Protector

by Larry Niven

  But there was no vacuum cementing on Mars. There was just enough gas to stop that, but not nearly enough to stop a meteor. Meteor dust covered most of the planet. Meteors would fuse it into craters, but it would not cement, though it was fine enough to behave like a viscous oil.

  “He had some reason for landing on Mars,” said Nick. “Maybe it’s something he can’t do under the dust. In that case he must have landed in a crater.”

  “And been spotted.” Luke keyed a photograph from the autopilot memory. It was one of a group from the smuggler trap. It showed a dimly shining metal egg with the small end pointed. The egg moved big-end first, and it moved as if rocket-propelled. But there was no reaction drive, at least none that any instrument could detect.

  “That thing’s big enough to see from space,” said Luke. “And easy to recognize, with that silver hull.”

  “Right. Shall we start with the Lacis Solis region?”

  “Why there?”

  “It’s the deepest dust on the planet.”

  “He’d have been stupid to pick the deepest. He’d have picked his place at random.”

  “Then we alone don’t have a chance of finding him. So let’s assume he’s stupid.”

  Luke nodded. “We’ll need dustboats. The old base—”

  “Blue Ox calling LSD4. Blue Ox calling LSD4.”

  There would be a directional signal in that message. Nick set the autopilot to aiming his own laser back at the source. “Take a few minutes,” he said.

  “I was saying that we’ll have to land at the old base and pick up a boat. Can we take the deep-radar out of this heap?”

  “Don’t know. I’d have to examine the ship from outside.”

  “Let’s hope we can. I don’t know what else we can use for a finder.”

  “A metal detector. There must be one aboard.”

  There was. But again, Nick couldn’t tell whether it could be removed. There hadn’t been time to examine the flatland ship before takeoff.

  “This is Nicholas Brewster Sohl aboard LSD4 calling any or all aboard the Blue Ox. What’s new? Repeating. This is Nicholas—”

  Nate flicked to transmit. “Nathan La Pan aboard Blue Ox. We have matched with the Outsider ship. The others are preparing to board. I will switch you to Einar Nilsson.” He did.

  And then he settled back to wait.

  It was torment, having to wait here in the Ox’s control room while Tim and Einar moved in on the Outsider. Nate had protested mightily, but Einar’s argument had no holes to crawl through.

  “This Brennan,” Einar had said. “We don’t know what happened to him, but it would be prudent to assume the Outsider kidnapped him. And where is the Outsider?”

  “Gone. And well you know it.”

  “And the other Outsiders? Do you know how many Outsiders there were? Suppose there are more of them aboard? Suppose they attack?”

  Nate hadn’t been given quite time to answer. “Why, you’ll blast them with fusion flame. Because you’ll be right here waiting if we need help.”

  And he was. But he hated it.

  “Einar Nilsson speaking. We are outside the alien ship. The drive system is too hot to get near, but we will send you our films. I’ve hooked the com laser into a teevee peeper on my helmet. Tim, have you found anything?”

  “Just this big porthole and a smooth hull. And cables trailing off in both directions. We’ll have to burn our way in.”

  “Through the porthole,” said Einar. “Otherwise we might burn through something explosive.”

  “He was right,” said Nick. “That’s a lifesystem. You can see a control through the glass.”

  “If it’s glass. That’s crazy engineering, Nick. Why not put the lifesystem last?”

  “We’ll wait and ask him.”

  “Maybe we can patent the idea and sell it to him. Do you suppose he’s just stupid?”

  “If he is, he’s clever with his hands.”

  “This transparent stuff has a twenty thousand Kelvin melting point,” said Einar. “But we’re about through. The lifesystem must be about out of air; we’re getting almost no fog through the cracks. Ah, we’re through.”

  A three-foot transparent disc puffed away on the last of the air, with a breath of white mist playing around it. Tim caught it and sent it gliding toward the Ox for later recovery. Einar ducked headfirst into the hole and pulled himself through. His beer belly gave him a little trouble.

  “I’m in a small control cabin,” he said and swung from the waist to give the teevee peeper a full view. Tendrils of icy fog drifted toward the hole in the porthole. “Very small. The control bank is almost primitively complex, so complex that I’m inclined to say the Outsider had no autopilot. No man could handle all these controls and adjustments. I see no more than one couch and no aliens present but me.

  “There’s a bin full of sweet potatoes,” he continued, “right beside the control couch. It’s the only kitchen in this section. I think I’ll move on.” He turned for a last look at the porthole, saw Tim hovered outside, obeying orders. “Stay out there,” he said. “If I need help I’ll yell.”

  He moved to the door in the back of the control room, tried to open it. Pressure forced it shut. He used his cutter. The door cut easily, much more so than the porthole material. He waited while the room filled with thick fog, then pushed his way in.

  “This room is bigger than the control room. Sorry about the view; we seem to have stumbled on a suburb of Los Angeles. The place seems to be a free-fall gymnasium.” He swept his peeper around the room, then crossed to one of the machines and tried to work it. It looked like you were supposed to stand up inside it against the force of springs. Einar couldn’t budge it.

  He disconnected the peeper and aimed it at the machine, then tried again.

  “Either I’m doing it wrong,” he told his audience, “or the Outsider could pick his teeth with me. Let’s see what else there is.” He looked around. “That’s funny,” he said presently.

  There was nothing else. Only the door to the control room.

  Three men searching for two hours only confirmed Einar’s find. The lifesystem consisted of:

  One control room the size of a singleship control room.

  One free-fall gymnasium, same size.

  A bin of roots.

  An enormous air tank. There were no safeties to stop the flow in case of puncture. The tank was empty. It must have been nearly empty when the ship reached the solar system.

  Vastly complex air cleaning machinery, apparently designed to remove even the faintest, rarest trace of biochemical waste.

  Equally complex equipment for conversion of fluid and solid waste.

  It was incredible. The single Outsider had apparently spent his entire trip in two small rooms, eating just one kind of food, with no ship’s library to keep him entertained and no autopilot to keep him pointed right and guard his fuel supply and steer him clear of meteors. He must have done it all himself. Yet the trip had taken years, at least. In view of the complexity of the cleaning and renewal plants, the huge air tank must have existed solely to replace air lost by osmosis through the walls!

  “That’s it,” said Einar. “I’ll call you back in an hour, when we’ve analyzed this root and done what we can with the porthole material. Leave your com laser pointed. Is there anything you especially want us to look for?”

  “Search the ship again,” Nick told them. “You may find a highly miniaturized autopilot with overrides. Could you have overlooked a bolthole of some kind? If there’s more living space somewhere, an Outsider may be in it.” He turned the volume down and faced Luke. “They won’t find anything, of course. The Outsider’s as big as we are, judging from the couch. Can you think of anything else?”

  “I’d like to see them analyze the air. And I’m particularly interested in the root.”

  “They’ll finish with the root by the time this beam reaches them,” He turned up the volume. “After you finish with the root, we’d like to know wha
t the air’s made of. Then do whatever comes to mind. Don’t come home yet. Stay with the ship. If an emergency comes up, remember you’ve got a fusion flame thrower. Sohl out.”

  Brennan shifted.

  He hadn’t moved in hours. He lay on his back in the root bin, his eyes closed, his body folded into near-foetal position around a grossly swollen belly, his fists clenched. But now he moved one arm, and Phssthpok came suddenly alert.

  Brennan reached for a root, put it in his mouth, bit and swallowed. Bit and swallowed. Bit and swallowed, under Phssthpok’s watchful eye. His own eyes stayed closed.

  Brennan’s hand released the last inch or so of root, and he turned over and stopped moving.

  Phssthpok relaxed. Presently he dreamed.

  The Blue Ox had circled the sun and was now on the other side of the system, headed for interstellar space, a good distance from LSD4. Between the two ships was a communications gap of twenty to thirty minutes. Nick and Garner waited, knowing that any information would be half an hour late.

  They had asked all the questions, made guesses at the answers, mapped out their search pattern of Mars. Luke was bored. He missed the conveniences built into his travel chair. The ship’s library was unsatisfactory. He thought Nick was bored too, but he was wrong. In space Nick was silent by habit.

  The screen flashed on. The radio cleared its throat and spoke.

  “Nick Sohl, this is Tim Truesdale aboard the Blue Ox.” The voice held barely repressed panic; the youngish face confirmed it. Tim Truesdale caught on his own voice, then blurted, “We’re in trouble. We were testing that alien root in the chem lab, and Einar tried to take a bite of it. The damn thing was like asbestos from vacuum exposure, but he swallowed a piece before we could stop him. I can’t understand why he did it. It smelled awful!

  “Einar’s sick, very sick. He tried to kill me when I took the root away from him, and now he’s gone into a coma. We’ve hooked him into the autodoc. The ’doc says Insufficient Data.” They heard a ragged intake of breath. Suddenly Nick realized what was strange about Truesdale’s face. It was a flatlander’s face, wide and overmuscled. “We’d like permission to get him to a human doctor.”

  “Nick Sohl speaking. Pick a route and get on it. Then finish analyzing that root. I want to know what it smelled like, to Einar, to Nate, to you. What exactly did it remind you of? Sohl over.” Nick turned the volume off. “What the blazes got into him?”

  “Who?”

  “All of them, but especially Einar. I was his boss for a year before he quit politics. Why would he try a suicidal trick like that?” He drummed on the arm of his chair, then began looking for Ceres with the laser.

  In the half hour that passed before the Blue Ox called again, Nick got dossiers on all three of her crew.

  Tim Truesdale was a flatlander, sure enough. He had joined the Belt when he was twenty. Eight years later he was still alive; the Belt hadn’t killed him and probably wouldn’t. Einar Nilsson and Nathan La Pan were both Belters: Einar a broad-shouldered, broad-bellied giant, nearly fifty, running to fat and baldness; Nathan an eighteen-year old, learning the ways of space at apprentice pay before being allowed to take off in his own singleship.

  “That explains why they waited for orders,” said Nick rather seriously.

  “Does that need an explanation?”

  “Most Belters would have turned back the moment Einar came down sick. But Truesdale’s still a flatlander, still used to being told when to breathe, and La Pan probably didn’t trust his own judgment enough to override him.”

  “I notice the others had fewer childhood diseases than Truesdale.”

  “We try to keep germs out of the Belt. Did you notice anything else?”

  “Only his age. Nilsson was the oldest.”

  “I noticed that too. He was also the biggest. Do you—”

  “Blue Ox calling Nick Sohl aboard LSD4. We’re on our way home. The root seems almost normal. High in carbohydrates, including righthanded sugars. Ordinary looking proteins. No vitamins at all. We found two compounds Nate says are brand new. One resembles a hormone, testosterone, but it definitely isn’t testosterone.

  “The root doesn‘t smell like anything I can name, except possibly sour milk or sour cream. Nate says it smells like food burning, but he can’t name the food.

  “The Outsider ship’s air was thin, with an adequate partial pressure of oxygen, no poisonous compounds, at least five percent helium. We spectroanalyzed the porthole material, and—” He listed a spectrum of elements. “The ’doc still reports Einar’s illness as Insufficient Data, but now there’s an emergency light. Whatever it is, it isn’t good. Any further questions?”

  “Not at the moment,” said Nick and signed off. He sat drumming on the console with long, tapering fingers.

  “So,” said Luke.

  “Where’d it come from?” Nick wondered aloud.

  “A small world with no moon,” said Luke. “Moons tend to skim away a planet’s atmosphere. The Earth would be like Venus without her big oversized moon. The helium would be the first to go, wouldn’t it?”

  “Maybe. It would also be the first to leave a small planet. And think about the Outsider’s strength. It was no small planet he came from.”

  “What then?”

  “From somewhere in a gas cloud, with lots of helium. The galactic core is in the direction he came from. There’s lots of gas clouds and dust clouds in that direction.”

  “But they’re all an unholy distance away. Will you stop that drumming?”

  “It helps me think. Like your smoking.”

  “Drum then.”

  “There’s no limit to how far he could have come. The faster a ramscoop ship goes, the more fuel it would pick up. You saw the intake on the drive section?”

  “There has to be a limit at which the exhaust velocity equals the velocity at which the gas hits the ramscoop field.”

  “True. But it must be way the Finale up there. That air tank was huge. The Outsider is a long way from home.”

  VIII

  Phssthpok dreamed.

  …He sat on the floor of the Library with a piece of root in his jaws and an ancient book balanced on one cantaloupe knee and a map spread before him on the floor. It was a map of the galaxy, but it was graded for time. The core section showed as it had been a million years ago, but the outer arms were only five hundred thousand years old. The Library staff had spent most of a year preparing it for him.

  Assume they went a distance X, he told himself. Their average velocity must have been eleven thousand seven hundred thirty glocka per klakwhoo, considering dust friction and the galaxy’s gravitational and electromagnetic effects. Their laser returned at light-speed; figure for space curvature. Then X = thirty thousand one hundred and ten light-years.

  Phssthpok set his compass and drew an arc, using the Pak sun as a center. Margin of error: point zero zero one, thirty light-years. They’re on that arc!

  Now, assume they went straight toward the nearest edge of the core. Phssthpok drew a radial line. Margin of error greater here. Original error, course alterations…And the straight line would have been twisted into a spiral curve during five hundred thousand years, while the galaxy twisted like curdled milk. But they must have stayed flat in the galactic plane. And they’re near this point. I’ve found them…

  …Phssthpok’s minions pouring like army ants through the Library, Every protector in reach had joined his quest. It’s in the Astronautics Section, Pphwee. You’ve got to find it. We need those ramscoop diagrams. Ttuss, I need to know what happens when a protector gets old, and when it happens. It must be in the Medical Section. Hrathk, we have to learn what could stop a tree-of-life from growing in the galactic arms. Put your whole crew on this. Use the Valley of Pitchok for the experiments and remember the environment was habitable. You of the Physics and Engineering Sections, I need a fusion drive. Design it! Every childless protector on the planet was looking for a purpose in living, a Cause. And Phssthpok gave it to them�
��

  …The ship, finally completed, standing in three parts on the sand not far from the Library. Phssthpok’s army assembling. We need monopoles, we need tree-of-life roots and seeds, we need solid-fuel rockets for the launching. The scoop won’t work below a certain speed. Meteor Bay has everything we need. We can take them! For the first time in fifty thousand years, the childless protectors of Pak assembled for war…

  Phssthpok dreamed.

  Days ago he had stopped eating. He told himself it was too early, but his belly didn’t believe it. He would live just long enough. Meanwhile, he dreamed.

  “How dangerous are these approaches?”

  “Get that brave little quiver out of your voice,” said Nick. It was pure slander; Luke was nothing but interested. “I’ve made a couple of hundred of these in my life. For sheer thrills I’ve never found anything to beat letting you drive me to the spaceport.”

  “You said you were in a hurry.”

  “So I did. Luke, I’d like to request an admiring silence for the next few minutes.”

  “Aha! Ah HA!”

  The red planet reached for them, unfolding like a wargod’s hand. Nick’s bantering mood drained away, and his face took on a set, stony look. He hadn’t been quite candid with Luke. He had made several hundred powered approaches in his life; true. But those had been asteroid approaches, with gravity negligible or nearly so. His first landing approach to a planet had been made a week ago.

  Diemos went by in the direction technically known as “ship’s upward.” Nick inched a lever toward him. Mars was flattening out and simultaneously sliding away as they moved north.