by Larry Niven
Jato units. Kzanol was going after the second suit!
X
In the dead of August the Kansas countryside was a steam bath with sunlamps. Under the city’s temperature umbrella it was a cool, somewhat breezy autumn, but the air hit Luke like the breath of Hell as his chair shot through the intangible barrier between Cool and Hot. From there he traveled at top speed, not much caring if his chair broke down as long as he could get into an air-conditioned hospital.
He stopped at the spaceport check point, was cleared immediately, and crossed the concrete like a ram on a catapult. The hospital stood like a wedge of swiss cheese at the edge of the vast landing field, its sharp corner pointing inward. He got inside before heat stroke could claim him.
The line before the elevator door was discouragingly long. His chair was rather bulky; he would need an elevator almost to himself. And people were no longer polite to their elders. There were too many elders around these days. Garner inhaled deeply of cool air, then went back out.
Outside the doors he fumbled in the ash tray on the left arm of his chair. The motor’s purr rose to a howl, and suddenly it wasn’t a ground-effect motor any more. If Masney could see him now! Six years ago Masney had profanely told him to get rid of the illegal power booster or be run in. Anything for a friend, Luke had reasoned, and had hidden the control in the ash tray. The ground became smaller and dimmer. The edge of the building shot downward past him: sixty stories of it. Then he was over the sun deck. He brought the travel chair down on the roof and scooted past the startled sunbathing patients and into the elevator.
Going down it was dead empty. He got out on the fifty-second floor and showed his credentials to a nurse.
They were all in one ward. Miday, Sandler, Buzin, Katz—there were twenty-eight of them, the men who had been closest to Kzanol when he threw his tantrum. Seven were buried in plastic cocoons. The alien had forgotten to order them to cover, so they had been in the way of the blast when the Golden Circle took off. The others were under sleep-inductors. Their faces twisted sometimes with the violence of their dreams.
“I’m Jim Skarwold,” said a blond, chubby man in an intern’s uniform. “I’ve heard of you, Mr. Garner. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“There better be.” Garner sent his glance down the line of beds. “Can any of these men stand a dose of scopolamine? They have information I need desperately.”
“Scop? I don’t think so. Mr. Garner, what happened to them? I took some psychiatry in college, but I never heard of anything like this. It isn’t withdrawal from reality, it isn’t straight or crooked fear. They’re in despair, but not like other people.”
“I was told they got this way from contact with an ET. If you could tell me more about it, I’d have a much better chance of treating them.”
“Right. Here’s what I know,” said Garner. He told the doctor everything that had happened since the statue had been retrieved from the ocean. The doctor listened in silence.
“Then it isn’t just a telepath,” he said when Garner had finished. “It can control minds. But what could it have ordered them to do that would produce this?” He gestured at the row of beds.
“Nothing. I don’t think he was giving orders at the time. He just got a helluva shock and started feeling out loud. That’s what put these men in shock.
“Now, if I were planning to treat them, I’d find out first who they think they are. Themselves? Or the alien?
“Being me, I want to know why both Greenberg and the ET separately stole spaceships and went rocketing off. They must know they’ve got interplanetary ships, not interstellar ones. Is there an alien base in the solar system? What are they after?
“Perhaps we can scratch both problems at the same time, Dr. Skarwold.”
“Yes,” said Skarwold slowly. “Perhaps you’re right. Give me an hour to find the man with the strongest heart.”
That was why Luke always carried paperbacks in the glove compartment of his chair. His career involved a lot of waiting.
Arthur T. Katz, qualified ramjet-rocket booster pilot (types C, D, and H-1), thrashed violently. His arms flailed without purpose. He began to make noises.
“It’ll be a few minutes,” said Skarwold. “He’s out of the sleep-inductor, but he has to wake up naturally.”
Garner nodded. He was studying the man intently, with his eyes narrowed and his lips tightened slightly. He might have been watching a strange dog, wondering whether it wanted to lick his face or tear his throat out.
Katz opened his eyes. They became very round, then closed desperately tight. Cautiously Katz opened them again. He screamed, and waved his arms meaninglessly in the air. Then he started to choke. It was horrible to watch. Whenever he somehow managed to catch his breath he would gasp for air for a few seconds, open his mouth, and begin to choke again. He was terrified, and, thought Garner, not merely because he might suffocate.
Skarwold pushed a switch and Katz’s autodoc sprayed sedative into his lungs. Katz flopped back and began to breathe deeply. Skarwold turned on Katz’s sleep inductor.
Abruptly Garner asked, “Are any of these people the least bit psychic?”
Arnold Diller, fusion drive inspector (all types), took a deep breath and began turning his head back and forth. Not gently. It seemed he was trying to break his own neck.
“I wish we could have found someone with a high telepathic aptitude,” said Garner. Between the palms of his oversized hands he rolled the sawdust fragments of a cigarette. “He would have had a better chance. Look at the poor guy!”
Skarwold said, “I think he’s got a good chance.”
Garner shook his head. “He’s only a poor man’s prescient. If he were any good at that he’d have been running instead of hiding when the ET blew up. How could it protect him against telepathy anyway? He—” Skarwold joggled his arm for silence.
“Diller!” said Skarwold, with authority. Diller stopped tossing his head and looked up. “Can you understand me, Diller?”
Diller opened his mouth and started to strangle. He closed it again, and nodded, breathing through his nose.
“My name is Skarwold. I’m your doctor.” He paused as if in doubt. “You are Arnold Diller, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” The voice was rusty, hesitant, as if it hadn’t been used in years. Something inside Garner relaxed, and he noticed his handful of sawdust and dropped it.
“How do you feel?”
“Terrible. I keep wanting to breathe wrong, talk wrong—could I have a cigarette?” Garner handed him a lighted one. Diller’s voice began to sound better, more proficient. “That was strange. I tried to make you give me a cigarette. By telepathy, I guess. When you just sat there I wanted to get mad. I had to fight it down.” He frowned. “Say, how come I rate a human doctor, anyway?”
“What happened to you isn’t programmed into the autodocs,” Skarwold said lightly. “It’s a good thing you had the sense to hide when you did. The others were closer. They’re in much worse shape, too. Is your prescient sense working?”
“It’s not telling me anything. I can never count on it anyway. Why?”
“Well, that’s why I picked you. I thought if you missed it you could get over the notion that you were a certain alien.”
“A certain—” Diller started strangling. He stopped breathing entirely for a moment, then resumed slowly, through distended nostrils. “I remember,” he said. “I saw this thing coming across the field, with a bunch of people trailing after it, and I wondered what it was. Then something went wrong in my head. I didn’t wait any more. I just ran like hell and got behind a building. Something going on in my head kept bugging me, and I wanted to get closer to it but I knew that was wrong, and then aarrrghgh—”
Diller stopped and swallowed; his eyes were mad with fear until he could breathe again.
“All right, Diller, it’s all right,” Skarwold kept repeating. Diller’s breathing went back to normal, but he didn’t talk. Skarwold said, “I’d like to i
ntroduce Mr. Garner of the United Nations Police.”
Diller gave a polite nod. His curiosity was plain. Garner said, “We’d like to catch this ET before he does any more damage. If you don’t mind, I think you may have some information that we don’t.”
Diller nodded.
“About five minutes after that telepathic blast hit you, the alien took off. An hour later he was followed by a human being who has reason to believe that he is the alien. He has false memories. They’re both headed in the same general direction. They’re after something. Can you tell me what it is?”
“No,” said Diller.
Garner said, “You may have gotten something in that mental blast. Please try to remember, Diller.”
“I don’t remember anything, Garner.”
“But—”
“You old fool! Do you think I want to choke to death? Every time I start to think about what happened I start strangling! I start thinking funny, too. Everything looks strange. I feel surrounded by enemies. But worst of all, I get so depressed! No. I don’t remember anything. Get out.”
Garner sighed and ostentatiously put his hands on the chair controls. “If you change your mind—”
“I won’t. So there’s no need to come back.”
“I won’t be able to. I’m going after them.”
“In a spaceship? You?”
“I’ve got to,” said Garner. Nevertheless he glanced involuntarily at his crossed legs—crossed this morning, by hand. “I’ve got to,” he repeated. “There’s no telling what they want, but it must be something worthwhile. They’re going to too much trouble to get it. It could be a weapon, or a signal device to call their planet.”
The travel chair whirred.
“Half a minute,” said Diller.
Garner turned off the motor and waited. Diller leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. His face began to change. The expression he wore was no longer a mirror of his personality, but a random dispersal of muscle tensions. His breathing was ragged.
Finally he looked up. He started to speak and failed. He cleared his throat and tried again. “An amplifier. The—the bastard has an amplifier in a suit on the eighth planet.”
“Fine! What does it amplify?” asked Garner.
Diller started to choke.
“Never mind,” said Garner. “I think I know.”
His chair left the room, going much too fast.
“They’re both runnin’ scared,” said Garner. “Headed for Neptune at one gee, with your husband an hour and a half behind.”
“But aren’t you sending someone after him?” Judy begged. “He isn’t responsible, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“Sure. We’re sending me. He’s got my partner, you know.” Seeing Mrs. Greenberg’s face, he added quickly, “They’re in the same ship. He can’t protect Masney without protecting Greenberg.” He glanced at his watch. “They ought to be calling me in a couple of hours to tell me my ship is ready.”
They sat in Judy’s hotel room sipping Tom Collinses. Somehow it was easier waiting in company, for two people who could do nothing but wait.
“Do you know how he got away?” Judy asked.
“Yah. Everybody at the spaceport was knocked coocoo by the ET. Greenberg managed to hypnotize a booster pilot who was hiding behind a building. Then he picked out a ship and had the booster man take it up. He’s got Lloyd as ship’s pilot. Lloyd knows how to fly the ship, worse luck.”
“And they’re going to Neptune. Why?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you have a sort of telepathic link with your husband?”
“I did,” she said bitterly. “Not any more. Since he went into Jansky’s time field I can’t feel anything any more.”
“Well, it wouldn’t feel like him anyway. Do you remember how you felt at twenty hours, night before last?”
“At twenty? Let me see.” She closed her eyes. “Wasn’t I asleep…? Oh. Something woke me up and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I had the feeling that something was terribly wrong. Monsters in the shadows. I was right, wasn’t I?”
“Yes. Especially if it was Greenberg’s mind you felt.” He gave that a moment to sink in. “And since then?”
“Nothing.” Her self-control gave way. “Nothing! Except that I want to find him. Find him! That’s all I’ve wanted since he stole the ship! Find him before something…”
There wasn’t any question of finding it, he told himself for the hundredth time. But he had to find it first. He had to find it before Kzanol, the real Kzanol, did. And for the hundredth time he wondered if he could.
The Earth had been invisible for hours.
On the great white screen in the Space Traffic Control Center, two dark blobs hung almost motionless. Halley Johnson swung his phone camera around so that Garner could see it.
“The military ship is going just a teeny bit faster than the honeymooner. If it’s really going all the way to Neptune they’ll pass each other.”
“Where else can they be going?”
“A number of asteroids. I have a list.”
“Read it.”
Johnson read off the names of fourteen minor Green deities. “A lot more have been crossed off,” he added. “When the ship crosses the turnover point and keeps accelerating, we mark it out.”
“Okay. Keep me posted. How about my ship?”
“Be ready in an hour.”
XI
Like a feathered arrow the Golden Circle fell away from the sun. The comparison was hackneyed but accurate; for the giant triangular wing was right at the rear of the ship, with the slender shaft of the fuselage projecting deep into the forward tip. The small forward wings had folded into the sides shortly after takeoff. The big fin was a maze of piping. Live steam, heated by the drive, through a generator before returning to start the journey again. Most of the power was fed back into the fusion shield of the drive tube. The rest of the power fed the life-support system.
In one respect the “arrow” simile was inexact. The arrow flew sideways, riding on the sun-hot torch which burned in its belly.
Kzanol roared his displeasure. The cards had failed again! He swept the neat little array between his clublike hands, tapped them into deck formation, and ripped the deck across. Then, carefully, he got to his feet. The drive developed one terran gravity, and he hadn’t quite had time to get used to the extra weight. He sat down at the casino table and dug into the locker underneath. He came out with a new deck of cards, opened it, let the automatic shuffler play with it for awhile, then took it out and began to lay it out solitaire style. The floor around him was littered with little pieces of card.
Perhaps he could think up some fitting punishment for the pilot, who had taught him this ridiculous game.
The pilot and copilot sat motionless in the control room. From time to time the pilot used his hands to change course a trifle. Every fourteen hours or so the copilot would bring Kzanol a glass of water and then return to her seat. Actinic gas streamed from the belly of the ship, pushing it to ever higher velocities.
It was a beautiful night. Years had passed since Garner had last seen the stars. In the cities they couldn’t shine through the smog and the neon glare, and the American continent was mostly city. Soon he would see them more clearly than he had in half a century. The air was like the breath of Satan. Garner was damp with sweat, and so were Anderson and Neumuth.
“I still say we could do this by ourselves,” said Anderson.
“You wouldn’t know what to look for,” Garner countered. “I’ve trained myself for this. I’ve been reading science fiction for decades. Centuries! Neumuth, where are you going?”
Neumuth, the short dark one, had turned and was walking away. “Time to get strapped down,” he called back. “Bon voyage!”
“He’s going forward, to the cockpit of the booster,” said Anderson. “We go up that escalator to the ship itself.”
“Oh. I wish I could see it better. It’s just one big shadow.”
The shadow
was a humped shadow, like a paper dart with a big lizard clinging to its back. The paper glider was a ramjet-rocketplane, hydrogen-fueled in the ramjet and using the cold liquid hydrogen to make its own liquid oxygen in flight. The slim cylinder clinging to the upper surface was a fusion-drive cruiser with some attachments for rescue work. It carried two men. Using its fusion motor in Earth’s atmosphere was a capital offense.
Light flared as another ship took off. Garner blinked. “That was our rendezvous ship,” Anderson said matter-of-factly.
Garner was tired of having to ask silly-seeming questions. He wasn’t going to like Anderson, he decided. If the kid wanted to tell him why they needed a rendezvous ship, he would.
They had reached the bottom of the escalator. “Meet you at the top,” said Garner, reaching into his ashtray. Anderson stared, jolted, as the wheel chair became a flying saucer. An Arm using an illegal flying machine? An Arm?
Anderson rode up the stairs, whistling. This trip might be fun after all.
“Just leave the chair on the escalator platform,” he said at the top. “They’ll take good care of it. I’ll carry you in, sir.”
“I’ll walk,” said Garner. And he did, wobbling and using his arms freely. Anderson checked Garner’s web before he used his own.
“Neumuth? Ready,” said Anderson, as if into thin air. He continued, “The other ramrocket carried a bundle of solid fuel rockets as big as this ship. They’re strap-ons. We don’t have any more power than the Golden Circle or the ship your friend is on, and we’re a day and a half behind them, so we use the strap-ons to give us an initial boost. Inefficient, but if it works—”
“—it’s good,” Garner finished for him. His voice was thickened by the pull of the catapult. For ten seconds the soundless pressure lasted, one gravity of pull. Then the rams went on and they were off.
One gravity is standard for spaceships. Some rescue ships, and a few expresses among the asteroids, use clusters of fusion engines to get where they’re going. Often it makes sense. More often it doesn’t. Given continuous acceleration, the decrease in trip time varies as the square root of the increase in power. The two ships Garner was following would have expected their pursuers, had they known of them, to stay a day and a half behind all the way to Neptune.