A World Out of Time

by Larry Niven

  That made his skin crawl. They were changing him around again!

  Sure, why shouldn’t the State trust him with a seeder ramship? They were feeding him State-oriented patriotism through a silver needle!

  He had lost his people. He had lost his world. He would lose this one. According to Pierce, he had lost himself four times already. A condemned criminal had had his personality wiped four times. Corbell’s goddamned skeleton had probably been ground up for phosphates. But this was the worst: that his beliefs and motivations were being lost bit by bit to the RNA solution while the State made him over into a rammer.

  There was nothing that was his.

  He failed to see Pierce at the next exercise period. It was just as well. He was somewhat groggy. As usual he ate dinner like a starving man. He returned to the dorm, rolled into his bunk and was instantly asleep.

  He looked up during study period the next day and found Pierce watching him. He blinked, fighting free of a mass of data on the attitude jet system that bled plasma from the inboard fusion plant that was also the emergency electrical power source, and asked, “Pierce, what’s a biological package probe?”

  “I would have thought they would teach you that. You know what to do with the probes, don’t you?”

  “The teaching widget gave me the procedures two days ago. Slow up for certain systems, kill the fields, turn a probe loose and speed up again.”

  “You don’t have to aim them?”

  “No. I gather they aim themselves. But I have to get them down below a certain velocity or they’ll fall right through the system.”

  “Amazing. They must do all the rest of it themselves.” Pierce shook his head. “I wouldn’t have believed it. Well, Corbell, the probes steer for an otherwise terrestrial world with a reducing atmosphere. They outnumber oxygen-nitrogen worlds about three to one in this region of the galaxy and probably everywhere else too—as you may know, if your age got that far.”

  “But what do the probes do?”

  “They’re biological packages. A dozen different strains of algae. The idea is to turn a reducing atmosphere into an oxygen atmosphere, just the way photosynthetic life forms did for Earth, something like fifteen-times-ten-to-the-eighth years ago.” The checker smiled, barely. His small narrow mouth wasn’t built to express any great emotion. “You’re part of a big project.”

  “Good Lord. How long does it take?”

  “We think about fifty thousand years. Obviously we’ve never had the chance to measure it.”

  “But, good Lord! Do you really think the State will last that long? Does even the State think it’ll last that long?”

  “That’s not your affair, Corbell. Still—” Pierce considered. “I don’t suppose I do. Or the State does. But humanity will last. One day there will be men on those worlds. It’s a Cause, Corbell. The immortality of the species. A thing bigger than one man’s life. And you’re part of it.”

  He looked at Corbell expectantly.

  Corbell was deep in thought. He was running a fingertip back and forth along the straight line of his nose.

  Presently he asked, “What’s it like out there?”

  “The stars? You’re—”

  “No, no, no. The city. I catch just a glimpse of it twice a day. Cubistic buildings with elaborate carvings at the street level—”

  “What the bleep is this, Corbell? You don’t need to know anything about Selerdor. By the time you come home the whole city will be changed.”

  “I know, I know. That’s why I hate to leave without seeing something of the world. I could be going out to die…” Corbell stopped. He had seen that considering look before, but he had never seen Pierce actually angry.

  The checker’s voice was flat, his mouth pinched tight. “You think of yourself as a tourist.”

  “So would you if you found yourself two hundred years in the future. If you didn’t have that much curiosity you wouldn’t be human.”

  “Granted that I’d want to look around. I certainly wouldn’t demand it as a right. What were you thinking when you foisted yourself off on the future? Did you think the future owed you a debt? It’s the other way around, and time you realized it!”

  Corbell was silent.

  “I’ll tell you something. You’re a rammer because you’re a born tourist. We tested you for that. You like the unfamiliar; it doesn’t send you scuttling back to something safe and known. That’s rare.” The checker’s eyes said: And that’s why I’ve decided not to wipe your personality yet. His mouth said, “Was there anything else?”

  Corbell pushed his luck. “I’d like a chance to practice with a computer like the ship’s autopilot-computer.”

  “We don’t have one. But you’ll get your chance in two days. You’re leaving then.”

  IV

  The next day he received his instructions for entering the solar system. He had been alive for seventeen days.

  The instructions were understandably vague. He was to try anything and everything to make contact with a drastically changed State, up to and including flashing his attitude jets in binary code. He was to start these procedures a good distance out. It was not impossible that the State would be at war with…something. He should be signaling: NOT A WARSHIP.

  He found that he would not be utterly dependent on rescue ships. He could slow the ramship by braking directly into the solar wind until the proton flux was too slow to help him. Then, whip around Sol and back out, slowing on attitude jets, using whatever hydrogen was left in the inboard tank. That was emergency fuel. Given no previous emergencies, a nearly full tank would actually get him to the Moon and land him there.

  The State would be through with him once he dropped his last probe. It was good of the State to provide for his return, Corbell thought—and then he shook himself. The State was not altruistic. It wanted the ship back.

  Now, more than ever, Corbell wanted a chance at the autopilot-computer.

  He found one last opportunity to talk to the checker.

  “A three-hundred-year round trip—maybe two hundred, ship’s time,” Corbell said. “I get some advantage from relativity. But, Pierce, you don’t really expect me to live two hundred years, do you? With nobody to talk to?”

  “The cold-sleep treatment—”

  “Even so.”

  Pierce frowned. “You’ve been briefed on the cold-sleep procedure, but you haven’t studied medicine. I’m told that cold sleep has a rejuvenating effect over long periods. You’ll spend perhaps twenty years awake and the rest in cold sleep. The medical facilities are automatic; you’ve been instructed how to use them. Do you think we’d risk your dying out there between the stars, where it would be impossible to replace you?”

  “No.”

  “Was there anything else you wanted to see me about?”

  “Yes.” He had decided not to broach the subject. Now he changed his mind. “I’d like to take a woman with me. The life-support system would hold two of us. I worked it out. We’d need another cold-sleep chamber, of course.”

  For two weeks this had been the only man Corbell could talk to. At first he had found Pierce unfathomable, unreadable, almost inhuman. Since then he had learned to read the checker’s face to some extent.

  Pierce was deciding whether to terminate Jerome Corbell and start over.

  It was a close thing. But the State had spent considerable time and effort on Jerome Corbell. It was worth a try. And so Pierce said, “That would take up some space. You would have to share the rest between you. I do not think you would survive.”

  “But—”

  “What we can do is this. We can put the mind of a woman in your computer. The computer is voice-controlled, and her voice would be that of a woman, any type of woman you choose. A subplot enclosing the personality of a woman would leave plenty of circuitry for the computer’s vital functions.”

  “I don’t think you quite get the point of—”

  “Look here, Corbell. We know you don’t need a woman. If you did you
would have taken one by now and we would have wiped you and started over. You’ve lived in the dormitory for two weeks and you have not used the mating facilities once.”

  “Damn it, Pierce, do you expect me to make love in public? I can’t!”

  “Exactly.”

  “But—”

  “Corbell, you learned to use the toilet, didn’t you? Because you had to. You know what to do with a woman but you are one of those men fortunate enough not to need one. Otherwise you could not be a rammer.”

  If Corbell had hit the checker then he would have done it knowing that it meant his death. And knowing that, he would have killed Pierce for forcing him to it.

  Something like ten seconds elapsed. Pierce watched him in frank curiosity. When he saw Corbell relax he said, “You leave tomorrow. Your training is finished. Good-bye.”

  Corbell walked away clenching and unclenching his fists.

  The dormitory had been a test. He knew it now. Could he cross a narrow bridge with no handrails? Then he was not pathologically afraid of falling. Could he spend two hundred years alone in the cabin of a starship? Then the silent people around him, five above his head, hundreds to either side, must make him markedly uncomfortable. Could he live twenty waking years without a woman? Surely he must be impotent.

  He returned to the dorm after dinner. They had replaced the bridge with a nearly invisible slab of glass. Corbell snarled and crossed ahead of the guard. The guard had to hurry to keep up.

  He stood between two walls of occupied bunks, looking around him.

  He had already refrained from killing the checker. He must have decided to live. What he did, then, was stupid. He knew it.

  He looked about him until he found the slender dark-haired girl with the elfin face watching him curiously from near the ceiling. He climbed the rungs between the bunks until his face was level with hers.

  The gesture he needed was a quick, formalized one; but he didn’t know it. In English he asked, “Come with me?”

  She nodded brightly and followed him down the ladder. By then it seemed to Corbell that the dorm was alive with barely audible voices.

  The odd one, the rammer trainee.

  Certainly a number of the wakeful turned on their sides to watch.

  He felt their eyes on the back of his neck as he zipped open his gray jumpsuit and stepped out of it. The dormitory had been a series of tests. At least two of those eyes would record his doings for Pierce. But to Corbell they were just like all the others, all the eyes curiously watching to see how the speechless one would make out.

  And sure enough, he was impotent. It was the eyes, and he was naked. The girl was at first concerned, then pitying. She stroked his cheek in apology or sympathy and then she went away and found someone else.

  Corbell lay listening to them, gazing at the bunk above him.

  He waited for eight hours. Finally a guard came to take him away. By then he didn’t care what they did with him.

  V

  He didn’t start to care until the guard’s floating jeep pulled up beneath an enormous .22 cartridge standing on end. Then he began to wonder. It was too small to be a rocket ship.

  But it was. They strapped him into a contour couch, one of three in a cabin with a single window. There were the guard, and Corbell, and a man who might have been Pierce’s second cousin once removed: the pilot. He had the window.

  Corbel’s heartbeat quickened. He wondered how it would be.

  It was as if he had suddenly become very heavy. He heard no noise except right at the beginning, a sound like landing gear being raised on an airplane. Not a rocket, Corbell thought. Possibly the ferry ship’s drive was electromagnetic in nature. He remembered the tricks a Bussard ramjet could play with magnetic fields.

  He was heavy and he hadn’t slept last night. He went to sleep.

  When he woke he was in free-fall. Nobody had tried to tell him anything about free-fall. The guard and pilot were watching.

  “Screw you.” said Corbell.

  It was another test. He got the straps open and pushed himself over to the window. The pilot laughed, caught him and held him while he closed a protective cover over the instruments. Then he let go and Corbell drifted in front of the window.

  His belly was revolving eccentrically. His inner ear was going crazy. His testicles were tight up against his groin and that didn’t feel good either. He was falling, FALLING!

  Corbell snarled within his mind and tried to concentrate on the window. But the Earth was not visible. Neither was the Moon. Just a lot of stars, bright enough—quite bright, in fact—even more brilliant than they had been above a small boat anchored off Catalina Island on many nights long ago. He watched them for some time.

  Trying to keep his mind off that falling-elevator sensation.

  He wasn’t about to get himself disqualified now.

  They ate aboard in free-fall. Corbell copied the others, picking chunks of meat and potatoes out of a plastic bag of stew, pulling them through a membrane that sealed itself behind his pick.

  “Of all the things I’m going to miss,” he told the broadfaced guard, “I’m going to enjoy missing you most. You and your goddamn staring eyes.” The guard smiled placidly and waited to see if Corbell would get sick.

  They landed a day after takeoff on a broad plain where the Earth sat nestled among sharp lunar peaks. One day instead of three: The State had expended extra power to get him here. But an Earth-Moon flight must be a small thing these days.

  The plain was black with blast pits. It must have been a landing field for decades. Transparent bubbles clustered near the runway end of the linear accelerator. There were buildings and groves of trees inside the bubbles. Spacecraft of various shapes and sizes were scattered about the plain.

  The biggest was Corbell’s ramship: a silver skyscraper lying on its side. The probes were in place, giving the ship a thick-waisted appearance. To Corbell’s trained eye it looked ready for takeoff.

  He was awed, he was humbled, he was proud. He tried to sort out his own reactions from RNA-inspired emotions, and probably failed.

  Corbell donned his suit first, while the pilot and guard watched to see if he would make a mistake. He took it slow. The suit came in two pieces: a skintight rubbery body stocking, and a helmet attached to a heavy backpack. On the chest was a white spiral with tapered ends: the sign of the State.

  An electric cart came for them. Apparently Corbell was not expected to know how to walk on an airless world. He thought to head for one of the domes, but the guard steered straight for the ship. It was a long way off.

  It had become unnervingly large when the guard stopped underneath. A fat cylinder the size of a house swelled above the jeep: the life-support section, bound to the main hull by a narrower neck. The smaller dome at the nose must be the control room.

  The guard said, “Now you inspect your ship.”

  “You can talk?”

  “Yes. Yesterday, a quick course.”

  “Oh.”

  “Three things wrong with your ship. You find all three. You tell me. I tell him.”

  “Him? Oh, the pilot. Then what?”

  “Then you fix one of the things, we fix the others. Then we launch you.”

  It was another test, of course. Maybe the last. Corbell was furious. He started immediately with the field generators and gradually he forgot the guard and the pilot and the sword still hanging over his head. He knew this ship. As it had been with the teaching chair, so it was with the ship itself. Corbell’s impotence changed to omnipotence. The power of the beast, the intricacy, the potential, the—the hydrogen tank held far too much pressure. That wouldn’t wait.

  “I’ll slurry this now,” he told the guard. “Get a tanker over there to top it off.” He bled hydrogen gas slowly through the valve, lowering the fuel’s vapor pressure without letting fuel boil out the valve itself. When he finished the liquid hydrogen would be slushy with frozen crystals under near-vacuum pressure.

  He finished the e
xternal inspection without finding anything more. It figured: The banks of dials would hold vastly more information than a man’s eyes could read through opaque titan-alloy skin.

  The airlock was a triple-door type, not so much to save air as to give him an airlock even if he lost a door somehow. Corbell shut the outer door, used the others when green lights indicated he could. He looked down at the telltales under his chin as he started to unclamp his helmet.

  Vacuum?

  He stopped. The ship’s gauges said air. The suit’s said vacuum. Which was right? Come to that, he hadn’t heard any hissing. Just how soundproof was his helmet?

  Just like Pierce to wait and see if he would take off his helmet in a vacuum. Well, how to test?

  Hah! Corbell found the head, turned on a water faucet. The water splashed oddly in lunar gravity. It did not boil.

  Did a flaw in his suit constitute a flaw in the ship?

  Corbell doffed his helmet and continued his inspection.

  There was no way to test the ram-field generators without causing all kinds of havoc in the linear accelerator. He checked out the telltales, then concentrated on the life-support mechanisms. The tailored plants in the air system were alive and well. But the urea absorption mechanism was plugged somehow. That would be a dirty job. He postponed it.

  He decided to finish his inspection. The State might have missed something. It was his ship, his life.

  The cold-sleep chamber was like a great coffin, a corpsicle coffin. Corbell shuddered, remembering two hundred years spent waiting in liquid nitrogen. He wondered again if Jerome Corbell were really dead—and then he shook off the thought and went to work.

  No flaws in the cold-sleep system. He went on.

  The computer was acting vaguely funny.

  He had a hell of a time tracing the problem. There was a minute break in one superconducting circuit, so small that some current was leaking through anyway, by inductance. Bastards. He donned his suit and went out to report.

  The guard heard him out, consulted with the other man, then told Corbell, “You did good. Now finish with the topping-off procedure. We fix the other things.”