The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  Kzanol/Greenberg did so. Garner lifted a threevee screen out of one arm of his chair. There was three dimensional color static, then a fuzzy picture…

  Curved lines, like snail tracks, on yellow sand. Dunes distorted them. A helicopter had landed among the tracks; it looked like a fly on a printed page. Kzanol gurgled, choked, and said, “I can read it. ‘Leave our planet or we will de-assemble your ship.’ It’s tnuctipun science language. Could I have some water?”

  “Sure,” said Masney. He jerked his thumb at the cooler. After a moment Kzanol got up and poured his own water.

  Lloyd went over to Garner’s chair and began talking in a low voice. “Luke, what is this? What are you doing?”

  “Just satisfying curiosity. Relax Lloyd. Dr. Snyder will be here in an hour, then he can take over. Meanwhile there are lots of things I want to know. This isn’t just a man with hallucinations, Lloyd.

  “Why would the ET’s race have thought that the bandersnatch was just a dumb animal? Why would a race as sophisticated as the tnuctipun must have been—” he pronounced the word as Kzanol/Greenberg had, badly—“have worked for Greenberg’s race? Was it just telepathy?”

  “I can tell you that,” Kzanol/ Greenberg said bitterly. He had drunk five cups of water, practically without breath. Now he was panting a little.

  “You’ve got good ears,” said Masney.

  “No. I’m a little telepathic; just enough to get by on. It’s Greenberg’s power, but he didn’t really believe in it so he couldn’t use it. I can. Much good may it do me.”

  “So why did the tnuctipun work for you?” Masney messed up the works even worse than Garner had.

  The question answered itself.

  Everyone in the room jerked like hooked fish.

  There was no fall. An instant after he put out his arms, Kzanol—the real Kzanol—was resting on his six fingertips like a man doing pushups. He stayed here for a moment, then got to his feet. The gravity was a little heavy.

  Where was everybody? Where was the thrint or slave who had released him?

  He was in an empty, hideously alien building, the kind that happen only on free slave worlds before the caretakers move in. But…how had he gotten here, when he was aimed at a deserted food planet? And where was everybody? He needed someone to tell him what was going on.

  He Listened.

  For some reason, neither human nor thrintun beings have flaps over their ears resembling the flaps over their eyes. The thrintun Power faculty is somewhat better protected. Kzanol was not forced to lower his mental shield all at once. But he chose to, and he paid for it.

  It was like looking into an arc light from two feet away. Nowhere in the thrintun universe would it have been that intense. The slave worlds never held this heavy an overpopulation; and the teeming masses of the thrintun worlds kept their mind shields up in public.

  Kzanol reeled from the pain. His reaction was automatic and immediate.

  STOP THINKING AT ME! he roared at the bellowing minds of Topeka, Kansas.

  VIII

  In the complex of mental hospitals still called Menninger’s, thousands of doctors and patients heard the command. Hundreds of patients eagerly took it as literal and permanent. Some became stupid and cured. Others went catatonic. A few who had been dangerously irresponsible became more so. A handful of doctors became patients; but they became an emergency when the casualties from downtown began pouring in. Menninger’s was miles from Topeka Police Headquarters.

  In the little room, everyone jerked like hooked fish. Then, all but Kzanol/Greenberg, they stopped moving. Their faces were empty. They were idiots.

  In the first instant of the mental blast. Kzanol/Greenberg’s mental shield went up with an almost audible clang. A roaring noise reverberated through his mind for minutes. When he could think again, he still didn’t dare drop the mind shield.

  There was a thrint on Earth!

  The guards at the door now squatted or sat like rag dolls. Kzanol/Greenberg pulled cigarettes from a dark blue shirt pocket and lit one from the burning butt between Masney’s lips, incidentally saving Masney a nasty burn. He sat and smoked while he thought about the other thrint.

  Item: That thrint would see him as a slave.

  Item: He, Kzanol, had a working mind shield. That might convince the thrint, whoever he was, that he, Kzanol, was a thrint in a human body. Or it might not. If it did, would the other thrint help? Or would he regard Kzanol/Greenberg as a mere ptavv, a Powerless thrint?

  In ugly fact, Kzanol/Greenberg was a ptavv. He had to get his body back before the other found him.

  And with that, incredibly, he stopped thinking about the other thrint. There was every reason to wonder about him. What was he doing on Earth? Would he claim Earth as his property? Would he help Kzanol/Greenberg reach Thrintun? (Or whatever new planet passed for Thrintun these days.) Did he still look thrintish, or had two billion years of evolution turned thrintun into monsters? But Kzanol/ Greenberg dropped the subject and began to think about reaching Neptune. Perhaps he knew who the other thrint was, but wasn’t ready to face it.

  Cautiously he Listened. The thrint had left the building; he could find out nothing more, for the other’s mind shield was up. He turned his Attention, such as it was, to the men in the room.

  They were recovering, but very slowly. He had to listen with excruciating concentration because of the limits of Greenberg’s brain, but he could feel their personalities reintegrating. The most advanced seemed to be Garner. Next was Masney.

  Another part of the Greenberg memory was about to become useful. Greenberg had not lied about his dolphin-like sense of the practical joke. To implement it he had spent weeks learning a technique we shall call a party trick.

  Kzanol/Greenberg bent over Lloyd Masney. “Lloyd,” he said, in a distinct, calm, authoritative voice. “Your eyelids are getting heavy. So heavy. Your fingers are becoming tired. So tired. Let them go limp. Your hands are so tired…”

  He could feel the Masney personality responding beautifully. It gave no resistance at all.

  The gravity was irritating. It was barely enough to notice at first, but after a few minutes it was exhausting. He gave up the idea of walking after he had gone less than a block, though he didn’t like the idea of riding in a slave cart.

  I’m not proud, he told himself. He climbed into a parked Cadillac and ordered the slacklipped driver to take him to the spaceport. There was a fang-jarring vibration, and the car took off with a wholly unnecessary jerk.

  These slaves were much larger than the average land-bound sentient being. Kzanol had plenty of head room. After a moment he took off his helmet. The air was a little thin, which was puzzling. Otherwise it was good enough. He put the helmet on the seat and swung his legs over beside it; the seat was too wide for comfort.

  The city was amazing. Huge and grotesque! The eye was faced with nothing but rectangular prisms, with here and there a yellow rectangular field or a flattish building with a strangely curved roof. The streets couldn’t decide whether to be crooked or straight. Cars zipped by, buzzing like flying pests. The drone from the fans of his own car rasped on his nerves, until he learned to ignore it.

  But where was he? He must have missed F124 somehow, and hit here. The driver knew that his planet—Earth?—had space travel, and therefore might know how to find F124. And the eighth planet of its system.

  For it was already obvious that he would need the second suit. These slaves outnumbered him. They could destroy him at any time—and would, when they knew what he was. He had to get the control helmet to make himself safe. Then he would have to find a thrintun planet; and he might need a better spaceship than the humans had produced so far.

  They must be made to produce better ships.

  The buildings were getting lower, and there were even spaces between them. Had poor transportation made these slaves crowd together in clumps?

  Some day he must spend the time to find out more about them. After all, they were his now.

>   There was no apparent need to be subtle. Once Kzanol/Greenberg had Masney fully under, he simply ordered Masney to take him to the spaceport. It took about fifteen minutes to reach the gate.

  At first he couldn’t guess why Masney was landing. Shouldn’t he simply fly over the fence? Masney wasn’t giving away information. His mind would have been nearly normal by now, and it was already normal for a hypnotized person. Masney ‘knew’ that he wasn’t really hypnotized; he was only going along with it for a joke. Any time now he would snap out of it and surprise Greenberg. Meanwhile he was calm and happy and free from the necessity of making decisions. He had been told to go to the spaceport and there he was. His passenger let him lead.

  Not until they were down did Kzanol/Greenberg realize that Masney was waiting to be passed through by the guards. He asked, “Will the guards let us through?”

  “No,” said Masney.

  Coosth, another setback. “Would they have let me through with—” he thought—“Garner?”

  “Yes. Garner’s an Arm.”

  “Well, turn around and go back for Garner.”

  The car whirred. “Wait a minute,” said Kzanol/Greenberg “Sleep.” Where were the guards?

  Across a tremendous flat expanse of concrete, with large red targets painted at regular intervals in a hexagonal array, he could see the spaceships. There were twenty or thirty ramjet-rocket orbital craft, some fitted out to lift other spaceships to orbit. A magnetic cannon launcher ran down the entire south side of the field. Fusion-drive military rockets lay on their sides in docks, ready to be loaded onto the lifters. They all looked like motor scooters beside two truly gigantic craft. One thing like a monstrous tin of tuna, a circular flying wing resting on its tail, was the re-entry, cargo and life-support system of the Lazy Eight III. Anyone would have recognized her, even without the blue human’s sign of infinity on her flank. The other, far to the right, was a passenger ship as big as the old Queen Mary, a luxury transport bound for the Titan Hotel. And—even at this distance it was apparent that everybody, everybody was clustered around her entrance port.

  Listening as hard as he could, Kzanol/Greenberg still couldn’t find out what they were doing there. But he recognized the flavor of the too-calm thoughts. Those were tame slaves, slaves under orders.

  The other thrint was here.

  But why wasn’t he taking his own ship? Or had he landed it here?

  He told Masney, “The guard has told us to go ahead. Take the car over to that honeymoon special.”

  Garner shook his head, let it fall back into place. His mind was the mind of a sleeping child. Across that mind flitted thoughts as ephemeral as dreams. They could not stay, because Garner had been ordered not to think.

  I must look terribly senile, he thought once. The idea slipped away…and returned. Senile! I’m old but not senile. No? There is drool on my chin.

  He shook his head, hard. He slapped his face with one hand. He was beginning to think again, but not fast enough to suit him. He fumbled at the controls of his chair and it lurched over to the coffee faucet. When he poured a cup his hand shook so that coffee spilled on his hand and wrist. Enraged, he hurled the cup at the wall.

  His mind went back to white dullness.

  A few minutes later Judy Greenberg wobbled through the door. She looked dazed, but her mind was functioning again. She saw Garner slumped in his travel chair wearing the face of a decrepit moron, and she poured cold water over his head until he came to life.

  “Where is he?” Garner demanded, gasping.

  “I don’t know,” Judy told him. “I saw him walk out, but it didn’t seem to matter to me. What happened to us?”

  “Something I should have expected.” Garner was no longer a decrepit old man, but an angry Jehovah. “It means things have gone from worse to terrible. That alien statue—I knew there was something wrong with it the moment I saw it, but I couldn’t see what it was. Oh, nuts!

  “It had both arms out, like it was turning chicken halfway through a swan dive. I saw a little projection on his chest, too. Look. The alien put himself into a freeze field to avoid some disaster. After that the button that turned on the field was in the field, and so was the alien’s finger pushing it in. So the button wouldn’t need a catch to hold it in. It wouldn’t have one.

  “But the alien had both arms out when I saw it. When Jansky put his own field around the statue, the alien dropped Greenberg’s ‘digging implement’ and the button too. The button must have popped out. Why he didn’t come to life right then I don’t know, unless the freeze field has inertia, like an electric current. But he’s alive now, and that was him we heard.”

  “Well, it’s quite a monster,” said Judy. “Is that what my husband thinks he is?”

  “Right.” Garner’s chair rose and raised a wind in the room. The chair slid out the door, picking up speed. Judy stared after it.

  “Then if he sees that he isn’t what he thinks he is—” she began hopefully. Then she gave it up.

  One of the policemen got to his feet, moving like a sleepwalker.

  IX

  Kzanol took the guards with him on his tour of the spaceport. He also took all the repairmen, dispatchers, spacemen and even passengers he happened to meet while moving around.

  The man he’d picked to drive him seemed to regard even a trip to Mars as a hazardous journey! If that was the state of Earth’s space technology, Kzanol wanted a bundleful of expert opinions.

  A couple of dispatchers were sent back to the office to try to find F124 on the star maps. The rest of the group came with Kzanol, growing as it moved. Just two men had the sense to hide when they saw the mob coming.

  By the time he reached the passenger liner Kzanol was towing everyone at the spaceport but those two cautious men, Masney, and Kzanol/Greenberg.

  He had already chosen the Lazy Eight III, the only interstellar ship on the field. While he was getting the rescue switch on his back repaired, slaves could finish building and orbiting the ship’s drive unit and fuel tanks. It would be at least a year before he was ready to leave Earth. Then he would take a large crew and pass the journey in stasis, with his slaves to wake him whenever a new child became old enough to take orders. Their descendants would wake him at the end of the journey.

  This exploration trip, thought Kzanol, is taking longer than I dreamed it might. Will I ever see Thrintun again?

  Well, at least he had time to burn. He might as well burn it. As long as he was here, he might as well see what a human called a luxury ship.

  He was impressed despite himself.

  There were thrintun liners bigger than this ship, and a few which were far bigger; but not many managed a greater air of luxury. Those that did carried the owners of planets. The ramjets under the triangular wing were almost as big as the military ships on the field. The builders of the Golden Circle had cut corners only where they wouldn’t show. The lounge looked huge; much bigger than it actually was. It was paneled in gold and navy blue. Crash couches folded into the wall to give way to a bar, a small dance floor, a compact casino. The front wall was a giant threevee screen. When the level of water in the fuel tanks became low enough, an entrance from the lounge turned the tank into a swimming pool.

  Kzanol was puzzled by the layout until he realized that the fusion drive was in the belly. Ramjets would lift the ship to a safe altitude, but from then on the fusion drive would send thrust up instead of forward. The ship used water instead of liquid hydrogen—not because the passengers needed a pool, but because water was safer to carry and provided a reserve oxygen supply. The staterooms were miracles of miniaturization.

  There were, thought Kzanol, ideas here that he could use when he got back to civilization. He sat down in one of the lounge crash couches and began reading some of the literature stuffed into the backs. One of the first things he found, of course, was a beautifully colored picture of Saturn seen from Titan.

  Of course he recognized it. He began to ask eager questions of the men around him
.

  The truth hit him all at once.

  Kzanol/Greenberg gasped, and his shield went up with a clang. Masney wasn’t so fortunate. He shrieked and clutched his head, and shrieked again. In Topeka, thirty miles away, unusually sensitive people heard the scream of rage and grief and desolation. Garner, with a curiosity and courage unmatched over most of Kansas, listened in hope of learning something useful. All he got was pain.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” said Kzanol/ Greenberg in a calm, reassuring, very loud voice. The loudness, hopefully, would carry over Masney’s screaming. “You can feel it but it doesn’t hurt. Anyway, you have enormous courage, more than you have ever had in your life.” Masney stopped screaming, but his face was a mask of suffering. “All right.” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “Sleep.” He brushed Masney’s face with his fingertips. Masney collapsed. The car continued weightlessly across the concrete, aiming itself at the cylindrical shell that was the Lazy Eight III. Kzanol/ Greenberg let it go. He couldn’t operate the controls from the back seat, and Masney was in no shape to help. He could have cut the air cushion, by stretching—but only if he wanted to die.

  The mental scream ended. He put his hand on Masney’s shoulder and said, “Stop the car, Lloyd.” Masney took over with no sign, physical or mental, of panic. The car dropped gently to the ground two yards from the outer hull of the giant colony ship.

  “Sleep,” said Kzanol/Greenberg, and Masney slept. It would probably do him good. He was still under hypnosis, and would be deeper when he awakened. As for Kzanol/Greenberg, he didn’t know what he wanted. To rest and think perhaps. Food wouldn’t hurt him either, he decided. He had recognized the mind that screamed its pain over half of Kansas, and he needed time to know that he was not Kzanol, thrint, lord of creation.

  By and by there was a roar like a fusor exploding. Kzanol/Greenberg saw a wave of flaming smoke pour across the concrete, then gradually diminish. He couldn’t imagine what it was. Cautiously he lowered his mind shield and found out.