Protector

by Larry Niven

  “Mph? Sure, but—Yipe! All right, damnit, so you’ve got strong hands.”

  “And we won’t be using our legs. We’ll be riding everywhere we go. You can’t walk anywhere on Mars.”

  “Luke, I think I’ve got it. You can get a ship, right? Right. So get a ship, then get a tough explorer-type flatlander. Sell him the ship. Then he hires me as his pilot, right?”

  “Right. But I won’t do it.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “Blackmail.”

  “You’re all crazy. All of you. It comes from living at the bottom of a gravity well. The gravity pulls the blood away from your brains.”

  “I’ll show you to a telephone. You’ll have to pay in your million marks before the UN catches on where we’re going.”

  Phssthpok dreamed.

  He stayed in the cargo hold where he could watch the native. There was food and water and no need to go outside. During the first week he had disassembled every machine in the cargo hold to make what repairs and adjustments were needed. Now he only watched his captive. The native required little care.

  Phssthpok rested on his stockpile of roots and dreamed.

  In a few weeks he would have completed his long, long task…or failed. In any case he would stop eating. He had been alive long enough to suit him. Soon he would end as he had nearly ended thirteen hundred shiptime years ago…

  It had been a matter of time.

  Phssthpok had been a protector for sixteen years. His remaining children in the radiation-blasted Valley of Pitchok were sixteen to thirty-five years of age; his living grandchildren were of all ages up to twenty-four or so. But who had survived the bomb? He had returned immediately to the Valley of Pitchok to find out.

  Not many breeders were left in the valley, but such as were still alive had to be protected. Phssthpok and the rest of the Pitchok families made peace, the terms being that they and their sterile children should have the valley until their deaths, at which time the valley would revert to Eastersea Alliance. There were ways to neutralize radioactive fallout. The Pitchok families used them. Then, leaving their valley and its survivors in the hands of one of their number, they had scattered.

  Of the several hundred survivors, all had been tested and all had been found essentially sterile. “Essentially” being taken to mean that if they did have children, the children would be mutants. Their smells would be altered. With no protector to look after their interests, they would quickly die.

  To Phssthpok, the most important of his surviving descendants was the youngest, Ttuss, a female of two years.

  It had been a matter of time. In thirty-two years Ttuss would reach the age of change. She would become an intelligent being and a heavily armored one, with skin that would turn a copper knife and strength to lift ten times her own weight. She would be ideally designed for the purpose of fighting, but she would have nothing to fight for.

  She would stop eating. She would die, and Phssthpok would stop eating. Ttuss’s lifespan was his own.

  But sometimes a protector could adopt the entire Pak species as his descendants. At least he’d have every opportunity to find a purpose in life. There was always truce for a childless protector, for such never had a reason to fight. And there was a place he could go.

  The library was as old as the radioactive desert which surrounded it. That desert would never be recultivated; it was reseeded every thousand years with radiocobalt so that no protector could covet it. Protectors could cross that desert; they had no gonadal genes to be smashed by subatomic particles. Reproducers could not.

  How old was the desert? Phssthpok never knew and never wondered. But the section on space travel was a million years old.

  He came to the Library with a number of—not friends, but associates in misery, childless former members of the Pitchok families. The Library was huge and rambling, a composite of at least a million years of Pak knowledge, crossfiled into various sections according to subject. Naturally several sections often contained the same book. The associates divided at the entrance, and Phssthpok didn’t see any of them again for thirty-two years.

  He spent those thirty-two years in one vast room, a floor-to-ceiling labyrinth of bookshelves. At scattered corners there were bins of tree-of-life root kept constantly filled by attendants. There were other foodstuffs brought at seeming random: meats, vegetables, fruits, whatever was available to childless protectors who had chosen to serve the Library rather than die. Tree-of-life root was the perfect food for a protector, but he could eat nearly anything.

  And there were books.

  They were nearly indestructible, those books. They would have emerged like fluttering meteors from the heart of a hydrogen bomb explosion. All were written more or less in the present language, and all were constantly being recopied by librarians as the language changed. In this room the books all dealt with space and space travel.

  There were treatises on the philosophy of space travel. They all seemed to make a fundamental assumption: someday the Pak race must find a new home; hence every contribution to the techniques of interstellar flight was a contribution to the immortality of the Pak species. Phssthpok could discount that assumption, knowing that a protector who did not believe it would never write a book on the subject. There were records of interstellar and interplanetary flights, hundreds of thousands of them, starting with a fantastic trip some group made almost a million years ago, riding a hollowed-out asteroidal rock into the arms of the galaxy in search of yellow dwarf suns. There were technical texts on everything that could possibly relate to space or spacecraft or astrogation: miniaturization, nuclear and subnuclear physics, plastics, ecology, gravity and how to use it, relativity, astronomy, astrophysics, records of extraplanetary mining, diagrams for a hypothetical ramscoop (in an unfinished work by a protector who had lost his appetite halfway through), ion drive diagrams, plasma theory.

  He started at the left and began working his way around.

  He’d chosen the section on space travel more or less at random; it had looked less crowded than the others. The romance of space was not in Phssthpok’s soul. He kept with it rather than change endeavors in midcourse, feeling certain that he’d need every minute of his thirty-four years of grace no matter what section he chose. In twenty-eight years he read every book in the Astronautics section, and he still had found nothing that drastically needed doing.

  Start a migration project? It simply wasn’t that urgent. The Pak sun had at least hundreds of millions of years to live…longer than the Pak species, probably, considering their perennial state of war. And the chance of disaster would be high. There were no known yellow suns in the galactic core. For that and other reasons, including the probability that the entire core would someday explode in a chain reaction of novas, it would be necessary to go into the arms looking for habitable planets.

  The first expedition to try that had met a horrible fate.

  So. Join the Library staff? He’d thought of it many times, but the answer always came out the same. No matter what phase of the Library he concerned himself with, his life would depend on others. To retain his will to live he would need to know that all Pak would benefit from his aspect of Library work. Let there be a dry spell in new discoveries, let his faith flag, and he would find himself no longer hungry.

  It was terrifying not to be hungry. During the last few decades it had happened several times. Each time he had forced himself to reread the communications from the Valley of Pitchok. The last communication always told him that Ttuss had been alive when it was sent. Gradually, time after time, his appetite had come back. But for Ttuss he would be dead. He had investigated the librarians and found that their lives were unusually short. The Library was no answer.

  Find a way to keep Ttuss alive? There was no way. If there were he would have used it on himself.

  Study theoretical astronomy? He had some ideas, but they would not help the race of Pak. The Pak did not seek abstract knowledge. Mine the asteroids? The asteroids were as th
oroughly mined out as the surface of the planet had often been, with the difference that convection currents in the planet’s interior eventually replaced worked-out mines. He should have gone in for metal reclamation. Now it was too late to change studies. Put plastic-bubble cities in orbit to provide more living room for breeders? Nonsense! Too vulnerable to capture or accidental destruction.

  One day Phssthpok’s appetite was gone. The letters from the Valley of Pitchok did not help; he did not believe them. He thought of returning to the valley, but he knew he’d starve to death on the way. When he was sure, he sat down against a wall, the last in a line of protectors who also did not eat, who were waiting to die.

  A week passed. The librarians found that two at the head of the line were dead. They picked them up, a pair of skeletons clothed in dried, wrinkled leather armor, and carried them away somewhere.

  Phssthpok remembered a book.

  He still had the strength to reach it.

  He read carefully, with the book in one hand and a root in the other. Presently he ate the root…

  The ship had been a roughly cylindrical asteroid, reasonably pure nickel-iron with stony strata running through it, about six miles long and four through. A group of childless protectors had carved it out with solar mirrors and built into it a small life-support and controls system, a larger frozen-sleep chamber, a breeder atomic pile and generator, a dirigible ion drive, and an enormous cesium tank. They had found it necessary to exterminate the protector stage members of a large family in order to get control of a thousand breeders. With two protectors as pilots and seventy more in suspended animation with the thousand breeders, with a careful selection of the beneficial lifeforms of the Pak planet, they set out into one arm of the galaxy.

  Though their knowledge was a million years scantier than Phssthpok’s, they had good reasons for choosing an arm. Most of the stars around them were Population II. They’d have a better chance of finding yellow suns out there, and a better chance of finding a double planet in the right place. Perturbations from stars an average of half a light-year away made double planets scarce in the Core; and there was reason to think that only an oversized moon could give any world an atmosphere capable of supporting Pak-style life.

  An ion drive and a certain amount of cesium…They expected to move slowly, and they did. At twelve thousand miles per second relative to the Pak sun, they turned off the ion motor. They then fired a laser message at the Pak system to tell the Library that the ion drive had worked. The blueprints were somewhere in the Library, with a list of suggested design changes.

  The next and last section of the book was nearly five hundred thousand years newer. It was a record of a laser message which had come plowing through the Pak system, torn and attenuated and garbled by dust and distance, in a language no longer spoken. Someone had translated it and filed it here. Hundreds of searchers like Phssthpok must have read it and wondered about the part of the story they could never know and passed on…

  But Phssthpok read it very carefully.

  They had traveled an enormous distance into the galactic arm. Half the protectors had been used up when they arrived, dying not of starvation nor of violence but of age. This was so unusual that a detailed medical description had been sent with the message. They had passed yellow suns with no planets, other yellow suns whose worlds were all gas giants. Yellow suns had gone by carrying potentially habitable worlds; but all were too far off course to be reached on the maneuvering reserve of cesium. Galactic dust and the galaxy’s gravity had slowed their strange craft, increasing the maneuver reserve. The sky darkened around them as suns became rare.

  Presently they had found a planet.

  They had braked the ship, transferred what was left of the plutonium to the piles of the landing craft, and gone down. The decision was final. If the planet failed to measure up they would have to work for decades to make their ship spaceworthy again.

  It had life. Some was inimical, but none that could not be handled. There was soil. The remaining protectors woke the breeders and turned them loose in the forests, planted their crops, dug mines, made machines to dig more mines, made machines to tend the crops…

  The black, nearly starless night sky bothered some, but they got used to it. The frequent rains bothered others, but did not hurt the reproducers, so that was all right. There was room for all, so the protectors did not even fight. None stopped eating. There were predators and bacteria to exterminate, there was a civilization to build, there was too much to do.

  When spring came, most of the planted crops did not come up. There was no tree-of-life at all.

  They could not return to space. Cesium they could get, but they could never build a uranium-producing technology in the time they had left.

  Finally, knowing they were lost, they had tried to build a laser beam big enough to pierce the dust clouds hiding them from the core. They did not know they had succeeded. They did not know what had killed their crops; they suspected it might be the sparsity of a particular kind of starlight, or starlight in general. They gave detailed information on the blood lines of their breeder cargo, hoping that some of the line might survive. And they asked for help.

  Five hundred thousand years ago.

  Phssthpok sat by the root bin, eating and reading. He would have smiled if his face had been built that way. Already he could see that his mission would involve every childless protector on the Pak planet.

  For five hundred thousand years those breeders had been living without tree-of-life. Without any way to make the change to the protector stage. Dumb animals.

  And Phssthpok alone knew how to find them.

  Nick took the ship up on a ram-and-wing rented from Death Valley Port. It went up smooth all the way, no turbulence, a lovely scenic ride up and out over the Pacific. One hundred and fifty miles up Nick switched to fusion power and headed outward, leaving the ram-and-wing to find its own way home.

  The sky turned black, with bright points. The Earth wrapped itself around itself and dropped behind. It was four days to Mars at one gee, with Ceres to tell them which asteroids to dodge.

  Nick put the ship on autopilot. It was a flatland navy job, unfamiliar to him but simple enough for a moron to use. He could have flown it blindfolded.

  Luke said, “Okay to smoke?”

  “If you want lung cancer.”

  “Does the UN have its money yet?”

  “Sure. They must have got it transferred hours ago.”

  “Good. Call them, identify yourself and ask for everything they’ve got on Mars. Tell them to put it on the screen and you’ll pay for the laser. That’ll kill two birds with one stone.”

  “How?”

  “It’ll tell them what we’re doing.”

  “I still don’t see it. You say they’re so unwieldy they can’t move. How will our going to Mars make them less unwieldy?”

  “Look at it from another direction, Nick. How did the Belt come to choose you to represent them?”

  “Aptitude tests said I had a high IQ and liked ordering people around. From there I worked my way up.”

  “Okay. We go by the vote.”

  “Popularity contests.”

  “It works. But it does have drawbacks. What government doesn’t?” Garner shrugged. “Every speaker in the UN represents some one section of the world. He thinks it’s the best section, filled with the best people. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been elected. So maybe twenty representatives each think they know just what to do about the Outsider, and not one of them will knuckle down to the others. Prestige. Eventually they’d work out a compromise between them. But if they get the idea that a civilian and a Belter could beat them to the Outsider, they’ll get off their thumbs a lot faster. See?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, make your call.”

  You’re flying from New York, USA, to Piquetsburg, South Africa. Suddenly you become aware that New York is flying in one direction, Piquetsburg in another, and a hurricane wind is blowing your plane off
course in still a third. All at speeds measured in miles per second…

  Nightmare? Well, yes. But traveling in the solar system is different from traveling on Earth. Each individual part moves at its own pace, like raisins in a vat of taffy being stirred by a witch.

  Mars moved in a nearly circular orbit. Asteroids moved nearby on orbits more elliptical, catching up to the red planet or falling behind, outrunning her or backing toward her. Some carried telescopes. Their operators would report to Ceres if they saw intelligent motion on the ochre surface.

  The LSD4 accelerated toward Mars, carrying Nicholas Sohl and Lucas Gamer. A modulated laser beam followed them from Earth’s orbit.

  The abandoned Outsider ship crossed over the sun and curved inward, following a shallow hyperbola which would take it through the plane of the planets.

  The Blue Ox followed an accelerating higher-order curve. Eventually it would match the Ox’s velocity and position to the Outsider’s.

  Eventually it did.

  VII

  “I’m ready for a vacation,” said Nick. For the past two days they had been skimming Earth’s stored information on Mars.

  “That dust is our biggest problem,” said Luke.

  “Why the Finagle did we have to watch all that? According to you, we’re just running a bluff.”

  “According to me, we’re running a search, unless you’ve got something better to do. We’re faking a search, so why not do a real one? Sometimes the best symbol for a thing is the thing itself.”

  Nick turned off the laser transmitter. It was hot from two days of use in blasting a locator beam back at Earth. “I’m game, like I said, I’m ready for a vacation. Hunting strange things is what I do on my vacations. Did you say something about the dust?”

  “I said it’s our biggest problem. The Outsider didn’t even have to dig a hole for itself. He could have sunk anywhere on Mars.”

  The dust of Mars was unique.

  Its uniqueness was the result of vacuum cementing. Once vacuum cementing had been a bugaboo of the space industries. Small spaceprobe components which would slide easily over one another in normal air would weld solidly in a vacuum, just as soon as the gas absorbed by their surfaces had evaporated away. Vacuum cementing had fused parts in the first American satellites and in the first Russian interplanetary probes. And vacuum cementing was what kept the Moon from being fathoms deep in meteor dust. The dust particles would weld into rock, into natural cement, under the same molecular attraction that fuses Johanssen blocks and turns the mud of sea bottoms to sedimentary rock.