by Larry Niven
Three blobs in a line, a fourth hanging nearby. Nick stared at the screen, his eyes squinched almost shut so that strain lines showed like webs around his eyelids. Whatever had happened, it had happened now.
Other matters begged for the First Speaker’s attention. Dickerings with Earth on the funding of ramrobots and on apportionment of ramrobot cargoes among the four interstellar colonies. Trade matters regarding Mercurian tin. The extradition problem. He was spending too much time on this... but something kept telling him that it could be the most important event in human history.
Cutter’s voice burst jarringly from a speaker. “Nick? The Blue Ox wants to take off.”
“Fine,” said Nick.
“Okay. But I notice they aren’t armed.”
“They’ve got a fusion drive, don’t they? And oversized attitude jets to aim it. If they need more than that we’ve got a war on our hands.” Nick clicked off.
And sat wondering. Was he right? Even an H-bomb would be less effective as a weapon than the directed exhaust of a fusion drive. And an H-bomb was an obvious weapon, an insult to a peace-loving Outsider. Still...
Nick went back to Brennan’s dossier. It was thin. Belters would not accept a government that kept more than minimal tabs on them.
John Fitzgerald Brennan was very much the average Belter. Forty-five years of age. Two daughters—Estelle and Jennifer—by the same woman, Charlotte Leigh Wiggs, a professional farming machine repairwoman in Confinement. Brennan had the beginnings of a nice retirement fund, though he’d drained it twice for trust funds for his children. He had twice lost loads of radioactive ore to the goldskins. Once would have been typical. Belters laugh at inept smugglers, but a man who has never been caught may be suspected of never having tried. No guts.
Suit design: The Madonna of Port Lligat. Dali. Nick frowned. Miners sometimes lost their grip on reality, out there. But Brennan was alive and fairly well-off on his own earnings, and he’d never had an accident.
Twenty years ago he’d worked with a crew mining molten tin on Mercury. Mercury was rich with valuable nonferrous elements, though the sun’s magnetic field made special ships necessary; a solar storm could pick up a metal ship and drop it miles away. 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?
Hell, 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.
His family wouldn’t have stopped him. They were Belters; they could take care of themselves.
But I wish he’d run, Nick thought. His fingers beat a nervous tattoo on his desk.
Brennan was all alone in a small space.
It had been a hairy, scary ride. The Outsider had jumped into space with a balloonful of Brennan, balanced itself against his mass and used its reaction pistol. They, had coasted for twenty minutes. Brennan had been near suffocation before they reached the trailing pod.
He remembered the alien touching a flat-nosed tool to the hull, then pulling them both through a viscous surface that looked like metal from both sides. The alien had unzipped the balloon, turned and jumped and vanished through the wall while Brennan was still tumbling helplessly in air.
The air tasted like the cabin air, though the peculiar scent was much stronger. Brennan drew it in in great rarefied gasps. The Outsider had left the balloon behind. It floated toward him like a translucent ghost, menacing and inviting, and Brennan began to laugh, a painful sound, almost like sobbing.
He began to look around him.
The light was greener than the sunlight tubes he was used to. The only clear space was the space he floated in, as roomy as the lifesystem of his singleship. 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 deep freeze. Above and around him, the curved wall.
So he’d been right. This was a cargo hold. But half of the space in this teardrop-shaped hold was still locked off from him.
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. They occupied most of what Brennan could see of the cargo hold. Brennan jumped down at them, wrapped his fingers in the net to bring his eyes closer.
The smell became hugely more intense. He’d never smelled, imagined, dreamed anything like it.
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. His lips skinned back from teeth and gums. He stabbed his fingers through the net, grasped for the roots. For minutes he tried to pull one through holes that 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. The scream brought him to his senses.
Suppose he did get one out? What then?
EAT IT! His mouth ran saliva.
It would kill him. An alien plant from an alien world, a plant that an alien species probably saw as food. 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 Outsider’s cabin, including the water and food-syrup nipples in his helmet. Was there water in here? Could he trust it? Would the Outsider guess that he had a use for partially burnt hydrogen?
What would he do for food?
He had to get out of here.
The plastic bag. He fielded it from the air and examined it. He found out how to seal and unseal it—from the outside. Wonderful. Wait—yes! He could turn the bag inside out, seal it from the inside. Then what?
He couldn’t move around in that plastic bag. No hands. Even in his own suit it would have been risky, jumping across eight miles of space without a backpac. He couldn’t get through the wall anyway.
He had to distract his stomach somehow.
So. Why were the contents of this hold so valuable?
How could they be worth more than the pilot, who was needed to get them to where they were going?
Might as well see what else is here.
The rectangular solid was a glossy, temperatureless material. Brennan found the handle easily enough, but he couldn’t budge it. Then the 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 built for Outsider strength.
The box 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 had brought a crop to plant, too. Seeds, roots, 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 gone crinkly with age. 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. He wondered.
An autopilot, of course. The Outsider was only 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 where it was going.
To Earth? But a crop meant other Outsiders, following.
He had to warn Earth.
Right. Good thinking. 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 of the roots 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 little 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 torn a hole in the net, and his right hand gripped a fibrous root.
He threw it 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, he was scared. Why, that damnable smell had turned off his mind as if he were no more than a child’s toy robot!
He floated through the cargo space like a football, hugging his knees and crying. He was hungry and angry and humiliated and scared. The Outsider had seared his mind with his own unimportance. But this was worse.
Why? What did the Outsider want with him?
Something smacked him across the back of the 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. It was tough and fibrous between his teeth. Its taste was as indescribable and as delicious as its scent.
In a last lucid moment Brennan wondered how long he would take to die. He didn’t much care. He bit again, and swallowed.
Phssthpok tracked a chain of answers with dogged persistence; but behind every answer there were more questions. His native captive smelled wrong: strange, animalistic. He was not of those Phssthpok had come seeking. Where were they, then?
They had not come here. The natives of GO Target #1-3 would have offered little resistance to colonists, judging by this one sample. But protectors would have exterminated them anyway, as a precaution. Some other star, then. Where?
The natives might have astronomical knowledge enough to tell him. With ships like these they might even have reached nearby stars.
In pursuit of answers, Phssthpok poised and leapt toward the native’s vehicle. It was an hour’s jump, but Phssthpok was not hurried. With his superb reflexes he did not even need the reaction pistol.
His captive would keep. Presently Phssthpok would have to learn his language, to question him. Meanwhile he would not hurt anything. He was too terrified, and too puny. Bigger but weaker than a breeder.
The captive ship was small. Phssthpok found little more than a cramped life support system, a long drive tube, a ring-shaped liquid hydrogen tank with a cooling motor. The toroidal fuel tank was detachable, with room for several more along the slender length of the drive tube. Around the rim of the cylindrical life support system were attachments for cargo, booms and folded fine-mesh nets and retractable hooks.
Several hooks now secured a lightweight metal cylinder which showed signs of erosion. Phssthpok examined it, dismissed it without knowing its purpose. Obviously it was not needed for the ship to function.
Phssthpok found no weaponry.
He did find inspection panels in the drive tube. Within an hour he could have built his own crystal-zinc fusion tube, had he the materials. He was impressed. The natives might 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 that was part of the horseshoe, and attachments to mechanical senses of types frequently used in Pak warfare. But this was no warship. The natives’ senses must be less acute than Pak senses. Behind the cabin were machinery and tanks of fluid, which Phssthpok examined with great interest.
If these machines were well designed, then GO Target #1-3 was habitable. Very. A bit heavy, both in air and in gravity. But—to a people who had been travelling for five hundred thousand years, it would have looked irresistible.
Had they reached here, they would have stopped.
That cut Phssthpok’s region of search in half. His target must be inward from here, back toward the galactic core. They simply had not got this far.
The life support system was most puzzling to Phssthpok. He 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 fuel consumption would have been enormous when multiplied by the number of ships he’d seen. Instead they preferred to carry a variety of prepackaged foods, and a complex machine to select and prepare them. They had chosen to cool these foods against decomposition rather than reduce them to d powder. Why?
Pictures, for instance. Phssthpok understood photographs, and he understood graphs and maps. But the three works of art on the back wall were neither. They were charcoal sketches. One showed the head of a native like Phssthpok’s captive, but with longer crest of hair and with odd pigmentation around eyes and mouth; the others must have been younger editions of the same uncomfortably Pak-like species. Only heads and shoulders were shown. What was their purpose?
Under other circumstances the design on Brennan’s spacesuit might have provided a clue.
Phssthpok had noticed that design and understood in part. For members of a cooperative, space-going subgroup, it would be useful to code spacesuits in bright colors. Others would recognize the pattern at great distances. The native’s design seemed overcomplex, but not enough so to rouse Phssthpok’s curiosity.
For Phssthpok would never understand art or luxury.
Luxury? A Pak breeder might appreciate luxury, but was too stupid to make it for himself. A protector hadn’t the motivation. A protector’s desires were all connected to the need to protect his blood line.
Art? There had been maps and drawings among the Pak since before Pak history. But they were for war. You didn’t recognize your loved ones by sight anyway. They smelled right.
Reproduce the smell of a loved one?
Phssthpok might have thought of that, had the painting on Brennan’s chest been anything else. That would have been a concept! A method of keeping a protector alive and functioning long after his line was dead. It could have changed Pak history. If only Phssthpok had been led to understand representational art...
But what could he make of Brennan’s suit?
Its chest was a copy in fluorescent dyes of Salvador Dali’s Madonna of Port Lligat. There were mountains floating above a soft blue sea, resisting gravity, their undersides flat and smooth. There were a woman and child, supernaturally beautiful, with windows through them. There was nothing for Phssthpok.
One thing he understood immediately.
He was being very careful with the instrument panel. He didn’t want to wreck anything before he found out how to pull astronomical data from the ship’s computer. When he opened the solar storm warning to ascertain its purpose, he found it surprisingly small. Curious, he investigated further. The thing was made with magnetic monopoles.
In one kangaroo leap Phssthpok was crossing interplanetary space. He fired half the gas charge in his reaction pistol, then composed
himself to wait out the fifteen minutes of fall.
He’d jumped toward the cargo pod. It would be necessary to tie the native down against acceleration. Already a cursory inspection of the native’s ship had cut his search area in half... and now he must abandon it. The native might have knowledge even more valuable. Even so, Phssthpok bitterly regretted the need to protect his captive; for the time involved could cost him his mission and his life.
The natives used monopoles. They must have means to detect them. Phssthpok had captured a native—a hostile act. And Phssthpok’s unarmed ship used a bigger mass of south poles than were to be found in this solar system.
Probably they were after him now.
They couldn’t catch him in any reasonable time. Their drives would be more powerful; gravity on GO Target #1-3 was about one point zero nine. But they wouldn’t have ramjet fields. Before their bigger drives could make a difference they’d be out of fuel... provided he started in time.
He braked to meet the cargo section, used his softener and oozed through the opaque twing hull. He reached for a handhold without looking, knowing where it would be, his eyes searching for the native.
He missed the handhold. He floated across the empty space while his muscles turned to jelly and melted.
The native had broken through the net and was burrowing feebly among the roots. His belly had become a hard, distended bulge. There was no sentience in his eyes.
With a kind of bewildered fury, Phssthpok thought: How can I get anything done it they keep changing the rules?
Stop that. I’m thinking like a breeder. One step at a time...
Phssthpok reached for a handhold and pushed himself down to Brennan. Brennan was limp now, his eyes half closed with the whites showing under the lids, his hand still clutching half of a root. Phssthpok set him rotating to make an examination.
All right.
Phssthpok climbed through the hull into vacuum and made his way around to the small end of the egg. There he crawled back inside, emerging in a cubicle just big enough to hold him.