The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  “You were not the first man to read a dolphin’s mind, Mr. Greenberg.” Jansky now held a gigantic cigar as if it were a professor’s blackboard pointer. “Am I right in thinking that the dolphin contacts were only training of a sort?”

  Larry nodded vigorously. “Right. Judy and I were trying for a berth on the Lazy Eight III, for Jinx. I knew from the standard tests that I had some telepathic talent, and when we got the word about the bandersnatchi I knew we were in. They’ve gotten nowhere trying to learn the bandersnatchi language, if there is one, and there aren’t any contact men among them. So I volunteered for the dolphin work and Judy started studying linguistics, and then we both put in for the trip. I thought our sizes would be the clincher. The dolphin work was just practice for reading a bandersnatch.” He sighed. “But this fool economic war with the Belt is fouling up the whole space effort. The bastards.”

  Judy reached across and took his hand. “We’ll get there yet,” she promised.

  “Sure we will,” said Larry.

  “You may not need to,” said the doctor, emphasizing with jerky gestures of his cigar. “If the mountain will not come to Mahomet—” He paused expectantly.

  “You don’t mean you’ve got a bandersnatch here?” Judy sounded startled, and well she might. Bandersnatchi weighed thirty tons apiece.

  “Am I a magician? No bandersnatchi, but something else. Did I explain that I am a physicist?”

  “No.” Larry wondered what a physicist would want with a contact man.

  “Yes, a physicist. My colleagues and I have been working for some twelve years on a time-retarding field. We knew it was possible, the mathematics were well known, but the engineering techniques were very difficult. It took us years.”

  “But you got it.”

  “Yes. We developed a field that will make six hours of outer, normal time equivalent to one second of inner time. The ratio of outer time to inner time moves in large, ahh, quantum jumps. The 21,000-to-one ratio is all we have been able to get, and we don’t know where the next quantum is.”

  Judy spoke unexpectedly.

  “Then build two machines and put one inside the field of the other.”

  The physicist laughed uproariously. He seemed to shake the room. “Excuse me,” he said when he had finished, “but it is very funny that you should make that suggestion so quickly. Of course it was one of the first things we tried.” Judy thought black thoughts, and Larry squeezed her hand warningly. Jansky didn’t notice. “The fact is that one time field cannot exist inside another time field. I have worked out a mathematical proof of this.”

  “Too bad,” said Larry.

  “Perhaps not. Mr. Greenberg, have you ever heard of the Sea Statue?”

  Larry tried to remember, but it was Judy who answered, “I have! Life did a pictorial on it. It’s the one they found of the Brazilian continental shelf.”

  “That’s right,” Larry remembered aloud. “The dolphins found it and sold it to the United Nations for some undersea gadgetry. Some anthropologists thought they’d found Atlantis.” He remembered pictures of a misshapen figure four feet tall, with strangely carved arms and legs and a humped back and a featureless globe of a head, surfaced like a highly polished mirror. “It looked like an early rendition of a goblin.”

  “Yes, it certainly does. I have it here.”

  “Here?”

  “Here. The United Nations Comparative Culture Exhibit loaned it to us when we explained what it was for.” He crushed his now tiny cigar butt to smithereens. “As you know, no sociologist has been able to link the statue to any culture. But I, the doctor of physics, I have solved the mystery. I believe.

  “Tomorrow I will show you why I believe the statue is an alien being in a time-retarder field. You can guess what I want you to do. I want to put you and the statue in the time-retarder field, to cancel our, er, visitor’s own field, and let you read its mind.”

  III

  They walked down to the corner at ten the next morning, and Judy stayed while Larry pushed the call button and waited for the cab. About two minutes passed before a yellow-and-black checked flyer dropped to the corner.

  Larry was getting in when he felt Judy grasping his upper arm. “What’s wrong?” he asked, turning half around.

  “I’m frightened,” she said. She looked it. “Are you sure it’s all right? You don’t know anything about him at all!”

  “Who, Jansky? Look—”

  “The statue.”

  “Oh.” He considered. “Look, I’m just going to quickly make a couple of points. All right?” She nodded. “One. The contact gadget isn’t dangerous. I’ve been using it for years. All I get is another person’s memories, and a little insight into how he thinks. Even then they’re damped a little so I have to think hard to remember something that didn’t happen to me personally.

  “Two. My experience with dolphins has given me some experience with unhuman minds. Right?”

  “Right. And you always want to play practical jokes after a session with Charley.”

  “Nuts. I’ve always liked practical jokes. Third point is that the time field doesn’t matter at all. It’s just to kill the field around the statue. You can forget it.

  “Four. Jansky won’t take any chances with my life. You know that, you can see it.

  “Okay?”

  She smiled and didn’t mean it. “Okay. I thought you’d be practicing next on bandersnatchi, but I guess this is the acid test. And I’m still worried. You know I’m prescient.”

  “Well—oh, well, I’ll call you as soon as I can.” He got into the cab and dialed the address of the UCLA physics building.

  “Mark will be back with the coffee in a minute,” said Dorcas Jansky. “Let me show you how the time-retarding field works.” They were in a huge room whose roof contained two of those gigantic electrodes which produce ear splitting claps of artificial lightning to impress groups of wide-eyed college students. But Jansky didn’t seem to be concerned with the lightning maker. “We borrowed this building because it had a good power source,” he said, “and it was big enough for our purposes. Do you see that wire construction?”

  “Sure.” It was a cube of very fine wire, with a flap in one side. The wire covered the top and floor as well as the sides. Busy workmen were testing and arranging great and complex-looking masses of machinery, which were not as yet connected to the wire cage.

  “The field follows the surface of that wire. The wire is the boundary between slow, inside time and fast, outside time. We had some fun making it, let me tell you!” He ran his fingers through his beard, meditating on the hard work to which he had been put. “We think the field around the alien is several quantum numbers higher than ours. There is no telling how long he has been in there—except by the method we will use.”

  “Well, he might not know either.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Larry, you will be in the field for six hours of our time. That will be one second of your time. I understand that the thought transfer is instantaneous?”

  “Not instantaneous, but it does take less than a second. Set things up and turn on the contact machine before you turn on the stasis field, and I’ll get his thoughts as soon as he comes to life. Until he does that I won’t get anything.” Just like with the dolphins, Larry told himself. It’s just like contacting a Tursiops truncatus.

  “Good. I wasn’t sure. Ahh.” Jansky went to tell Mark where to put the coffee. Larry welcomed the interruption, for suddenly he was getting the willies. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been the night before his first session with a dolphin, but it was bad enough. He was remembering that his wife was sometimes uncomfortably psychic. He drank his coffee gratefully.

  “So,” Jansky gasped, having drained his cup at a few gulps. “Larry, when did you first suspect that you were telebaddic?”

  “College,” said Larry. “I was going to Washburn University, it’s in Kansas, and one day a visiting bigwig gave the whole school a test for psi powers. We spent the whole day
at it. Telepathy, esper, PK, prescience, even a weird test for teleportation which everybody flunked. Judy came up high on prescience, but erratic, and I topped everyone on telepathy. That’s how we met. When we found out we both wanted to go star-hopping…”

  “Surely that wasn’t why you two married?”

  “Not entirely. And it sure as hell isn’t the reason we haven’t gotten divorced.” Larry grinned a feral grin, then seemed to recollect himself. “Telepathy makes for good marriages, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Jansky smiled.

  “I might have made a good psychologist,” Larry said without regret. “But it’s a little late to start now. I hope they send out the Lazy Eight III,” he said between his teeth. “They can’t desert the colonies anyway. They can’t do that.”

  Jansky refilled both cups. The workmen wheeled something in the huge doorway, something covered by a sheet. Larry watched them as he drank the coffee. He was feeling completely relaxed. Jansky drained his second cup as fast as he had finished the first. He must either love it, Larry decided, or hate it.

  Unexpectedly Jansky asked, “Do you like dolphins?”

  “Sure. Very much, in fact.”

  “Why?”

  “They have so much fun,” was Larry’s inadequate-sounding reply.

  “You’re glad you entered your profession?”

  “Oh, very. It would have surprised my father, though. He thought I was going to be a pawnbroker. You see, I was born…” His voice trailed off. “Hey! Is that it?”

  “Um?” Jansky looked where Larry was looking. “Yes, that is the Sea Statue. Shall we go and look at it?”

  “Let’s.” They got up.

  The three men carrying the statue took no notice of them. They carried it into the cubical structure of fine wire mesh and set it under one of the crystal-iron helmets of the contact machine. They had to brace its feet with chocks of wood. The other helmet, Larry’s end of the contact link, was fixed at the head of an old psychoanalyst’s couch. The workmen left the cage, single file, and Larry stood in the open flap and peered at the statue.

  The surface was an unbroken, perfect mirror. A crazy mirror. It made the statue difficult to see, for all that reached the eye was a distorted view of other parts of the room.

  The statue was less than four feet tall. It looked very much like a faceless hobgoblin. The triangular hump on its back was more stylized than realistic, and the featureless globular head was downright eery. The legs were strange and bent, and the heels stuck out too far behind the ankle. It could have been an attempt to model a gnome, except for the strange legs and feet and the stranger surface and the short, thick arms with massive Mickey Mouse hands.

  “I notice he’s armed,” was Larry’s first, slightly uneasy comment. “And he seems to be crouching.”

  “Crouching? Take a closer look,” Jansky invited genially. “And look at the feet.”

  A closer look was worse. The crouch was menacing, predatory, as if the supposed alien was about to charge an enemy or a food animal. The gun, a ringed double-barreled shotgun with no handle, was ready to deal death. But—

  “I still don’t see what you’re driving at, but I can see his feet aren’t straight. They don’t lie flat to the ground.”

  “Right!” Jansky waxed enthusiastic. His accent thickened noticeably. “That was the first thing I thought of, when I saw a picture of the statue in the Griffith Park Observatory. I thought, the thing wasn’t made to stand up. Why? Then I saw. He is in free flight!”

  “Yeah!” It was startling, how obvious the thing became. The statue was in a weightless spaceman’s crouch, halfway toward foetal position. Of course he was!

  “That was when the archeologists were still wondering how the artist had gotten that mirror finish. Some of them already thought the statue had been left by visitors from space. But I had already completed my time field you see, and I thought, suppose he was in space and something went wrong. He might have put himself in slow time to wait for rescue. And rescue never came. So I went to Brasilia and persuaded the UNCCE to let me test my t’eory. I aimed a liddle laser beam at one finger…

  “And what happened? The laser couldn’t even mark the surface. Then they were convinced. I took it back here with me.” He beamed happily.

  The statue had seemed formidable, armed and crouched and ready to spring. Now it was merely pitiful. Larry asked, “Can’t you bring him out of it?”

  Jansky shook his head violently. “No. You see that unshiny bump on his back?”

  Larry saw it, just below the apex of the triangular hump. It was just around it, and faintly red.

  “It sticks out of the field, just a little. Just a few molecules. I think it was the switch to turn off the field. It may have burned off when our friend came through the air, or it may have rusted away while he was at the bottom of the ocean. So now there is no way to turn it off. Poor designing.”

  “Well, I think they are ready.”

  Larry’s uneasiness returned. They were ready. Machinery hummed and glowed outside the cage. The dials were steady on the humped contact machine, from which two thick multicolored cables led to the helmets. Four workmen in lab smocks stood nearby, not working but not idling. Waiting.

  Larry walked rapidly back to the table, poured and drained half a cup of coffee, and went back into the cage. “I’m ready too,” he announced.

  Jansky smiled. “Okay,” he said, and stepped out of the cage. Two workmen immediately closed the flap with a zipper twenty feet long.

  “Give me two minutes to relax,” Larry called.

  “Okay,” said Jansky.

  Larry stretched out on the couch, his head and shoulders inside the metal shell which was his contact helmet, and closed his eyes. Was Jansky wondering why he wanted extra time? Let him wonder. The contact worked better when he was resting.

  Two minutes and one second from now, what wonders would he remember?

  Judy Greenberg finished programming the house and left. Larry wouldn’t be back until late tonight, if then; various people would be quizzing him. They would want to know how he took the ‘contact’. There were things she could do in the meantime.

  The traffic was amazing. In Los Angeles, as in any other big city, the taxis were each assigned to a certain altitude. They took off straight up and landed straight down, and the coordinator took care of things when two taxis had the same destination. But here, taxi levels must have been no more than ten feet apart. In the three years they had been living here she had never gotten used to seeing a cab pass that close overhead. The traffic was faster in Kansas but at least it was set to keep its distance.

  She noticed the city’s widely advertised cleanup project at work on many of the black-sided buildings.

  The stone came away startlingly white where the decades, sometimes centuries, of dirt had washed off. She noted with amusement that only corner buildings were being cleaned.

  She was about to enter a women’s leather goods store when it happened. In the back of her mind something slowed, then disappeared. Involuntarily Judy stopped walking. The traffic around her seemed to move with bewildering speed. The cars were blurred motion, pedestrians shot by on twinkling feet or were hurled at suicidal velocities by the slidewalks. She had known something was coming, but she had never imagined it would feel like this.

  Judy went into the shop and began searching for gifts. She was determined not to let this throw her. In six hours he would be back.

  “Suei minuten,” Doctor Jansky muttered, and threw the switch.

  There was a complaining whine from the machinery, rising in pitch and amplitude, higher and louder until even Jansky blinked uncomfortably. Then it cut off, sharply and suddenly. The cage was an unbroken mirror.

  The timing mechanism was inside the cage. It would cut the current in ‘one second’.

  “It is thirteen twenty,” said Jansky. “I suggest we should be back here at nineteen hours.” He left the room without looking back.

  Kz
anol dropped the wire and pushed the button on his chest. The field must have taken a moment to reach its peak, for the universe was suddenly jagged with flying streaks of light.

  Gravity snatched at him. If there were other changes in his personal universe he missed them. All he knew was the floor beneath him, and the block of something beneath each heel-spur, and the weight which yanked him down. There was no time to tense his legs or catch his balance. He bleated and threw both arms out to break his fall.

  IV

  Jansky was the last to arrive, He came promptly at nineteen hours, pushing a keg of beer on a cart. Someone took it from him and wheeled it over to a table. His image wavered as he passed the cube; the wire wall couldn’t have been quite flat.

  Another man was in the building, a dumpy man about forty years old, with a blond Mohican haircut. When Jansky was rid of the keg he came forward to introduce himself. “I’m Dr. Dale Snyder, Mr. Greenberg’s experimental psychologist. I’ll want to talk to him when he gets out of there, make sure he’s all right.” Jansky shook hands and offered Snyder a fair share of the beer. At Snyder’s insistence he spent some time explaining what he hoped to accomplish.

  At nineteen twenty the cage remained solid. “There may be a little delay,” said Jansky. “The field takes a few minutes to die. Sometimes longer.”

  At nineteen thirty he said, “I hope the alien time field hasn’t reinforced mine.” He said it softly, in German.

  At nineteen fifty the beer was almost gone. Dale Snyder was making threatening noises, and one of the technicians was soothing him. Jansky, not a diplomat, sat staring fixedly at the silvered cube. At long intervals he would remember the beer in his paper cup and pour it whole down his throat. His look was not reassuring.