Protector

by Larry Niven

  Alice’s face was almost a snarl. “I won’t let a man think of me that way.”

  “And he takes samples. To see how we’re doing, where we’re going. I suppose his next step is a selective breeding project.”

  “All right, what’s our next move?”

  “I don’t know.” He sipped at his brandy. Wonderful stuff; it seemed to turn to vapor in his mouth. The Belt ought to export it. It’d be cheap in fuel: all downhill.

  She said, “We’ve got three choices, I think. First is to tell everything we know, first to Vinnie, then to any newstape producer that’ll listen.”

  “Will they listen?”

  “Oh—” she waved a negligent band. “They’ll publish, I think. It’s a new slant on things. But we don’t have any proof. We’ve got a theory, and it’s got a gaping hole in it, and that’s all we’ve got.”

  “What did he eat?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, we can try it.”

  Alice thumbed a call button. When the waiter slid over in a whisper of air, she punched for two more brandies. She said, “Then what?”

  “…Yah.”

  “People would listen, and talk it over, and wonder. And nothing would happen. And gradually it would all blow over. Brennan would just wait it out, as long as it takes: a hundred years, a thousand…”

  “We’d never know. We’d be yelling into a vacuum.”

  “All right. Second choice is for us to drop it now.”

  “No.”

  “Agreed. Third choice is to go after him. With a Belt police fleet, if they’d back us. Otherwise, alone.”

  He thought about it, sipping brandy. “Go where?”

  “All right, let’s think about that.” Alice leaned back with her eyes half-closed. “He headed out toward interstellar space. He stopped in the cometary belt, well beyond Pluto’s orbit, for a couple of months—came to a dead stop, which must have cost him plenty in fuel—then went on.”

  “His ship went on. If he’s here now, he must have sent the Pak drive section on without him. That leaves him with the Pak control cabin and a Belt singleship.”

  “And fuel. All the fuel he wants, from the maneuvering reserve tanks in the drive section. They were filled before he took off.”

  “All right. We assume he found a way to grow the roots for food. Maybe he took some seeds from the cargo pod before he left Mars. What does he need now that he doesn’t have?”

  “A home. A base. Building materials.”

  “Could he have mined the comets for those?”

  “Maybe. For gasses and chemicals, anyway.”

  “All right. I’ve been thinking about this too,” said Truesdale. “When you speak so glibly of the cometary belt, do you think you’re talking about a ring of rocks like the asteroid belt? The cometary belt is a region of convenience.” He spoke with some care. The brandy was getting to his tongue. If he mangled some complicated word she would only laugh. “It’s where the comets slow up and hover and fall back toward the sun. It’s ten to twenty times the volume of the solar system, and most of the solar system is in a plane anyway. There’s hydrogen in most of the compounds in a comet’s tail, isn’t there? So Brennan’s got no fuel problem. He could be anywhere in that shell by now, and somewhere else tomorrow. Where do we look?”

  She watched him narrowly. “You’re giving up?”

  “I’m tempted. It’s not that he’s too big for me. He’s too small. His hiding place is too mucking big.”

  “There is another possibility,” she said. “Persephone.”

  Persephone. And how the hell had he forgotten that there was a tenth planet? Still—“Persephone’s a gas giant, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I suppose so. It was detected by its mass, its influence on the orbits of comets. But the atmosphere could be frozen. He could hover until he’d burned a hole through the frozen layers, then land.” She leaned forward across the table. Her eyes were intense, and deep brown. “Roy, he had to get metals from somewhere. He built some kind of gravity generator, didn’t be? And he must have done some experimenting to get it. Metal. Lots of metal.”

  “From a comet head, maybe?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Truesdale shook his head. “He couldn’t mine Persephone. A planet that big has to be a gas giant—with a molten core. It’ll heat itself; it’ll have a gaseous atmosphere. He couldn’t land in it. The pressure would be, well, Jovian.”

  “A moon, then! Maybe Persephone’s got a moon!”

  “…Why the hell not? Why shouldn’t any random gas giant have a dozen moons?”

  “He spent two months at rest, making sure he could live out there. He must have located Persephone and studied it with his telescopes. When he was sure it had moons, that was when he cut loose from the Pak drive section. Otherwise he’d have come home and turned himself in.”

  “That sounds right. He may have been growing tree-of-life root…He might not still be there.”

  “He’d have left traces. We’re talking about a moon now. There’d be a scar where he landed a fusion drive, and big gaping scars where he dug his mines, and buildings he’d have to abandon, and heat. He could cover up some of the damage, but not the heat, not on some little moon way the hell beyond Pluto. It would have gone into the environment, and fouled up superfluid effects, and vaporized some of the ices.”

  “Wed have proof,” said Truesdale. “Holograph pictures. At worst we’d have holos of the scars he left on Persephone’s moon. Not just a half-cocked theory.”

  “And at best?” She grinned. “We’d meet the Brennan-monster face to face.”

  “Have at him!”

  “Right on.” Alice raised her brandy. They clinked the blown glass snifters carefully, and drank.

  The fear of falling brought him half awake, and the familiar sensations of a hangover did the rest. He sat up on a bed like a pink cloud: Alice’s bed. They’d come here last night, perhaps to celebrate or to seal a bargain, perhaps just because they liked each other.

  No headache. Good brandy leaves a hangover, but not a headache.

  It had been one of the better nights.

  Alice wasn’t there. Gone to work? No, he could hear her in the kitchen. He padded into the kitchen on bare feet. She was frying pancakes in the nude.

  He asked, “Did we really mean it?”

  “Now you get to taste Belter cooking,” she said. She handed him a plate with a stack of pancakes, and when he grabbed it wrong they bounced and floated, just like in the advertisements. He managed to catch them, but the stack came down skewed.

  They tasted like pancakes: good pancakes, but pancakes. Maybe you had to include the nudity of the cook to make it Belter cooking. He poured imitation maple syrup, and made a mental note: send Alice some bottles of Vermont maple syrup, if she stayed in the Belt, if he ever reached Earth alive.

  He asked again. “Did we really mean it?”

  She gave him a cup and a jar of freeze-dried coffee with an Earth brand. “Let’s find out about Persephone first. Then we can decide.”

  “I can do that myself, at the hotel. Route you the information the way you sent it to me yesterday. Save you some work.”

  “Good idea. Then I can brace Vinnie.”

  “I’m wondering if a goldskin fleet would let me come along.”

  She sat in his lap—feather-lightly, but a lot of girl, as much girl as a man could need. She looked him in the eyes. “Which way are you hoping?”

  He thought about it. “I’ll come if your superiors let me. But I’ll put it to you straight: if I can set the goldskins on Vandervecken’s tail, I’ve proved that he can’t manipulate me. As long as Vandervecken knows it, that’s all I care about.”

  “I…suppose that’s fair enough.”

  They left the apartment together. Alice’s apartment was part of what seemed a cliff dwelling, apartments carved into a wall of the deep hydrate-mining scar that was Alderson City. They took a tube train back to Waring, and
parted there.

  PERSEPHONE: First discovered by mathematical analysis of perturbations in the orbits of certain known comets, 1972. First sighted 1984. Persephone is retrograde, in an orbit tilted sixty-one degrees to the ecliptic. Mass is somewhat less than Saturn.

  Possible first exploratory visit to Persephone was by Alan Jacob Mion, in 2094. Mion’s claim has been cast into doubt by the lack of photographic evidence (his films were damaged by radiation, as was Mion himself; he had stripped shielding from his ship to save fuel) and by Mion’s claim that Persephone has a moon.

  A more formal exploratory expedition was launched in 2170. Persephone was reported to have no moons and an atmosphere typical of gas giant worlds, rich in hydrogen compounds. The planet’s atmosphere would be worth scoop-mining if the planet itself were as available as Jupiter. There have been no further expeditions.

  Damn, thought Truesdale. No moons.

  He wondered if Brennan could have scoop-mined Persephone’s cold chemical gasses. With what, his cupped hands? And for what? He couldn’t have found metals that way…and it didn’t matter; he’d have left no scars in the clouds.

  He located the report of the 2170 expedition and read it. With a little more trouble he found a condensed interview between Alan Jacob Mion and a reporter for Spectrum News. He was a boastful, flamboyant type, the kind of man who would take a year off to orbit a tenth planet, just to say he was the first. Not a careful observer. Perhaps his “moon” had been a comet head cruising past Persephone on a slow parabola.

  He used his information terminal to send the material off to Police Headquarters.

  Alice came back about 1800. “Vinnie didn’t buy it,” she said wearily.

  “I don’t blame her. No moons. All our beautiful logic, and no mucking moon.” He had spent the day trying to play tourist in a city that wasn’t designed for tourists. Waring was a working city.

  “She wouldn’t have gone for it even if there’d been a moon. She said…well, I’m not sure she wasn’t right.” Alice’s weariness was not a thing of gravity. She did not drop sagging onto the bed. Her posture was straight, her head high. But in her eyes and her voice…“In the first place, this is all hypothetical, she said. Which is true. In the second place, if it were true, what would we be sending a poor, helpless goldskin fleet into? In the third place, this Snatcher business has been adequately explained as cases of the Far Look.”

  “I didn’t get that.”

  “The Far Look. Self-hypnosis. A Belter spends too long staring into infinity. Sometimes he wakes up in orbit around his destination without remembering anything after his takeoff. In fact, Vinnie showed me the report on Norma Stier. Remember her? Disappeared 2230—”

  “Right.”

  “She was on course during that four months she was supposed to be missing. The films in her ship prove it.”

  “But the bribes. The Snatcher bribes the people he kidnaps.”

  “We’ve got evidence of a couple of bribes. But they could be explained away. People using the Snatcher story to hide profits from a smuggling run—or something dirtier.” She smiled. “Or Vandervecken doctored the films on Norma Stier’s ship. I believe in the Snatcher, myself.”

  “Hell, yes!”

  “But Vinnie makes a telling point. What are we going up against with a miserable Belt police fleet? Brennan had to get his metal from somewhere. If he mined Persephone’s moon, he must have moved it afterward!”

  “Uh?”

  “That didn’t occur to you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not that startling. What are we talking about, a mass the size of Ganymede, or a little ball of rock like Vesta? Asteroids have been moved before.”

  “Right…and he had unlimited hydrogen fuel, and he already had his gravity generator, and were already assuming he moved the Mahmed Asteroid. But he couldn’t have moved it far. Any metallic chunk we find out there is going to be Persephone’s moon, right? And he wouldn’t have moved it unless it was pretty telling evidence against him.”

  “You’re still going up against him?”

  Truesdale took a deep breath. “Yah. I’ll need your help to pick my equipment.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “Good.”

  “I was afraid I’d have to drop it,” she said. “I don’t have the money to finance anything like this, and you didn’t seem…eager enough, and Vinnie just about convinced me it’s a wild goose chase anyway. Roy, suppose it is?”

  “It’ll still make a nice little honeymoon trip. And we’ll be the only humans alive who’ve seen the tenth planet. I suppose we can sell the equipment again when we get back?”

  They got down to technical discussions.

  It was going to cost.

  Brennan…

  …what can one say about Brennan? He will always make maximum use of his environment to achieve his ends. Knowing his environment, knowing his motives, one could predict his actions exactly.

  But his mind. What goes on in his mind?

  His chosen career—the career that has chosen him for its life’s work—is accomplished largely by waiting. Long ago he was prepared. Now he waits and watches, and sometimes he adds refinements to his preparations. He has his hobbies. The solar system is one of these.

  Sometimes he takes samples. Otherwise he watches the moving lights of fusion drives with his eccentric substitute for a telescope. He catches fragments of news and entertainment broadcasts with sophisticated noise filtering equipment. Earth provides most of these fragments. The Belt communicates via lasers, and they are not aimed at Brennan.

  Civilization goes on. Brennan watches.

  In a news broadcast he learns of the death of Estelle Randall.

  This raises an interesting possibility. Brennan begins to watch for a fusion light source moving toward Persephone.

  Roy wasn’t sure what had wakened him. He lay quiet in the web hammock, feeling the ship alive around him.

  The vibration of the drive was feel rather than sound. Two days of that, and he couldn’t sense it without concentrating. The sensation had not changed—he thought.

  Alice was beside him in the other hammock. Her eyes were open, her mouth faintly frowning.

  That scared him. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Suit up.”

  He grimaced. Suit up—she’d had him climbing in and out of that damn emergency suit for six hours of the first day. It was a man-shaped clear plastic bag with a zipper that ran from chin to knees, forking at the crotch. You could get into it in an instant, and it took another instant to plug that thick air-and-water tube into the ship’s lifesystem; but he’d caught the zipper a couple of times and got language one does not expect from one’s sex partner regardless of previous experience. “From now on you wear nothing but a jock strap,” she’d ordered. “And you wear that all the time. Nothing gets caught in that zipper.” The last couple of hours she was throwing the suit at him from behind, a crumpled ball he had to shake out and get into in ten seconds. When he could do it with a blindfold, she was satisfied.

  “It’s your first move,” she’d said. “Always. Anything happens, get into that suit.”

  He snatched the suit without looking, slid feet and hands and head in and zipped it two-handed and plugged into the wall. Another instant to pull the shoulder pack out of its recess, slip it on, pull the plug and plug it into that. Stored air filled his suit, tasting tasteless. Alice was still faster; she was ahead of him, swarming up the ladder.

  She was in the pilot’s chair when he came through the hatch. “Nice going,” she said without looking around.

  “What’s happening?”

  “The drive’s functioning perfectly. We’re doing one gee exactly, still lined up for Persephone.”

  “Okay.” He relaxed. He moved toward the other chair, stumbling slightly.

  She looked around. “Don’t you feel it?”

  “Feel what?”

  “Maybe it’s me. I feel…light.”

 
; Now he felt it too. “But we’re registering one gee.”

  “Yah.”

  He made an intuitive leap. “Check our course.”

  She threw him an odd look, then nodded and went to work.

  He couldn’t help. He had spent part of the first day and all of the next using learning tapes; he now had a good classroom education in how to fly, maintain, and repair a Belt cargo spacecraft. But Alice knew the instruments. He left her to it.

  He felt it when the change came: a little more weight settling on his shoulders, a faint creaking in the fabric of the ship. He saw the fear in her eyes, and be said nothing.

  Some time later she said, “We are no longer moving toward Persephone.”

  “Ah.” He felt cold fear within him.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “I guessed. But it makes sense. Brennan’s got generated gravity; we’ve been assuming that. If we were in a strong gravitational field, there might be a tidal effect.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s what’s happened. It didn’t register on the autopilot, of course. Which means I’ll have to get our new course by triangulation. It’s for sure we’re going wide of Persephone.”

  “What can we do about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  He didn’t believe her. They’d planned it all in such vast detail. “Nothing?”

  She turned around in her seat. “You may remember that we were going to blast up to a peak velocity of fifty-six hundred miles per second, then coast. We’ve got enough fuel to do that twice, once going, once coming.”

  “Sure.” Two hundred and fifty-six hours accelerating, the same decelerating, about a hundred hours coasting. And if they had to use some fuel exploring, they’d come back at lower peak velocity. He ought to remember. They’d worked out dozens of possibilities. They’d taken a cargo ship to carry the extra fuel, lasers to cut away the empty cargo hold if things really went wrong and they had to save the weight. And the lasers would double as weapons.

  All the planning, and now what? He’d sensed it then, and said nothing. He sensed it now, before she finished speaking—