by Larry Niven
Nor, later, in California. Or Washington. Georgia, Pakistan, England, Switzerland, France, Rhodesia…
The pedwalk was moving at ten miles per hour. Below, unnoticed by pedestrians who had quit work late and night owls who were just beginning their rounds, Lewis Knowles hung from the moving strip and watched the ledge go by beneath his dangling feet. The ledge was no more than two feet wide, a good four feet beneath his stretching toes.
He dropped.
As his feet struck he caught the edge of a window casement. Momentum jerked at him, but he didn’t fall After a long moment he breathed again.
He couldn’t know what building this was, but it was not deserted. At twenty-one hundred at night, all the windows were ablaze. He tried to stay back out of the light as he peered in.
The window was an office. Empty.
He’d need something to wrap around his hand to break that window. But all he was wearing was a pair of shoesocks and a prison jumper. Well, he couldn’t be more conspicuous than he was now. He took off the jumper, wrapped part of it around his hand, and struck.
He almost broke his hand.
Well… they’d let him keep his jewelry, his wristwatch and diamond ring. He drew a circle on the glass with the ring, pushing down hard, and struck again with the other hand. It had to be glass; if it was plastic he was doomed.
The glass popped out in a near-perfect circle.
He had to do it six times before the hole was big enough for him.
He smiled as he stepped inside, still holding his jumper. Now all he needed was an elevator. The cops would have picked him up in an instant if they’d caught him on the street in a prison jumper, but if he hid the jumper here he’d be safe. Who would suspect a licensed nudist?
Except that he didn’t have a license. Or a nudist’s shoulder pouch to put it in.
Or a shave.
That was very bad. Never had there been a nudist as hairy as this. Not just a five o’clock shadow, but a full beard all over, so to speak. Where could he get a razor?
He tried the desk drawers. Many businessmen kept spare razors. He stopped when he was halfway through. Not because he’d found a razor, but because he knew where he was. The papers on the desk made it all too obvious.
A hospital.
He was still clutching the jumper. He dropped it in the wastebasket, covered it tidily with papers, and more or less collapsed into the chair behind the desk.
A hospital. He would pick a hospital. And this hospital, the one which had been built right next to the Topeka County courthouse, for good and sufficient reason.
But he hadn’t picked it, not really. It had picked him. Had he ever in his life made a decision except on the instigation of others? Friends had borrowed his money for keeps, men had stolen his girls, he had avoided promotion by his knack for being ignored. Shirley had bullied him into marrying her, then left him four years later for a friend who wouldn’t be bullied.
Even now, at the possible end of his life, it was the same. An aging body snatcher had given him his escape. An engineer had built the cell bars wide enough apart to let a small man squeeze between them. Another had put a pedwalk along two convenient roofs. And here he was.
The worst of it was that here he had no chance of masquerading as a nudist. Hospital gowns and masks would be the minimum. Even nudists had to wear clothing sometime.
The closet?
There was nothing in the closet but a spiffy green hat and a perfectly transparent rain poncho.
He could run for it. If he could find a razor he’d be safe once he reached the street. He bit at a knuckle, wishing he knew where the elevator was. Have to trust to luck. He began searching the drawers again.
He had his hand on a black leather razor case when the door opened. A beefy man in a hospital gown breezed in. The intern (there were no human doctors in hospitals) was halfway to the desk before he noticed Lew crouching over an open drawer. He stopped walking. His mouth fell open.
Lew closed it with the fist which still gripped the razor case. The man’s teeth came together with a sharp click. His knees were buckling as Lew brushed past him and out the door.
The elevator was just down the hall, with the doors standing open. And nobody coming. Lew stepped in and punched 0. He shaved as the elevator dropped. The razor cut fast and close, if a trifle noisily. He was working on his chest as the door opened.
A skinny technician stood directly in front of him, her mouth and eyes set in the utterly blank expression of those who wait for elevators. She brushed past him with a muttered apology, hardly noticing him. Lew stepped out fast. The doors were closing before he realized that he was on the wrong floor.
That damned tech! She’d stopped the elevator before it reached bottom!
He turned and stabbed the Down button. Then what he’d seen in the one cursory glance came back to him, and his head whipped around for another look.
The whole vast room was filled with glass tanks, ceiling height, arranged in a labyrinth like the bookcases in a library. In the tanks was a display more lewd than anything in Belsen. Why, those things had been men and women! No, he wouldn’t look. He refused to look at anything but the elevator door. What was taking that elevator so long?
He heard a siren.
The hard tile floor began to vibrate against his bare feet. He felt a numbness in his muscles, a lethargy in his soul.
The elevator arrived… too late. He blocked the doors open with a chair. Most buildings didn’t have stairs: only alternate elevators. They’d have to use the alternate elevator to reach him now. Well, where was it? …He wouldn’t have time to find it. He was beginning to feel really sleepy. They must have several sonic projectors focused on this one room. Where one beam passed the interns would feel mildly relaxed, a little clumsy. But where the beams intersected, here, there would be unconsciousness. But not yet.
He had something to do first.
By the time they broke in they’d have something to kill him for.
The tanks were faced in plastic, not glass: a very special kind of plastic. To avoid provoking defense reactions in all the myriads of body parts which might be stored touching it, the plastic had to have unique characteristics. No engineer could have been expected to make it shatterproof too!
It shattered very satisfactorily.
Later Lew wondered how he managed to stay up as long as he did. The soothing hypersonic murmur of the stun beams kept pulling at him, pulling him down to a floor which seemed softer every moment. The chair he wielded became heavier and heavier. But as long as he could lift it, he smashed. He was knee deep in nutritive storage fluid, and there were dying things brushing against his ankles with every move; but his work was barely a third done when the silent siren song became too much for him.
He fell.
And after all that they never even mentioned the smashed organ banks!
Sitting in the courtroom, listening to the drone of courtroom ritual, Lew sought Mr. Broxton’s ear to ask the question. Mr. Broxton smiled at him. “Why should they want to bring that up? They think they’ve got enough on you as it is. If you beat this rap, then they’ll persecute you for wanton destruction of valuable medical resources. But they’re sure you won’t.”
“And you?”
“I’m afraid they’re right. But we’ll try. Now, Hennessey’s about to read the charges. Can you manage to look hurt and indignant?”
“Sure.”
“Good.”
The prosecution read the charges, his voice sounding like the voice of doom coming from under a thin blond mustache. Warren Lewis Knowles looked hurt and indignant. But he no longer felt that way. He had done something worth dying for.
The cause of it all was the organ banks. With good doctors and a sufficient flow of material in the organ banks, any taxpayer could hope to live indefinitely. What voter would vote against eternal life? The death penalty was his immortality, and he would vote the death penalty for any crime at all.
Lewis Knowles had
struck back.
“The state will prove that the said Warren Lewis Knowles did, in the space of two years, willfully drive through a total of six red traffic lights. During that same period the same Warren Knowles exceeded local speed limits no less than ten times, once by as much as fifteen miles per hour. His record had never been good. We will produce records of his arrest in 2082 on a charge of drunk driving, a charge which he was acquitted only through—”
“Objection!”
“Sustained. If he was acquitted, Counselor, the Court must assume him not guilty.”
At the Bottom of a Hole
* * *
After more than a century of space travel, Man’s understanding of his own solar system was nearly complete. So he moved on to industrial development.
The next hundred years saw the evolution of a civilization in space. For reasons of economy the Belters concentrated on the wealth of the asteroids. With fusion-driven ships they could have mined the planets; but their techniques were more universally applicable in free fall and among the falling mountains. Only Mercury was rich enough to attract the Belt miners.
For a time Earth was the center of the space industries. But the lifestyles of Belter and flatlander were so different that a split was inevitable. The flatland phobia—the inability to tolerate even an orbital flight—was common on Earth, and remained so. And there were Belters who would never go anywhere near a planet.
Between Earth and the Belt there was economic wrestling, but never war. The cultures needed each other. And they were held together by a common bond: the conquest of the stars. The ramrobots—the unmanned Bussard ramjet probes—were launched during the mid twenty-first century.
By 2100 AD, five nearby solar systems held budding colonies: the worlds were Jinx, Wunderland, We Made It, Plateau, and Down. None of these worlds was entirely Earthlike. Those who programmed the ramrobots had used insufficient imagination. Some results are detailed in A Gift From Earth and the Neutron Star collection, and in the story “The Borderland of Sol.”
On Earth, three species of cetacean had been recognized as intelligent and admitted to the United Nations. Their lawsuit against the former whaling nations had not been resolved, and in fact never was. The cetaceans enjoyed the legal gymnastics too much ever to end it.
Mankind’s first meeting with extraterrestrial intelligence came in 2106—though Kzanol had been on Earth for longer than humanity—and is chronicled in World of Ptavvs.
LN
* * *
Twelve stories below the roof gardens were citrus groves, grazing pastures, and truck farms. They curved out from the base of the hotel in neat little squares, curved out and up, and up, and up and over. Five miles overhead was the fusion sunlight tube, running down the radius of the slightly bulging cylinder that was Farmer’s Asteroid. Five miles above the sunlight tube, the sky was a patchwork of small squares, split by a central wedding ring of lake and by tributary rivers, a sky alive with the tiny red glints of self-guided tractors.
Lucas Garner was half-daydreaming, letting his eyes rove the solid sky. At the Belt government’s invitation he had entered a bubbleworld for the first time, combining a vacation from United Nations business with a chance at a brand new experience—rare thing for a man seventeen decades old. He found it pleasantly kooky to look up into a curved sky of fused rock and imported topsoil.
“There’s nothing immoral about smuggling,” said Lit Shaeffer.
The surface overhead was dotted with hotels, as if the bubbleworld were turning to city. Garner knew it wasn’t. Those hotels, and the scattered hotels in the other bubbleworld, served every Belter’s occasional need for an Earthlike environment. Belters don’t need houses. A Belter’s home is the inside of his pressure suit.
Garner returned his attention to his host. “You mean smuggling’s like picking pockets on Earth?”
“That’s just what I don’t mean,” Shaeffer said. The Belter reached into his coverall pocket, pulled out something flat and black, and laid it on the table. “I’ll want to play that in a minute. Garner, picking pockets is legal on Earth. Has to be, the way you crowd together. You couldn’t enforce a law against picking pockets. In the Belt smuggling is against the law, but it isn’t immoral. It’s like a flatlander forgetting to feed the parking meter. There’s no loss of self-respect. If you get caught you pay the fine and forget it.”
“0h.”
“If a man wants to send his earnings through Ceres, that’s up to him. It costs him a straight fifty percent. If he thinks he can get past the goldskins, that too is his choice. But if we catch him we’ll confiscate his cargo, and everybody will be laughing at him. Nobody pities an inept smuggler.”
“Is that what Muller tried to do?”
“Yah. He had a valuable cargo, twenty kilos of pure north magnetic poles. The temptation was too much for him. He tried to get past us, and we picked him up on radar. Then he did something stupid. He tried to whip around a hole.
“He must have been on course for Luna when we found him. Ceres was behind him with the radar. Our ships were ahead of him, matching course at two gee. His mining ship wouldn’t throw more than point five gee, so eventually they’d pull alongside him no matter what he did. Then he noticed Mars was just ahead of him.”
“The hole.” Garner knew enough Belters to have learned a little of their slang.
“The very one. His first instinct must have been to change course. Belters learn to avoid gravity wells. A man can get killed half a dozen ways coming too close to a hole. A good autopilot will get him safely around it, or program an in-and-out spin, or even land him at the bottom, God forbid. But miners don’t carry good autopilots. They carry cheap autopilots, and they stay clear of holes.”
“You’re leading up to something,” Garner said regretfully. “Business?”
“You’re too old to fool.”
Sometimes Garner believed that himself. Sometime between the First World War and the blowing of the second bubbleworld, Garner had learned to read faces as accurately as men read print. Often it saved time—and in Garner’s view his time was worth saving.
“Go on,” he said.
“Muller’s second thought was to use the hole. An in-and-out spin would change his course more then he could hope to do with the motor. He could time it so, Mars would hide him from Ceres when he curved out. He could damn near touch the surface, too. Mars’ atmosphere is as thin as a flatlander’s dreams.”
“Thanks a lot. Lit, isn’t Mars UN property?”
“Only because we never wanted it.”
Then Muller had been trespassing. “Go on. What happened to Muller?”
“I’ll let him tell it. This is his log.” Lit Shaeffer did something to the flat box, and a man’s voice spoke.
April 20, 2112.
The sky is flat, the land is flat, and they meet in a circle at infinity. No star shows but the big one, a little bigger than it shows, through most of the Belt, but dimmed to red, like the sky.
It’s the bottom of a hole, and I must have been crazy to risk it. But I’m here. I got down alive. I didn’t expect to, not there at the end.
It was one crazy landing.
Imagine a universe half of which has been replaced by an ocher abstraction, too distant and far too big to show meaningful detail, moving past you at a hell of a clip. A strange, singing sound comes through the walls, like nothing you’ve ever heard before, like the sound of the wings of the angel of death. The walls are getting warm. You can hear the thermosystem whining even above the shriek of air whipping around the hull. Then, because you don’t have enough problems the ship shakes itself like a mortally wounded dinosaur.
That was my fuel tanks tearing loose. All at once and nothing first, the four of them sheered their mooring bars and went spinning down ahead of me, cherry red.
That faced me with two bad choices. I had to decide fast. If I finished the hyperbola I’d be heading into space on an unknown course with what fuel was left in my inboard cooling ta
nk. My lifesystem wouldn’t keep me alive more than two weeks. There wasn’t much chance I could get anywhere in that time, with so little fuel, and I’d seen to it the goldskins couldn’t come to me.
But the fuel in the cooling tank would get me down. Even the ships of Earth use only a little of their fuel getting in and out of their pet gravity well. Most of it gets burned getting them from place to place fast. And Mars is lighter than Earth.
But what then? I’d still have two weeks to live.
I remembered the old Lacis Solis base, deserted seventy years ago. Surely I could get the old lifesystems working well enough to support one man. I might even find enough water to turn some into hydrogen by electrolysis. It was a better risk than heading out into nowhere.
Right or wrong, I went down.
The stars are gone, and the land around me makes no sense. Now I know why they call planet dwellers “flatlanders.” I feel like a gnat on a table.
I’m sitting here shaking, afraid to step outside.
Beneath a red-black sky is a sea of dust punctuated by scattered, badly cast glass ashtrays. The smallest, just outside the port, are a few inches in diameter. The largest are miles across. As I came down the deep-radar showed me fragments of much larger craters deep under the dust. The dust is soft and fine, almost like quicksand. I came down like a feather, but the ship is buried to halfway up the lifesystem.
I set down just beyond the lip of one of the largest craters, the one which houses the ancient flatlander base. From above the base looked like a huge transparent raincoat discarded on the cracked bottom.
It’s a weird place. But I’ll have to go out sometime; how else can I use the base lifesystem?
My Uncle Bat used to tell me stupidity carries the death penalty.
I’ll go outside tomorrow.