N-Space

by Larry Niven

  …It had started a year and a month ago, when two men climbed into the almost luxurious lifesystem of the Overcee, ran the ship out to Neptune’s orbit under escort, and vanished.

  One was back.

  Now his face was no stonier than Turnbull’s. Turnbull had just watched his work of the last ten years melt and run like quicksilver. He was mad clean through; but his mind worked furiously. Part of him, the smaller part, was wondering how he would explain the loss of ten billion dollars’ worth of ship. The rest was reviewing everything it could remember about Carver Geoffrey Rappaport and William (Wall) Kameon.

  Turnbull entered his office and went straight to the bookshelf, sure that Rappaport was following. He pulled out a leather-bound volume, did something to the binding and poured two paper cups full of amber fluid. The fluid was bourbon, and it was more than ice cold.

  Rappaport had seen this bookcase before, yet he wore a faintly puzzled frown as he took a cup. He said, “I didn’t think I’d ever anticipate anything again.”

  “The bourbon?”

  Rappaport didn’t answer. His first swallow was a gulp.

  “Did you destroy your ship?”

  “Yes. I set the controls so it would only melt. I didn’t want anyone hurt.”

  “Commendable. And the overcee motor? You left it in orbit?”

  “I hard-landed it on the Moon. It’s gone.”

  “That’s great. Just great. Carver, that ship cost ten billion dollars to build. We can duplicate it for four, I think, because we won’t be making any false starts, but you—”

  “Hell you wouldn’t.” Rappaport swirled the bourbon in his cup, looking down into the miniature whirlpool. He was twenty to thirty pounds lighter than he had been a year ago. “You build another Overcee and you’ll be making one enormous false start. We were wrong, Turnbull. It’s not our universe. There’s nothing out there for us.”

  “It is our universe.” Turnbull let the quiet certainty show in his politician’s voice. He needed to start an argument—he needed to get this man to talking. But the certainty was real, and always had been. It was humanity’s universe, ready for the taking.

  Over the rim of his cup Rappaport looked at him in exasperated pity. “Turnbull, can’t you take my word for it? It’s not our universe, and it’s not worth having anyway. What’s out there is—” He clamped his mouth shut and turned away in the visitor’s chair.

  Turnbull waited ten seconds to point up the silence. Then he asked, “Did you kill Kameon?”

  “Kill Wall? You’re out of your mind!”

  “Could you have saved him?”

  Rappaport froze in the act of turning around. “No,” he said. And again, “No. I tried to get him moving, but he wouldn’t—Stop it! Stop needling me. I can walk out anytime, and you couldn’t stop me.”

  “It’s too late. You’ve aroused my curiosity. What about Kameon’s black-bordered grave?”

  No answer.

  “Rappaport, you seem to think that the UN will just take your word and dismantle Project Overcee. There’s not a prayer of that. Probability zero. In the last century we’ve spent tens of billions of dollars on the ramrobots and the Overcee, and now we can rebuild her for four. The only way to stop that is to tell the UN exactly why they shouldn’t.”

  Rappaport didn’t answer, and Turnbull didn’t speak again. He watched Rappaport’s cigarette burning unheeded in the ashtray, leaving a strip of charred wet paper. It was uncharacteristic of the former Carver Rappaport to forget burning cigarettes, or to wear an untrimmed beard and sloppily cut hair. That man had been always clean shaven; that man had lined up his shoes at night, every night, even when staggering drunk.

  Could he have killed Kameon for being sloppy?—and then turned messy himself as he lost his self-respect? Stranger things had happened in the days when it took eight months to reach Mars.—No, Rappaport had not done murder; Turnbull would have bet high on that. And Kameon would have won any fair fight. Newspapermen had nicknamed him The Wall when he was playing guard for the Berlin Nazis.

  “You’re right. Where do I start?”

  Turnbull was jerked out of his abstraction. “Start at the beginning. When you went into hyperspace.”

  “We had no trouble there. Except with the windows. You shouldn’t have put windows on the Overcee.”

  “Why not? What did you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, then?”

  “You ever try to find your blind spot? You put two dots on a piece of paper, maybe an inch apart, and you close one eye, focus on one dot and slowly bring the paper up to your face. At some point the other dot disappears. Looking at the window in overcee is like your blind spot expanding to a two-foot square with rounded corners.”

  “I assume you covered them up.”

  “Sure. Would you believe it, we had trouble finding those windows? When you wanted them they were invisible. We got them covered with blankets. Then every so often we’d catch each other looking under the blankets. It bothered Wall worse than me. We could have made the trip in five months instead of six, but we had to keep coming out for a look around.”

  “Just to be sure the universe was still there.”

  “Right.”

  “But you did reach Sirius.”

  “Yes. We reached Sirius…”

  Ramrobot #6 had reported from Sirius B, half a century ago. The Sirius stars are an unlikely place to look for habitable worlds, since both stars are blue-white giants. Still, the ramrobots had been programed to test for excessive ultraviolet. Sirius B was worth a look.

  The ship came out where Sirius was two bright stars. It turned its sharp nose toward the dimmer star and remained motionless for twenty minutes, a silver torpedo shape in a great, ungainly cradle studded with heavy electromagnetic motors. Then it was gone again.

  Now Sirius B was a searing ball of light. The ship began to swing about, like a hound sniffing the breeze, but slowly, ponderously.

  “We found four planets,” said Rappaport. “Maybe there were more, but we didn’t look. Number Four was the one we wanted. It was a cloudy ball about twice the size of Mars, with no moon. We waited until we’d found it before we started celebrating.”

  “Champagne?”

  “Hah! Cigars and drunk pills. And Wall shaved off his grubby beard. My God, we were glad to be out in space again! Near the end it seemed like those blind spots were growing around the edges of the blankets. We smoked our cigars and sucked our drunk pills and yakked about the broads we’d known. Not that we hadn’t done that before. Then we slept it off and went back to work…”

  • • •

  The cloud cover was nearly unbroken. Rappaport moved the telescope a bit at a time, trying to find a break. He found several, but none big enough to show him anything. “I’ll try infrared,” he said.

  “Just get us down,” Wall said irritably. He was always irritable lately. “I want to get to work.”

  “And I want to be sure we’ve got a place to land.”

  Carv’s job was the ship. He was pilot, astrogator, repairman, and everything but the cook. Wall was the cook. Wall was also the geologist, astrophysicist, biologist, and chemist—the expert on habitable planets, in theory. Each man had been trained nine years for his job, and each had some training as backup man for the other; and in each case the training had been based largely on guesswork.

  The picture on the scope screen changed from a featureless disk to a patterned ball as Carv switched to infrared. “Now which is water?” he wondered.

  “The water’s brighter on the night side and darker on the day side. See?” Wall was looking over his shoulder. “Looks like about forty percent land. Carv, those clouds might cut out enough of the ultraviolet to let people live in what gets through.”

  “Who’d want to? You couldn’t see the stars.” Carv turned a knob to raise the magnification.

  “Hold it right there, Carv. Look at that. There’s a white line around the edge of that continent.”

&n
bsp; “Dried salt?”

  “No. It’s warmer than what’s around it. And it’s just as bright on the night side as on the day.”

  “I’ll get us a closer look.”

  The Overcee was in orbit, three hundred miles up. By now the continent with the “hot” border was almost entirely in shadow. Of the three supercontinents, only one showed a white shoreline under infrared.

  Wall hung at the window, looking down. To Rappaport he looked like a great ape. “Can we do a reentry glide?”

  “In this ship? The Overcee would come apart like a cheap meteor. We’ll have to brake to a full stop above the atmosphere. Want to strap down?”

  Kameon did, and Carv watched him do it before he went ahead and dropped the overcee motor. I’ll be glad to be out of here, he thought. It’s getting so Wall and I hate the sight of each other. The casual, uncaring way Kameon fastened his straps jarred his teeth. He knew that Kameon thought he was finicky to the point of psychasthenia.

  The fusion drive started and built up to one gee. Carv swung the ship around. Only the night side showed below, with the faint blue light of Sirius A shining softly off the cloud cover. Then the edge of dawn came up in tom blue-white cloud. Carv saw an enormous rift in the cloud bank and turned ship to shift their path over it.

  Mountains and valleys, and a wide river…Patches of wispy cloud shot by, obscuring the view, but they could see down. Suddenly there was a black line, a twisting ribbon of India ink, and beyond that the ocean.

  Only for a moment the ocean showed, and then the rift jogged east and was gone. But the ocean was an emerald green.

  Wall’s voice was soft with awe. “Carv, there’s life in that water.”

  “You sure?”

  “No. It could be copper salts or something. Carv, we’ve got to get down there!”

  “Oh, wait your turn. Did you notice that your hot border is black in visible light?”

  “Yah. But I can’t explain it. Would it be worth our while to turn back after you get the ship slowed?”

  Carv fingered his neatly trimmed Vandyke. “It’d be night over the whole continent before we got back there. Let’s spend a few hours looking at that green ocean.”

  The Overcee went down on her tail, slowly, like a cautious crab. Layer after layer of cloud swallowed her without trace, and darkness fell as she dropped. The key to this world was the word “moonless.” Sirius B-IV had had no oversized moon to strip away most of her atmosphere. Her air pressure would be comfortable at sea level, but only because the planet was too small to hold more air. That same low gravity produced a more gentle pressure gradient, so that the atmosphere reached three times as high as on Earth. There were cloud layers from ground to 130 kilometers up.

  The Overcee touched down on a wide beach on the western shore of the smallest continent. Wall came out first, then Carv lowered a metal oblong as large as himself and followed it down. They wore lightly pressurized vac suits. Carv did nothing for twenty minutes while Wall opened the box out flat and set the carefully packed instruments into their grooves and notches. Finally Wall signaled, in an emphatic manner. By taking off his helmet.

  Carv waited a few seconds, then followed suit.

  Wall asked, “Were you waiting to see if I dropped dead?”

  “Better you than me.” Carv sniffed the breeze. The air was cool and humid, but thin. “Smells good enough. No. No, it doesn’t. It smells like something rotting.”

  “Then I’m right. There’s life here. Let’s get down to the beach.”

  The sky looked like a raging thunderstorm, with occasional vivid blue flashes that might have been lightning. They were flashes of sunlight penetrating tier upon tier of cloud. In that varying light Carv and Wall stripped off their suits and went down to look at the ocean, walking with shuffling steps in the light gravity.

  The ocean was thick with algae. Algae were a bubbly green blanket on the water, a blanket that rose and fell like breathing as the insignificant waves ran beneath. The smell of rotting vegetation was no stronger here than it had been a quarter of a mile back. Perhaps the smell pervaded the whole planet. The shore was a mixture of sand and green scum so rich that you could have planted crops in it.

  “Time I got to work,” said Wall. “You want to fetch and carry for me?”

  “Later maybe. Right now I’ve got a better idea. Let’s get the hell out of each other’s sight for an hour.”

  “That is brilliant. But take a weapon.”

  “To fight off maddened algae?”

  “Take a weapon.”

  Carv was back at the end of an hour. The scenery had been deadly monotonous. There was water below a green blanket of scum six inches deep; there was loamy sand, and beyond that dry sand; and behind the beach were white cliffs, smoothed as if by countless rainfalls. He had found no target for his laser cutter.

  Wall looked up from a binocular microscope, and grinned when he saw his pilot. He tossed a depleted pack of cigarettes. “And don’t worry about the air plant!” he called cheerfully.

  Carv came up beside him. “What news?”

  “It’s algae. I can’t name the breed, but there’s not much difference between this and any terrestrial algae, except that this sample is all one species.”

  “That’s unusual?” Carv was looking around him in wonder. He was seeing a new side to Wall. Aboard ship Wall was sloppy almost to the point of being dangerous, at least in the eyes of a Belter like Carv. But now he was at work. His small tools were set in neat rows on portable tables. Bulkier instruments with legs were on flat rock, the legs carefully adjusted to leave their platforms exactly horizontal. Wall handled the binocular microscope as if it might dissolve at a touch.

  “It is,” said Wall. “No little animalcules moving among the strands. No variations in structure. I took samples from depths up to six feet. All I could find was the one alga. But otherwise—I even tested for proteins and sugars. You could eat it. We came all this way to find pond scum.”

  They came down on an island five hundred miles south. This time Carv helped with the collecting. They got through faster that way, but they kept getting in each other’s way. Six months spent in two small rooms had roused tempers too often. It would take more than a few hours on ground before they could bump elbows without a fight.

  Again Carv watched Wall go through his routines. He stood just within voice range, about fifty yards away, because it felt so good to have so much room. The care Wall exercised with his equipment still amazed him. How could he reconcile it with Wall’s ragged fingernails and his thirty hours growth of beard?

  Well, Wall was a flatlander. All his life he’d had a whole planet to mess up, and not a crowded pressure dome or the cabin of a ship. No flat ever learned real neatness.

  “Same breed,” Wall called.

  “Did you test for radiation?”

  “No. Why?”

  “This thick air must screen out a lot of gamma rays. That means your algae can’t mutate without local radiation from the ground.”

  “Carv, it had to mutate to get to its present form. How could all its cousins just have died out?”

  “That’s your field.”

  A little later Wall said, “I can’t get a respectable background reading anywhere. You were right, but it doesn’t explain anything.”

  “Shall we go somewhere else?”

  “Yah.”

  They set down in deep ocean, and when the ship stopped bobbing Carv went out the airlock with a glass bucket. “It’s a foot thick out there,” he reported. “No place for a Disneyland. I don’t think I’d want to settle here.”

  Wall sighed his agreement. The green scum lapped thickly at the Overcee’s gleaming metal hull, two yards below the sill of the airlock.

  “A lot of planets must be like this,” said Carv. “Habitable, but who needs it?”

  “And I wanted to be the first man to found an interstellar colony.”

  “And get your name in the newstapes, the history books—”

 
“—And my unforgettable face on every trivis in the solar system. Tell me, shipmate, if you hate publicity so much, why have you been trimming that Vandyke so prettily?”

  “Guilty. I like being famous. Just not as much as you do.”

  “Cheer up then. We may yet get all the hero worship we can stand. This may be something bigger than a new colony.”

  “What could be bigger than that?”

  “Set us down on land and I’ll tell you.”

  • • •

  On a chunk of rock just big enough to be called an island, Wall set up his equipment for the last time. He was testing for food content again, using samples from Carv’s bucket of deep ocean algae.

  Carv stood by, a comfortable distance away, watching the weird variations in the clouds. The very highest were moving across the sky at enormous speeds, swirling and changing shape by the minutes and seconds. The noonday light was subdued and pearly. No doubt about it, Sirius B-IV had a magnificent sky.

  “Okay, I’m ready.” Wall stood up and stretched. “This stuff isn’t just edible. I’d guess it would taste as good as the food supplements they were using on Earth before the fertility laws cut the population down to something reasonable. I’m going to taste it now.”

  The last sentence hit Carv like an electric shock. He was running before it was quite finished, but long before he could get there his crazy partner had put a dollup of green scum in his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Good,” he said.

  “You—utter—damned—fool.”

  “Not so. I knew it was safe. The stuff has an almost cheesy flavor. You could get tired of it fast, I think, but that’s true of anything.”

  “Just what are you trying to prove?”

  “That this alga was tailored as a food plant by biological engineers. Carv, I think we’ve landed on somebody’s private farm.”