The Man-Kzin Wars 01 mw-1

by Larry Niven

  If he'd brought his drive unit, maybe it could have lifted him out. He wasn't sure. It was for use in space. This fluid might clog it or ooze into circuitry that there had never been any reason to seal tight. Irrelevant anyway, when he'd left it behind.

  “My boy,” he said, “it looks like you've had the course.”

  That was a mistake. The sound seemed to flap around in the cage of his helmet. If he was trapped, he shouldn't dwell on it. That way lay screaming panic.

  He forced himself to lie quiet and think. How long till Laurinda took off. By rights, she should have already. If he did escape the pit, he'd be alone on the moon. Naturally, he'd try to get at Rover in some different fashion, such as coming around on the hillside. But meanwhile Dorcas would return in Shep, doubtless with the other two. She was incapable of cutting and running, off into futility. Chances were, though, that by the time she got here a kzin auxiliary or two would have arrived. The odds against her would be long indeed.

  So if Saxtorph found a way to return topside and repossess Rover — soon — he wouldn't likely find his wife at the asteroid. And he couldn't very well turn back and try to make contact, because of those warboats and because of his overriding obligation to carry the warning home. He'd have to conn the ship all by himself, leaving Dorcas behind for the kzinti. The thought was strangling. Tears stung. That was a relief, in the nullity everywhere around. Something he could feel, and taste the salt of on his lips. Was the tomb blackness thickening? No, couldn't be. How long had he lain buried? He brought his timepiece to his faceplate, but the hell-stuff blocked off luminosity. The blood in his ears hammered against a wall of stillness. Had a whine begun to modulate the rasping of his breath? Was he going crazy? Sensory deprivation did bring on illusions, weirdness’s, but he wouldn't have expected it this soon.

  He made himself remember — sunlight, stars, Dorcas, a sail above blue water, fellowship among men, Dorcas, the tang of a cold beer, Dorcas, their plans for children — they'd banked gametes against the day they'd be ready for domesticity but maybe a little too old and battered in the DNA for direct begetting to be advisable—

  Contact ripped him out of his dreams. He reached wildly and felt his gloves close on a solid object. They slid along it, along humanlike lineaments, a spacesuit, no, couldn't be! Laurinda slithered across him till she brought faceplate to faceplate. Through the black he recognized the voice that conduction carried: “Robert, thank God, I'd begun to be afraid I'd never find you, are you all right?”

  “What the, the devil are you doing here?” he gasped.

  Laughter crackled. “Fetching you. Yes, mutiny. Court-martial me later.” Soberness followed: “I have a cable around my waist, with the end free for you. Feel around till you find it. There's a lump at the end, a knot I made beforehand and covered with solder so the buckyballs can't get in and make it work loose. You can use that to make a hitch that will hold for yourself, can't you? Then I'll need your help. I have two geologist's hammers with me. Secured them by cords so they can't be lost. Wrapped tape around the handles in thick bands, to give a grip in spite of no friction. Used the pick ends to chip notches in the rock, and hauled myself along. But I'm exhausted now, and it's an uphill pull, even though gravity is weak. Take the hammers. Drag me along behind you. You have the strength.”

  “The strength — oh, my God, you talk about my strength?” he cried.

  The cable was actually heavy — gauge wire from the electrical parts locker, lengths of it spliced together till they reached. The far end was fastened around a great boulder beyond the treacherous part of the slope. Slipperiness had helped as well as hindered the ascent, but when he reached safety, Saxtorph allowed himself to collapse for a short spell. He returned to Laurinda's earnest tones: “I can't tell you how sorry I am. I should have guessed. But it didn't occur to me — such quantities gathered together like this — I simply thought 'nebular dust,' without stopping to estimate what substance would become dominant over many billions of years—”

  He sat straight to look at her. In the level red light, her face was palely rosy, her eyes afire. “Why, how could you have foreseen, lass?” he answered. “I'd hate to tell you how often something in space has taken me by surprise, and that was in familiar parts. You did realize what the problem was, and figured out a solution. We needn't worry about your breaking orders. If you'd failed, you'd have been insubordinate; but you succeeded, so by definition you showed initiative.”

  “Thank you.” Eagerness blazed. “And listen, I've had another idea—”

  He lifted a palm. “Whoa! Look, in a couple of minutes we'd better hike back to Shep, you take your station again, I get a drive unit and fly across to Rover. But first will you please, please tell me what the mess was that I got myself into?”

  “Buckyballs,” she said. “Or, formally, Buckminster fullerene. I didn't think the pitful of it that you'd slid down into could be very deep or the bottom very large. Its walls would surely slope inward. It's really just a… pothole, though surely the formation process was different, possibly it's a small astroblem—” She giggled. “My, the academic in me is really taking over, isn't it? Well, essentially, the material is frictionless. It will puddle in any hole, no matter how tiny, and it has just enough cohesion that a number of such puddles close together will form a film over the entire surface. But that film is only a few molecules thick, and you can't walk on it or anything. In this slight gravity, though — and the metal poor rock is friable — I could strike the sharp end of a hammerhead in with a single blow to act as a kind of… piton, is that the word?”

  “Okay. Splendid. Dorcas had better look to her standing as the most formidable woman in known space. Now tell me what the— the hell buckyballs are.”

  “They're produced in the vicinity of supernovae. Carbon atoms link together and form a faceted spherical molecule around a single metal atom. Sixty carbons around one lanthanum is common, galactically speaking, but there are other forms, too. And with the molecule closed in on itself the way it is, it acts in the aggregate like a fluid. In fact, it's virtually a perfect lubricant, and if we didn't have things easier to use you'd see synthetic buckyballs on sale everywhere.” A vision rose in those ruby eyes. “It's thought they may have a basic role in the origin of life on planets—”

  “Damn near did the opposite number today,” Saxtorph said. “But you saved my ass, and the rest of me as well. I don't suppose I can ever repay you.”

  She got to her knees before him and seized his hands. “You can, Robert. You can fetch me back my man.”

  Ponderously, Rover closed velocities with the iron asteroid. She couldn't quite match, because it was under boost, but thus far the acceleration was low.

  Ominously aglow, the molten mass dwarfed the spacecraft that toiled meters ahead of it; yet Sun Defier, harnessed by her own forcefield, was a plowhorse dragging it bit by bit from its former path; and the dwarf sun was at work, and Secunda's gravity was beginning to have a real effect…

  Arrived a little before the ship, the boat drifted at some distance, a needle in a haystack of stars. Laurinda was still aboard. The tug had no place to receive Shep, nor had the girl the skill to cross safely by herself in a spacesuit even though relative speeds were small. The autopilot kept her accompanying the others.

  In Rovers command center, Saxtorph asked the image of Dorcas, more shakily than he had expected to, “How are you? How's everything?” She was haggard with weariness, but triumph rang: “Kam's got our gear packed to transfer over to you, and I– I've worked the bugs out of the program. Compatibility with kzin hardware was a stumbling block, but — well, it's been operating smoothly for the past several hours, and I've no reason to doubt it will continue doing what it's supposed to.”

  He whistled. “Hey, quite a feat, lady! I really didn't think it would be possible, at least in the time available, when I put you up to trying it. What're you going to do next — square the circle, invent the perpetual motion machine, reform the tax laws, or what?”
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  Her voice grew steely. “I was motivated.” She regarded his face in her own screen. “How are you? Laurinda said something about your running into danger on the moon. Were you hurt?”

  “Only in my pride. She can tell you all about it later. Right now we're in a hurry.” Saxtorph became intent. “Listen, there's been a change of plan. You and Kam both flit over to Shep. But don't you bring her in; lay her alongside. Kam can help Laurinda aboard Rover before he moves your stuff. I'd like you to join me in a job around Shep. Simple thing and shouldn't take but a couple hours, given the two of us working together. Though I'll bet even money you'll have a useful suggestion or three. Then you can line out for deep space.”

  She sat a moment silent, her expression bleakened, before she said, “You're taking the boat to Prima while the rest of us ferry Rover away.”

  “You catch on quick, sweetheart.”

  “To rescue Juan and Carita.”

  “What else? Laurinda's hatched a scheme I think could do the trick. Naturally, we'll agree in advance where you'll wait, and Shep will come join you there. If we don't dawdle, the odds are pretty good that the kzinti won't locate you first and force you to go hyperspatial.”

  “What about them locating you?”

  “Why should they expect anybody to go to Prima? They'll buzz around Secunda like angry hornets. They may well be engaged for a while in evacuating survivors from the warship; I suspect the shuttles aren't terribly efficient at that sort of thing. Afterward they'll have to work out a search doctrine, when Rover can have skitted in any old direction. And sometime along about then, they should have their minds taken off us. The kzinti will notice a nice big surprise bound their way, about which it is then too late to do anything whatsoever.”

  “But you— How plausible is this idea of yours?”

  “Plausible enough. Look, don't sit like that. Get cracking. I'll explain when we meet.”

  “I can take Shep. I'm as good a pilot as you are.”

  Saxtorph shook his head. “Sorry, no. One of us has to be in charge of Rover, of course. I hereby pull rank and appoint you. I am the captain.”

  The asteroid concealed the ship's initial boost from any possible observers around Secunda. She applied her mightiest vector to give southward motion, out of the ecliptic plane; but the thrust had an extra component, randomly chosen, to baffle hunter analysts who would fain reduce the volume of space wherein she might reasonably be sought. That volume would grow fast, become literally astronomical, as she flew free, generator cold, batteries maintaining life support on a minimum energy level. Having thus cometed for a time, she could with fair safety apply power again to bring herself to her destination.

  Saxtorph let her make ample distance before he accelerated Shep, also using the iron to conceal his start. However, he ran at top drive the whole way. It wasn't likely that a detector would pick his little craft up. As he told Dorcas, the kzinti wouldn't suppose a human would make for Prima. It hurt them less, losing friends, provided the friends died bravely; and few of them had mastered the art of putting oneself in the head of an enemy.

  Mainly, though, Carita and Juan didn't have much time left them. Ever circling, the planets had changed configuration since Rover arrived. The navigation system allowed for that, but could do nothing to shorten a run of 30-odd hours. Saxtorph tried to compose his soul in peace. He played a lot of solitaire after he found he was losing most of the computer games, and smoked a lot of pipes. Books and shows were poor distraction, but music helped him relax and enjoy his memories. Whatever happened next, he'd have had a better life than 90 percent of his species — 99 percent if you counted in everybody who lived and died before humankind went spacefaring.

  Prima swelled in his view, sallow and faceless. The recorded broadcast came through clear from the night side, over and over. Saxtorph got his fix. Fido wasn't too far from the lethal dawn. He established a three hour orbit and put a curt message of his own on the player. It ended with “Acknowledge.”

  Time passed. Heaviness grew within him. Were they dead? He rounded dayside and came back across darkness.

  The voice leaped at him: “Bob, is that you? Juan here. We'd abandoned hope, we were asleep. Standing by now. Bob, is that you? Juan here!” Joy surged.

  “Who else but me?” Saxtorph said. “How're you doing, you two?”

  “Hanging on. Living in our spacesuits this past — I don't know how long. The boat's a rotted, crumbling shell. But we're hanging on.”

  “Good. Your drive units in working order?”

  “Yes. But we haven't the lift to get onto a trajectory which you can match long enough for us to come aboard.” Unspoken: It would be easy in atmosphere, or in free space, given a pilot like you. But what a vessel can do above an airless planet, at suborbital speed, without coming to grief, is sharply limited.

  “That's all right,” Saxtorph said, “as long as you can go outside, sit in a lock chamber or on top of the wreck, and keep watch, without danger of slipping off into the muck. You can?… Okay, prepare yourselves. I'll land in view of you and open the main personnel lock.”

  “Hadn't we better all find an area free of the material?”

  “I'm not sure any exists big enough and flat enough for me. Anyhow, looking for one would take more time than we can afford. No, I'm coming straight down.”

  Carita cut in. She sounded wrung out, Saxtorph suspected her physical strength was what had preserved both. He imagined her manhandling pieces of metal and plastic, often wrenched from the weakened structure, to improvise braces, platforms, whatever would give some added hours of refuge. “Bob, is this wise?” she asked. “Do you know what you're getting into? The molecule might bind you fast immediately, even if you avoid shining light on it. The decay here is going quicker all the while. I think the molecule is… learning. Don't risk your life.”

  “Don't you give your captain orders,” Saxtorph replied. “I'll be down in, m-m, about an hour. Then get to me as fast as you prudently can. Every minute we spend on the surface does add to the danger. But I've put bandits on the jacks.”

  “What?”

  “Footpads,” he laughed childishly. “Okay, no more conversation till we're back in space. I've got my reconnoitering to do.”

  Starlight was brilliant but didn't illuminate an unknown terrain very well. His landing field would be minute and hemmed in. For help he had optical amplifiers, radar, data-analysis programs which projected visuals as well as numbers. He had his skill. Fear shunted from his mind, he became one with the boat.

  Location identification… positioning; you don't float around in airlessness the way you can in atmosphere… site picked, much closer to Fido than he liked but he could manage… coordinates established… down, down, nurse her down to touchdown…

  It was as soft a landing as he had ever achieved. It needed to be. For a pulsebeat he stared across the hollow at the other boat. She was a ghastly sight indeed, a half hull pocked, ragged, riddled, the pale devourer well up the side of what was left. Good thing he was insured; though multi-billionaire Stefan Brozik would be grateful, and presumably human governments— Saxtorph grinned at his own inanity and hastened to go operate the airlock. Or was it stupid to think about money at an hour like this? To hell with heroics. He and Dorcas had their living to make.

  Descent with the outer valve already open would have given him an imbalance: slight, but he had plenty else to contend with. He cracked it now without stopping to evacuate the chamber. Time was more precious than a few cubic meters of air. A light flashed green. His crewfolk were in. He closed the valve at once. A measure of pressure equalization was required before he admitted them into the hull proper. He did so the instant it was possible. A wind gusted by. His ears popped. Juan and Carita stumbled through. Frost formed on their spacesuits.

  He hand-signaled: Grab hold. We're boosting right away.

  He could be gentle about that, as well as quick.

  Or need he have hastened? Afterward he inspected things at
length and found Laurinda's idea had worked as well as could have been hoped, or maybe a little better.

  Buckyballs scooped from that sink on the moon. (An open container at the end of a line; he could throw it far in the low gravity.) Bags fashioned out of thick plastic, heat-sealed together, filled with buckyballs, placed around the bottom of each landing jack, superglued fast at the necks. That was all.

  The molecule had only eaten through one of them while Shep stood on Prima. Perhaps the other jacks rested on sections where most of the chemical bonds were saturated, less readily catalyzed. It didn't matter, except scientifically, because after the single bag gave way, the wonderful stuff had done its job. A layer of it was beneath the metal, a heap of it around. The devourer could not quickly incorporate atoms so strongly interlinked. As it did, more flowed in to fill the gaps. Shep could have stayed for hours.

  But she had no call to. Lifting, the tension abruptly off him, Saxtorph exploded into tuneless song. It wasn't a hymn or anthem, though it was traditional: “The Bastard King of England.” Somehow it felt right.

  Rover drove though hyperspace, homeward bound. Man and wife sat together in their cabin, easing off. They were flesh, they would need days to get back the strength they had spent. The ship throbbed and whispered. A screen gave views of Hawaii, heights, greennesses, incredible colors on the sea. Beethoven's Fifth lilted in the background. He had a mug of beer, she a glass of white wine.

  “Honeymoon cruise,” she said with a wry smile. “Laurinda and Juan. Carita and Kam.”

  “You and me, for that matter,” he replied drowsily.

  “But when will we get any proper work done? The interior is a mess.”

  “Oh, we've time aplenty before we reach port. And if we aren't quite holystoned — perfect, who's going to care?”

  “Yes, we'll be the sensation of the day.” She grew somber. “How many will remember Arthur Tregennis?”

  Saxtorph roused. “Our kind of people will. He was… a Moses. He brought us to a scientific Promised Land, and… I think there'll be more explorations into the far deeps from now on.”