by Larry Niven
"The skeletons got thicker as we went along. Some of them had daggers of splintered bone. One had a chipped stone fist ax. You see, Turnbull, they were intelligent. They could make tools, if they could find anything to make tools out of.
"After we'd been walking awhile we saw that some of the skeletons were alive. Dying and drying under that overcast blue sky. I'd thought that sky was pretty once. Now it was— horrible. You could see a shifting blue beam spear down on the sand and sweep across it like a spotlight until it picked out a mummy. Sometimes the mummy would turn over and cover its eyes.
"Wall's face was livid, like a dead man's. I knew it wasn't just the light. We'd been walking about five minutes, and the dead and living skeletons were all around us. The live ones all stared at us, apathetically, but still staring, as if we were the only things in the world worth looking at. If they had anything to wonder with, they must have been wondering what it was that could move and still not be human. We couldn't have looked human to them. We had shoes and coveralls on, and we were too small.
"Wall said, 'I've been wondering about the clean skeletons. There shouldn't be any decay bacteria here.'"
"I didn't answer. I was thinking how much this looked like a combination of Hell and Belsen. The only thing that might have made it tolerable was the surrealistic blue lighting. We couldn't really believe what we were seeing.
"'There weren't enough fats in the algae,' said Wall. 'There was enough of everything else, but no fats.'"
"We were closer to the beach now. And some of the mummies were beginning to stir. I watched a pair behind a dune who looked like they were trying to kill each other, and then suddenly I realized what Wall had said.
"I took his arm and turned to go back. Some of the long skeletons were trying to get up. I knew what they were thinking. There may be meat in those limp coverings. Wet meat, with water in it. There just may. I pulled at Wall and started to run.
"He couldn't run. He tried to pull loose. I had to leave him. They couldn't catch me, they were too starved, and I was jumping like a grasshopper. But they got Wall, all right. I heard his destruct capsule go off. Just a muffled pop."
"So you came home."
"Uh huh." Rappaport looked up like a man waking from a nightmare. "It took seven months. All alone."
"Any idea why Wall killed himself?"
"You crazy? He didn't want to get eaten."
"Then why wouldn't he run?"
"It wasn't that he wanted to kill himself, Turnbull. He just decided it wasn't worthwhile saving himself.
Another six months in the Overcee, with the blind spots pulling at his eyes and that nightmare of a world constantly on his mind— it wasn't worth it."
"I'll bet the Overcee was a pigpen before you blew it up."
Rappaport flushed. "What's that to you?"
"You didn't think it was worthwhile either. When a Belter stops being neat it's because he wants to die.
A dirty ship is deadly. The air plant gets fouled. Things float around loose, ready to knock your brains out when the drive goes on. You forget where you put the meteor patches—"
"All right. I made it, didn't I?"
"And now you think we should give up space."
Rappaport's voice went squeaky with emotion. "Turnbull, aren't you convinced yet? We've got a paradise here, and you want to leave it for— that. Why? Why?"
"To build other paradises, maybe. Ours didn't happen by accident. Our ancestors did it all, starting with not much more than what was on Sirius B-IV."
"They had a helluva lot more." A faint slurring told that the bourbon was finally getting to Rappaport.
"Maybe they did at that. But now there's a better reason. These people you left on the beach. They need our help. And with a new Overcee, we can give it to them. What do they need most, Carver? Trees or meat animals?"
"Animals." Rappaport shuddered and drank.
"Well— that could be argued. But pass it. First we'll have to make soil." Turnbull leaned back in his chair, face upturned, talking half to himself. "Algae mixed with crushed rock. Bacteria to break the rock down. Earthworms. Then grass..."
"Got it all planned out, do you? And you'll talk the UN into it, too. Turnbull, you're good. But you've missed something."
"Better tell me now then."
Rappaport got carefully to his feet. He came over to the desk, just a little unsteadily, and leaned on it so that he stared down into Turnbull's eyes from a foot away. "You've been assuming that those people on the beach really were the farmer's race. That Sirius B-IV has been deserted for a long, long time. But what if some kind of carnivore seeded that planet? Then what? The algae wouldn't be for them. They'd let the algae grow, plant food animals, then go away until the animals were jammed shoulder to shoulder along the coast. Food animals! You understand, Turnbull?"
"Yes. I hadn't thought of that. And they'd breed them for size..."
The room was deadly quiet.
"Well?"
"Well, we'll simply have to take that chance, won't we?"
***
Bordered in Black does not belong to the Known Space universe. (And if that statement means nothing to you, don't worry about it.)
When I wrote Bordered in Black, Known Space had not taken form. I was playing with some preliminary ideas, and one of these— the "Blind Spot" effect of this form of faster-than-light travel— was later incorporated into Known Space. But it's a different timeline entirely.
Similar statements hold for One Face, which follows. Hair styles and human colony worlds from this story later entered Known Space; but the story does not belong to that universe.
A further note to both stories. Many astronomers believed for a time (the time following our discovery that Venus's atmosphere was sixty times as thick as Earth's, and hotter than Hell) that an Earth-sized world could not have an Earthlike atmosphere unless there was an oversized moon to skim away most of the more normal "Venusian" atmosphere. That idea has now been discredited.
***
One Face
An alarm rang: a rising, falling crescendo, a mechanical shriek of panic. The baritone voice of the ship's Brain blared, "Strac Astrophysics is not in his cabin! Strac Astrophysics, report to your cabin immediatelyl The Hogan's Goat will Jump in sixty seconds."
Verd sat bolt upright, then forced himself to lie down again. The Hogan's Goat had not lost a passenger through carelessness in all the nearly two centuries of Verd's captaincy. Passengers were supposed to be careless. If Strac didn't reach his room Verd would have to postpone Jump to save his life: a serious breach of custom.
Above the green coffin which was his Jump couch the Brain said, "Strac Astrophysics is in his cabin and protected."
Verd relaxed.
"Five," said the Brain. "Four. Three..."
In various parts of the ship, twenty-eight bodies jerked like springs released "Oof," came a complaint from the Jump couch next to Verd's. "That felt strange. Damn strange."
"Um," said Verd.
Lourdi Coursefinder tumbled out of her Jump couch. She was a blend of many subdivisions of man, bearing the delicate, willowy beauty born of low-gravity worlds. She was Verd's wife, and an experienced traveler. Now she looked puzzled and disturbed.
"Jump never felt like that. What do you suppose—"
Verd grunted as he climbed out. He was a few pounds overweight. His face was beefy, smooth and unlined, fashionably hairless. So was his scalp, except for a narrow strip of black brush which ran straight up from between his brow ridges and continued across his scalp and downward until it faded out near the small of his back. Most of the hair had been surgically implanted. Neither wrinkled skin nor width of hair strip could number a man's years, and superficially Verd might have been anywhere from twenty to four hundred years old. It was in his economy of movement that his age showed. He did things the easy way, the fast way. He never needed more than seconds to find it, and he always took that time. The centuries had taught him well.
"I don't
know," he said. "Let's find out what it was. Brain!" he snapped at a wall speaker.
The silence stretched like a nerve.
"Brain?"
***
One wall arced over to become the ceiling, another jogged inward to leave room for a piece of the total conversion drive, a third was all controls and indicators for the ship's Brain. This was the crew common room. It was big and comfortable, a good place to relax, and no crewman minded its odd shape. Flat ceilings were for passengers.
Verd Spacercaptain, Lourdi Coursefinder, and Parliss Lifesystems sat along one wall, watching the fourth member of the crew.
Chanda Metalminds was a tall, plain woman whose major beauty was her wavy black hair. A strip three inches wide down the center of her scalp had been allowed to grow until it hung to the region of her coccyx. Satin black and satin smooth, it gleamed and rippled as she moved. She stood before the biggest of the Brain screens, which now showed a diagram of the Hogan's Goat, and she used her finger as a pointer.
"The rock hit here." Chanda's finger rested almost halfway back along the spinal maze of lines and little black squares which represented the Jumper section. The Hogan's Goat was a sculptured torpedo, and the Jumper machinery was its rounded nose and its thick spine and its trailing wasplike sting. You could see it in the diagram. The rest of the Goat had been designed to fit the Jumper. And the Jumper was cut by a slanting line, bright red, next to Chanda's fingertip.
"It was a chunk of dirty ice, a typical piece of comet head,", said Chanda. "The meteor gun never had a chance at it. It was too close for that when we came out of overspace. Impact turned the intruder to plasma in the Jumper. The plasma cone knocked some secondary bits of metal loose, and they penetrated here. That rained droplets of high-speed molten metal all through the ship's Brain."
Parliss whistled. He was tall, ash blond, and very young. "That'll soften her up," he murmured irreverently. He winced under Chanda's glare and added, "Sorry."
Chanda, held the glare a moment before she continued. "There's no chance of repairing the Brain ourselves. There are too many points of injury, and most of them too small to find. Fortunately the Brain can still solve problems and obey orders. Our worst problem seems to be this motor aphasia. The Brain can't speak, not in any language. I've circumvented that by instructing the Brain to use Winsel code. Since I don't know the extent of the damage precisely, I recommend we land the passengers by tug instead of trying to land the Goat."
Verd cringed at the thought of what the tug captains would say. "Is that necessary?"
"Yes, Verd. I don't even know how long the Brain will answer to Winsel code. It was one of the first things I tried. I didn't really expect it to work, and I doubt it would on a human patient."
"Thanks, Chanda." Verd stood up and the Brain surgeon sat down. "All I have to say, group, is that we're going to take a bad loss this trip. The Brain is sure to need expensive repairs, and the Jumper will have to be almost completely torn out. It gave one awful discharge when the meteor hit, and a lot of parts are fused. —Lourdi, what's wrong? We can afford it."
Lourdi's face was bloodless. Her delicate surgeon's fingers strangled the arms of her chair.
"Come on," Verd said gently. What could have driven her into such a panic? "We land on Earth and take a vacation while the orbital repair companies do the worrying. What's wrong with that?"
Lourdi gave her head a spastic shake. "We can't do that. Oh, Eye of Kdapt, I didn't dare believe it. Verd, we've got to fix the Jumper out here."
"Not a chance. But—"
"Then we've got trouble," Lourdi had calmed a little, but it was the calm of defeat.
"I couldn't ask the Brain to do it, so I used the telescope myself. That's not Sol."
The others looked at her.
"It's not the Sun. It's a greenish-white dwarf, a dead star. I couldn't find the Sun."
***
Once it had its orders, the Brain was much faster with the telescope than Lourdi. It confirmed her description of the star which was where Sol should have been, and added that it was no star in the Brain's catalogue. Furthermore the Brain could not recognize the volume of space around it. It was still scanning stars, hoping to find its bearings.
"But the rock hit after we came out of overspace. After!" Verd said between his teeth. "How could we have gone anywhere else?" Nobody was listening.
They sat in the crew common room drinking droobleberry juice and vodka.
"We'll have to tell the passengers something," said Chanda. Nobody answered, though she was dead right. Interstellar law gave any citizen free access to a computer. In space the appropriate computer was a ship's Brain. By now the passengers must have discovered that the Brain was incommunicado.
Lourdi stopped using her glass to make rings on the tabletop. "Chanda, will you translate for me?"
Chanda looked up. "Of course."
"Ask the Brain to find the planet in this system which most resembles Saturn."
"Saturn?" Chanda's homely face lost its hopeful expression. Nonetheless she began tapping on the rim of a Brain speaker with the end of a stylus, tapping in therhythms of Winsel code.
Almost immediately a line of short and long white dashes began moving left to right across the top of the Brain screen. The screen itself went white, cleared, showed what looked like a picture of Saturn. But the ring showed too many gaps, too well defined. Chanda said, "Fifth major planet from primary. Six moons.
Period: 29.46 years. Distance from Sun: 9.45 A.U. Diameter: 72,018 miles. Type: gas giant. So?"
Lourdi nodded. Verd and Parliss were watching her intently. "Ask it to show us the second and third planets."
The second planet was in its quarter phase. The Brain screen showed it looking like a large moon, but less badly pocked, and with a major difference: the intensely bright area across the middle. Chanda translated the marching dots: "Distance: 1.18 A.U. Period: 401.4. Diameter: 7918 miles. No moons. No air."
The third planet— "That's Mars," said Lourdi.
It was.
And the second planet was Earth.
***
"I believe I know what has happened." Verd was almost shouting. Twenty-seven faces looked back at him across the dining room. He was addressing crew and passengers, and he had to face them in person, for the Brain could no longer repeat his words over the stateroom speakers.
"You know that a Jumper creates an overspace in which the speed of light becomes infinite in the neighborhood of the ship. When—"
"Almost infinite," said a passenger.
"That's a popular misconception," Verd snapped. He found that he did not like public speaking, not under these conditions. With an effort he resumed his speaking voice. "The speed of light goes all the way to infinity. Our speed is kept finite by the braking spine, which projects out of the effective neighborhood.
Otherwise we'd go simultaneous: we'd be everywhere at once along a great circle of the universe. The braking spine is that thing like a long stinger that points out behind the ship.
"Well, there was a piece of ice in our way, inside the range of our meteor gun, when we came out of overspace. It went through the Jumper and into the Brain.
"The damage to the Brain is secondary. Something happened to the Jumper while the meteor was in there. Maybe some metal vaporized and caused a short circuit. Anyway the Goat Jumped back into the counterpart of overspace." Verd stopped. Was he talking over their heads? "You understand that when we say we travel in an overspace of Einsteinian space, we really mean a subspace of that overspace?"
A score of blank faces looked back at him. Doggedly Verd went on. "We went into the counterpart of that subspace. The speed of light went to zero."
A murmur of whispering rose and fell. Nobody laughed.
"The braking spine stuck out, or we'd have been in there until the bitter end of time. Well, then. In a region around the ship, the speed of light was zero. Our mass was infinite, our clocks and hearts stopped, the ship became an infinitely thin di
sk. This state lasted for no time in ship's time, but when it ended several billion years had passed."
A universal gasp, then pandemonium. Verd had expected it. He waited it out.
"Billion?" "Kdapt stomp it—!" "Oh my God." "Practical joke, Marna. I must say—" "Shut up and let him finish!"
The shouting died away. A last voice shouted, "But if our mass was infinite—"
"Only in a region around the ship!"
"Oh," said a dark stick figure Verd recognized as Strac Astrophysics. Visibly he shrugged off a vision of suns and galaxies snatched brutally down upon his cringing head by the Goat's infinite gravity.
"The zero effect has been used before," Verd continued in the relative quiet. "For suspended animation, for very long-range time capsules, et cetera. To my knowledge it has never happened to a spacecraft.
Our position is very bad. The Sun has become a greenish-white dwarf. The Earth has lost all its air and has become a one-face world; it turns one side forever to the Sun. Mercury isn't there anymore. Neither is the Moon.
"You can forget the idea of going home, and say good-bye to anyone you knew outside this ship. This is the universe, ourselves and nobody else, and our only duty is to survive. We will keep you informed of developments. Anyone who wishes his passage money refunded is welcome to it."
In a crackle of weak graveyard laughter, Verd bobbed his head in dismissal.
The passengers weren't taking the hint. Hearing the captain in person was as unique to them as it was to Verd. They sat looking at each other, and a few got up, changed their minds, and sat down again. One called, "What will you do next?"
"Ask the Brain for suggestions," said Verd. "Out, now!"
"We'd like to stay and listen," said the same man. He was short and broad and big footed, probably from one of the heavier planets, and he had the rough-edged compactness of a land-tank. "We've the legal right to consult the Brain at my time. If it takes a translator we should have a translator."
Verd nodded. "That's true." Without further comment he turned to Chanda. and said, "Ask the Brain what actions will maximize our chance of survival for maximal time."