  “Never.” It sounded like one of those sneaky ways to teach kids survival and organizational skills, like the Boy Scouts, which he’d left under a cloud after bringing a “snipe” back to camp. (It had been black with a couple of white stripes. Quite peaceful, too, before all the yelling. Ambled into the sack on its own while his eyes were shut, or he’d have had a clue.)

  “Really lets you know who you can rely on,” she went on, unthinkingly confirming his notion.

  “…!” said Sam, utterly unable to recall what he’d been about to say due to an absolutely terrific crick in the left side of his neck, from looking down at the plans for so long. It ran about halfway down his arm, which he grabbed and began to massage.

  “Well, shit,” said Theresa in the most reasonable of conversational tones. She grabbed him by his right arm, put him into the small-cargo booth, and said, “There’s always a standby team for medical emergencies.” Then she shut the door and bounded to her console.

  Nothing changed until the booth opened to reveal Theresa, now drenched with sweat and accompanied by the sound of an alarm. “Son of a bitch!” She slapped a switch nearby and said, “Captain, he’s back. Receivers on Earth must be offline.”

  “Jesus, of course they are,” said Ralph’s voice. “Damn. Get him into a survival bubble. We’re about to have a proof of concept.”

  “Captain, we can’t!” she said, but broke a pack off the wall as she spoke. She pulled the inflation pin.

  “It’s that or let him die. We don’t have anything for a heart attack here. The first ten minutes are critical.”

  “I’m getting a pain patch on him,” she said, slapping one on Sam’s neck. “That’ll give me time to write on the label.” She stuffed Sam into the bubble and wrote something on the lid in big block letters.

  Sam had narcotics being distributed through his Circle of Willis by then, or he’d have been able to say, “It’s a muscle spasm. I’ve had a heart attack. My heart’s a cultured replacement.”

  Theresa’s eyes were sheened with unspilled tears when she said, “I’m sorry, Doc. It’s the only way.” She sealed the bubble, then he heard her shut the booth.

  *****

  He was in free fall, it was dark, and things were banging on the outside of the bubble.

  And everybody he knew was dead.

  Abruptly his left side slammed against the inside of the bubble. He was just getting used to the concept of that being “down” when the pull changed and the bubble whacked the top of his head.

  He was scrabbling for a handhold (the Engineer who was most often in charge of his brain was noting that these goddamn things should have interior straps, padding, and a light) when the bubble opened and he saw someone uglier than he would have believed a human being could be.

  He was right, too. This was an alien.

  “You are safe,” it enunciated with great precision, spraying him all over with what looked like a plant fogger. “I am an orderly. A kyuman doctor is nearby, on call. Do you need kelp?”

  It was a design feature of emergency patches that they needed a specific solvent to remove. That kept a patient, who might have been, say, concussed, suicidal, or just stupid, from taking them off. Regrettably, in the present circumstances, just such a patch, designed to keep an angina victim from dying of traumatic shock, was hosing down the brain of someone who merely had a neck cramp, who was being questioned by an alien whose soft palate evidently had no middle position, which caused it to sound like a really dedicated holistic practitioner.

  It would be some little while later before Samuel Watt was able to articulate this, even to himself. Meanwhile, with an act of will bordering on the superhuman, he reached up to touch the patch on his neck, then tapped his head.

  “You are stoned? I will assist you.” Very long arms reached into the bubble, under his arms, and lifted him out. As it sprayed the rest of him, the alien said, “Your shell label says your problem is a cart attack. We get a lot of those, but usually after they arrive. No?”

  Sam had been shaking his head. He tapped his chest, then tried to hold up both thumbs, but only succeeded in some mild thrashing. (His real heart attack had not only given him a tolerance for narcotics, it had made him something of a connoisseur, and whatever this stuff was, it had definitely not been on the menu back then. Wow.)

  “You may be in error.” The alien moved him to a seat, pulled a belt across his lap—there was some gravity, more than the ship’s thrust, but still not much—and pulled up his shirt. The scar was conspicuous, and the alien said, “New?”

  Sam nodded.

  “There could still be a problem.” It pulled something like a fat stethoscope out of a nearby table-mounted box and pressed the end to his chest, where it stayed, connecting him to the box. The alien looked at the box, whose inside cover now showed a remarkably clear image of a beating heart, with nine rows of jiggling lines underneath. Sam decided it might be a separate line for each chamber of the heart, and a function readout for each lobe of the lungs. “Kealthy. Well, that is. Better than mine. Muscle spasm caused a false alarm?” Sam nodded. “That is rare and sad. I will call a counselor for orientation.” It turned to a wall console and began tapping colored spaces.

  Sam, who was drying out fast, looked around and saw a thoroughly ordinary examining room, with the usual cabinets, drawers, sink, and even a frosted-glass window in the door. He was sure this was a deliberate attempt to be reassuring. There must be a hell of a lot of people from around his time.

  He was moderately distressed to see narrow black stains along most of the corners where walls came together. It bespoke a breakdown in maintenance procedures.

  The alien wore coveralls in pale gray, and had what seemed to be the same proportions as the alien in the film from Mercury Station, but the resemblance to humans went very little further. Its skin was dusty orange. The orifice it talked with was almost between two widely-set nearly-human eyes, and Sam tentatively tagged the cashew-shaped holes below the eyes as nostrils. If he was right, it could breathe while swallowing, a much better design than Earth vertebrates enjoyed. Ears could be the shallow bubbles on the sides of the head, and they were below
jarringly normal-looking hair in a humanlike hairline. Brown and wavy. Better than Sam’s, really.

  Sam jumped a little when it reached over to the box it had opened, to get out a spray bottle, and he saw that the elbows were ball-and-socket joints. Harder to injure than hinge joints, but might not support as much weight.

  The alien turned back to him, sprayed the patch, and removed it. The patch was carefully placed in a small plastic bag. “We save these,” said the alien. “Some supplies are card to make quickly, and we are getting another cluster of arrivals lately, in excess of reserves. A counselor is on the way. I asked for a female just in case. We know about kyumans.” It nodded a couple of times—that neck was all cables, no sign of a larynx—and added, “Can you talk yet?”

  Sam made some foolish noises, shook his head, and pointed back and forth between his own throat and the alien’s.

  “Neck? Throat? Voice? My voice. It’s at the back.” It pointed well back on the side of its own neck, and nodded twice more. “You are observant. Not usually the first question. I’m sorry, I know your name. I am familiarly called Tolul, and I am male. This matters to us as well, but not in the same way as to you.” Tolul nodded several more times. (Was that amusement?) He studied Sam’s face, and Sam studied him back. Those irises weren’t irises, they were internal lids that closed from the sides, with another set behind them that closed vertically. It looked like he could close his nostrils, too. Tolul nodded slightly and held up a hand to be inspected. It looked like a human hand, but with an extra thumb opposite the usual one, instead of a pinky. Exactly like one. “We’re willing to make improvements,” Tolul said. “Our natural cands are more obviously adapted paws than yours. I got mine fixed.”

  Somebody short showed up beyond the frosted glass of the door, and Tolul said, “Aa.” The door opened, and Tolul said, “O. This is Davoost. She is in command kere.”

  Davoost was another alien, unquestionably a different species. She was about four feet tall, chunky, and what he could see of her skin was hairless and very pale, with darker blotches. If more of the blotches met up she’d have looked something like a bald miniature panda. She was, bluntly, cute.

  Sam had never trusted cute. He had frequently been told this was an unreasoning prejudice.

  The black body armor and the sidearm did nothing to disabuse him of his views.

  “Does he work?” she said. At least her voice wasn’t cute. She sounded like an angry bullfrog. (On reflection, Tolul’s voice was as strange as his hair. He sounded very human, and oddly familiar.)

  Tolul replied—sounding exactly like Davoost—“Key is not dying but will need kelp to stay sane. Key is the first. Samuel Watt.”

  “So?” she said.

  “As in Samuel Watt Rescue Station.”

  The shock of realizing they’d named the place for him was slightly greater than abruptly figuring out that Tolul had been addressing him in his, Sam’s, own voice. Sam was familiar with this as a calming technique; long ago, he’d used a delayed recording of himself to cure his snoring, and years later gave the playback system to his sister Judith, whose first baby refused to stop crying no matter what she did. (It only worked while the playback was on. The issue finally went away when a TV was put in her nursery. She’d been bored.)

  The issue arose of how he could know what Sam’s voice sounded like without hearing it first. Personal sonar to map his throat?

  Davoost stared at Sam in a way that made him wonder if he was edible and hope he was poison. “You have respect here.”

  “Oh?”

  “Can’t breathe respect,” she said. “Get sane so you can do work.”

  The door opened behind her, and she dropped her hand to her gun as she turned.

  “Orientation,” said the woman who came in. Sam stared. She carried a large bag, which he scarcely noticed: she was dressed in nothing but a push-up corset, a garter belt, fishnets, and stiletto heels, all brilliant red, which set off her wavy black hair and deep brown South Asian skin nicely. Her generous figure did not need the corset … but it didn’t do any harm, either.

  “This is Mr. Watt,” said Tolul.

  Sam found he could now form actual words in his mind, and thus probably in his mouth.

  Okay, he thought, I’m exiled to the future, bad shock, have to adapt, and the first three people I see are a Growleywog, a rabid stuffed toy, and a porn star who is evidently on duty.

  This place needs new management.

  “Watt? Oh, then he’s from Scotland! Hobbellobbo,” said the woman. “Yobbou spobbeak obbEnglobbish?”

  He hadn’t heard it since high school. Insert the syllable “obb” before every spoken vowel sound, and place the accent on the “obb.” Not secure from a bright teenaged speaker of English, but capable of driving the average public school teacher to issuing even more demented edicts than usual, which was the point. “Yobbes, obbI dobboo. Obbis thobbere trobboubobble?” (He’d always been proud of “trobboubobble.”)

  She gave him a bright smile. “Obboh yobbes,” she said. “He needs sex quickly,” she said.

  Davoost made a belching noise. “Do that, then,” she said. “And teach him the common language.”

  The woman said, “Wobbee nobbeed tobboo tobbalk,” came over, leaned down, and kissed him at length.

  Davoost belched again. “Not in public! Gross creatures!”

  The woman undid his lap belt, straightened up, and said, “Dobbon’t tobbake obbit obbout obbuntobbil obbI sobbay.”

  Sam nodded, wondering how she’d been able to speak around whatever it was she’d slipped into his mouth.

  ***

  She took him by the hand and led him out of the examination room, and they were in a long, wide corridor, which looked like it might have been part of an absolutely typical 21st-century hospital, except that the floor curved up in the distance.

  Rotational gravity, no wonder it was low. The gentler the curve, the faster the spin needed to be, and this place had to be miles across. Too much spin would put a strain on fullerite, let alone metal.

  That mildew or whatever was visible in every interior edge he looked at carefully.

  A human emergency team rushed past them, with a gurney bearing a human patient, who had either been exposed to vacuum or spent decades working on a rum-blossom worthy of a Surgeon-General. Almost all the people Sam saw were human, and most of the aliens were the gangly types. The cute ones were rare.

  The cute ones were also all readily visible, because everyone went wide around them. Except the emergency team; every alien moved aside for that.

  She took him to a room whose door had no window, closed it behind them, and said, “All right, it won’t be a problem now. Chups and tols think humans are perverts because we don’t have a mating season, so they never look into these rooms.”

  Sam wasn’t surprised. He was still getting used to the decor.

  The sex toys and bondage furniture actually didn’t bother him quite as much as the fact that the red carpeting covered the floor, the walls, and the ceiling, except for one large mirror and the glowing white globes in the room’s eight corners to provide the light. He finally decided that what the place looked like was a set from a film warning parents about their children having sex, said film having been directed by a monk who had been brooding on the topic for the past forty years.

  “You can take it out now,” she said.

  Sam grunted and removed the thing from his mouth. It was an oblong gray plastic capsule, and looked like nothing much.

  “No, no, you were supposed to swallow that. It’s a tracking jammer. You thought I meant that?” She laughed, then grew serious. “You’re not celibate, are you? It’ll make it difficult to talk very often if you are.”

  “No, but I’m in my seventies.” (Not counting transit time, of course.)

  Her eyebrows rose and tried to come together. “So am I.”

  “I haven’t had access to your kind of medicine.”

  “The restoratives should be st
arting to work by now.”

  “What restoratives?”

  “The shots Tolul gave you.”

  “I never got any. We were interrupted by Davoost.”

  Her eyes widened in dismay, and she said, “Swallow that right now.”

  Alarmed, he did so (not difficult, teflon coating), and she bent forward, tucked her shoulder into his belly, picked him up, opened the door, and ran into someone immediately. They all landed on the hall floor in a loose pile.

  It was Tolul. “I calve to give you some treatments for your kealth,” he said once he’d reached a sitting position. He produced a pressure injector, not so much a pistol as a small Tommy gun, complete with drum magazine. “I’m sorry I forgot. Please remove most of your clothing.”

  People were going past frequently. Sam, not sure whether he was supposed to let Tolul know he spoke something other than gibberish, pointed at the open door.

  Tolul pulled his elbows in and held his hands before his neck. “I would rather not.”

  Okay, that was embarrassment or something like it. Sam couldn’t blame him. He stood and took off his shirt, shoes, and pants. He then got very small shots in twenty-seven places. Individually, each was as easily ignored as a pinch. By the twenty-seventh pinch, however, Sam was in a mood such that if he was told, oops, he needed just one more, then whoever subsequently managed to pull his, Sam’s, foot out of Tolul’s butt would immediately become king of England.

  Tolul said, “You will not get sick now,” and patted Sam on top of his head, this being what he clearly knew from experience was just about the only place where Sam didn’t have a fresh pinhole with a sore lump underneath.

  Unfortunately it was where Sam had landed when being retrieved, so it hurt anyway. “Ow.”

  Tolul exposed teeth like a lamprey’s, quickly covered his mouth with his free hand, and said, “Sorry. Kere.” He hung the injector on his belt, got out a pill, and said, “Take this. Pain will stop soon.”

  Sam glanced at—he still didn’t know her name—and got a slight smile, so he took it. She put a fingertip under his chin and led him back into the room, and Tolul departed without further comment.