Crashlander

by Larry Niven

  “That young?”

  “He’s a genius. As I say, he was a good friend of ours. Liked to talk about space; he had the flatland phobia, like Sharrol. Well, Sharrol and I made our decision, and then we went to him for help. He agreed.

  “So Sharrol’s married him on a two-year contract. In two years I’ll go back and marry her, and we’ll raise our family.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  I’d been angry about it for too long, with nobody to be angry at. I flared up. “Well, what would you have done?”

  “Found another woman. But I’m a dirty old man, and you’re young and naive. Suppose Wu tried to keep her.”

  “He won’t. He’s a friend; I told you. Besides, he’s got more women than ten of him could handle with that license of his.”

  “So you left.”

  “I had to. I couldn’t stand it.”

  He was looking at me with something like awe. “I can’t remember ever being in love that hard. Bey, you’re overdue for a drunk, and you’re surrounded by friends. Shall we switch to something stronger than beer?”

  “It’s a good offer, but no, thanks. I didn’t mean to cry on your shoulder. I’ve had my drunk. A week on Wunderland, drinking Vurguuz.”

  “Finagle’s ears! Vurguuz?”

  “I said to myself, Why mess around with half measures? said I. So—”

  “What does it taste like?”

  “Like a hand grenade with a minted sugar casing. Like you better have a chaser ready.”

  Silence threatened to settle. No wonder, the way I’d killed the conversation by spilling my personal problems all over everything. I said, “So as long as I had to do some traveling, I thought I’d do some people some favors. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What kind of favors?”

  “Well, a friend of mine happens to be an ET taxidermist. It’s a complicated profession. I told him I’d get him some information on Gummidgy animals and Gummidgy biochemistry. Now that the planet’s open to hunters, sooner or later people like you are going to be carting in perforated alien bodies.”

  Bellamy frowned. “I wish I could help,” he said, “but I don’t kill the animals I hunt. I just shoot them full of anesthetic so they’ll hold still while I photo them. The same goes for the rest of us.”

  “I see.”

  “Otherwise I’d offer to take you along one day.”

  “Yah. I’ll do my own research, then. Thanks for the thought.”

  Then, being a good host, Bellamy proceeded to work Emil into the conversation. Emil was far from being the strong, silent type who smiles a lot; in fact, we were soon learning all about the latest advances in computer technology. But he kept his word and did not mention why we had come.

  I was grateful.

  The afternoon passed swiftly. Dinnertime arrived early. Most of the people on Gummidgy accommodate to the eighteen-hour day by having two meals: brunch and dinner. We accepted Bellamy’s invitation.

  With dinner arrived a dedicated hunter named Warren, who insisted on showing us photos of everything he’d caught since his arrival. That day he’d shot a graceful animal like a white greyhound, “but even faster,” he said; a monkeylike being with a cupped hand for throwing rocks; and a flower.

  “A flower?”

  “See those tooth marks on my boot? I had to shoot it to get it to let go. No real sport in it, but as long as I’d already shot the damn thing…”

  His only resemblance to Bellamy was this: He carried the same indefinable air of age. Now I was sure it had nothing to do with appearance. Perhaps it was a matter of individuality. Bellamy and Warren were individuals. They didn’t push it, they didn’t have to demonstrate it, but neither were they following anybody’s lead.

  Warren left after dinner. Going to see how the others were doing, he said; they must be hot on the trail of something or they’d have been back to eat. Not wanting to wear out our welcome, we said our good-byes and left, too. It was near sunset when we emerged from the camp tent.

  “Let me drive,” I said.

  Emil raised his brows at me but moved around to the passenger seat.

  He did more than raise his brows when he saw what I was doing.

  I set the autopilot to take us back to the base and let the car fly itself until we were below the horizon. We were a mile up by then and a goodly distance away. Whereupon I canceled the course, dipped the car nearly to ground level, and swung back toward the forest. I flew almost at treetop level, staying well below the speed of sound.

  “Tell me again,” I said, “about Beowulf the hero.”

  “What kind of game are you playing now?”

  “You thought the size of the Drunkard’s Walk cleared Bellamy, didn’t you?”

  “It does. It’s much too small to be Captain Tellefsen’s pirate.”

  “So it is. But we already know there was a pirate on board the Argos.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s assume it’s Margo.”

  “The captain?”

  “Why not?”

  I’ll say this for him, he got it all in one gulp. Margo to release the gas. Margo to tell Bellamy where to meet the Argos and to hold the ship, in one place long enough to be met. Margo to lie about the size of Bellamy’s ship.

  And me to keep Emil in the dark until now, so he wouldn’t blow his lines when he met Bellamy.

  He gulped, and then he said, “It fits. But I’d swear Bellamy’s innocent.”

  “Except for one thing. He didn’t invite me to go hunting with him.”

  A yellow patch of forest streamed away beneath us. The purple polka dots we’d seen from high up turned out to be huge blossoms several feet across, serviced by birds the size of storks. Then we were over scarlet puffballs that shook in the wind of our passage. I kept us low and slow. A car motor is silent, but a sonic boom would make us more than conspicuous.

  “That’s your evidence against him? He didn’t want you hunting with him?”

  “And he gave lousy reasons.”

  “You said he hated ETs. He’s a flatlander. To some flatlanders we’d both look like ETs.”

  “Maybe. But the Drunkard’s Walk is still the only ship that could have landed Lloobee, and Margo’s still our best bet as the kidnapper on the Argos. Maybe the pirates could have found the Argos by guess and hope, but they’d have a damn sight better chance with Margo working with them.”

  Emil glared out through the windshield. “Were you thinking this all the time we were in the camp?”

  “Not until he turned down the chance to take me hunting. Then I was pretty sure.”

  “You make a first-class liar.”

  I didn’t know how to deny it, so I said nothing. Nonetheless, Emil was wrong. If I’d spilled my personal problems in Bellamy’s lap, if I’d accepted his hospitality, professed friendship, drunk his liquor, laughed at his jokes and made him laugh at mine, it was not an act. Bellamy made you like him, and he made you want him to like you. And Emil would never understand that in my eyes Bellamy had done nothing seriously wrong.

  Six years earlier I’d tried to steal a full-sized spacecraft, fitted more or less for war, from a group of Pierson’s puppeteers. I’d been stopped before the plan had gotten started, but so what? The puppeteers had been blackmailing me, but again, so what? Who says the aliens of known space have to think we’re perfect? We know we’re not. Ask us!

  “I’m sorry,” said Emil. “Excuse my mouth. I got you into this practically over your dead body, and now, when you do your best to help out, I jump on you. I’m an ungrateful…” And what he said then about his anatomic makeup probably wasn’t true. He was married, after all. He concluded, “You’re the boss. Now what?”

  “Depends. We don’t have any evidence yet.”

  “You really think Bellamy’s the one?”

  “I really do.”

  “He could be holding Lloobee anywhere. Hundreds of miles away.”

  “We’ll never find him thinking that way. He wasn’t in the camp
tent. Even Bellamy wouldn’t have that much nerve. If he’d been in the ship, we’d have seen the air lock open—”

  “Closed.”

  “Open. Lloobee couldn’t sense anything through a ship’s hull. In a closed ship that size he’d go nuts.”

  “Okay.”

  “We know one thing that might be helpful. Bellamy’s got a disintegrator.”

  “He does?”

  “The holes in the Argos. You didn’t see them, did you?”

  “No. You think he might have dug himself a hideout?”

  “Yah. Bellamy isn’t the type to let a tool like that go to waste. If he’s got a slaver disintegrator, he’ll use it. It’s a fine digging tool. A big roomy cave would take you an hour, and even the dust would be blown hundreds of miles. Disintegrator dust is nearly monatomic.”

  “How are you planning to find this cave?”

  “Let’s see if the car has a deep-radar attachment.”

  It didn’t. Rent-a-cars usually do on worlds where there are swampy areas. So now we knew Gummidgy wasn’t swampy. Everything on the dash had its uses, and not one of them was sonar.

  “We’ll have to make a sight search,” said Emil. “How close are we to Bellamy’s camp?”

  “About thirty miles.”

  “Well, there’s a chance they won’t see us.” Emil sat forward in his chair, hands gripping his knees. His smile was thin and tight. Obviously he had something. “Take us up to ten miles. Don’t cross sonic speed until we’ve got lots of room.”

  “What can we see from ten miles up?”

  “Assume I’m a genius.”

  That served me right. I took the car up without quibbling.

  Ten miles down was the wandering line of the forest border, sharply demarcated from the veldt. At this height all the magnificent colors of Gummidgy vegetation blurred into a rich brown.

  “Do you see it?”

  “No.”

  “Look for two nearly parallel lines,” said Emil. “A little lighter than the rest of the forest.”

  “I still don’t see it.”

  “It shows on the veldt, too.”

  “Nope. Hah! Got it.” Crossing the rich brown of the forest was a strip of faintly lighter, faintly more uniform brown. “Hard to see, though. What is it?”

  “Dust. Blown for hundreds of miles, just like you said. Some of it settled on the tops of the trees.”

  So dim was the path that it kept flickering in and out of the visible. But it was straight, with edges that slowly converged. It crossed the veldt, too, in a strip of faintly dimmed blue-green. Before its edges met, the path faded out, but one could extend those edges in the mind’s eye.

  I let the car fall.

  Unless we were building dream castles, Lloobee’s cave must be at the intersection.

  When we got too low, the dust path disappeared in the colors of forest and veldt. Bellamy’s hypothetical cave was half a mile into the forest. I couldn’t land there for reasons involving too many big plants and too many pirates. I dropped the car in a curve of the forest.

  Emil had been fumbling in the back. Now he pressed something into my hand and said, “Here, take this.” To my amazement I found myself holding a sonic stunner.

  “That’s illegal!” I whispered furiously.

  “Why are you whispering? Kidnapping Kdatlyno is illegal, too. We may be glad we’ve got these before we’re finished.”

  “But where did you get police stunners?”

  “Let’s say some criminal slipped them into my luggage. And if you’ll look at the butts, you’ll see they aren’t police stunners.”

  They’d started life as police stunners, but they weren’t anymore. The butts were hand-carved from big cultured emeralds. Expensive. Dueling pistols?

  Sure, dueling pistols. Lose a duel with one of these and you’d lose nothing but face. I hear most Jinxians would rather lose an arm, permanently. They were not illegal—on Jinx.

  “Remember,” said Emil, “they only knock a man out for ten minutes.”

  “I can run a long way in ten minutes.”

  Emil looked me over rather carefully. “You’ve changed. You could have driven me straight back to base, and I’d never have been the wiser.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “Bah.”

  “Would you believe I’ve decided to be an epic hero? Whatever that is.”

  Emil shrugged and moved into the forest. I followed.

  I wasn’t about to explain my motives to Emil. He’d put me in an unpleasant situation, and if he wanted to worry about my backing out, let him worry.

  Back out? I couldn’t. It was too late.

  There had been a time when I knew nothing about Lloobee’s kidnappers. I might suspect Margo, but I had no evidence.

  Later, I could suspect Bellamy. But I had no proof.

  But Emil had pressured me into confronting Bellamy, and Bellamy had been pressured into putting on an act. If I quit now, Bellamy would continue to think I was a fool.

  And when Bellamy confronted Margo, Margo would continue to think I was a fool. That would hurt. To have Margo and Bellamy both thinking that I had been twice an idiot…

  It wasn’t Bellamy’s fault, except that he had voluntarily kidnapped a valuable Kdatlyno sculptor. It was partly my fault and mostly Emil’s. I might be able to leave Margo out of this. But Bellamy would have to pay for my mistakes.

  And why shouldn’t he? It was his antisocial act.

  The vegetation was incredibly lush, infinitely varied. Its chemistry was not that of terrain life, but the chemical it used for photosynthesis was similar to chlorophyll. For billions of years the plants of Gummidgy had had oversupplies of ultraviolet light. The result was life in plenty, a profusion of fungi and animals and parasites. On every branch of the magenta trees was an orchid thing, a sessile beast waiting for its dinner to fly by. The air was full of life: birdforms, insectforms, and a constant rain of dust and spores and feathery seeds and bits of leaf and bird dung. The soil was dry and spongy and rich, and the air was rich with oxygen and alien smells. Somewhere in the spectrum of odors were valuable undiscovered perfumes.

  Once we saw a flower thing like the one in Warren’s photo. I found a dry branch and stuck it down the thing’s blossom and pulled back half a branch.

  Again, four feet of snake flew by. Emil stunned it. It had two small fins near the head end, and its hind end was a huge, leathery delta wing. Its mouth was two-thirds back along the body.

  With typical abruptness, the flowering magenta trees gave way to a field of scarlet tubing. No branches, no leaves; just interlocking cables, three feet thick, moving restlessly over each other like too many snakes in a pit. They were four or five deep. Maybe they were all one single plant or animal; we never did see a head or a tail. And we’d never have kept our footing if we’d tried to cross.

  We circled the area, staying in the magenta trees because we were getting too close to where the hypothetical cave ought to be. That brought us to a small round hill surmounted by a tree that was mostly wandering roots. We started around the hill, and Emil gripped my arm.

  I saw it. A cave mouth, small and round, in the base of the hill. And leaning against the dirt slope of the hill was a woman with a mercy gun.

  “All right!” I whispered. “Come on, let’s get out of here!” I pulled at Emil’s arm and turned toward freedom.

  It was like trying to stop a warship from taking off. Emil was gone, running silently toward the cave with his gun held ready, leaving me with numb fingers and a deep appreciation of Finagle’s first law. I swallowed a groan and started after him.

  On flat ground I can beat any Jinxian who ever ran the short sprint. My legs were twice the length of Emil’s. But Emil moved like a wraith through the alien vegetation, while I kept getting tangled up. My long legs and arms stuck out too much, and I couldn’t catch him.

  It was such a crying pity. Because we had it! We had it all, or all we were going to get. The guarded cave was our pr
oof. Bellamy and his hunter friends were the kidnappers. That knowledge would be a powerful bargaining point in our negotiations for the return of Lloobee, despite what I’d told Emil. All we had to do now was get back to base and tell somebody.

  But I couldn’t catch Emil!

  I couldn’t even keep up with him.

  A bare area fronted the cave, a triangular patch of ground bounded by two thick, sprawling roots belonging to the treelike thing on the hill. I’d lost sight of Emil; when I saw him again, he was running for the cave at full speed, and the woman with the gun was faceup in the dirt. Emil reached the darkness at the mouth of the cave and disappeared within.

  And as he vanished into the dark, he was unmistakably falling.

  Well, now they had Emil. With blazing lasers…! Proof wasn’t enough. He’d decided to bring back Lloobee himself. Now we’d have to negotiate for the two of them.

  Would we? Bellamy was back at the hunting camp. When he found out his men had Emil, he’d know I was somewhere around. But whoever was in the cave might think Emil was alone. In which case they might kill him right now.

  I settled my back against the tree. As a kind of afterthought I focused the dueling pistol on the woman and fired. I’d have to do that every ten minutes to keep her quiet.

  Eventually someone would be coming out to see why she hadn’t stopped Emil.

  I didn’t dare try to enter the cave. Be it man or booby trap, whatever had stopped Emil would stop me.

  Too bad the dueling pistols didn’t have more power. The craftsmen who had carved their emerald butts had scaled them down because, after all, they would be used only to prove a point. It would take a shopful of tools to readjust them, because readjusting them to their former power would violate Jinxian law. Real police stunners will knock a man out for twelve hours or more.

  I was sitting there waiting for someone to come out when I felt the prickly numbness of a stunner.

  The sensations came separately. First, a pull in my ankles. Then, in the calves of my legs. Then, something rough and crumbly sliding under me. Separate sensations, just above the threshold of consciousness, penetrating the numbness. A sliding bump! bump! against the back of my head. Gritty sensation in the backs of my hands, arms trailing above and behind my head.