Protector

by Larry Niven

  An unbelieving grin split his face, like lightning across a black sky. Two sources! Almost an embarrassment of riches. He didn’t need this new one, but he could sell it once he’d located it. That would take doing. The needle wavered between two attractions, one of which was his cargo box.

  He spent twenty minutes focusing a com laser on Ceres.

  “This is Nick Sohl, repeat, Nicholas Brewster Sohl. I wish to register a claim for a monopole source in the general direction of—” He looked, tried to guess how much his cargo was affecting the needle, and named a star. “I want to offer this source for sale to the Belt government. Details follow, half an hour.”

  He then turned off his fusion motor, climbed laboriously into suit and backpac and left the ship, carrying a telescope and his mining detector.

  The stars are far from eternal, but for Man they might as well be. Nick floated among the eternal stars, motionless, falling toward the tiny sun at tens of thousands of miles per hour, and knew once again why he went monopole mining. The universe blazed like diamonds on black velvet, an unforgettable backdrop for golden Saturn. The Milky Way was a jeweled bracelet for all the universe. Nick loved the Belt, from the carved-out rocks to the surface domes to the spinning inside-out bubble worlds; but most of all he loved space itself.

  A mile from the ship he used scope and detector to fix the location of the new source. He moved back to the ship to call in. A few hours from now he could take a new fix and pin the source by triangulation.

  When he reached the ship his communicator was alight. The thin, fair face of “Little” Shaeffer, Third Speaker, was talking to the empty acceleration couch.

  “—Must call in at once, Nick. Don’t wait to take your second fix. This is urgent. Martin Shaeffer calling Nick Sohl, repeat Martin—”

  Nick refocused his laser. “Lit, I’m truly honored. How can my poor find justify your august attention? A simple clerk would have sufficed.” He set the message to repeat a few times, then started putting away tools. Ceres was light-minutes distant.

  The answer came. Shaeffer’s face was very serious. “Nick, one hundred and four miners have called in so far to report your source.” He paused, not for an answer, but for emphasis. “Think about it. Most miners work their own mines. If that many called in to sell, thousands must have decided not to. And they’re all across the system. If you’d taken your second fix you’d have registered two parallel lines.”

  Another pause. “I said we’ve had calls from across the system. They give us enough parallax to locate the source. It’s one source, all right, and it’s ninety A.U. from the sun, two and a half times as far as Pluto. You can guess how powerful it is. Mitchikov says that big a source could power a really big interstellar hydrogen ramscoop.

  “We’ve been following it for an hour. Nick, it’s moving toward the system at nearly ten thousand miles per second. That’s way above even intergalactic speeds. We’re all convinced it’s an Outsider.”

  “Any comments?”

  “Repeating—”

  Nick switched it off and sat for a moment, stunned. An Outsider!

  Outsider was Belter slang for alien; but the word meant more than that. The Outsider would be the first sentient alien to contact the human race. And it, singular, would contact the Belt instead of Earth, not only because the Belt held title to most of the solar system but because those humans who had colonized space were obviously more intelligent. There were many hidden assumptions in the word Outsider, and not every Belter believed them all.

  “Nick Sohl calling Lit Shaeffer. Yes, I’ve got comments. One, it sounds like your assumption is valid. Two, will you for Christ’s sake stop blasting the news all over the system? Some flatlander ship might pick up the fringe of one of your lasers. Or have we decided to bring them in on it? Three, I’ll be home in five days. Concentrate on getting information. If you have to make decisions without me, do it, but first be sure it’s urgent. Four—” Find out if the jerk is decelerating! Find out where he’ll stop! But he couldn’t say any of that. Until they decided to bring Earth in, which they probably would not, they would have to be careful. Shaeffer would know what to do. “There is no Four. Sohl out.”

  III

  The solar system is big and, in the outer reaches, thin. In the main Belt, from slightly inside Mars’ orbit to slightly outside Jupiter’s, a determined man can examine a hundred rocks in a month. Further out, he’s likely to spend a couple of weeks coming and going, just to look at something he hopes nobody else has noticed.

  The main Belt is not mined out, though most of the big rocks are now private property. Most miners prefer to work the Belt. In the Belt they know they can reach civilization and civilization’s vital by-products: stored air water and hydrogen fuel, a restaurant with human waitresses, a new air regenerator, autodocs and therapeutic psychomimetic drugs.

  Brennan didn’t need drugs or company to keep him sane. He preferred the outer reaches. He was in Uranus’ trailing trojan point, following sixty degrees behind the big planet in its orbit. Trojan points, being points of stable equilibrium, are dust collectors and collectors of larger objects. There was a good deal of dust here, for deep space, and a handful of rocks worth exploring.

  Had he found nothing at all, Brennan would have moved on to the moons, then to the leading trojan point. Then home for a short rest and a visit with Charlotte; and, because his funds would be low by then, a paid tour of duty on Mercury, which he would hate.

  Had he found pitchblende he would have been in the point for months.

  None of the rocks held enough radioactives to interest him. But something nearby showed the metallic gleam of an artifact. Brennan moved in on it, expecting to find some Belt miner’s throwaway fuel tank, but looking anyway. Brennan was a confirmed optimist.

  This time he was right. The artifact was the shell of a solid-fuel rocket motor. Part of the Mariner XX, from the lettering.

  The Mariner XX, the ancient Pluto fly-by. Ages ago the ancient empty shell must have drifted back toward the distant sun, hit the thin trojan-point dust and coasted to a stop. The hulk, lightly pitted with dust holes, was still rotating with the stabilizing impulse imparted three generations back.

  As a collector’s item the thing was nearly beyond price. Brennan took photographs of it in situ, then moved in to strap it to his fusion tube, below his lifesystem cabin. The gyros could compensate for the imbalance.

  In another sense the hulk presented a problem.

  He stood next to it on the fusion tube’s metal hull. The tank was half as big as his mining singleship, but very light, little more than a metal skin for its original shaped-core charge. If Brennan had found pitchblende, the singleship would have been hung with cargo nets under the fuel ring, carrying its own weight in radioactive ore. He would have returned to the Belt at half a gee. But with the Mariner relic as his cargo he could accelerate at the one gee which was standard for empty singleships.

  It might just give him the edge he’d need.

  If he sold the tank through the Belt, the Belt would take thirty percent in income tax and agent’s fees. But if he sold it on the Moon, Earth’s Museum of Spaceflight would charge no tax at all.

  Brennan was in a good position for smuggling. There were no goldskins out here. His velocity over most of his course would be tremendous. They couldn’t begin to catch him until he approached the Moon. He wasn’t hauling monopoles or radioactives; the magnetic detectors would look right through him. He could swing in over the plane of the system, avoiding rocks and other ships.

  But if they did get him, they’d take one hundred percent of his find. Everything.

  Brennan smiled to himself. It was worth the risk.

  Phssthpok’s mouth closed once, twice, three times. A yellow tree-of-life root separated into four chunks, raggedly, because the edges of Phssthpok’s beak were not sharp. They were blunt and uneven, like the top of a molar. Phssthpok gulped four times.

  He had hardly noticed the action. It was as if his
hand, mouth and belly were on automatic, while Phssthpok watched the scope screen.

  Under 104 magnification, the screen showed three tiny violet points.

  Looking around the edge of the scope screen, Phssthpok could see only the bright yellow star he’d called GO Target #1. He’d been searching for planets; and he’d found one, a beauty, the right size and approximate temperature, with a transparent atmosphere and an oversized moon. But he’d also found myriads of violet points so small that at first he’d thought they were mere flashes in his retinae.

  They were real, and they moved. Some moved no faster than planetary objects; others hundreds of times faster than escape velocity for GO Target #1. They glowed with an intensely hot color, the color of a neutron star in its fourth week of life, when its temperature is still in the tens of billions of degrees.

  Obviously they were spacecraft. At these speeds, natural objects would have been lost to interstellar space within months. Probably they used fusion drives. If so, and judging from their color, they burned hotter and more efficiently than Phssthpok’s own.

  There were tens of thousands of them.

  They seemed, to spend most of their time in space. At first he’d hoped they were some form of space-born life, perhaps related to the starseeds of the galactic core. But as he drew nearer the yellow sun, he’d had to give up the idea. All the sparks had destinations, from the myriad small orbiting rocks to the moons and planets of the inner system. One frequent target was the double planet with the transparent atmosphere, the one he’d decided might be Pak-habitable. No spaceform could have stood its gravity or its atmosphere.

  That planet, GO Target #1 - 3, was the biggest such target.

  If the pilots of those fusion craft had developed on GO Target #1 - 3, they would naturally prefer lighter gravities to heavier.

  But the ones he sought hadn’t the minds to build such craft. Had something, something alien, usurped their places?

  Then he and his thousands had given their long lives to extract only a sterile vengeance.

  It needn’t be that. GO Target #1 was not the only likely sun. Probability was only twenty-eight percent. He could hope that the ones he had come to help circled another possible star. But he’d have to check.

  Centered in the great twing porthole was a steady point of blue-white light. It grew, but unlike the other sparks, it did not shift. Phssthpok was matching its course.

  Nick docked his ship on the surface of Ceres, hurriedly issued orders for unloading and sale of his cargo, and went underground. His office was some four miles beneath the pitted, bubble-dotted surface, buried deep in the nickel-iron core.

  Lit Shaeffer’s suit and helmet were hanging in the vestibule of his office. Nick grinned fleetingly at the sight. He always did.

  Most Belters wore suits with personalized decorations. Why not? The interior of his suit was the only place many a Belter could call Home, and it was the one possession he had to keep in perfect condition. But even in the Belt, Shaeffer’s suit was unusual.

  On an orange background was the painting of a girl. She was short, for her head barely reached Lit’s neck ring, and her skin was a softly glowing green. Only her lovely back showed across the front of her suit. Her hair was streaming bonfire flames, flickering orange with touches of yellow and white, darkening into red-black smoke as it swept across the suit’s left shoulder. She was nude, and she had both arms wrapped around the chest of the suit, her hands touching the airpac on the back; her legs wrapped around the suit’s thighs, so that her heels touched the backs of the flexible metal knee joints. It was a very beautiful painting, so beautiful that it almost wasn’t vulgar. A pity the suit’s sanitary outlet wasn’t somewhere else.

  Sometimes Nick wondered. Had Marda known about that suit when she married Lit?

  He entered his office, dropped into his chair and closed his eyes for a moment, ignoring Lit in one of the guests’ chairs, getting used to the feel of being First Speaker again. With his eyes still closed he said, “Okay, Lit. What’s been happening?”

  “Got it all here,” Rustle of papers. “Yah The monopole source is coming in over the plane of the solar system, aimed at the sun. As of an hour ago it was one billion eight hundred and seven million miles out. For the past week it’s shown a steady deceleration of point nine two gee. At that rate it’ll stop at Earth’s orbit in five days.”

  Nick opened his eyes. “Where will Earth be then?”

  Lit looked grim. His gaunt mahogany face was built for it. “About six feet away. We checked.”

  “Hardly fair. The Outsider’s supposed to contact us, not them. What have you done about anything?”

  “Nothing concrete. Just plans and observations. We’ve got photos of what looks like a drive flame.”

  “Fusion? Chemical? Ion?”

  “Fusion, but much cooler than ours.”

  “Can we contact that ship before it reaches Earth?”

  “Yah. Mitchikov has several courses plotted. Our best bet is to start a fleet from the trailing Jupiter Trojans in about—”

  “Not a fleet. We want to look harmless to this bird—assuming he can think, which we may as well. Do we have any big ships in the Trojans?”

  “The Blue Ox. She was about to leave for Juno, but I commandeered her and had her cargo tank cleared.”

  “Good. Nice going.” The Blue Ox was a mammoth fluid cargo carrier, as big as one of the Titan Hotel’s luxury liners, though not as pretty. “We’ll want a computer, and a good one. Also a computer tech, and some spare senses for the machine. I want to use it as a translator, and the damn Outsider might talk by eye-blinks or radio or modulated current. Can we maybe fit a singleship into the Ox’s cargo hold?”

  “What for?”

  “Just in case. We’ll give the Ox a lifeboat. If the Outsider plays rough somebody might get away.”

  “He doesn’t look dangerous. The drive flame is cool, about the temperature of the first fusion drives, before we had crystal-zinc fusion tubes.”

  “But he crossed interstellar space. Why take chances? Make sure there’s a scope on him at all times from now on. Now let’s see if we can call Achilles.”

  Some part of his mind reflected that Shaeffer had anticipated all his needs, had even guessed that he might want to use the Blue Ox. Shaeffer was good. Someday he’d have Sohl’s job. If you had to be a politician you might just as well be a darn good one.

  It would take awhile for the operator to focus a laser on Achilles. Nick hung up to wait. And the phone went off jarringly in his hand.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Traffic Control,” said the phone. “Cutter. Your office wanted everything concerning the big monopole source.”

  Nick opened the volume control so Shaeffer could hear. “Right. What?”

  “It’s matching course with a Belt ship. The pilot doesn’t seem to be evading contact. They’ll be alongside in six hours.”

  Sohl’s lips tightened. “What kind of ship?”

  “The scope man didn’t say. Probably a mining singleship. Shall I call back and try to find out?”

  “Get all the information he’s got. Set nearby telescopes on watch. I don’t want to miss anything.” Nick rang off. “You heard?”

  “Yah. Finagle’s First Law.”

  “Can we stop that Belter?”

  “I doubt it.”

  It could have been anyone. It turned out to be Jack Brennan.

  He was several hours from turnover en route to Earth’s Moon. The Mariner XX’s discarded whistle jet rode his hull like an undernourished Siamese twin. Its whistle was still fixed in the blunt nose, the whistle whose pitch had controlled the rate at which the core burned. Brennan had crawled inside to look, knowing that a damaged whistle might lower the relic’s value.

  For a used one-shot, the relic was in fine shape. The nozzle had burned a little unevenly, but not seriously so; naturally not, for the Mariner XX had reached its destination. The Museum of Spaceflight would pay plenty for it.

/>   In the Belt smuggling is illegal, but not immoral. Smuggling was no more immoral to Brennan than forgetting to pay a parking meter would have been to a flatlander. If you got caught you paid the fine and that was it.

  Brennan was an optimist. He didn’t expect to be caught.

  He’d been accelerating for four days at just short of one gee. The Uranus orbit was far behind him, the flatland system far ahead. He was going at a hell of a clip. There were no observable relativity effects, he wasn’t going that fast, but his watch would need resetting when he arrived.

  Have a look at Brennan. He masses one hundred and seventy-eight pounds per one gee, stands six feet two inches tall. Like any Belter, he looks much like an under-muscled basketball player. Since he’s been sitting in that control couch for most of four days, he’s beginning to look and feel crumpled and weary. But his brown eyes are clear and steady, twenty-twenty, having been corrected by microsurgery when he was eighteen. His straight dark hair is a strip of foliage running across a brown polished scalp. Since he’s Caucasian, his Belter tan is no darker than cordovan leather; as usual it covers only his hands and his face and scalp above his neck. Elsewhere he is the color of a vanilla milkshake.

  He is forty-five years old. He looks thirty. Gravity has been kind to the muscles of his face, and growth salve to the potential bald patch at the crown of his head. But the developing fine lines around his eyes, stand out clearly now, since he has been wearing a puzzled frown for the past twenty hours.

  Something was following him.

  At first he’d thought it was a goldskin, a Ceres cop. But what would a goldskin have been doing that far from the sun?

  Even at second glance it couldn’t have been a goldskin. Its drive flame was too fuzzy, too big, not bright enough. At third glance, which included a few instrument readings, Brennan realized that it must have come from beyond Pluto. Brennan was accelerating, but the stranger was decelerating and still had enormous velocity. Either it was from beyond Pluto, or its drive generated tens of gees. Which gave the same answer.