Protector

by Larry Niven

  “Very tricky, Captain.”

  “The trailing ship probably has it worked out too, but there isn’t anything he can do about it.” Now the flare was a lemon glow across one flank of Phssthpok’s Star. Suddenly another white point glowed at one edge. “Even if they worked it out in advance, they couldn’t be sure I had the guns. And there’s only one course window they can follow me through. Either I dropped something or I didn’t. Let’s see what the last pair does.”

  “Let’s put Protector back together. I think that must be the drive section ahead.”

  “Right.”

  They worked for hours. Protector was fairly spread across the sky. Roy worked with his shoulders hunched against deadly green light, but it never came. The second pair of Pak scouts was dead.

  Midway they stopped to watch events that had happened an hour ago: the third pair of Pak scouts reconnecting their ships in frantic haste, then using precious reserve fuel to accelerate outward from the star. “Thought so,” Brennan grunted. “They don’t know what kind of variable velocity weapon I’ve got, and they can’t afford to die now. They’re the last. And that puts them on a course that’ll take them way the hell away from us. We’ll beat them to Home by at least half a year.”

  Roy Truesdale was thirty-nine years old when he and Brennan rounded Phssthpok’s Star. He was forty-three when they slowed below ram speed outside the Epsilon Indi system.

  There were times during those four years when Roy thought he would go mad.

  He missed women. It wasn’t Alice Jordan be was missing now; he missed women, the varied score he had loved and the hundreds he had known slightly and the billions he had not. He missed his mother and his sister and his aunts and his ancestresses all the way back to Greatly ’Stelle.

  He missed women and men and children and old people; people to fight with, to talk with, to love, to hate. One entire night he spent crying for all the people of Earth, taking care that Brennan shouldn’t hear him; crying not for what the Pak fleet could do to them but just because they weren’t here or he wasn’t there.

  He spent long periods in his room with the door locked. Brennan had put the lock on it, and Brennan could have picked that lock in thirty seconds, or opened the door with a single kick; but it had a psychological effect, and Roy was grateful for it.

  He missed the space. On any random beach on Earth you could run down the curve of wet hard sand between sea and shore until there was no strength left in you to do anything but breathe. On Earth you could walk forever. In his locked room aboard Protector, no longer hampered by Protector’s heavy acceleration, Roy paced endlessly between the walls.

  Sometimes, alone, he cursed Brennan for using up all of the radon bombs. Otherwise he could have ridden this out in stasis. He wondered if Brennan had done it deliberately, for the company.

  Sometimes he cursed Brennan for bringing him at all. A silly act for such an intelligence. At full acceleration Protector could have outrun the second and third pairs of scouts, with no need to fight. But three gravities might have injured Roy Truesdale.

  He hadn’t been that much use during the battles. Had Brennan brought him only for company? Or as a kind of mascot? Or—he toyed with another idea. One of Brennan’s daughters had been named Estelle, hadn’t she? She might have passed the name to her own daughter. Greatly ’Stelle.

  That was an angry thought: that he had been brought only because he belonged to the protector’s blood line, a living reminder of what Brennan was fighting for, to keep Brennan’s interest in the war alive. Because he smelled right. Roy never asked him. He didn’t really want to know.

  “In a sense you’re being subjected to sensory deprivation,” Brennan told him once. That was not long before turnover, after they had tried something decidedly kooky: Brennan taking the parts of five experts of varying disciplines and accents, in a six-sided discussion of free will versus determinism. It hadn’t worked. They were both trying too hard.

  Roy was losing the urge to talk.

  “We’ve got all kinds of entertainment,” said Brennan, “but no conversation except mine. There’s a limit to how much illusion you can get from me. But let’s try something.”

  Roy didn’t ask what he meant. He found out a few days later, when he walked into his room and found himself looking down a mountainside.

  Now he spent more time in there than ever. Every so often Brennan would change the environment. The 270° holograph vision tapes had come out of the computer memory, and they were all of worlds other than Earth. After a few false starts he avoided scenes that involved people. The people never noticed Roy; they behaved as if he did not exist. That was bad.

  He would sit for hours, staring out into the faintly unearthly landscapes, wishing that he could walk out into them. Too much of that was bad too, and he would have to turn them off.

  It was during such a time—with the walls around him nothing but walls—that he began wondering again as to just what Brennan was planning on Home.

  The Pak scouts had veered wide during the pass around the neutron star. Now their enormous turning radius had finally aimed them toward Home; but their 5.5 gee acceleration would not compensate for the time they had lost. They were out of the running as far as Protector was concerned. And Home would have ten months to prepare for their arrival.

  A peaceful people was not that easily persuaded to prepare for all-out defense. It took time to convert factories to make weapons. Just how big a threat was one pair of Pak scouts?

  “I’m sure they could destroy a planet,” Brennan said judiciously when Roy put it to him. “A planet is a big target, and environmental systems are delicate, and it can’t dodge like a Bussard ramjet. Aside from that, a Pak scout was probably designed to wreck planets. If it can’t do that, what good is it?”

  “We’ll have less than a year to get ready for them.”

  “Stop worrying. That’s long enough. Home already has message lasers that can reach Earth. That speaks well for their accuracy and their power. We’ll use them as cannon. And I’ve got designs for induced gravity weapons.”

  “But will they build them? These are peaceful people in a stable society!”

  “We’ll talk them into it.”

  Sitting in his room, staring into an empty, stormy seascape, Roy wondered at Brennan’s optimism. Had he grown unfamiliar with the way breeders thought? “I’ve stopped taking chances,” Brennan had said once. Well?

  There had never been a war on Home…according to the tapes of their communications to Earth. Their novels rarely dealt in violence. Once they had used fusion bombs to shape harbors; but then they had the harbors, and now they didn’t even have the factories any more.

  Had Brennan seen something in their novels—a buried violence—that Roy had not?

  One day it occurred to him that there was a solution.

  It was a horrifying thought. He never mentioned it to Brennan. He feared that it was evidence of his own madness. He conscientiously resumed his long conversations with Brennan; he tried to take some interest in the very predictable course of the remaining Pak; he offered suggestions for the vision walls of his cubical; be played gin and dominoes. He exercised. He was turning into a mountain of muscle. Sometimes he awed himself.

  “Teach me to fight Pak,” he once asked Brennan.

  “No way,” said Brennan.

  “The subject might arise. If a Pak ever wanted to take a breeder prisoner—”

  “All right, come on. I’ll show you.”

  They cleared out the exercise room, and they fought. In half an hour Brennan “killed” him something like thirty times, pulling his karate blows with exquisite accuracy. Then he let Roy hit him several times. Roy delivered killing blows with a vicious enthusiasm Brennan may have found enlightening. Brennan even admitted that they hurt. But Roy was convinced.

  Nonetheless they made the fights part of their program.

  There were all kinds of ways to kill time. And the time passed. Sometimes it crawled, excruciatin
gly slow; but always it passed.

  There was one Jupiter-sized mass in the Epsilon Indi system. Godzilla, Epsilon Indi V, was out of Protector’s path as they braked in at three thousand miles per second. But Brennan veered a bit to show Roy a wondrous sight.

  They slid past a glittering translucent sphere of ice crystals. It was Godzilla’s Trojan point, and it looked like a vast Xmas tree ornament; but to Roy it was a Welcome sign. He began to believe they would make it.

  Two days later, at 1000 miles/second, the ram field was no longer doing anything useful. Brennan turned it off. “Home in forty-two hours,” he said. “I could skydive the sun and use the ram field in the solar wind, but what the hell. We’ve got plenty of fuel, and I sense somehow that you’re anxious to get down.”

  “Oddly enough.” Roy wore a hungry grin. “Not that I haven’t enjoyed your company.” He had Home in the telescope screen. Home looked like Earth: deep blue swirled with the white frosting of clouds, the outlines of continents almost invisible. He felt a throb in his throat. This past year, his vision walls had showed only scenes from Home.

  “Listen,” he said, “are we going to wait for the ferries or just go down?”

  “I thought I’d put Protector in distant orbit and go down with the cargo ship. We may need it to refuel Protector. Homers haven’t done much with their asteroid resources. They may not have any cargo ships.”

  “All right. Before you turn on the insystem drive, why don’t I just go over to the cargo ship and put it through a countdown?”

  Brennan studied him for a moment. It was the kind of considering look that sometimes had Roy thinking he’d made a foolish suggestion. But, “All right. That’ll save some time. Call me when you’re aboard.”

  Home was already naked-eye visible, a white star not far from the sun. Roy boarded, stripped off his suit, went to the controls and called Brennan. Shortly Protector was again under thrust, backing toward Home at one Home gravity.

  Roy started his inspection with the life support systems. All okay. The drive system checked out as far as instruments could tell. Roy worried that the drive tube might have been bent out of alignment by the tidal force of Phssthpok’s Star. They had never had a chance to inspect for that. They wouldn’t, until the cargo ship cut loose from Protector.

  There was no landing gear to inspect. He’d land in a harbor; the ship would float.

  He put twelve hours into his countdown, then broke for a nap. By now Brennan would have called whatever passed for spaceport facilities on Home. In another twelve hours…

  Under one Home gravity he slept less, and lightly. He woke in the dim light, remembering his odd suspicions of Brennan. There was a faint smile on his face.

  He went over them again…expecting to see how ridiculous they were. He’d been a bit paranoid then. Man was not meant to live locked in with a not-quite-human being for six years.

  He went over his suspicions again, and they were logical. The idea was still horrid, but he could not find the logical flaw.

  That bothered him.

  And he still didn’t know just what Brennan planned for Home.

  He got up and prowled the ship. He found something Alice had stowed aboard, long ago: paints for a pressure suit. There had never been a design on the chest of Roy’s suit. He draped the suit across a chair and stood before it, waiting for inspiration. But the inspiration that came to him was a vivid fluorescent target.

  Sucker. If he was right—but he couldn’t be right.

  He called Brennan. Have it out—

  “All okay here,” said Brennan. “How’re things at your end?”

  “Green bird, as far as I can tell without actually flying it.”

  “Good.”

  Roy found that he was stupidly trying to read expression in the hard face. “Brennan, something occurred to me a while ago. I never mentioned it—”

  “’Bout two and a half years back? I thought something was bothering you besides the lack of a harem.”

  “Maybe I’m nuts,” said Roy. “Maybe I was nuts then. It hit me that you’d have a lot easier job of talking the Home population into backing your war, if you first—” He almost didn’t say it. But of course Brennan had thought of it. “If you first seeded the planet with tree-of-life.”

  “That wouldn’t be nice.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. But will you please explain to me why it isn’t logical?”

  “It isn’t logical,” said Brennan. “The crop would take too long to grow.”

  “Yah,” Roy said in a burst of relief. Then, “Yah, but you kept me out of the hydroponics garden. Wasn’t that because some of the virus might get to me?”

  “No. It was because the smell would get to you and you’d eat something.”

  “And the same with the garden on Kobold.”

  “Right.”

  “The garden Alice and I wandered through without smelling anything at all.”

  “You’re older now, idiot!” Brennan was losing his temper.

  “Yah, of course. Sorry, Brennan. I should have thought of all this—” Brennan was losing his temper? Brennan? And—“Dammit, Brennan, I was only a month older when you told me never to enter the Flying Dutchman’s hydroponics garden!”

  “Censor you,” said Brennan, and he clicked off.

  Roy leaned back in the crash chair. Thick depression was on him. Whatever else he was, Brennan had been a friend and ally. Now—

  Now, very suddenly, Protector surged under three gravities acceleration. Roy sagged back. His mouth went wide in shock. Then, with all the strength of a now-massive right arm, he reached up to the controls and found a red button.

  It was under a guard lock.

  The key was in his pocket. Roy dug for it, cursing steadily under his breath. Brennan wanted to immobilize him. It wasn’t going to work. He reached up against three gravities of pull, opened the guard, pushed the button.

  The cable that linked him to Protector blasted free. He was falling.

  It took him a full minute to bring the drive up to thrust. He started a ninety degree turn. Protector couldn’t possibly match the turning radius of the smaller cargo ship. Through the port he watched Protector’s drive flame drifting away to the side.

  He saw it go out.

  Why had Brennan turned off the drive?

  Never mind. Next step: the com laser, and warn Home. Assuming he was right…but he dared assume nothing else, now. Brennan could clear himself afterward: turn himself over to spacemen from Home, wearing nothing but a pressure suit, and tell them how Roy had gone mad. Perhaps it would be true.

  He swung the com laser toward Home and began tuning it. He knew the frequency he wanted, and the spot…if it was on the right side of the planet. What would Brennan be doing now? What could he do? That was what he would be doing. There was little of free will in a protector…and Hell’s own weaponry in Protector’s weapons pod. He was going to kill Roy Truesdale.

  Home seemed to be turning the wrong face. The colony was big, as big as a medium-sized nation, but it had stupidly turned its back! And where was Brennan’s killing beam? He had to use it.

  And Protector’s drive was still out. Not trying to chase him down.

  Was Brennan still aboard the ship?

  Roy saw a possibility then. Irrational, but no time to think: he swarmed out of the crash chair and scrambled down a ladder. The weapons were in the airlock. And the inner door was still open. Roy dashed in, snatched one of the lasers off the wall, and leapt back before the door could close on him.

  It hadn’t moved.

  But if Brennan wasn’t aboard Protector…

  Then, irrational as it certainly was, Brennan must be trying to save the situation and Roy Truesdale too. To do that he must board the cargo ship. A feat of impossible heroism…but Roy could see him setting Protector’s drive to cut off automatically, then dropping out of the airlock toward the cargo ship just as Roy cut the cable. Dropping onto the hull, welding a line before Roy could build up thrust. Then,
down the line to the airlock.

  Impossible? What was impossible to Brennan? Roy held the gun ready, waiting for the inner airlock door to close.

  He had his answer in the roar and flash behind him. In a whistling shriek of breathing-air the Brennan-monster was through the hull side of the cabin toilet, through the toilet door and closing it softly behind him. The door was not hull material; it buckled slightly under the pressure; but it held.

  Roy raised the gun.

  Brennan threw something. It came too fast to see, and it hit Roy in the upper right arm. The bone shattered like fine crystal. Roy spun half around with the impact, his arm swinging out from his shoulder like something dead. The laser bounced off the wall and back at him.

  He fielded it with his left hand and finished his turn.

  Brennan was poised like a pitcher on the mound. He held a soft carbon lubrication disc the size of a hockey puck.

  Roy shifted his grip on the laser. Why didn’t Brennan throw? Now he had the trigger. Why didn’t Brennan throw? He fired.

  Brennan leapt to the side, incredibly fast, but not as fast as light. Roy swung the beam after him. It crossed Brennan’s body just below the waist.

  Brennan dropped, cut in half.

  His arm wasn’t hurting him at all, but the sound of Brennan’s fall hurt Roy sickeningly in the guts. He looked down at his arm. It dangled, swollen like a melon and running blood where a fragment of bone poked through. He looked back at Brennan.

  What was left of Brennan rose up on its hands and came for him.

  Roy sagged against the wall. The cabin was going round and round. Shock. He smiled as Brennan came near. He said, “Touché, Monsieur.”

  Brennan said, “You’re hurt.”

  Things were graying out, losing color. Roy was aware of Brennan ripping his shirt to tie a tourniquet below his shoulder. Brennan talked in a steady monotone, whether or not he expected Roy to hear. “I could have killed you if you weren’t a relative. Stupid, stupid. May the ceiling fall on you, Roy. Roy, listen, you’ve got to live. They might not believe what’s in the computer. Roy? Dammit, listen!”