05-A Gift From Earth

by Larry Niven

  The KNOWN SPACE Universe

  Tales of Known Space 1: Human Space

  World of Ptavvs

  Flatlander (Gil Hamilton)

  Protector

  A Gift From Earth

  Tales of Known Space 2: Known Space

  Crashlander (Beowulf Shaeffer)

  Ringworld

  Ringworld Engineers

  The Ringworld Throne

  Ringworld's Children

  Fleet of Worlds

  Juggler of Worlds

  Destroyer of Worlds

  Betrayer of Worlds

  Fate of Worlds

  The Man-Kzin Wars

  This novel originally appeared as:

  Slowboat Cargo

  in

  IF Science Fiction

  (February, March & April 1968)

  Artwork by Dan Adkins

  The Ethics of Madness

  IF Science Fiction

  April 1967

  Artwork by Jack Gaughan

  A Del Rey Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  September 1968

  Cover Art by Rick Sternbach

  Orbit Cover Art by Peter Jones

  Table of Contents

  A GIFT FROM EARTH

  1: The Ramrobot

  2: The Sons of Earth

  3: The Car

  4: The Question Man

  5: The Hospital

  6: The Vivarium

  7: The Bleeding Heart

  8: Polly's Eyes

  9: The Way Back

  10: Parlette's Hand

  11: Interview With the Head

  12: The Slowboat

  13: It All Happened at Once

  14: Balance of Power

  The Ethics of Madness

  Artwork from IF Science Fiction

  1: The Ramrobot

  A Ramrobot had been the first to see Mount Lookitthat. Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds. The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light. Long ago the UN had sent ramrobots to nearby stars to search out habitable planets.

  It was a peculiarity of the first ramrobots that they were not choosy. The Procyon ramrobot, for instance, had landed on We Made It in spring. Had the landing occurred in summer or winter, when the planet's axis points through its sun, the ramrobot would have sensed the fifteen-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. The Sirius ramrobot had searched out the two narrow habitable bands on Jinx, but had not been programmed to report the planet's other peculiarities. And the Tau Ceti ramrobot, Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #4, had landed on Mount Lookitthat.

  Only the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat was habitable. The rest of the planet was an eternal searing black calm, useless for any purpose. The Plateau was smaller than any region a colony project would settle by choice. But Inter stellar Ramscoop Robot #4 had found an habitable point, and that was all it knew.

  The colony slowboats, which followed the ramrobots. had not been built to make round trips. Their passengers had to stay, always. And so Mount Lookitthat was settled, more than three hundred years ago.

  A flock of police cars fanned out behind the fleeing man. He could hear them buzzing like summer bumble-bees. Now, too late, they were using all their power. In the air this pushed them to one hundred miles per hour: fast enough for transportation in as small a region as Mount Lookitthat, but, just this once, not fast enough to win a race. The running man was only yards from the edge.

  Spurts of dust erupted ahead of the fugitive. At last the Implementation police had decided to risk damaging the body. The man bit the dust like a puppet thrown in anger, turned over hugging one knee. Then he was scrambling for the cliff's sharp edge on the other knee and two hands. He jerked once more, but kept moving... At the very edge he looked up to see a circling car coming right at him from the blue void beyond.

  With the tip of his tongue held firmly between his teeth, Jesus Pietro Castro aimed his car at the enraged, agonized, bearded face. An inch too low and he'd hit the cliff; an inch too high and he'd miss the man, miss his chance to knock him back onto the Plateau. He pushed two fan throttles forward ...

  Too late. The man was gone.

  Later, they stood at the edge and looked down.

  Often Jesus Pietro had watched groups of children standing fearful and excited at the void edge, looking down toward the hidden roots of Mount Lookitthat, daring each other to go closer — and closer. As a child he had done the same. The wonder of that view had never left him.

  Forty miles below, beneath a swirling sea of white mist, was the true surface of Mount Lookitthat the planet. The great plateau on Mount Lookitthat the mountain had a surface less than half the size of California. All the rest of the world's surface was a black oven, hot enough to melt lead, at the bottom of an atmosphere sixty times as thick as Earth's.

  Matthew Keller had committed, deliberately, one of the worst of possible crimes. He had crawled off the edge of the Plateau, taking with him his eyes, his liver and kidneys, his miles of blood tubing, and all twelve of his glands — taking everything that could have gone into the Hospital's organ banks to save the lives of those whose bodies were failing. Even his worth as fertilizer, not inconsiderable on a three-hundred-year-old colony world, was now nil. Only the water in him would someday return to the upper world to fall as rain on the lakes and rivers and as snow on the great northern glacier. Already, perhaps, he was dry and flaming, in the awful heat forty miles below.

  Or had he stopped falling, even yet?

  Jesus Pietro, Head of Implementation, stepped back with an effort. The formless mist sometimes brought strange hallucinations and stranger thoughts — like that odd member of the Rorschach inkblot set, the one sheet of cardboard which is blank. Jesus Pietro had caught himself thinking that when his time came, if it ever came, this was the way he would like to go. And that was treason.

  The major met his eye with a curious reluctance.

  "Major," said Jesus Pietro, "why did that man escape you?"

  The major spread his hands. "He lost himself in the trees for several minutes. When he broke for the edge, it took my men a few minutes to spot him."

  "How did he reach the trees? No, don't tell me how he broke loose. Tell me why your cars didn't catch him before he reached the grove."

  The major hesitated a split second too long. Jesus Pietro said, "You were playing with him. He couldn't reach his friends and he couldn't remain hidden anywhere, so you decided to have a little harmless fun."

  The major dropped his eyes.

  "You will take his place," said Jesus Pietro.

  The playground was grass and trees, swings and teetertotters, and a slow, skeletal merry-go-round. The school surrounded it on three sides, a one-story building of architectural coral, painted white. The fourth side, protected by a high fence of tame vine growing on wooden stakes, was the edge of Gamma Plateau, a steep cliff overlooking Lake Davidson on Delta Plateau.

  Matthew Leiah Keller sat beneath a watershed tree and brooded. Other children played all around him, but they ignored Matt. So did two teachers on monitor duty. People usually ignored Matt when he wanted to be alone.

  Uncle Matt was gone. Gone to a fate so horrible that the adults wouldn't even talk about it.

  Implementation police had come to the house at sunset yesterday. They had left with Matt's big comfortable uncle. Knowing that they were taking him to the Hospital, Matt had tried to stop those towering, uniformed men; but they'd been gentle and superior and firm, and an eight-year-old boy had not slowed them down at all. A honey-bee buzzing around four tanks.

  One day soon his uncle's trial and conviction would be announced on the colonist te
edee programs, along with the charges and the record of his execution. But that didn't matter. That was just cleaning up. Uncle Matt would not be back.

  A sting in his eyes warned Matt that he was going to cry.

  Harold Lillard stopped his aimless running around when he realized that he was alone. He didn't like to be alone. Harold was ten, big for his age, and he needed others around him. Preferably smaller others, children who could be dominated. Looking rather helplessly around him, he spotted a small form under a tree near the playground's edge. Small enough. Far enough from the playground monitors.

  He started over.

  The boy under the tree looked up.

  Harold lost interest. He wandered away with a vacant expression, moving more or less toward the teeter-totters.

  Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #143 left Juno at the end of a linear accelerator. Coasting toward interstellar space, she looked like a huge metal insect, makeshift and hastily built. Yet, except for the contents of her cargo pod, she was identical to the last forty of her predecessors. Her nose was the ramscoop generator, a massive, heavily armored cylinder with a large orifice in the center. Along the sides were two big fusion motors, aimed ten degrees outward, mounted on oddly jointed metal structures like the folded legs of a praying mantis. The hull was small, containing only a computer and an insystem fuel tank.

  Juno was invisible behind her when the fusion motors fired. Immediately the cable at her tail began to unroll. The cable was thirty miles long and was made of braided Sinclair molecule chain. Trailing at the end was a lead capsule as heavy as the ramrobot itself.

  Identical cargo pods had been going to the stars for centuries. But this one was special.

  Like Ramrobots #141 and #142, already moving toward Jinx and Wunderland — like Ramrobot #144, not yet built — Ramrobot #143 carried the seeds of revolution. That revolution was already in process on Earth. On Earth it was quiet, orderly. It would not be so on Mount Lookitthat.

  The medical revolution that began with the beginning of the twentieth century had warped all human society for five hundred years. America had adjusted to Eli Whitney's cotton gin in less than half that time. As with the gin, the effects would never quite die out. But already society was swinging back to what had once been normal. Slowly; but there was motion.

  In Brazil a small but growing, alliance agitated for the removal of the death penalty for habitual traffic offenders. They would be opposed, but they would win.

  On twin spears of actinic light the ramrobot approached Pluto's orbit. Pluto and Neptune were both on the far side of the sun, and there were no ships nearby to be harmed by magnetic effects.

  The ramscoop generator came on.

  The conical field formed rather slowly, but when it had stopped oscillating, it was two hundred miles across. The ship began to drag a little, a very little, as the cone scooped up interstellar dust and hydrogen. She was still accelerating. Her insystem tank was idle now, and would be for the next twelve years. Her food would be the thin stuff she scooped out between the stars.

  In nearby space the magnetic effects would have been deadly. Nothing with a notochord could live within three hundred miles of the storm of electromagnetic effects that was a working ramscoop generator. For hundreds of years men had been trying to build a magnetic shield efficient enough to let men ride the ramrobots. They said it couldn't be done, and they were right. A ramrobot could carry seeds and frozen fertile animal eggs, provided they were heavily shielded and were carried a good distance behind the ramscoop generator. Men must ride the slowboats, carrying their own fuel, traveling at less than half the speed of light.

  For Ramrobot #143, speed built up rapidly over the years. The sun became a bright star, then a dim orange spark. The drag on the ramscoop became a fearsome thing, but it was more than compensated for by the increase in hydrogen pouring into the fusion motor. The telescopes in Neptune's Trojan points occasionally picked up the ramrobot's steady fusion light: a tiny, fierce blue-white point against Tau Ceti's yellow.

  The universe shifted and changed. Ahead and behind the ramrobot the stars crept together, until Sol and Tau Ceti were less than a light-year apart. Now Sol was dying-ember red, and Tau Ceti showed brilliant white. The pair of red dwarfs known as L726-8, almost in the ramrobot's path, had become warm yellow. And all the stars in all the heavens had a crushed look, as if somebody heavy had sat down on the universe.

  Ramrobot #143 reached the halfway point, 5.95 light-years from Sol as measured relative to Sol, and kept going. Turnover was light-years off, since the ramscoop would slow the ship throughout the voyage.

  But a relay clicked in the ramrobot's computer. It was message time. The ramscoop flickered out, and the light died in the motors as Ramrobot #143 poured all her stored power into a maser beam. For an hour the beam went out, straight ahead, reaching toward the system of Tau Ceti. Then the ramrobot was accelerating again, following close behind her own beam, but with the beam drawing steadily ahead.

  A line of fifteen-year-old boys had formed at the door of the medcheck station, each holding a conical bottle filled with clear yellowish fluid. One by one they handed their specimen bottles to the hard-faced, masculine-looking nurse, then stepped aside to wait for new orders.

  Matt Keller was third from the end. As the boy in front of him stepped aside, and as the nurse raised one hand without looking up from her typewriter, Matt examined his bottle critically. "Doesn't look so good," he said.

  The nurse looked up in furious impatience. A colonist brat wasting her time!

  "I better run it through again," Matt decided aloud. And he drank it.

  "It was apple juice," he said later that night. "I almost got caught sneaking it into the medcheck station. But you really should have seen her face. She turned the damndest color."

  "But why?" his father asked in honest bewilderment. "Why antagonize Miss Prynn? You know she's part crew. And these medical health records go straight to the Hospital"

  "I think it was funny," Jeanne announced. She was Matt's sister, a year younger than Matt, and she always sided with him.

  Matt's grin seemed to slip from his face, leaving something dark, something older than his years. "One for Uncle Matt."

  Mr. Keller glared at Jeanne, then at the boy. "You keep thinking like that, Matthew, and you'll end up in the Hospital, just like he did! Why can't you leave well enough alone?"

  His father's evident concern penetrated Matt's mood. "Don't worry, Ghengis," he said easily. "Miss Prynn's probably forgotten all about it. I'm lucky that way."

  "Nonsense. If she doesn't report you, it'd be through sheer kindness."

  "Fat chance of that."

  In a small recuperation room in the treatment section of the Hospital, Jesus Pietro Castro sat up for the first time in four days. His operation had been simple though major: he now had a new left lung. He had also received a peremptory order from Millard Parlette, who was pure crew. He was to give up smoking immediately.

  He could feel the pull of internal surgical adhesive as he sat up to deal with four days of paperwork. The stack of forms his aide was setting on the bedside table looked disproportionately thick. He sighed, picked up a pen, and went to work.

  Fifteen minutes later he wrinkled his nose at some petty complaints practical joke — and started to crumple the paper. He unfolded it and looked again. He asked, "Matthew Leigh Keller?"

  "Convicted of treason," Major Jensen said instantly. "Six years ago. He escaped over the edge of Alpha Plateau, the void edge. The records say he went into the organ banks."

  But he hadn't, Jesus Pietro remembered suddenly. Major Jansen's predecessor had gone instead. Yet Keller had died .... "What's he doing playing practical jokes in colonist medcheck station?"

  After a moment of cogitation Major Jensen said, "He had a nephew."

  "Be about fifteen now?"

  "Perhaps. I'll check."

  Keller's nephew, said Jesus Pietro to himself. I could follow standard practice and send him a repri
mand.

  No. Let him think he'd got away with it. Give him room to move around in, and one day he'd replace the body his uncle stole.

  Jesus Pietro smiled. He started to chuckle, but pain stabbed him in the ribs and he had to desist.

  The snout projecting from the ramscoop generator was no longer bright and shiny. Its surface was a montage of big and little pits, craterlets left by interstellar dust grains pushing their way through the ramscoop field. There was pitting everywhere, on the fusion motors, on the hull, even on the cargo pod thirty miles behind. The ship looked pebble-finished.

  The damage was all superficial. More than a century had passed since the rugged ramscoop design had suffered its last major change.

  Now, eight and a half years beyond Juno, the ramscoop field died for the second time. The fusion flames became two actinic blue candles generating a twentieth of a gee. Slowly the cargo spool rewound until the cargo pod was locked in its socket.

  The machine seemed to hesitate ... and then its two cylindrical motors rose from the hull on their praying-mantis legs. For seconds they remained at right angles to the hull. Then, slowly, the legs contracted. But now the motors pointed forward.

  A U-shaped bar swung the cargo pod around until it also pointed forward. Slowly the spool unwound to its full length.

  The ramscoop went on again. The motors roared their full strength, and now they fired their long streams of fusing hydrogen and fused helium through the ramscoop itself.

  Eight point three light-years from Sol, almost directly between Sol and Tau Ceti, lie the twin red dwarf stars L726-8. Their main distinction is that they are the stars of smallest mass known to man. Yet they are heavy enough to have collected a faint envelope of gas. The ramrobot braked heavily as her ramscoop plowed through the fringes of that envelope.