A Gift From Earth

by Larry Niven

  Lydia turned appealingly to Hood.

  "I pass," said Hood. "I think you're all ignoring something."

  Harry said, "Oh?"

  "I'm not sure yet. I'll have to wait and see. Keep talking."

  "I don't understand," said Lydia. "I don't understand any of you. What have we been fighting for? What have we been dying for? To smash the organ banks!"

  "You're overlooking something, Mrs. Hancock," Parlette said gently. "It isn't that the crew wouldn't agree to that, and it isn't that the colonists wouldn't agree to that. They wouldn't, of course. But I won't let you kick in the organ banks."

  "No." Lydia's words dripped scorn. "You'd have to die then, wouldn't you?"

  "Yes, I would. And you need me."

  "Why? What have you got for us besides your influence and your good advice?"

  "A small army. I have more than one hundred lineal descendants. They've been prepared for this day for a very long time. Not all of them will follow me, but most will obey my orders without question. They all have hunting weapons."

  Lydia sighed, raggedly.

  "We'll do our best, Mrs. Hancock. We can't eliminate the organ banks, but we can eliminate the injustice."

  "What we'll have to do," said Harry, "is establish a first-come, first-serve basis for what's already in the banks. Whoever gets sick first ... you see what I mean. Meanwhile we set up a new code of law, so that a crew stands just as much chance of getting into the banks as a colonist."

  "Don't push to hard there, Kane. Remember, we have to satisfy both groups."

  "Phut!" said Lydia Hancock. It was hard to tell whether she was ready to cry or to start a fistfight.

  They were a circle of three, leaning toward each other across the coffeetable, holding forgotten mugs. Hood sat a little back from the coffeetable, ignored, waiting for something.

  "The thing is," said Parlette, "We can make everyone equal before the law. We can do that, and get away with it, provided that there is no redistribution of property. Do you agree to that?"

  "Not completely."

  "Look at the logic. Everyone is equal in the courts. A crime is a crime. But the more property a man has, the less likely he is to want to commit a crime. It gives the crew something to protect, and it gives the colonist something to gain."

  "It makes sense, yes. But there are a few things we'll want."

  "Go ahead."

  "Our own electrical power sources."

  "Fine. We'll supply it free until we can build plants on Gamma and Delta. We can put hydraulic plants along the Muddy and Long Fall rivers."

  "Good. We want free access to the organ banks guaranteed."

  "That's a problem. An organ bank is like any other bank. You can't take out more than you put in. We'll have less condemned criminals and a lot more sick colonists to take care of."

  Hood had his chair tilted back on two legs, with his feet on the edge of the table. His eyes were half closed, as if he was dreaming pleasant daydreams.

  "Lotteries, then, fair lotteries. And heavy research into alloplasty, financed by the crew."

  "Why the crew?"

  "You've got all the money."

  "We can work out a graduated tax. Anything else?"

  "There are a lot of unjust laws. We'll want to build houses as we see fit. No restrictions on the clothes we wear. Free travel. The right to buy machinery, any machinery, at the same price a crew pays. We'll want to put some solid restrictions on Implementation — "

  "Why? They'll be police. They'll be enforcing your laws."

  "Parlette, have you ever had a squad of police come crashing through the wall of your house, throwing mercy-bullets and sleepy gas around, dragging housecleaners into the light, tearing up the indoor lawn?"

  "I've never been a rebel."

  "The hell you say."

  Parlette smiled. It made him look too much like a death's head. "I've never been caught."

  "Point is, Implementation can do that to anyone. And does, constantly. The householder doesn't even get an apology when they don't find evidence of crime."

  "I hate to restrict the police. It's a sure route to chaos." Parlette took a long swallow of cider. "All right, how does this sound? There used to be a thing called a search warrant. If kept the UN police from entering any home unless they had a good and sufficient reason, one they could show to a judge."

  "Sounds good."

  "I can look up the details in the library."

  "Another thing. As things stand now, Implementation has an exclusive monopoly on prisoners. They catch 'em, decide whether they're guilty, and take 'em apart. We ought to split those functions up somehow."

  "I've thought about that, Kane. We can establish laws such that no man can be executed until he has been declared guilty by a clear majority of ten men. Five crew, five colonists, in cases where crew and colonists are both involved. Otherwise, trial by five of the prisoner's own social group. All trials to be public, on some special teedee channel."

  "That sound — "

  "I knew it." Jay Hood dropped back into the discussion with a thump of chair legs on flooring. "Do you realize that every suggestion either of you has made tonight would take power away from the Hospital?"

  Parlette frowned. "Perhaps. What does it matter?"

  "You've been talking as if there were two power groups on Mount Lookitthat. There are three! You, us, and the Hospital, and the Hospital is the most powerful. Parlette, you've been studying the Sons of Earth for Mist Demons know how long. Have you spent any time studying Jesus Pietro Castro?"

  "I've known him a long time." Millard Parlette considered. "At least, I know he's competent. I don't suppose I really know how he thinks."

  "Harry does. Harry, what would Castro do if we tried to put all these restrictions on his police?"

  "I don't understand you," said Millard Parlette. "Castro is a good, loyal man. He has never done anything that wasn't in the best interests of the crew. Perhaps I don't know him socially, but I do know that he regards himself as a servant of the crew. Anything the crew accepts, lie will accept."

  "Dammit, Hood's right," said Harry Kane. "I know Castro better than I knew my father. I just hadn't thought of this."

  "Jesus Pietro Castro is a good, loyal — "

  " — Servant of the crew. Right. Now hold on just a minute, Parlette. Let me speak.

  "First of all, what crew? What crew is he loyal to?"

  Parlette snorted. He picked up his mug and found it empty.

  "He's not loyal to any specific crew," said Harry Kane. "In fact he doesn't respect most crew. He respects you, and there are others who fit his ideals, but what he's loyal to is a sort of ideal crew: a man who does not overspend, is polite to his inferiors and knows exactly how to treat them, and has the best interests of the colonists in his mind at all times. This image is the man he serves.

  "Now, let's look for a moment at what we propose to do. Search warrants for the Implementation police. We remove Implementation's power to choose what colonists get the leftover materials from the organ banks. We tell them who they may and may not execute. Anything else, Jay?"

  "Power. We're taking the electrical monopoly away from the Hospital. Oh, and with less restrictions on the colonists, the police would have less work to do. Castro would have to fire some of 'em."

  "Right. Now, you don't suppose every crew on the Plateau is going to agree with all of that, do you?"

  "No, not all. Of course not. We may be able to swing a majority. At least a majority of political power."

  "Damn your majority. What crew is Castro going to be loyal to? You can name him."

  Parlette was rubbing the back of his neck. "I see your point, of course. Given that you've analyzed Castro correctly, he'll follow the conservative faction."

  "He will, believe me. The crew who would rather die than accept our compromise is the man he'll follow. And all of Implementation will follow him. He's their leader."

  "And they've got all the weapons," said Hood.
/>   12: The Slowboat

  Bleeding heart. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist.

  Why Polly Tournquist?

  She could have nothing to do with the present trouble. Since Saturday evening she had been suffering sensory deprivation in the coffin cure. Why must he be haunted by the colonist girl? What was her hold on him that she could pull him away from his office at a time like this? He hadn't felt a fascination like this since ...

  He couldn't remember.

  The guard in front of him stopped suddenly, pushed a button in the wall, and stepped aside. Jesus Pietro jerked back to reality. They had reached the elevator.

  The doors slid back, and Jesus Pietro stepped in, followed by the two guards.

  (Where's Polly? Deep in his mind something whispered, Where is she? Subliminally, he remembered. Tell me where Polly is!)

  Bleeding heart. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist.

  Either he'd finally lost his mind — and over a colonist girl! — or there was some connection between Matthew Keller and Polly Tournquist. But he had no evidence of that at all.

  Perhaps the girl could tell him.

  And if she could, certainly she would.

  Matt had trailed them to the end of a blind corridor. When they stopped, Matt stopped too, confused. Was Castro going to Polly, or wasn't he?

  Doors slid back in the wall, and Matt's three guides entered. Matt followed, but stopped at the doors. The room was too small. He'd bump an elbow and get shot ....

  The doors closed in his face. Matt heard muted mechanical noises, diminishing.

  What in blazes was it, an airlock? And why here?

  He was at the end of a dead-end corridor, lost in the Hospital. The Head and two guards were on the other side of those doors. Two guards, armed and alert — but they were the only guides he had. Matt pushed the big black button which had opened the doors.

  This time they stayed closed.

  He pushed it again. Nothing happened.

  Was he doing exactly what the guard had done? Had the guard used a whistle, or a key?

  Matt looked down the hall to where it bent, wondering if he could make his way back to Castro's office. Probably not. He pushed the button again ....

  A muted mechanical noise, nearly inaudible, but rising.

  Presently the doors opened to show a tiny, box-like room, empty.

  He stepped in, crouched slightly, ready for anything. There were no doors in the back. How had the others left? Nothing. Nothing but four buttons labeled One, Two, Door Open, Emergency Stop.

  He pushed them in order. One did nothing. He pushed Two, and everything happened at once.

  The doors closed.

  The room started to move. He felt it, vibration and uncanny pressure against the soles of his feet. He dropped to his hands and knees, choking off a yell.

  The pressure was gone, but still the room quivered with motion, and still there was the frightening, unfamiliar sound of machinery. Matt waited, crouching on all fours.

  There was a sudden foreign feeling in his belly and gonads, a feel of falling. Matt said, "Wump!" and clutched at himself. The box jarred to a stop.

  The doors opened. He came out slowly.

  He was on a high narrow bridge. The moving box was at one end, supported in four vertical girders that dropped straight down into a square hole in the roof of the Hospital. At the other end of the bridge was a similar set of girders, empty.

  Matt had never been this high outside a car. All of the Hospital was below him, lit by glare lights: the sprawling amorphous structure of rooms and corridors, the inner grounds, the slanting wall, the defense perimeter, the trapped forest, and the access road. And rising up before him was the vast black hull of the Planck.

  Matt's end of the bridge was just outside what was obviously the outer hull of the ancient slowboat. The bridge crossed the chisel-sharp ring of the leading edge, so that its other end was over the attic.

  The Planck. Matt looked down along the smooth black metal flank of the outer hull. For most of its length the ship was cylindrical; but the tail, the trailing edge, flared outward for a little distance, and the leading edge was beveled like a chisel, curving in at a thirty-degree angle to close the twenty-foot gap between outer and inner hulls, the gap that held the guts of the ship. More than halfway down, just below a ring of narrow windows, the roof of the Hospital moved in to grip the hull.

  Something hummed behind him.

  The moving box was on its way down.

  Matt watched it go, and then he started across the bridge, sliding his hands along the hip-high handrails. The dropping of the box might mean that someone would be coming up.

  At the other end he looked for a black button in one of the four supporting girders. It was there, and he pushed it. Then he looked down.

  The Attic, the space enclosed by the inner hull, was as perfectly cylindrical as a soup can with both ends removed. Four airfoils formed a cross at the stem, a few yards above the ground, and where they crossed was a bulky, pointed casing. There was a ring of four windows halfway down the inner hull. The airlock was at the same level. Matt could see it by looking between the hull and the moving box, which was rising toward him.

  Matt felt a chill as he looked down at that pointed casing between the fins. The ship's center of mass was directly over it. Therefore it had to be the fusion drive.

  The Planck was rumored to be a dangerous place, and not without reason. A ship that had carried men between the stars, a ship three hundred years old, was bound to inspire awe. But there was real power here. The Planck's landing motors should still be strong enough to hurl her into the sky. Her fusion drive supplied electrical power to all the colonist regions: to teedee stations, homes, smokeless factories — and if that fusion plant ever blew, it would blow Alpha Plateau into the void.

  Somewhere in the lifesystem, sandwiched between inner and outer hull, were the controls that could blow the bomb in that casing. The Head was in there too ... somewhere.

  If Matt could bring them together ....

  The moving box reached the top, and Matt entered.

  It dropped a long way. The Planck was tall. Even the beveled ring of the leading edge, which had held stored equipment for the founding of a colony, was forty feet high. The ship was one hundred and eighty feet high, including a landing skirt, for the inner hull did not quite reach the ground. The stem and the mouths of the landing motors were supported ten feet above the ground by that long skirt-like extension of the outer hull.

  This moving box was an open grid. Matt could watch his progress all the way down. Had he been acrophobic, he'd have been insane before the box stopped opposite the airlock.

  The airlock was not much bigger than the moving box. Inside, it was all dark metal, with a dial-and-control panel in chipped blue plastic. Already Matt was heartily sick of blinking dials and metal walls. It was strange and discomforting to be surrounded by so much metal, and unnerving to wonder what all those dials were trying to tell him.

  Set in the ceiling was something Matt had trouble recognizing. Something simple, almost familiar ... ah. A ladder. A ladder running uselessly from door to wall across the ceiling of the airlock.

  Sure. With the ship spinning in space, the outer door would be a trapdoor down from the attic. Of course you'd need a ladder. Matt grinned and strode through the airlock and nearly ran face on into a policeman.

  "The luck of Matt Keller" had no time to work. Matt dodged back into the airlock. He heard a patter of mercybullets, like gravel on metal. In a moment the man would be around the corner, firing.

  Matt yelled the only thing he could think of. "Stop! It's me!"

  The guard was around in the same instant. But he didn't fire yet ... and he didn't fire yet ... and presently he turned and went, muttering a surly apology. Matt wondered whom he'd been taken for. It wouldn't matter; the man had already forgotten him.

  Matt chose to follow him instead of turning the other way. It seemed to him that if a guard saw two men app
roach, and ignored one and recognized the other, he wouldn't shoot — no matter how trigger-happy he was.

  The corridor was narrow, and it curved to the left. Floor and ceiling were green. The left-hand wall was white, set with uncomfortably bright lights; the wall on the right was black, with a roughened rubbery surface, obviously designed as a floor. Worse yet, the doors were all trapdoors leading down into the floor and up into the ceiling. Most of the doors in the floor were closed and covered with walkways. Most of the ceiling doors were open, and ladders led up into these. All the ladders and walkways looked old and crude, colony-built, and all were riveted into place.

  It was eerie. Everything was on its side. Walking through this place was like defying gravity.

  Matt heard sounds and voices from some of the rooms above. They told him nothing. He couldn't see what was happening above him, and he didn't try. He was listening for Castro's voice.

  If he could get the Head to the fusion-drive controls ... wherever they were ... then he could threaten to blow up the Planck. Castro had held out under threat of physical pain, but how would he react to a threat to Alpha Plateau?

  And all Matt wanted was to free one prisoner.

  ... That was Castro's voice. Coming not from the ceiling but from underfoot, from a closed door. Matt bent over the walkway across it and tried the handle. Locked.

  Knock? But all of Implementation was on edge tonight, ready to shoot at anything. Under such circumstances Matt could be unconscious and falling long seconds before a gunman could lose interest in him.

  No way to steal a key, to identify the right key. And he couldn't stay here forever.

  If only Laney were here now.

  A voice. Polly jerked to attention — except that she felt no jerk; she did not know if she had moved or not.

  A voice. For some timeless interval she had existed with no sensation at all. There were pictures in her memory and games she could play in her mind, and for a time there had been sleep. Some friend had shot her full of mercy-bullets. She remembered the sting, vividly. But she'd wakened. Mental games had failed; she couldn't concentrate. She had begun to doubt the reality of her memories. Friends' faces were blurred. She had clung to the memory of Jay Hood, his sharp-edged, scholarly face, easy to remember. Jay. For two years they had been little more than close friends. But in recent hours she had loved him hopelessly; his was the only visual image that would come clear to her, except for a hated face, wide and expressionless, decorated with a bright snowy moustache: the face of the enemy. But she was trying to make Jay come too clear, to give him texture, expression, meaning. He had blurred, she had reached to bring him back, he had blurred more ...