Crashlander

by Larry Niven

  From a few miles up you still can’t see the breaks. But they’re there, where girders and pavement have collapsed. Only two superhighways are still kept in good repair. They are both on the same continent: the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Santa Monica Freeway. The rest of the network is broken chaos.

  It seems there are people who collect old groundcars and race them. Some are actually renovated machines, fifty to ninety percent replaced; others are handmade reproductions. On a perfectly flat surface they’ll do fifty to ninety miles per hour.

  I laughed when Elephant told me about them, but actually seeing them was different.

  The rodders began to appear about dawn. They gathered around one end of the Santa Monica Freeway, the end that used to join the San Diego Freeway. This end is a maze of fallen spaghetti, great curving loops of prestressed concrete that have lost their strength over the years and sagged to the ground. But you can still use the top loop to reach the starting line. We watched from above, hovering in a cab as the groundcars moved into line.

  “Their dues cost more than the cars,” said Elephant. “I used to drive one myself. You’d turn white as snow if I told you how much it costs to keep this stretch of freeway in repair.”

  “How much?”

  He told me. I turned white as snow.

  They were off. I was still wondering what kick they got driving an obsolete machine on flat concrete when they could be up here with us. They were off, weaving slightly, weaving more than slightly, foolishly moving at different speeds, coming perilously close to each other before sheering off—and I began to realize things.

  Those automobiles had no radar.

  They were being steered with a cabin wheel geared directly to four ground wheels. A mistake in steering and they’d crash into each other or into the concrete curbs. They were steered and stopped by muscle power, but whether they could turn or stop depended on how hard four rubber balloons could grip smooth concrete. If the tires lost their grip, Newton’s first law would take over; the fragile metal mass would continue moving in a straight line until stopped by a concrete curb or another groundcar.

  “A man could get killed in one of those.”

  “Not to worry,” said Elephant. “Nobody does, usually.”

  “Usually?”

  The race ended twenty minutes later at another tangle of fallen concrete. I was wet through. We landed and met some of the racers. One of them, a thin guy with tangled, glossy green hair and a bony white face with a widely grinning scarlet mouth, offered me a ride. I declined with thanks, backing slowly away and wishing for a weapon. This joker was obviously dangerously insane.

  I remember flatlander food, the best in known space, and an odd, mildly alcoholic drink called Taittinger Comtes de Champagne ’59. I remember invading an outworlder bar, where the four of us talked shop with a girl rock miner whose inch-wide auburn crest of hair fell clear to the small of her back. I remember flying cross-country with a lift belt and seeing nothing but city enclosing widely separated patches of food-growing land. I remember a submerged hotel off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and a dolphin embassy off Italy, where a mixed group of dolphins and flatlanders seemed to be solving the general problem of sentient beings without hands (there are many, and we’ll probably find more). It seemed more a coffee-break discussion than true business.

  We were about to break up for bed on the evening of the fourth day when the tridphone rang. Don Cramer had found an Outsider.

  I said, disbelieving, “You’re leaving right now?”

  “Sure!” said Elephant. “Here, take one of these pills. You won’t feel sleepy till we’re on our way.”

  A deal is a deal, and I owed Elephant plenty. I took the pill. We kissed Sharrol and Dianna good-bye, Dianna standing on a chair to reach me, Sharrol climbing me like a beanpole and wrapping her legs around my waist. I was a foot and a half taller than either of them.

  Calcutta Base was in daylight. Elephant and I took the transfer booth there, to find that the ST∞ had been shipped ahead of us.

  Her full name was Slower Than Infinity. She had been built into a General Products No. 2 hull, a three-hundred-foot spindle with a wasp-waist constriction near the tail. I was relieved. I had been afraid Elephant might own a flashy, vulnerable dude’s yacht. The two-man control room looked pretty small for a lifesystem until I noticed the bubble extension folded into the nose. The rest of the hull held a one-gee fusion drive and fuel tank, a hyperspace motor, a gravity drag, and belly-landing gear, all clearly visible through the hull, which had been left transparent.

  She held fuel, food, and air. She must have been ready for days. We took off twenty minutes after arriving.

  Using the fusion drive in Earth’s atmosphere would have gotten us into the organ banks, in pieces. Flatlander laws are strict about air pollution. A robot rocket with huge wings lifted us to orbit, using air compressed nearly to degenerate matter as a propellant. We took off from there.

  Now there was plenty of time for sleep. It took us a week at one gee just to get far enough out of the solar system’s gravity well to use the hyperdrive. Somewhere in that time I removed my false coloring (it had been false; I’d continued to take tannin-secretion pills against Earth’s sunlight), and Elephant turned his skin back to light tan and his beard and hair back to black. For four days he’d been Zeus, with marble skin, a metal-gold beard, and glowing molten-gold eyes. It had fitted him so perfectly that I hardly noticed the change.

  Hyperdrive—and a long, slow three weeks. We took turns hovering over the mass indicator, though at first-quantum hyperdrive speeds we’d have seen a mass at least twelve hours before it became dangerous. I think I was the only man who knew there was a second quantum, a puppeteer secret. The Outsider ship was near the edge of known space, well beyond Tau Ceti.

  “It was the only one around,” Elephant had said. “Number fourteen.”

  “Fourteen? That’s the same ship I dealt with before.”

  “Oh? Good. That should help.”

  Days later he asked, “How’d it happen?”

  “The usual way. Number fourteen was on the other side of known space then, and she sent out an offer of information exchange. I was almost to Wunderland, and I caught the offer. When I dropped my passengers, I went back.”

  “Did they have anything worthwhile?”

  “Yah. They’d found the Lazy Eight II.”

  The Lazy Eight II had been one of the old slowboats, a circular-flying wing taking colonists to Jinx. Something had gone wrong before turnover, and the ship had continued on, carrying fifty passengers in suspended animation and a crew of four, presumed dead. With a ramscoop to feed hydrogen to her fusion drive, she could accelerate forever. She was five hundred years on her way.

  “I remember,” said Elephant. “They couldn’t reach her.”

  “No. But we’ll know where to find her when the state of the art gets that good.” Which wouldn’t be soon, I thought. A hyperdrive ship not only would have to reach her but would have to carry fuel to match her speed. Her speed was barely less than a photon’s, and she was more than five hundred light-years away, seventeen times the diameter of known space.

  “Did you have any problems?”

  “Their translator is pretty good. But we’ll have to be careful, Elephant. The thing about buying information is that you don’t know what you’re getting until you’ve got it. They couldn’t just offer to sell me the present position of the Lazy Eight II. We’d have tracked their course by telescope until we saw the light of a fusion drive and gotten the information free.”

  The time came when only a small green dot glowed in the center of the mass indicator. A star would have shown as a line; no star would have shown no dot. I dropped out of hyperspace and set the deep radar to hunt out the Outsider.

  The Outsider found us first.

  Somewhere in the cylindrical metal pod near her center of mass, perhaps occupying it completely, was the reactionless drive. It was common knowledge that that drive was
for sale and that the cost was a full trillion stars. Though nobody, and no nation now extant, could afford to pay it, the price was not exorbitant. In two or three minutes, while we were still searching, that drive had dropped the Outsider ship from above point nine lights to zero relative and pulled it alongside the ST∞.

  One moment, nothing but stars. The next, the Outsider ship was alongside.

  She was mostly empty space. I knew her population was the size of a small city, but she was much bigger because more strung out. There was the minuscule-seeming drive capsule, and there, on a pole two and a half miles long, was a light source. The rest of the ship was metal ribbons, winding in and out, swooping giddily around themselves and each other, until the ends of each tangled ribbon stopped meandering and joined the drive capsule. There were around a thousand such ribbons, and each was the width of a wide city pedwalk.

  “Like a Christmas tree decoration,” said Elephant. “What now, Bey?”

  “They’ll use the ship radio.”

  A few minutes of waiting, and here came a bunch of Outsiders. They looked like black cat-o’-nine-tails with grossly swollen handles. In the handles were their brains and invisible sense organs; in the whip ends, the clusters of motile root tentacles, were gas pistols. Six of them braked to a stop outside the air lock.

  The radio spoke. “Welcome to Ship Fourteen. Please step outside for conveyance to our office. Take nothing on the outsides of your pressure suits.”

  Elephant asked, “Do we?”

  I said, “Sure. The Outsiders are nothing if not honorable.”

  We went out. The six Outsiders offered us a tentacle each, and away we went across open space. Not fast. The thrust from the gas pistols was very low, irritatingly weak. But the Outsiders themselves were weak; an hour in the gravity of Earth’s moon would have killed them.

  They maneuvered us through the tangled clutter of silver ribbons, landing us on a ramp next to the looming convex wall of the drive capsule.

  It wasn’t quite like being lost in a giant bowl of noodles. The rigid ribbons were too far apart for that. Far above us was the light source, about as small and intense and yellowish-white as Earth’s sun seen from a moon of Neptune. Shining down through the interstellar vacuum, it cast a network of sharp black shadows across all the thousand looping strands that made up, the city.

  Along every light-shadow borderline were the Outsiders. Just as their plantlike ancestors had done billions of years ago on some unknown world near the galactic core, the Outsiders were absorbing life energy. Their branched tails lay in shadow, their heads in sunlight, while thermoelectricity charged their biochemical batteries. Some had root tentacles dipped in shallow food dishes; the trace elements which kept them alive and growing were in suspension in liquid helium.

  We stepped carefully around them, using our headlamps at lowest intensity, following one of the Outsiders toward a door in the wall ahead.

  The enclosure was dark until the door closed behind us. Then the light came on. It was sourceless, the color of normal sunlight, and it illuminated a cubicle that was bare and square. The only furnishing was a transparent hemisphere with an Outsider resting inside. Presumably the hemisphere filtered out excess light going in.

  “Welcome,” said the room. Whatever the Outsider had said was not sonic in nature. “The air is breathable. Take off your helmets, suits, shoes, girdles, and whatnot.” It was an excellent translator, with a good grasp of idiom and a pleasant baritone voice.

  “Thanks,” said Elephant, and we did.

  “Which of you is Gregory Pelton?”

  “Gronk.”

  The wall was not confused. “According to your agent, you want to know how to reach that planet which is most unusual inside or within five miles of the sixty-light-year wide region you call known space. Is this correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “We must know if you plan to go there or to send agents there. Also, do you plan a landing, a near orbit, or a distant orbit?”

  “Landing.”

  “Are we to guard against danger to your life?”

  “No.” Elephant’s voice was a little dry. The Outsider ship was an intimidating place.

  “What kind of ship would you use?”

  “The one outside.”

  “Do you plan colonization? Mining? Growth of food plants?”

  “I plan only one visit.”

  “We have selected a world for you. The price will be one million stars.”

  “That’s high,” said Elephant. I whistled under my breath. It was, and it wouldn’t get lower. The Outsiders never dickered.

  “Sold,” said Elephant.

  The translator gave us a triplet set of coordinates some twenty-four light-years from Earth along galactic north. “The star you are looking for is a protosun with one planet a billion and a half miles distant. The system is moving at a point eight lights toward—” He gave a vector direction. It seemed the protosun was drawing a shallow chord through known space; it would never approach human space.

  “No good,” said Elephant. “No hyperdrive ship can go that fast in real space.”

  “You could hitch a ride,” said the translator, “with us. Moor your ship to our drive capsule.”

  “That’ll work,” said Elephant. He was getting more and more uneasy; his eyes seemed to be searching the walls for the source of the voice. He would not look at the Outsider business agent in the vacuum chamber.

  “Our ferry fee will be one million stars.”

  Elephant sputtered.

  “Just a sec,” I said. “I may have information to sell you.”

  There was a long pause. Elephant looked at me in surprise.

  “You are Beowulf Shaeffer?”

  “Yah. You remember me?”

  “We find you in our records. Beowulf Shaeffer, we have information for you, already paid. The former regional president of General Products on Jinx wishes you to contact him. I have a transfer-booth number.”

  “That’s late news,” I said. “The puppeteers are gone. Anyway, why would that two-headed sharpie want to see me?”

  “I do not have that information. I do know that not all puppeteers have left this region. Will you accept the transfer-booth number?”

  “Sure.”

  I wrote down the eight digits as they came. A moment later Elephant was yelling just as if he were a tridee set turned on in the middle of a program. “—hell is going on here?”

  “Sorry about that,” said the translator.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t hear anything! Did that mon—Did the Outsider have private business with you?”

  “Sort of. I’ll tell you later.”

  The translator said, “Beowulf Shaeffer, we do not buy information. We sell information and use the proceeds to buy territory and food soil.”

  “You may need this information,” I argued. “I’m the only man within reach who knows it.”

  “What of other races?”

  The puppeteers might have told them, but it was worth taking a chance. “You’re about to leave known space. If you don’t deal with me, you may not get this information in time.”

  “What price do you set on this item?”

  “You set the price. You’ve got more experience at putting values on information, and you’re honorable.”

  “We may not be able to afford an honest price.”

  “The price may not exceed our ferry fee.”

  “Done. Speak.”

  I told him of the Core explosion and how I’d come find out about it. He made me go into detail on what I’d seen: the bright patch of supernovas, spreading out as my ship caught up with ancient light waves, until all the bright multicolored ball of the Core was ablaze with supernovas. “You wouldn’t have known this until you got there, and then it would have been too late. You don’t use faster-than-light drives.”

  “We knew from the puppeteers that the Core had exploded. They were not able to go into detail because they ha
d not seen it for themselves.”

  “Oh. Ah, well. I think the explosion must have started at the back side of the Core from here. Otherwise it would have seemed to go much more slowly.”

  “Many thanks. We will waive your ferry fee. Now, there is one more item. Gregory Pelton, for an additional two hundred thousand stars we will tell you exactly what is peculiar about the planet you intend to visit.”

  “Can I find out for myself?”

  “It is likely.”

  “Then I will.”

  Silence followed. The Outsider hadn’t expected that. I said, “I’m curious. Your galaxy is rapidly becoming a death trap. What will you do now?”

  “That information will cost you—”

  “Forget it.”

  Outside, Elephant said, “Thanks.”

  “Forget it. I wonder what they will do.”

  “Maybe they can shield themselves against the radiation.”

  “Maybe. But they won’t have any starseeds to follow.”

  “Do they need them?”

  Finagle only knew. The starseeds followed a highly rigid migratory mating pattern out from the Core of the galaxy and into the arms, almost to the rim, before turning back down to the Core. They were doomed. As they returned to the Core, the expanding wave of radiation from the multiple novas would snuff out the species one by one. What would the Outsiders do without them? What the hell did they do with them? Why did they follow them? Did they need starseeds? Did starseeds need Outsiders? The Outsiders would answer these and related questions for one trillion stars apiece. Personal questions cost high with the Outsiders.

  A crew was already bringing the ST∞ into dock. We watched from the ramp, with crewmen sunbathing about our feet. We weren’t worried. The way the Outsiders handled it, our invulnerable hull might have been made of spun sugar and sunbeams. When a spiderweb of thin strands fastened the ST∞ to the wall of the drive capsule, the voice of the translator spoke in our ears and invited us to step aboard. We jumped a few hundred feet upward through the trace of artificial gravity, climbed into the air lock, and got out of our suits.

  “Thanks again,” said Elephant.