by Larry Niven
The air was thin, and it carried a strange scent.
“You son of a bitch,” said Brennan. “I could have died.”
The Outsider didn’t answer. It had stripped off Brennan’s suit like peeling an orange, without unnecessary roughness but without excessive care. Still its hand attached it to Brennan like a ball-and-chain. It wore nothing more than a vest with big pockets, a human-seeming garment as strange on the Outsider as a snap-brim fedora on Frankenstein’s monster. Its skin was like leather armor.
The alien’s gaze moved over Brennan, feet to head, head to feet, insultingly familiar. In the regions of the Belt where air and temperature were controlled, the Belters practiced nudism all their lives. Never before had Brennan felt naked. Not nude, but naked. Defenseless. Alien fingers reached to probe his scalp along the sides of the Belter crest; massaged the knuckles of a human hand, testing the joints beneath the skin. At first Brennan fought furiously. He couldn’t even distract the alien’s attention. Then he waited, limp with embarrassment, enduring the examination.
Abruptly it was over. The knobby alien jumped across the room, dug briefly into a bin along one wall, removed a big, plastic bag. Brennan thought of escape; but his suit was in ribbons. The alien ran fingers along the bag, and the bag popped open as if he’d used a zipper.
The alien jumped at Brennan, and Brennan jumped away. It bought him nearly thirty seconds of relative freedom. Then knobby steel fingers closed on him and pushed him gently into the sack.
Brennan found he couldn’t open it from inside. “I’ll suffocate!” he screamed. The alien made no response. It wouldn’t have understood anyway. It was climbing back into its suit.
Oh, no, thought Brennan. He struggled to rip the bag.
The alien picked up the bag and moved out through the porthole. Brennan felt the bag puff out around him, thinning the air inside even further. He stopped struggling instantly. He waited with the fatalism of despair while the alien moved around the eyeball-shaped hull to where an inch-thick line of smooth plastic stretched away in the direction of the trailing pod.
Brennan was all alone in a small space.
The Outsider was gone. It had jumped into space with the Brennan-bag, balanced itself against the bag and used its reaction pistol. The trip had taken twenty minutes. Brennan had been near suffocation when they finally arrived at the trailing pod.
The Outsider had touched some small tool to the hull, then pulled them both through a viscous surface that looked like metal from both sides. It had unzipped the bag, turned and jumped and vanished through the entrance while Brennan was still tumbling helplessly in air.
The air was the same as in the cabin, except that the peculiar scent was much stronger. Brennan drew it in in great rarified gasps.
The lighting was greener than the sunlight tubes he was used to. The only clear space was the space he floated in, no bigger than the lifesystem of a two-man mining ship. On his right were a number of squarish crates whose material was almost wood, certainly a plant of some kind. To his left, a massive rectangular solid with a lid, almost like a big deepfreeze. Above, a curved wall.
So he’d been right. This was a cargo hold.
And all through the air, a peculiar scent, like an unfamiliar perfume. The smell in the lifesystem had been an animal smell, the smell of the Outsider. This was different.
Below him, behind a net of coarse weave, were things that looked like yellow roots. If there were no hidden motors or other sections behind them, they must have occupied most of the cargo hold. Brennan jumped down at them, wrapped his fingers in the net to bring his eyes close.
The smell became hugely more intense. He’d never smelled, imagined, dreamed anything like it.
Close up, they still looked like pale yellow roots: a cross between a sweet potato and a peeled piece of the root of a small tree. They were squat and wide and fibrous, pointed at one end and knife flattened at the other. Brennan reached through the net, got a two-finger grip on one, tried to pull it through the net and couldn’t.
He’d had breakfast just before the Outsider pulled alongside. Yet, with no warning grumblings in his belly, suddenly he was ravenously hungry. He stabbed his fingers through the net, grasped for the roots. For minutes he tried to pull one through holes which were just too small. He tore at the net, raging. The net was stronger than human flesh; it would not tear, though fingernails did. He screamed his frustration, and the scream brought him to his senses.
Suppose he did get one out? What then?
EAT IT! cried his belly and viscera, commanding. His mouth ran saliva.
It would kill him. An alien plant from an alien world, a plant obviously regarded a food by an alien species. He should be thinking of a way out of here!
Yet his fingers were still tearing at the net. Brennan kicked himself away. He was hungry. The fragments of his suit were gone, left behind in the alien lifesystem, including the water and food-syrup nipples in his helmet. Was there water in here? Could he trust it? What guarantee had he that the Outsider had a use for partially burnt hydrogen?
What would he do for food?
He had to get out of here.
But he couldn’t move around in that plastic bag; even in his own suit it would have been risky, jumping across eight miles of space without a backpac.
He had to distract his stomach somehow.
Why were the contents of this hold so valuable? How could they be more valuable than the pilot, who was needed to get them to their destination?
Might as well see what’s here.
The rectangular solid was a glossy, temperatureless material. Brennan found the handle easily enough, but it wouldn’t budge under his pull. Then the enticing smell of the roots made a concerted attack on his hunger, and he yelled and pulled with all the strength of killing rage. The handle jarred open.
It was filled with seeds, large seeds like almonds, frozen in a matrix of frost, bitterly cold. He wrenched one loose with numbing fingers. The air about him was turning the color of cigarette smoke when he closed the lid.
He put the seed in his mouth, warmed it with saliva. It had no taste; it was merely cold, and then not even that. He spit it out.
So. Green light and strange, rich-smelling air. But not too thin, not too strange; and the light was cool and refreshing.
If Brennan liked the Outsider’s lifesystem, the Outsider would like Earth.
He’d brought a crop to plant, too. Seeds, roots, and…and what?
Brennan kicked across the clear space to the stack of crates. Not all the strength of his back and legs would tear a crate loose from the wall. Contact cement? But a lid came up with great reluctance and a creaking noise. Sure enough, it had been glued down; the wood itself had torn away. Brennan wondered what strange plant had produced it.
Inside was a sealed plastic bag. Plastic? It looked and felt like a strong commercial sandwich wrap. What was inside felt like fine dust packed nearly solid. It was dark through the plastic.
Brennan floated near the crates, one hand gripping the torn lid, wondering…
An autopilot, of course. The Outsider was only a backup for the autopilot; it didn’t matter what happened to him, he was only a safety device. The autopilot would get this crop to wherever it was going.
To Earth. But a crop meant other Outsiders, following.
He had to warn Earth.
How?
Brennan laughed at himself. Was ever a man so completely trapped? The Outsider had him. Brennan, a Belter and a free man, had allowed himself to become property. His laughter died into despair.
Despair was a mistake. The smell had been waiting to pounce.
…It was the pain that brought him out of it. His hands were bleeding from cuts and abrasions. There were sprains and blisters and bruises. His left finger screamed its agony at him; it stuck out at a strange angle, and it swelled as he watched. Dislocated or broken. But he’d tom a hole in the net, and his right hand gripped a fibrous root.
He threw i
t as hard as he could and instantly curled in upon himself, hugging his knees as if to surround his pain and smother it. He was angry and scared. Why, that damnable smell had turned off his mind as if he were no more than a child’s toy robot! Worse, his body had ignored his wishes as thoroughly as had the Outsider.
He floated through the cargo space like a football, hugging his knees and crying. He was hungry and angry and humiliated, but most of all he was scared. The Outsider had seared his mind with his own unimportance. He had slapped his fists against the Outsider’s blank, hard face, but the Outsider had ignored him, holding him out for inspection like a judge in the Toy group at a dog show. When Brennan kicked him where his groin should have been, the alien had noticed and looked down, watched as Brennan kicked again, returned to his inspection…
But why? What did the Outsider want with him?
Something smacked him across the back of his head. In one fluid motion Brennan snatched the missile out of the air and bit into it. The root had returned to him on a ricochet orbit. Its taste was as indescribable and as delicious as its scent.
In a last lucid moment Brennan wondered how long he would need to die. He didn’t much care. He bit again, and swallowed.
V
There were few big cargo ships in the Belt. Most miners preferred to haul their own cargo. The ships which hauled the large cargos from asteroid to asteroid were not large; they were simply furnished with a great many attachments. To haul a large cargo, the crew strung it out on the attachments, in nets or on lightweight shelves, sprayed foam plastic to protect whatever they were hauling, covered the bottom of the nets or shelves with special reflective foil to ward off the searing light of the drive, and took off at low power.
The Blue Ox was a special case. She hauled fluids and fine dusts: refined quicksilver and mined water, grain, seeds, highly impure tin scooped molten from lakes on dayside Mercury, mixed and dangerous chemicals from Jupiter’s atmosphere. Such cargos were not always available for hauling. So the Ox was a huge tank with a small threeman lifesystem and an adequate propulsion system; but, since she must sometimes carry bulky objects instead of seeds or fluids, her big tank had been designed with a big lid.
Einar Nilsson stood at the rim of that lid, looking in. He was seven feet tall and overweight for a Belter, and that was overweight for anyone, for the fat had gone into his belly and second chin. The device on his suit was a Viking ship with snarling dragon prow, floating not in space but in the bright, milky swirl of a spiral galaxy.
The singleship in the Ox’s tank was Nilsson’s own. There was a new Adzhubei 4-4 computer; there were machines intended to serve as the computer’s senses and speakers, radar and radio and sonics and monochromatic lights. Each item was tethered separately, half a dozen ways, to hooks on the inside wall of the tank.
Nilsson nodded, satisfied, his graying red Belter crest brushing the crown of his helmet. “Fire,” he said.
Tim Truesdale began spraying fluid into the tank. In thirty seconds the tank was filled with foam which was already hardening.
“Close the lid.”
It was done.
“Get aboard, Tim. Nate, how much time we got?”
“Another twenty minutes to catch the optimum course,” said the young voice.
“Okay, call Ceres. Ask for permission to take off. We’ll have to take off before it comes, but we might as well ask.”
“Sold,” said the young voice, and clicked off. Nathan was young, but not young enough to waste words over a phone. He learned fast. Einar had taken him on at the request of his father, an old friend.
He’d taken Tim because Tim could obey orders. Perhaps too much so. Tim had been a flatlander until he was twenty, and flatlanders were not high on originality. But Tim had sense, and he’d lived in the Belt for eight years.
Einar finished sealing the lid over the hardened foam plastic, then jumped for the airlock, following Tim. They were going to meet the first alien to reach the solar system in human history; but it never occurred to him to doubt the competency of either of his men. They were Belters. And they would be cautious.
“Nick?”
“Here.” Nick picked up his tea bottle, found it empty. There was a plate beside it, also empty.
“The Blue Ox wants to take off.”
“Send ’em permission.”
“Okay. But I notice they aren’t armed.”
“They’ve got a fusion drive, don’t they? And oversized steering jets to aim it. The drive is all the weapon they’ll need.”
Cutter clicked off.
Nick stared at the screen for a moment, with his eyes squinched shut so the strain lines showed like webs around the eyelids. Was he right? He was ninety percent sure he was. Even an H-bomb would be less effective as a weapon than the directed hydrogen explosion from a fusion drive. And an H-bomb was an obvious weapon, an insult and a challenge to a peace-loving Outsider.
Four blobs showed on the screen. Without the fusion drives they were dark-on-dark, hard to see, but Nick could see that the Outsider ship was strung out into three parts. A poor way to build a ship, unless your shielding was very bad. That middle section, well, it might contain anything, including a reserve fuel supply; but principally it must be a shield for the lifesystem. The blobs hadn’t changed motion for hours.
The waiting was a strain.
Nick went back to Brennan’s dossier. It was thin. They were all thin. Belters wouldn’t have accepted a government which kept more than minimal tabs on them.
John Fitzgerald Brennan was very much the average Belter. Forty-five years of age. Two daughters by the same woman, Charlotte Leigh Wiggs, a professional farming machine repairwoman in Confinement. Brennan had the beginnings of a nice retirement fund, though it had been drained twice to establish trust fund for his children. He had twice lost loads of radioactive ore to the goldskins and the Belt smuggling laws. Once would have been typical. Belters laugh at inept smugglers, but a man who’s never been caught may be suspected of never having tried. No guts.
His suit design proclaimed him a Dali fan. Nick frowned. Miners sometimes lost their grip on reality, out there. But Brennan was alive, and fairly well off on his own earnings.
Twenty years ago he’d worked with a crew, mining molten tin on Mercury’s dayside. Because of the Sun’s magnetic field, Mercury was rich with valuable non-ferrous elements. The tin was easier to get at when molten. Brennan had been competent, and he’d made good money, but he’d quit after ten months and never worked with a crew again. Apparently he didn’t like working with others.
Why had he let the Outsider catch him?
Silly question. Nick would have done the same. The Outsider was here in the system; somebody had to meet him. Running would have been an admission that Brennan couldn’t handle such a meeting. No miner would make that admission.
His family wouldn’t have stopped him. His family were Belters; they could take care of themselves.
But I wish he’d run, thought Nick. His fingers beat a rhythmic tattoo on the desk. He’d have been a smoker, if Belters smoked.
Leaving his captive in the cargo hold, Phssthpok moved across to the native’s ship. It was an hour’s jump, but Phssthpok was not hurried. With his superb reflexes he didn’t even need the reaction pistol.
His captive would keep. Eventually he would have to learn the alien’s language, to question him about the ones Phssthpok had come to help. By now Phssthpok was sure he’d picked the wrong star. There had only been twenty-eight percent chance to start with. But with ships like this the natives might have reached other stars.
The ship was small. Phssthpok found little more than a small life-support system, a long drive tube, a ring-shaped hydrogen tank with a cooling motor and an attached something-or-other whose purpose was not obvious. The fusion, tube extended far beyond the fuel ring, which was under the lifesystem. The fuel ring was so attached that it could be slipped off the drive tube and replaced by a full tank in a few minutes. Around the rim of the l
ife-support system were a set of attachments, including several folded fine-mesh nets.
Some of the attachments—hooks—now secured a lightweight metal cylinder which showed signs of erosion. Phssthpok looked it over, dismissed it without knowing its purpose. Obviously it was not needed for the ship to function. It was some kind of cargo.
Phssthpok found inspection panels in the fusion tube and used them. Within half an hour he could build his own fusion shield, had he the materials, though he still didn’t understand what made it go. The natives must be more intelligent than he had guessed. Or luckier. He moved up to the lifesystem and through the oval door.
The cabin included an acceleration couch, banks of controls surrounding it in a horseshoe, a space behind the couch big enough to move around in, an automatic kitchen, and attachments to several mechanical senses of types frequently used in Pak warfare. But this was not a warship. Perhaps the native’s senses were less acute than Pak senses. Behind the cabin were machinery and tanks of fluid, which Phssthpok examined with great interest.
Assume that these machines are well designed, he told himself. Then GO Target #1 - 3 is habitable. Very. A trifle heavy, both in air and in gravity. But to a people who had been traveling for five hundred thousand years, it would have looked irresistible.
Had they reached here, they would have gone no further.
And that cut Phssthpok’s region of search in half. He need not look at stars further from the galactic core than this one.
The lifesystem was the most puzzling part of the ship. Phssthpok found things he flatly didn’t understand, that he would never understand.
The kitchen, for instance. Weight was important in space. Surely the natives could have provided a lightweight food, synthetic if necessary, capable of keeping the pilot fed and healthy indefinitely. The saving in effort and in fuel consumption would have been enormous when multiplied by the number of ships he’d seen. Instead, they preferred to carry a tremendous variety of prepackaged foods and a complex machine to select and heat them. They had chosen to cool these foods against decomposition rather than reduce them to a powder. Why?