Crashlander

by Ларри Нивен

  Voices came from below, barely audible. They didn't sound like a search in progress. Why not? I looked back and saw no pursuit. Halfway up the hill I slid out of my blue falling jumper, tucked it as far under the root as it would go, and went on, thinking kindly thoughts about tannin pills. Now I'd be all but invisible if I stayed in the shadows. All but my white hair.

  Why had Lloobee made that grandstand play? It was as if he'd read my mind. He must have known there was no chance of escape for him. But I'd have had no chance without his diversion. Had he known I was conscious?

  Could Kdatlyno read minds?

  At the top of the hill I stopped in a cleft between two huge roots. The magenta tree seemed much too small to need all that root area, but the sunlight was rich, and maybe the soil was poor. And the roots would hide me.

  But where were my pursuers?

  I knew they needed me. They couldn't dispose of Emil until they had me. Granted that they could find me as soon as it got dark; I'd stand out like a beacon on a heat sensor. But suppose I reached the car first?

  The car! Sure, that was it. While I was crouching somewhere or taking a tangled trail that would keep me hidden at all times, Bellamy or one of his men was taking the shortest, straightest route to my car. To move it before I could reach it.

  I pounded my head to get it working. No use. I was stymied. The cave? I'd find guns in there, hunting guns. The anesthetic slivers probably wouldn't work on human beings, but they might be poisonous — and they would certainly hurt. But no, I couldn't attack the cave. There'd be no way around the booby trap.

  But there'd be someone in there to turn the booby trap on and off and to guard Lloobee. Another on the way to the car, that made two.

  The third would have found some high point, chosen days previously for its view of the surroundings. He'd be waiting now for a glimpse of my snow-white hair. I couldn't break and run for the car.

  Maybe.

  And maybe the third man had been the first to come charging after me. And maybe he'd snatched at the trigger cord as he passed to turn off a police stunner that was already off. And maybe he'd run through the beam.

  Maybe.

  But if anyone reached the car, I was cooked.

  I spun it over and over while handfuls of needed seconds passed me by. There was no other way to figure it. Tanya was back at camp. A second man was in the cave; a third was on the way to the car. The fourth either was waiting for me to show myself or he wasn't. I had to risk it.

  I came out from under the roots, running.

  I'm good at sprinting, not so good at a long-distance run. The edge of the forest was half a mile away. I was walking when I got there and blowing like a city-sized air pump. There was no sign of anyone and no sign of the car. I stood just within the forest, sucking wind, nerving myself to run out into the fern grass.

  Then Bellamy emerged to my left. He dog-trotted fearlessly out onto the veldt, into the fern grass, and stood looking around. One of Emil's sonics dangled from one hand. He must have known by then that it was only a dueling pistol, but it was the only sonic he had.

  He saw something to his right, something hidden from me by a curve of forest. He turned and trotted toward it.

  I followed as best I could. Multicolored things kept tripping me, and I didn't dare step out into the fern grass. Bellamy was going to get there first …

  He was examining the car when I found him. The car was right out in the open, tens of yards from any cover. Any second now he'd get in and take off.

  What was he waiting for? Me?

  I knelt behind a magenta bush, dithering. Bellamy was peering into the backseat. He wanted to know just what we'd planned before he made his move. Every two seconds his head would pop up for a long, slow look around.

  A black dot in the distance caught my eye. It took me a moment to realize that it was in the plastic goggles, blotting out the dot of actinic sunlight. The sun was right on the horizon.

  Bellamy was opening the trunk.

  … The sun.

  I started circling. The magenta bushes offered some cover, and I used it all. Bellamy's eyes maintained their steady sweep, but they hadn't found me yet.

  Abruptly he slammed the trunk, circled the car to get in.

  I was where I wanted to be. My long shadow pointed straight at the car. I charged.

  He looked up as I started. He looked straight at me, and then his eyes swept the curve of forest, taking their time. He bent to get into the car, and then he saw me. But his gun hand was in the car, and I was close enough. The dots on his goggles had covered more than CY Aquarii. They'd covered my approach.

  My shoulder knorked him spinning away from the car, and I heard a metal tick. He got up fast, empty-handed. No gun. He'd dropped it. I turned to look in the car, fully expecting to find it on the floor or on the seat. It was nowhere to be seen. I looked back in time to duck, and his other hand caught me and knocked me away. I rolled with it and came to my feet.

  He was standing in a relaxed boxer stance between me and the car.

  «I'm going to break you, Bey.»

  «So you can't find the gun, either.»

  «I don't need it. Any normal ten-year-old could break you in two.»

  «Then come on.» I dropped into boxer stance, thanking Finagle that he didn't know karate or ju-whatsis or any of the other illegal killing methods. Hundreds of years had passed since the usual laws against carrying a concealed weapon were extended to cover special fighting methods, but Bellamy had had hundreds of years to learn. I'd come up lucky.

  He came toward me, moving lightly and confidently, a flatlander in prime condition. He must have felt perfectly safe. What could he have to fear from an attenuated weakling, a man born and raised in We Made It's point six gee? He grinned when he was almost in range, and I hit him in the mouth.

  My range was longer than his.

  He danced back, and I danced forward and hit him in the nose before he got his guard up. He'd have to get used to the extra reach of my arms. But his guard was up now, and I saw no point in punching his forearms.

  «You're a praying mantis,» he said. «An insect. Overspecialized.» And he moved in.

  I moved back, punching lightly, staying out of his reach. He'd have to get used to that, too. His legs were too short. If he tried to move forward as fast as I could backpedal, he wouldn't be able to keep his guard up.

  He tried anyway. I caught him one below the ribs, and his head jerked up in surprise. I wasn't hurting him much … but he'd been expecting love pats. Four years in Earth's one point oh gee had put muscle on me, muscle that didn't show along my long bones. He tried crowding me, and I caught him twice in the right eye. He tried keeping his guard intact, and that was suicide because he couldn't reach me at all.

  I caught that eye a third time. He bellowed, lowered his head, and charged.

  I ran like a thief.

  I'd led him in a half circle. He never had a chance to catch me. He reached the car just as I slammed the door in his face and locked it.

  By the time he reached the left-hand door, I had that locked, too, and all the windows up. He was banging a rock on a window when I turned on the lift units and departed the field of battle.

  He'd have to get used to my methods of fighting, too.

  As I took the car up, I saw him running back toward the hunting camp.

  No radio. No com laser. The base was a third of the way around the planet, and I'd have to go myself.

  I set the autopilot to take me a thousand miles north of the base, flying low. Bellamy was bound to come after me with a car, and I didn't want to be found.

  Come to that, did he have a car? I hadn't seen one.

  Maybe he'd use –

  But that didn't bear thinking about, so I didn't.

  A glove compartment held a small bar. Emil and I hadn't depleted it much on the way out. I ordered something simple and sat sipping it,

  The forest disappeared behind me. I watched the endless plain of fern grass w
hipping underneath. Mach four is drifting with the breeze if you're a spaceman, but try it in a car with the altitude set for fifty yards. It wasn't frightening; it was hypnotic.

  The sun had been setting. Now it stayed just where it was, on the horizon, a little to my left. The ground was a blur; the sky was a frozen sphere. It was as if time stopped.

  I thought of Margo.

  What an actress she would have made! The confusion she'd shown after the kidnapping. She hadn't remembered the cargo mass meter; oh, no! She hadn't even known Lloobee was one of her passengers! Sure she hadn't.

  She'd taken me for a fool.

  I had no wish to harm her. When I told the MPs about Bellamy, she would not be mentioned. But she'd know that I knew.

  I wondered what had brought her into this.

  Come to that, what had brought Bellamy? He couldn't need the money that badly. Simple kicks? Had he wanted to strike at human-alien relationships? The races of known space are vastly richer for the interstellar trade. But Bellamy had lived through at least three human-kzinti wars; he'd read of things that looked like Lloobee in his children's books.

  He was a man displaced in time. I remembered the way he'd said «stark naked.» I'd used a nudist's license myself on Earth, not because I believed the incredible claims for nudism's health-giving properties but because I was with friends who did. Come to that, I was nude now. (Would I have to buy a license when I reached the base?) But Bellamy had laughed when he'd said it. Nudism was funny.

  I remembered the archaisms in his speech.

  Bellamy. He'd done nothing seriously wrong, not until he had decided to kill Emil and me. We could have been friends. Now it was too late. I finished my drink and crumpled the cup; it evaporated.

  A black streak on my goggles at the edge of my right eye.

  … Much too late. The black blotch of Bellamy's fusion flame was far to the north, passing me. He'd done it. He'd brought the Drunkard's Walk.

  Had he seen me?

  The ship curved around toward the sun, slowed, and stopped in my path. It came down my throat. I swerved; Bellamy swerved to meet me.

  He flashed by overhead, and my car, moving at Mach four, bucked under the lash of the sonic boom. The crash field gripped me for an instant, then went off.

  He turned and came from behind.

  Slam! And he was disappearing into the blue and green and orange sunset. What was he playing at? He must know that one touch of fusion flame would finish me.

  He could end me any time he pleased. The Drunkard's Walk was moving at twice my speed, and Bellamy moved it about like an extension of his fingers. He was playing with me.

  Again he turned, and again the hypersonic boom slapped me down. The blur of veldt came up at me, then receded. Another such might slap me into the fern grass at Mach four.

  He wasn't playing. He was trying to force me to land. My corpse was to carry no evidence of murder.

  Slam! And again the black blotch shrank against the sunset.

  It was no playboy's yacht he was flying. Such an expensive toy would have been long and slender, with a superfluous needle nose and low maneuverability due to its heavy angular movement. The Drunkard's Walk was short, with big attitude jets showing like nostrils in the stubby nose. I should have known when I saw the landing legs. Big and wide and heavy, folded now into the hull, but when they were down, they were comically splay-footed, with a wide reach to hold the ship on almost any terrain.

  The playboy's flashy paint job was indirection only. The ship …

  The ship made a wide loop ahead of me and came slashing back.

  I pulled back hard on the wheel.

  The blood left my head, and then the crash field took hold. I was in a cushioned shell, and the crash field held my shape like an exoskeleton. As I curved up to meet him Bellamy came down my throat.

  Give him a taste of his own medicine!

  If I hadn't been half-loaded, I'd never have done it.

  A crash now was the last thing Bellamy wanted. It would leave evidence not only on the car but on the Drunkard's Walk. But space pilots crack up more cars. They can't get used to the idea that in the atmosphere of a planet Mach four is fast. He must have been doing Mach eight himself.

  He pulled up too late.

  I smashed into the ship's flank at a low angle. Without the crash field I'd have been hamburger. As it was, I blacked out instantly.

  I woke in the midst of a flaming maelstrom, gripped in a vise that wouldn't let me breathe, with agony tearing at my hands. The car was diving out of the sky at four times sonic speed, with its aerodynamic stability smashed to hell. I could feel the terrific deceleration in my inner ear.

  I tried to use the controls. Not that they would have worked; the ship was obviously stone dead. But I tried it anyway, and then the pain came. My hands had been outside the crash field, naturally; how else could I control the car? Half the joints had been dislocated in the crash.

  The ground came up, rotating. I tried to pull my hands back, but deceleration pulled me hard against the crash web, and the crash field held. I was embedded in glass.

  I hit.

  The car was on its nose in high fern grass. All the plastic windows had become flying shards, including the windshield; they littered the car. The windshield frame was crushed and bent. I hung from the crash web, unable to unfasten it with my crippled hands, unable to move even if I were free.

  And I watched the Drunkard's Walk, its fusion drive off, floating down ahead of me on its gravity drag.

  I didn't notice the anomaly then. I was dazed, and I saw what I expected to see: a spaceship landing. Bellamy? He didn't see it, either, but he would have if he'd looked to the side when he came down the landing ladder.

  He came down the ladder with his eyes fixed on mine and Emil's sonic in his hand. He stepped out into the fern grass, walked over to the car, and peered in through the bent windshield frame.

  «Come on out.»

  «I can't use my hands.»

  «So much the better.» Bellamy rested the sonic on the rim of the frame and pointed it at my face. With his other hand he reached in to unfasten the crash web and pull me out by the arm. «Walk,» he said. «Or be dragged.»

  I could walk, barely. I could keep walking because he kept prodding the small of my back with the gun.

  «You've helped me, you know. You had a car crash,» he said. «You and Jilson. Then some predators found you.»

  It sounded reasonable. I kept walking.

  We were halfway to the ship when I saw it. The anomaly. I said, «Bellamy, what's holding your ship up?»

  He prodded me. «Walk.»

  «Your gyros. That's what's holding the ship up.»

  He prodded me without answering. I walked. Any moment now he'd see …

  «What the —» He'd seen it. He stared in pure amazement, and then he ran. I stuck out a foot to trip him, lost my balance, and fell on my face. Bellamy passed me without a glance.

  One of the landing legs wasn't down. I'd smashed it into the hull. He hadn't seen it on the indicators, so I must have smashed the sensors, too. The odd thing was that we'd both missed it, though it was the leg facing us.

  The Drunkard's Walk stood on two legs, wildly unbalanced, like a ballet dancer halfway through a leap. Only her gyros held her monstrous mass against gravity. Somewhere in her belly they must be spinning faster and faster … I could hear the whine now, high-pitched, rising …

  Bellamy reached the ladder and started up. He'd have to use the steering jets now, and quickly. With steering jets that size, the gyros — which served more or less the same purpose — must be small, little more than an afterthought.

  Now was my chance!

  I struggled to my feet and staggered a few steps. Bellamy looked down, then ignored me. He'd take care of me when he had time. Where could I go? Where could I hide on this flat plain?

  Some chance. I stopped walking.

  Bellamy had almost reached the air lock when the ship screamed like a wounde
d god.

  The gyros had taken too much punishment. That metal scream must have been the death agony of the mountings. Bellamy stopped. He looked down, and the ground was too far. He looked up, and there was no time. Then he turned and looked at me.

  I read his mind then, though I'm no telepath.

  Bey! What'll I DO?

  I had no answer for him. The ship screamed, and I hit the dirt. Well, I didn't hit it; I allowed myself to collapse. I was on the way down when Bellamy looked at me, and in the next instant the Drunkard's Walk spun end for end, shrieking.

  The nose gouged a narrow furrow in the soil, but the landing legs came down hard, dug deep, and held. Bellamy sailed high over my head, and I lost him in the sky. The ship poised, braced against her landing legs, taking spin from her dying flywheels. Then she jumped.

  The landing legs acted like springs, hurling her somersaulting into the air. She landed and jumped again, screaming, tumbling, like a wounded jackrabbit trying to flee the hunter. I wanted to cry. I'd done it; I was guilty; no ship should be killed like this.

  Somewhere in her belly the gyroscope flywheels were coming to rest in a tangle of torn metal.

  The ship landed and rolled. Bouncing. Rolling. I watched as she receded, and finally the Drunkard's Walk came to rest, dead, far across the blue-green veldt.

  I stood up and started walking.

  I passed Bellamy on the way. If you'd like to imagine what he looked like, go right ahead.

  It was nearly dark when I reached the ship.

  What I saw was a ship on its side, with one landing leg up. It's hard to damage hullmetal, especially at the low subsonic speeds the Drunkard's Walk was making when she did all that jumping. I found the air lock and climbed in.

  The lifesystem was a scrambled mess. Parts of it, the most rugged parts, were almost intact, but thin partitions between sections showed ragged, gaping holes. The flywheel must have passed here.

  The autodoc was near the back. It looked intact, and I needed it badly to take the pain from my hands and put them back together. I'd as soon have stepped into a Bandersnatch's mouth. You can get the willies thinking about all the things that can go wrong with a 'doc.