by Larry Niven
Their world had altered them, even as our worlds have altered you and me. And underground civilization and point six gravities have made of me a pale stick figure of a man, tall and attenuated. The Jinxians we passed were short and wide, designed like bricks, men and women both. Among them the occasional offworlder seemed as shockingly different as a Kdatlyno or a Pierson's puppeteer.
And so we came to the Camelot.
The Camelot is a low, two-story structure that sprawls like a cubistic octopus across several acres of downtown Sirius Mater. Most offworlders stay here for the gravity control in the rooms and corridors and for access to the Institute of Knowledge, the finest museum and research complex in human space.
The Camelot Bar carries one Earth gravity throughout. We left our travel couches in the vestibule and walked in like men. Jinxians were walking in like bouncing rubber bricks, with big happy grins on their wide faces. Jinxians love low gravity. A good many migrate to other worlds.
We spotted Ausfaller easily: a rounded, moon-faced flatlander with thick, dark wavy hair and a thin black mustache. He stood as we approached. "Beowulf Shaeffer!" he beamed. "How good to see you again! I believe it has been eight years or thereabouts. How have you been?"
"I lived," I told him.
Carlos rubbed his hands together briskly. "Sigmund! Why did you bomb Bey's ship?"
Ausfaller blinked in surprise. "Did he tell you it was his ship? It wasn't. He was thinking of stealing it. I reasoned that he would not steal a ship with a hidden time bomb aboard."
"But how did you come into it?" Carlos slid into the booth beside him. "You're not police. You're in the Extremely Foreign Relations Bureau."
"The ship belonged to General Products Corporation, which is owned by Pierson's puppeteers, not human beings."
Carlos turned on me. "Bey! Shame on you."
"Damn it! They were trying to blackmail me into a suicide mission! And Ausfaller let them get away with it! And that's the least convincing exhibition of tact I've ever seen!"
"Good thing they soundproof these booths," said Carlos. "Let's order."
Soundproofing field or not, people were staring. I sat down. When our drinks came, I drank deeply. Why had I mentioned the bomb at all?
Ausfaller was saying, "Well, Carlos, have you changed your mind about coming with me?"
"Yes, if I can take a friend."
Ausfaller frowned and looked at me. "You wish to reach Earth, too?"
I'd made up my mind. "I don't think so. In fact, I'd like to talk you out of taking Carlos."
Carlos said, "Hey!"
I overrode him. "Ausfaller, do you know who Carlos is? He had an unlimited parenthood license at the age of eighteen. Eighteen! I don't mind you risking your own life; in fact, I love the idea. But his?"
"It's not that big a risk!" Carlos snapped.
"Yeah? What has Ausfaller got that eight other ships didn't have?"
"Two things," Ausfaller said patiently. "One is that we will be incoming. Six of the eight ships that vanished were leaving Sol system. If there are pirates around Sol, they must find it much easier to locate an outgoing ship."
"They caught two incoming. Two ships, fifty crew members and passengers, gone. Poof!"
"They would not take me so easily," Ausfaller boasted. "The Hobo Kelly is deceptive. It seems to be a cargo and passenger ship, but it is a warship, armed and capable of thirty gees acceleration. In normal space we can run from anything we can't fight. We are assuming pirates, are we not? Pirates would insist on robbing a ship before they destroy it."
I was intrigued. "Why? Why a disguised warship? Are you hoping you'll be attacked?"
"If there are actually pirates, yes, I hope to be attacked. But not when entering Sol system. We plan a substitution. A quite ordinary cargo craft will land on Earth, take on cargo of some value, and depart for Wunderland on a straight-line course. My ship will replace it before it has passed through the asteroids. So you see, there is no risk of losing Mr. Wu's precious genes."
Palms flat to the table, arms straight, Carlos stood looming over us. "Diffidently I raise the point that they are my futzy genes and I'll do what I futzy please with them! Bey, I've already had my share of children, and yours, too!"
"Peace, Carlos. I didn't mean to step on any of your inalienable rights." I turned to Ausfaller. "I still don't see why these disappearing ships should interest the Extremely Foreign Relations Bureau."
"There were alien passengers aboard some of the ships."
"Oh."
"And we have wondered if the pirates themselves are aliens. Certainly they have a technique not known to humanity. Of six outgoing ships, five vanished after reporting that they were about to enter hyperdrive."
I whistled. "They can precipitate a ship out of hyperdrive? That's impossible. Isn't it? Carlos?"
Carlos's mouth twisted. "Not if it's being done. But I don't understand the principle. If the ships were just disappearing, that'd be different. Any ship does that if it goes too deep into a gravity well on hyperdrive."
"Then...maybe it isn't pirates at all. Carlos, could there be living beings in hyperspace, actually eating the ships?"
"For all of me, there could. I don't know everything, Bey, contrary to popular opinion." But after a minute heshook his head. "I don't buy it. I might buy an uncharted mass on the fringes of Sol system. Ships that came too near in hyperdrive would disappear."
"No," said Ausfaller. "No single mass could have caused all of the disappearances. Charter or not, a planet is bounded by gravity and inertia. We ran computer simulations. It would have taken at least three large masses, all unknown, all moving into heavy trade routes simultaneously."
"How large? Mars size or better?"
"So you have been thinking about this, too."
Carlos smiled. "Yeah. It may sound impossible, but it isn't. It's only improbable. There are unbelievable amounts of garbage out there beyond Neptune. Four known planets and endless chunks of ice and stone and nickel-iron."
"Still, it is most improbable."
Carlos nodded. A silence fell.
I was still thinking about monsters in hyperspace. The lovely thing about that hypothesis was that you couldn't even estimate a probability. We knew too little.
Humanity has been using hyperdrive for almost four hundred years now. Few ships have disappeared in that time, except during wars. Now eight ships in ten months, all around Sol system.
Suppose one hyperspace beast had discovered ships in this region, say during one of the Man-Kzin Wars? He'd gone to get his friends. Now they were preying around Sol system. The flow of ships around Sol is greater than that around any three colony stars. But if more monsters came, they'd surely have to move on to the other colonies.
I couldn't imagine a defense against such things. We might have to give up interstellar travel.
Ausfaller said, "I would be glad if you would change your mind and come with us, Mr. Shaeffer."
"Um? Are you sure you want me on the same ship with you?"
"Oh, emphatically! How else may I be sure that you have not hidden a bomb aboard?" Ausfaller laughed. "Also, we can use a qualified pilot. Finally, I would like the chance to pick your brain, Beowulf Shaeffer. You have an odd facility for doing my job for me."
"What do you mean by that?"
"General Products used blackmail in persuading you to do a close orbit around a neutron star. You learned something about their homeworld -- we still do not know what it was -- and blackmailed them back. We know that blackmail contracts are a normal part of puppeteer business practice. You earned their respect. You have dealt with them since. You have dealt also with Outsiders without friction. But it was your handling of the Lloobee kidnapping that I found impressive."
Carlos was sitting at attention. I hadn't had a chance to tell him about that one yet. I grinned and said, "I'm proud of that myself."
"Well, you should be. You did more than retrieve known space's top Kdatlyno touch sculptor: you did it with hono
r, killing one of their number and leaving Lloobee free to pursue the others with publicity. Otherwise the Kdatlyno would have been annoyed."
Helping Sigmund Ausfaller had been the farthest thing from my thoughts for these past eight years, yet suddenly I felt damn good. Maybe it was the way Carlos was listening. It takes a lot to impress Carlos Wu.
Carlos said, "If you thought it was pirates, you'd come along, wouldn't you, Bey? After all, they probably can't find incoming ships."
"Sure."
"And you don't really believe in hyperspace monsters."
I hedged. "Not if I hear a better explanation. The thing is, I'm not sure I believe in supertechnological pirates, either. What about those wandering masses?"
Carlos pursed his lips, said, "All right. The solar system has a good number of planets -- at least a dozen so far discovered, four of them outside the major singularity around Sol."
"And not including Pluto?"
"No, we think of Pluto as a loose moon of Neptune. It runs Neptune, Persephone, Caina, Antenora, Ptolemea, in order of distance from the sun. And the orbits aren't flat to the plane of the system. Persephone is tilted at 120 degrees to the system and retrograde. If they find another planet out there, they'll call it Judecca."
"Why?"
"Hell. The four innermost divisions of Dante's hell. They form a great ice plain with sinners frozen into it."
"Stick to the point," said Ausfaller.
"Start with the cometary halo," Carlos told me. "It's very thin: about one comet per spherical volume of the Earth's orbit. Mass is denser going inward: a few planets, some inner comets, some chunks of ice and rock, all in skewed orbits and still spread pretty thin. Inside Neptune there are lots of planets and asteroids and more flattening of orbits to conform with Sol's rotation. Outside Neptune space is vast and empty. There could be uncharted planets. Singularities to swallow ships."
Ausfaller was indignant. "But for three to move into main trade lanes simultaneously?"
"It's not impossible, Sigmund."
"The probability -- "
"Infinitesimal, right. Bey, it's damn near impossible. Any sane man would assume pirates."
It had been a long time since I had seen Sharrol. I was sorely tempted. "Ausfaller, have you traced the sale of any of the loot? Have you gotten any ransom notes?" Convince me!
Ausfaller threw back his head and laughed.
"What's funny?"
"We have hundreds of ransom notes. Any mental deficient can write a ransom note, and these disappearances have had a good deal of publicity. The demands were a fakes. I wish one or another had been genuine. A son of the Patriarch of Kzin was aboard Wayfarer when she disappeared. As for loot -- hmm. There has been a fall in the black market prices of boosterspice and gem woods. Otherwise -- 2' He shrugged. "There has been no sign of the Barr originals or the Midas Rock or any of the more conspicuous treasures aboard the missing ships."
"Then you don't know one way or another."
"No. Will you go with us?"
"I haven't decided yet. When are you leaving?"
They'd be taking off tomorrow morning from the East End. That gave me time to make up my mind.
After dinner I went back to my room, feeling depressed. Carlos was going, that was clear enough. Hardly my fault...but he was here on Jinx because he'd done me and Sharrol a large favor. If he was killed going home...
A tape from Sharrol was waiting in my room. There were pictures of the children, Tanya and Louis, and shots of the apartment she'd found us in the Twin Peaks arcology, and much more.
I ran through it three times. Then I called Ausfaller's room. It had been just too futzy long.
I circled Jinx once on the way out. I've always done that, even back when I was flying for Nakamura Lines, and no passenger has ever objected.
Jinx is the close moon of a gas giant planet more massive then Jupiter and smaller than Jupiter because its core has been compressed to degenerate matter. A billion years ago Jinx and Primary were even closer, before tidal drag moved them apart. This same tidal force had earlier locked Jinx's rotation to Primary and forced the moon into an egg shape, a prolate spheroid. When the moon moved outward, its shape became more nearly spherical, but the cold rock surface resisted change.
That is why the ocean of Jinx rings its waist, beneath an atmosphere too compressed and too hot to breathe, whereas the points nearest to and farthest from Primary, the East and West Ends, actually rise out of the atmosphere.
From space Jinx looks like God's Own Easter Egg: the Ends bone white tinged with yellow, then the brighter glare from rings of glittering ice fields at the limits of the atmosphere, then the varying blues of an Earthlike world, increasingly overlaid with the white frosting of cloud as the eyes move inward, until the waist of the planet-moon is girdled with pure white. The ocean never shows at all.
I took us once around and out.
Sirius has its own share of floating miscellaneous matter cluttering the path to interstellar space. I stayed at the controls for most of five days for that reason and because I wanted to get the feel of an unfamiliar ship.
Hobo Kelly was a belly-landing job, three hundred feet long, of triangular cross section. Beneath an uptilted, forward-thrusting nose were big clamshell doors for cargo. She had adequate belly jets, and a much larger fusion motor at the tail, and a line of windows indicating cabins. Certainly she looked harmless enough, and certainly there was deception involved. The cabin should have held forty or fifty, but there was room only for four. The rest of what should have been cabin space was only windows with holograph projections in them.
The drive ran sure and smooth up to a maximum at ten gravities: not a lot for a ship designed to haul massive cargo. The cabin gravity held without putting out more than a fraction of its power. When Jinx and Primary were invisible against the stars, when Sirius was so distant that I could look directly at it, I turned to the hidden control panel Ausfaller had unlocked for me. Ausfaller woke up, found me doing that, and began showing me which did what.
He had a big X-ray laser and some smaller laser cannon set for different frequencies. He had four self-guided fusion bombs. He had a telescope so good that the ostensible ship's telescope was only a finder for it. He had deep radar.
And none of it showed beyond the discolored hull.
Ausfaller was armed for Bandersnatchi. I felt mixed emotions. it seemed we could fight anything and run from it, too. But what kind of enemy was he expecting?
An through those four weeks in hyperdrive, while we drove through the Blind Spot at three days to the light-year, the topic of the ship eaters reared its disturbing head.
Oh, we spoke of other things: of music and art and of the latest techniques in animation, the computer programs that let you make your own holo flicks almost for lunch money. We told stories. I told Carlos why the Kdatlyno Lloobee had made busts of me and Emil Home. I spoke of the only time the Pierson's Puppeteers had ever paid off the guarantee on a General Products hull, after the supposedly indestructible hull had been destroyed by antimatter. Ausfaller had some good ones...a lot more stories than he was allowed to tell, I gathered, from the way he had to search his memory every time.
But we kept coming back to the ship eaters.
"It boils down to three possibilities," I decided. "Kzinti, puppeteers, and humans."
Carlos guffawed. "Puppeteers? Puppeteers wouldn't have the guts!"
"I threw them in because they might have some interest in manipulating the interstellar stock market. Look, our hypothetical pirates have set up an embargo, cutting Sol System off from the outside world. The puppeteers have the capital to take advantage of what that does to the market. And they need money. For their migration."
"The puppeteers are philosophical cowards."
"That's right. They wouldn't risk robbing the ships or coming anywhere near them. Suppose they can make them disappear from a distance?"
Carlos wasn't laughing now. "That's easier than dropping them out of hyp
erspace to rob them. It wouldn't take more than a great big gravity generator...and we've never known the limits of puppeteer technology."
Ausfaller asked, "You think this is possible?"
"Just barely. The same goes for the kzinti. The kzinti are ferocious enough. Trouble is, if we ever learned they were preying on our ships, we'd raise pluperfect hell. The kzinti know that, and they know we can beat them. Took them long enough, but they learned."
"So you think it's humans," said Carlos.
"Yeah. If it's pirates."
The piracy theory still looked shaky. Spectrum telescopes had not even found concentrations of ship's metals in the space where they have vanished. Would pirates steal the whole ship? If the hyperdrive motor was still intact after the attack, the rifled ship could be launched into infinity, but could pirates count on that happening eight times out of eight?
And none of the missing ships had called for help via hyperwave.
I'd never believed pirates. Space pirates have existed, but they died without successors. Intercepting a spacecraft was too difficult. They couldn't make it pay.
Ships fly themselves in hyperdrive. All a pilot need do is watch for green radial lines in the mass-sensor. But he has to do that frequently, because the mass sensor is a psionic device; it must be watched by a mind, not another machine.
As the narrow green line that marked Sol grew longer, I became abnormally conscious of the debris around Sol System. I spent the last twelve hours of the flight at the controls, chain-smoking with my feet. I should add that I do that normally when I want both hands free, but now I did it to annoy Ausfaller. I'd seen the way his eyes bugged the first time he saw me take a drag from a cigarette between my toes. Flatlanders are less than limber.
Carlos and Ausfaller shared the control room with me as we penetrated Sol's cometary halo. They were relieved to be nearing the end of a long trip. I was nervous. "Carlos, just how large a mass would it take to make us disappear?"