05-A Gift From Earth

by Larry Niven

  A man should have the sense to hide his differences.

  Too late. They would forget him, again and again, as often as he desired. But always they would come back.

  Matt Keller, tool, captive assassin.

  Not likely!

  "You," he said. "Mrs. Hancock."

  The others stirred, turned to face him, returned to the world in which Matt Keller was a factor to be considered.

  "Mrs. Hancock. Do you have anything to say to me?"

  "I don't think so," said the middle-aged rebel who should have been a shrewish housewife.

  "You didn't say a word while the others were browbeating me. Why did you come?"

  She shrugged. "Just to see what would happen. Keller, did you ever lose someone you loved?"

  "Sure."

  "To the organ banks?"

  "My Uncle Matt."

  "I did my damndest to stop you from getting a transplant, Keller. Dr. Bennet says you'd have lived without it, but of course you'd have been a cripple."

  "I'd have been just as glad," said Matt, though he wasn't sure it was true.

  "I wanted to smash the organ banks the first chance we got. Nobody else seems to feel that way. Maybe nobody else had a husband cut up for the organ banks."

  "Make your point."

  She shrugged again. "I don't know if you're as important as Harry says. It seems to me nobody could be that important. You got us out of the Hospital, right. Parlette would never have found us otherwise, right. We're grateful, right. But did we have to cut a man up to show how grateful we are? You didn't do him any good.

  "Well, he's dead, and we can't break up the organ banks yet. But we're trying to change the laws so less people go into the organ banks and then only the ones that deserve it most. If you were any kind of man, you'd be wild to help us. I say it's all you can do for that dead man."

  "For sweet charity."

  Mrs. Hancock's mouth closed like a trap.

  "I'm going to join you," said Matt. "But not for sweet charity. And now I'll give you my reasons."

  "Go on," said Harry Kane. He was the only one who didn't show surprise.

  "I can't go back to my mining worms. That's absolute. But I'm no hired killer, and that's for sure too. I've never committed murder. I haven't wanted to, not often. If I ever kill a man, I'll want to know just why I'm doing it.

  "There's only one way I can be sure I will.

  "From now on, the five of us are going to be the leaders of the Sons of Earth." That he saw, jolted even Harry Kane. "I'll want a hand in all decisions. I'll want all the information available to any of you. What do you say, Harry?"

  "Keep talking."

  Matt's mouth was dry. Harry Kane didn't like this, and Harry Kane was a bad enemy. "The Sons of Earth can't commit murder without my consent, and I won't give it unless I decide murder is necessary. To make that decision, I'd have to know everything, always. One more thing. If I ever decide one of you is trying to cheat me, I'll kill you because cheating me of information will be murder."

  "What makes you think you can handle that much power, Keller?" Harry's voice was dispassionate, me interested.

  "I have to try," Matt pointed out. "It's my power."

  "Fair enough." Harry stood up. "One of us will be here tomorrow, with copies of Parlette's New Law, in full. If we decide to make changes later, we'll let you know."

  "Let me know before you make the changes."

  Kane hesitated, then nodded. They went.

  Millard Parlette sighed and turned off the receiver.

  Invisible assassin?

  An odd phrase to come from a practical man like Harry Kane. What could he have meant?

  Kane would tell him eventually, of course.

  Even then it wouldn't matter. Kane could be trusted now, and that did matter. Now Kane had a hold on Millard Parlette. Be it real or imaginary, he would use that hold before he started a civil war.

  And Millard Parlette could concentrate on the man waiting outside. Implementation had selected one of their number to present a set of grievances. The man must be getting angrier and angrier as he waited for the Head's attention.

  Parlette used the intercom. "Send him in, Miss Lauessen."

  "Good."

  "Wait. What's his name again?"

  "Halley Fox. Corporal."

  "Thank you. Would you please send to Gamma and Delta and Iota plateaus for records on Matthew Keller."

  "Done, mine ancestor."

  Mist Demons! How had Castro put up with the woman? Parlette smiled. Why not? Let him take care of Implementation and the Council, and Harry Kane would take care of the rest. An invisible assassin had just lifted half the load from his back.

  "It'll be one strange balance of power," said Harry Kane. "Parlette's got every weapon on the planet except for what we've built in our basements. He's got all the electrical and medical facilities, and most of the wealth. And what have we got? Matt Keller."

  "And lucky to get him," said Laney.

  A red-haired girl in an iridescent dress passed them, walking quickly down the corridor. A crew girl, probably visiting a relative. They stopped talking until she had passed. Harry Kane grinned after her, grinned at her startled expression and at the way she'd quickened her step to leave them behind. They'd all have to get used to this someday — to the sight of colonists in the hallowed corridors of the Hospital.

  Jay Hood said, "Well, we've got him. Or has he got us?" He slapped the wall, making gunshot echoes. "Can you imagine what the historians will say? They may never figure it out."

  Matt lay on his back and contemplated the ceiling.

  He'd made the right decision. He was sure of it. If he had a power, then someone had to have a use for it.

  He himself had none.

  A detrimental mutation is one that prevents the organism from surviving long enough to breed. Matt's only hope of becoming a father lay in suppressing the "luck" entirely, at least in his private life. An invisible man goes nowhere in a civilized society.

  Someone entered. Matt's eyes jerked hard over, caught by the iridescent blue of her dress.

  "I beg your pardon," she said, and turned to leave. She was tall and slender, and young, with dark red hair curved into impossible contours. Her dress was of a type never seen on Delta Plateau, loose and clinging, and it glowed. A face lovely in its strangeness, with flared nostrils and pronounced cheekbones, marked her as pure crew.

  "Just a minute," Matt called.

  She turned in surprise, not at what he'd said, but at his colonist accent. Then her back straightened and her chin lifted and her mouth became a hard, angry line. Matt flushed.

  And before her eyes could coldly leave him, he thought, Look at me.

  Her eyes didn't turn. Her chin came down and her face went soft and dreamy.

  Keep your eyes on mine, he thought at her. I fascinate you, right? Right. Keep looking.

  She took a slow step toward him.

  Matt dropped the control. She took another step forward, and then she looked horrified. She turned and ran from the room, followed by Matt's pealing laughter.

  Detrimental mutation?

  Maybe not.

  The Outsider ship was a Christmas decoration, a hall of tinsel ribbons looping over and under and around one another, never touching. It was the diameter of New York with about the same population, in beings like black cat-o'-nine-tails with thickened handles.

  Miles ahead at the end of its tethering cables, the fusion drive spread dim light over the ship. The basking-ramps cast vacuum-sharp shadows across each other, and in the borderlands between light and shade lay the crew. They lay with their heads in sunlight and their branched tails in shadow, soaking up energy through thermoelectric currents. Fusion radiation sleeted through their bodies, unnoticed. It was a peaceful, lazy time.

  Between stars there was little to do.

  Until actinic blue flame flashed across their course, throwing high-energy particles and electromagnetic fields about with carefree aban
don.

  In moments the object was out of sight, even to an Outsider's sensitive eye. But not to the ship's instruments. In an hour the Outsiders had it nailed: position, velocity, mass, design, thrust. It was metal, mechanical, pushed by fusion, and fueled by interstellar hydrogen. Not a primitive device, but —

  Built by potential customers.

  In every, arm of the galaxy were Outsiders, using everything from photon sails to reactionless, inertialess drives to push their ships; but always they traveled through Einsteinian space. Hyperdrive was vulgar. The Outsiders never used hyperdrive.

  Other species were different. They preferred not to dawdle in space, enjoying the trip, sightseeing, taking their time. Usually they preferred the speedy convenience of the hyperdrive Blind Spot. Hundreds of times over, alien races had bought the secret of the hyperdrive from passing Outsiders.

  The trade ship swung easily toward Procyon and the human colony on We Made It, following Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #144. No chance of catching up, not at the customary .01 gee. No hurry. Plenty of time ....

  In two sparks of fusion light, an industrial revolution moved on We Made It.

  The Ethics of Madness

  Tau Ceti is a small cool-yellow G0 dwarf with four planets. Strictly speaking, none of the planets is habitable. Two are gas giants. The third inward has no air; the innermost has too much.

  That innermost world is about the size of Venus. With no oversized moon to strip away most of its air, it has an atmosphere like Venus’s: thick and hot and corrosive. No human explorer would have marked it for colonization.

  But the ramrobots were not human.

  During the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries, the ramrobots explored most of what later came to be called “known space.” They were complexly programmed, but their mission was simple. Each was to find a habitable planet.

  Unfortunately they were programmed wrong.

  The designers didn’t know it, and the UN didn’t know it; but the ramrobots were programmed only to find a habitable point. Having located a world the right distance from the star to which it was sent, the ramrobot probe would drop and circle until it found a place at ground level which matched its criteria for atmospheric composition, average temperature, water vapor, and other conditions. Then the ramrobot would beam its laser pulse back at the solar system, and the UN would respond by sending a colony slowboat.

  Unlike the ramrobots, the man-carrying slowboats could not use interstellar ramscoops. They had to carry their own fuel. It meant that the slowboats took a long time to get where they were going, and there were no round-trip tickets. The slowboats could not turn back.

  So We Made It was colonized because a ramrobot elected to settle in spring. Had it landed in summer or winter, when the planet’s axis of rotation points through its primary, Procyon, it would have sensed the fifteen-hundred-mile-per-hour winds.

  So Jinx was colonized. Jinx, with a surface gravity of 1.78 and two habitable bands between the ocean, where there is too much air, and the Ends, where there is none at all. Jinx, the Easter Egg Planet, home of men and women who are five feet tall and five feet wide, the strongest bipeds in known space. But they die young, of heart trouble.

  So Plateau was colonized. For the innermost world of Tau Ceti is like Venus in size and atmosphere, save for one mountain, flat straight-sided mountain is forty miles tall, and its nearly flat top is half the size of California. It rises out of the searing black calm at the planet’s surface to the transparent atmosphere above; and that air can be breathed. Snow covers the peaks near the center of the Plateau, and rivers run lower down-rivers that tumble off the void edges of the Plateau into the shining mist below. The ramrobot landed there. And founded a world.

  Several centuries passed.

  Up from the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat came Douglas Hooker, rising like a star. He was the only occupant of a four-man exploration craft. Fifteen years ago he had stolen that ship from the UN, the government of Earth, and taken it to Plateau. He didn’t dare return it. The laws of Earth were far stricter than those of Plateau.

  And he couldn’t stay on Plateau.

  Plateau would not have complained. Hooker was a cured maniac, a guaranteed model citizen. An autodoc had adjusted the chemistry of his body, cancelling the biochemical cause of his insanity. Two years of psychoanalysis, hypnoanalysis, and conditioning had attacked his memories, altering them in some cases, reducing or enhancing their importance in others. Conditioning had seen to it that he would never remain far from an autodoc; his chemistry would never again have the chance to go haywire in that particular fashion.

  But he’d done a terrible thing on Plateau. He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t bear the thought of someday facing Greg Loeffler.

  The world below changed from a vast white plain to a round white ball. Hooker’s fusion drive glowed hotter and bluer than any sun. He was using the hydrogen in his tank. Though his ship carried a model of mankind’s first “safe” ramscoop, he was not yet moving, fast enough to use interstellar hydrogen for fuel.

  When Plateau was in danger of being lost against the stellar background, he turned the ship toward Wunderland. He’d decided on Wunderland months ago, when he really began to believe that he would be well someday. Wunderland was small, of light gravity; a nice world, but distant from Earth. Wunderland’s technology was always several decades behind the times. The Wunderlanders would appreciate an extra spaceship, especially one as modern as Hooker’s.

  They might jail him—though he had served a term on Plateau, concurrently with his cure. But they wouldn’t kill him. And Hooker could wait out a jail sentence. His health was perfect. Though he was eighty-seven years old, he might have been twenty. Earth’s medical sciences had become very good indeed. Men and women walked the Earth in places they had trod three centuries earlier, and the medicine of their time was long obsolete.

  (Yet… look again. Twenty? Never. He acts scarred. Neither years nor scars show in the flesh, nor around the eyes, nor in them. But behind the eyes there are scars. It takes decades to form scars so deeply in the crevices of the brain that they show through to the surface.)

  Hooker turned toward Wunderland and set the autopilot. His motions were quicker and surer than they had been for a long time. He was leaving Plateau, and he left a weight behind. Now he could begin to forget.

  Hours later a second star rose from the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat. It turned slowly, questing, like a hound sniffing out a trail. Then it fixed on Wunderland and began to accelerate.

  October, AD. 2514, San Francisco.

  He took the news as if he’d expected it. He looked at the human doctor for a long moment after she had stopped talking; then he slumped, back and shoulders dropping, chin nearly touching his chest. He mumbled, “I always knew I was different.”

  “Is that a crime, Doug?” Dr. Doris Hahn might have been any age beyond thirty. She was small and oriental, and she had had that look of great wisdom long before she acquired the wisdom itself.

  “Seems it is,” said Doug Hooker. He was eighteen years old, thin, with blue eyes and straw-colored hair. “I can’t do anything about it, can I?”

  “Sure you can! Why, you need never know you’ve got it, any time during the rest of your life. There are millions of potential paranoids walking this world and others. And diabetics, and epileptics, and schizophrenics. Nobody knows the difference.”

  “They know.”

  “Well, yes.”

  Doug looked the doctor in the eye. “Why? If they need never know, why tell them? How will this affect me, Doctor? What am I supposed to do about it?”

  She nodded. “You’re right, of course. It will affect you in two ways.

  “First, the Fertility Board will probably not pass a potential paranoid. If you want to have a child, you’ll have to do something so spectacular that the Board itself must recognize you as a genius. Something like inventing hyperdrive.”

  Doug smiled at that. Hyperdrive was “the moon on a platter.”


  “Second,” she said, “you must never be out of reach of an autodoc for more than a month, for the rest of your life. Do you understand? Up to now your parents have had this responsibility. Now you’re an adult. You must get to a 'doc every month so that it can stabilize your metabolism. Your body is chemically unstable. Without antiparanoia substances you can go insane.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all. Best go every two weeks to give yourself some leeway.”

  “I will,” said Doug. He wanted to leave. The news had been as bad as he had expected, and he’d expected it for years. He had been born into a paranoid body. It was a thing he couldn’t tell even to Greg. He wanted to leave, to hide somewhere, to lick his wounds. But…

  “How bad is it, Doctor? I mean, what would happen to me if I missed six weeks instead of a month?”

  “The first time, very little. Your thinking processes would change a little, not enough to notice. When the 'doc readjusted you, you wouldn’t notice that change either. But the second and third times would be worse. You see, Doug, a large part of being insane is having been insane. If you were paranoid for a year, a 'doc couldn’t cure you. Your year of insanity would have formed habits. The 'doc would change your metabolism without changing your paranoid habits of thinking. You’d need a human psychotherapist.”

  Doug wet his lips. He thought the question: What is it like to be paranoid? How does a paranoid think?

  He didn’t want to know. He said, “'Bye, Doctor,” and he got up and left. He thought he heard Dr. Hahn call something after him, but he wasn’t sure.

  June, AD. 2526, Kansas City.

  At the age of thirty Douglas Hooker thought he knew himself pretty well. He had long known that he was a man of habits, so he had trained his habits. Each weekday he entered his office at just ten o’clock, and the first thing he did was to use the desk 'doc.