by Larry Niven
Growling deep in his throat, like the carnivore he was, Kzanol scraped the cards together and shuffled them. He was learning coordination, too. And he had learned something about himself: he would not let a slave see him cheating at cards. He had cheated once, and the pilot had somehow guessed. He would not cheat again.
Kzanol jumped. Another one! This one was too far to the side to control, but easily close enough to sense. And yet…the image had a fuzziness that had nothing to do with distance. As if the slave were asleep. But…different.
For half an hour it stayed within reach. In that time Kzanol satisfied himself that there was no other slave on board. He did not think of another thrint. He would have recognized the taste of a thrint command.
At six hundred hours the next morning, Greenberg’s ship turned around. Three minutes later the Golden Circle did the same. Anderson found the prints in the scope camera when he woke up: two lights which stretched slowly into bright lines, then contracted with equal deliberation into somewhat brighter points.
The time passed slowly. Garner and Anderson were already deep in a tournament which they played on the viewer screen: a rectangular array of dots to be connected by lines, with victory going to the player who completed the most squares. Almost every day they raised the stakes.
On the morning of the last day Garner got back to even. At one point he had been almost eleven thousand dollars in debt. “See?” he said. “You don’t give up all your pleasures as you get older.”
“Just one,” Anderson said thoughtlessly.
“More than that,” Garner admitted. “My taste buds have been wearing out for, lo, these many years. But I guess someday someone will find a way to replace them. Just like my spinal cord. That wore out too.”
“Wore out? You mean—it wasn’t an accident? The nerves just—died?”
“Just went into a coma would be more like it.”
A swift change of subject was in order. “Have you got any better idea of what we do when we get to Neptune? Do we hide on one of the moons and watch?”
“Right,” said Garner.
But half an hour later he asked, “Can we reach Earth from here?”
“Only by maser,” Anderson said dubiously. “Everyone on Earth will be able to listen in. The beam will spread that far. Have you got any secrets from the man on the slidewalk?”
“Don’t worry about it. Aim a maser at Earth.”
It took half an hour for Anderson to center the beam and set it tracking. “If it’s ‘Love to Mother,’ you’re dead,” he warned Garner.
“My mother passed away some time ago. In fact, it’s been just about a century. And she thought she was an old woman! Hello, Arm Headquarters. This is Lucas Garner calling the United Nations Technological Police.”
Anderson nudged him with an elbow. “Are you waiting for an answer, shnook?”
“Of course not!” Habits are hard to break. “This is Garner calling Arm Headquarters, Earth. Please aim your reply at Neptune. We urgently need the following information from Dorcas Jansky. Does his retarder field stop radar completely? Repeat, completely. Would the ET suit do the same?” He put down the mike. “Okay, son, repeat that a few times.”
“All right, it’s on repeat. Now what was that all about?”
“I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out,” Garner said smugly. “The ET has been frozen for about two billion years, according to Greenberg. I think he was telling the truth. He couldn’t know that there’s something on Neptune unless he put it there two billion years ago. And how could he assume that it hasn’t fallen apart or rusted to death or whatever, after all that time?”
“It’s in a retarder field.”
“Right.”
Anderson looked at the chron. “You’ll be getting your answer in a little over eight hours, not counting the time it takes to get what’s-his-name. Figure an hour; they’ll be calling around nineteen thirty. So let’s get some sleep. We’ll be coming in about three tomorrow morning.”
“Okay. Sleeping pills?”
“Uh huh.” Anderson punched buttons on the medicine box. “Luke, I still think you were waiting for Earth to answer.”
“You can’t prove it, son.”
Twenty-one forty-five. Garner studied the board for a moment, then drew one short line between two dots of light. The scanner, set to follow the movements of the tip of his stylus, reproduced the line on the board.
The radio boomed to life.
“This is Arm Headquarters calling spaceship Heinlein. Arm Headquarters calling Lucas Garner, spaceship Heinlein. Garner, this is Chick. I got hold of Jansky this morning, and he spent three hours doing experiments in our lab. He says a retarder field does, repeat does, reflect one hundred percent of energy of any frequency, including radar, and including everything he could think of. Visible, ultraviolet, infrared, radio, X rays. If you’re interested, he thinks there’s a mathematical relation between a retarder field and a fusion shield. If he finds one, do you want to know? Is there anything else we can help you with?”
“You can help me with this game,” Luke muttered. But Anderson had erased it, along with the six-inch curve Luke had drawn when he jerked his arm at the sound of the radio.
The man in the lead ship ran fingers through his cottony hair like a man sorely puzzled. He barely had room in the tiny control bubble. “All ships,” he said. “What the hell did he mean by that?”
After a few moments someone suggested, “Code message.” Others chorused agreement. Then Tartov asked, “Lew, does Earth have something called a retarder field?”
“I don’t know. And there’s nowhere we can beam a maser that some Earth ship won’t get in it.” He sighed, for masers are always a chore to use. “Someone ask the Political Section about retarder fields.”
“Retarder fields?”
“Retarder fields. And they sent us the full text of the message to Garner.”
Lit smiled with one side of his mouth. “Retarder fields were part of Garner’s story. I knew he’d be thorough, but this is ridiculous.” He thought of the thousands of Belt ships he’d put on standby alert, just in case Garner’s fleet was intended to distract attention from things closer to home; and he thought of five mining ships and a priceless radar proof headed for what might as well be outer space. Garner was causing more than his fair share of activity. “All right, I’ll play his silly game. Beam Arm Headquarters and ask them what they know about retarder fields.”
Cutter was shocked. “Ask the Arms?” Then he got the joke, and his face was chilled by a smile. On Cutter a smile always looked false.
It wasn’t until Arm Headquarters cautiously denied all knowledge of retarder fields, that Lit Shaeffer began to have doubts.
With the first jarring clang of the alarm Garner was awake. He saw Anderson groan and open his eyes, but the eyes weren’t seeing anything. “Meteor strike!” he bawled.
Anderson’s eyes became aware. “Not funny,” he said.
“No?”
“No. Are you the type who yells ‘Red Alert’ on a crowded slidewalk? What time is it?”
“Oh three oh four.” Garner looked out at the stars. “No Neptune. Why?”
“Just a sec.” Anderson fooled with the attitude jets. The ship swung around. Neptune was a blue-green ball, dim in the faint sunlight. Usually a world that close is awe-inspiring, if not blinding. This world only looked terribly cold. “There it is. What’ll I do with it?”
“Put us in a search orbit and start scanning with the radar. Can you set it to search for something as dense as dwarf star matter?”
“You mean, set it to search below the crust? Will do, Captain.”
“Anderson?”
“Uh huh?” He was already at work on the instrument panel.
“You will remember that we have a time limit?”
Anderson grinned at him. “I can put this thing in a forced orbit and finish the search in five hours. Okay?”
“Great.” Luke started punching for break
fast.
“There’s just one thing. We’ll be in free fall some of the time. Can you take it?”
“Sure.”
Anderson moved in. When he finished, the ship balanced nose down, one thousand miles above the surface, driving straight at the planet with a force of more or less one gee. The “more or less” came from Anderson’s constant readjustments.
“Now don’t worry,” Anderson told him. “I’m trying keep us out of the atmosphere, but if we do happen to land in the soup all I have to do is turn off the motor. The motor is all that’s holding us in this tight orbit. We’d fall straight up into outer space.”
“So that’s what a forced orbit is. How are you working the search?”
“Well, on a map it would look like I’m following lines of longitude. I’ll turn the ship sideways for a few minutes every time we cross a pole, so we can keep changing our line of search. We can’t just let the planet turn under us. It would take almost sixteen hours.”
The world rolled beneath them, one thousand miles below—more or less. There was faint banding of the atmosphere, but the predominant color was bluish white. Anderson kept the radar sweeping at and below the ward horizon, which on the radar screen looked like stratified air. It was solid rock.
“Understand, this is just to find out if it’s there,” Anderson said an hour later. “If we see a blob, we’ll have pinned within five hundred miles. That’s all.”
“That’s all we need.”
At nine hours Anderson turned the ship around, facing outward. He ached from shoulders to fingertips. “It’s not there,” he said wearily. “Now what?”
“Now we get ready for a fight. Get us headed toward Nereid and turn off the drive.”
The bright stars that were two fusion-drive spacecraft were too close to the tiny Sun to be easily seen. Anderson couldn’t even find the Golden Circle. But Greenberg’s ship came steadily on, blue and brightening at the edge of the Sun’s golden corona. Garner and Anderson were on a ten-hour path to Nereid, Neptune’s outermost moon. They watched as Greenberg’s light grew brighter.
At nine thirty the light began to wiggle. Greenberg was maneuvering. “Do we start shooting?” Anderson wanted to know.
“I think not. Let’s see where he’s going.”
They were on the night side of the planet. Greenberg was diving toward Neptune at a point near the twilight line. He was clearly visible.
“He’s not coming toward Nereid,” said Anderson. They were both whispering, for some reason.
“Right. Either he left it on Triton, or it’s in orbit. Could it be in orbit after that long?”
“Missile’s tracking,” Anderson whispered.
Greenberg was past Triton before he started to decelerate. “In orbit?” wondered Garner. “He must have nuts.”
Twenty minutes later Greenberg’s ship was a wiggling between the horns of Neptune’s cold blue crescent. They watched its slow crawl toward one of the horns. He was in a forced orbit, covering a search pattern of surface. “Now what?” Anderson asked.
“We wait and see. I give up, Anderson. I can’t understand it.”
“I swear it’s not on Neptune.”
“Uh, oh.” Garner pointed. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.” A tiny spear of light was going by the lighted edge of the planet.
The blue-green ball was larger than he had anticipated. For the first time Kzanol regretted his carelessness in not finding out more about the eighth planet when he had the chance, some two billion years ago. He asked the pilot and copilot, who remembered that Neptune had 1.23 gee at surface. Earth gee, of course. For Kzanol it would be about two and a half.
Kzanol stood at one of the small windows, his jaw just above the lower edge, his leathery lips drawn back in a snarl of worry. Not long now! One way or another. For the pilot was nudging the ship into a search orbit.
Someone was already there.
It was the half-asleep free slave he’d passed at the halfway point. He was almost around the curve of the world, but he would be back in eighteen diltun or so. Kzanol had the pilot put the Golden Circle in orbit and turn off the motor. Let the slave do the searching.
The ship went by underneath, spitting fire at the stars. The slave was indeed marking out a search pattern. Kzanol let him go on.
And he wondered. How was he going to get down, on a motor which simply didn’t have the power?
He let the pilot think about it, and the pilot told him. On rockets, wings, and rams, all going at once. But even the pilot couldn’t think of a way back up.
Kzanol/Greenberg, of course, had no warning at all. At its present setting his radar would have shown Kzanol’s ship as more transparent than air. Even the planet itself was translucent. Kzanol/Greenberg kept watch over the radar screen, sure that if Masney missed the suit, he wouldn’t.
“Why isn’t the other ship searching too?” Anderson wondered. “It’s just floating.”
“Ordinarily,” said Garner, thinking out loud, “I’d think they were in cahoots. There’s no need for them both to search. But how—? Oh. I get it. The ET has taken control of Masney and Greenberg. Either that or he’s letting them do his job for him without their knowing it.”
“Wouldn’t the job get done quicker if they both searched?”
“I’m beginning to wonder if this alien isn’t the aristocrat’s aristocrat. Maybe he thinks that anyone who works is a slave. Since he’s a master…But the real question is, what are they searching for, and where is it?
“Look, son, why don’t you warm up the radio and point the maser at our fleet of Belters. I might as well fill them in.”
One thing about the Belt ships: at least the air plant could handle pipe tobacco. The man in the third ship was the only man in the fleet who took advantage of the fact, one of exactly six in the entire Belt. He was known, not too affectionately, as Old Smoky.
Once he had been a flatlander. For nearly thirty years he had piloted a succession of circumlunar tourist boats. His nights he had spent in a small, cheap apartment a few stories above the vehicular traffic level in Los Angeles. On holidays he went to the beach, and was lucky to find enough clear sand to sit on; his vacations were spent in foreign cities, strange and novel and undeniably fascinating but generally just as crowded as Los Angeles. Once he stayed two weeks in what was left of the Amazon jungle. He smuggled some cigarettes in with him, risking two years in prison, and ran out in five days. When he found he was telling every friend and stranger how much he wanted a smoke, he went back to the cities.
He had met Lucas Garner in the line of duty; Garner’s duty. There was a massive sit-in to protest rumored corruption in the Fertility Board; and when the law hauled Smoky off the top strip he met Garner in the uniform of a police chief. Somehow they got to be friends. Their respective views on life were just close enough to make for violent, telling, fun arguments. For years they met irregularly to argue politics. Then Luke joined the Arms. Smoky never forgave him.
One day Smoky was rounding the Moon nose down with a load of tourists, when he felt a sudden, compelling urge to turn nose out and keep driving until all the stars were behind him. He fought it down, and landed in Death Valley that evening as he had landed seven-thousand-odd times before. That night, as he approached his apartment through the usual swirling mob, Smoky realized that he hated every city in the world.
He had saved enough to buy his own mining ship. Under the circumstances the Belt was glad to have him. He learned caution before the Belt killed him, and he earned enough to keep his ship in repair and himself in food and tobacco.
Now he was the only man in the fleet who could recognize Lucas Garner’s voice. When the radio burst to life he listened carefully to the message, then called Lew to report that it really was Garner.
For Smoky, the broadcast removed all doubt. It was Garner himself. The old man was not above a judicious lie, but he was not prone to risk his life. If he was near Neptune in a leaky terran Navy crate, he must have an outstanding reaso
n to be there.
Thoughtfully Old Smoky checked through his arsenal of two radar missiles, one heat seeker, and a short-range laser “cannon.” The war of the worlds was here at last!
Kzanol was baffled. After six hours of searching, the slave Masney had covered the entire planet. The suit wasn’t there!
He let the slave begin his second search, for the sake of thoroughness. He took his own ship to Triton. The Brain could not compute the course of moons; one of them may have gotten in the way of the ship as it speared toward Neptune. Very likely it had been Triton. That moon was not only closer than Nereid, it was far bigger: 2500 miles thick as compared to 200.
A nerve-wracking hour later, an hour of flying upside down over Triton’s surface with the jet firing outward and the lightly pitted moon showing flat overhead, Kzanol admitted defeat. No white flash had shown itself on the radar screen, though Neptune itself had glowed through the transparent image of the larger moon. He turned his attention to the small moon.
“So that’s it!” Anderson’s face glowed. “They thought it was on the surface and it wasn’t. Now they don’t know where it is!” He frowned in thought. “Shouldn’t we get out of here? The honeymooner’s aiming itself at Nereid, and we’re too close for comfort.”
“Right,” said Garner. “But first we turn the missile loose. The one that’s homed on the alien. We can worry about Greenberg later.”
“I hate to do it. There’re two other people on the Golden Circle.” A moment passed. Lengthened. “I can’t move,” said Anderson. “It’s that third button under the blue light.”
But Luke couldn’t move either.
“Who’d have thought he could reach this far?” he wondered bitterly. Anderson couldn’t help but agree. The ship continued to fall toward Nereid.
To the Power, distance was of little importance. What mattered was numbers.
Nereid was a bust. The deep radar went through it as through a warped window pane, and showed nothing. Kzanol gave it up and watched the half-asleep slave for a while. His tiny flame burned bravely against the Neptunian night.