by Larry Niven
The world did not intrude. The office was soundproof; its light did not depend on the sun; its false windows looked upon alien worlds, and on each a Skyhook ramship was landing. Impressive, for visitors. So Hooker could ignore the passage of time.
He thought of things that had gone wrong with his life.
He had no friends.
He had no hobbies. He’d thought of taking one up, but it turned out that he hated games. Losing irritated him. He always lost interest before he could become good enough to win.
His life was his work and the Palace. The Palace was a house of ill repute with a reputation for being very good and very expensive. If only Hooker had had the ability to play … but that he had never had. He went to the Palace when his gonads told him to, and he left when they quieted. Most of the girls could not have told you his name.
His work was all habit. He slid through life as in a dream, and the dream was a dull one of easy defeat. For a long time it had been that way. It had started…
When Clarisse left him? His teeth bared in savagery. If she were the cause, he would track her down wherever she hid! And the children for whom she had deserted him… No. He could remember periods of enjoyment, brief flashes of sunlight in his life, and some of them had happened since Clarisse.
That Christmas party at the office, decades ago. Someone’s idea had sparked them all, and they had stayed until three in the morning, using plant facilities to build a robot. The body had been built of emergency foam-plastic from the failsafe systems in a ramship. It couldn’t have weighed more than twenty pounds, excluding another twenty pounds of motors, but it had stood twenty feet tall, blank-visaged and horrifying, with huge flat feet. Yes, it had been Greg: his idea, and mostly his suggestions. They had turned it loose on 217th pedwalk downtown, walking east in the westbound lane, so that it stood in one place, marking time. Skyhook employees had waited four hours for the seven o’clock rush hour, in an automated restaurant above the walk. The panic had been a beautiful thing.
Loeffler?
Sure, Loeffler! He’d waited until Doug’s dependence on him was complete. Then he had left. So diabolically simple. Doug had not had a moment of real enjoyment since.
Hooker’s lips pulled back and away from his teeth. His nostrils flared and turned white. So simple! Why hadn’t he seen it before? Since high school it had always been Loeffler, blocking every chance he’d ever had to make his own friends and his own way of life. A decades-old plot that had not come to fruition until Doug was sixty-one years old. Now, now that he was finally alert, Doug could see the bones of the plan. The ramship had been part of it; it made the business so rich and so complex that it took all of Doug’s time to handle it. A very neat trap. Had Clarisse been involved? Perhaps. There was no way to tell. But … Greg had introduced him to Clarisse, hadn’t he?
Doug settled back in his chair. His face became almost calm. Clarisse, wherever she was, did not count. She had been a pawn, but Greg Loeffler was the king. Greg Loeffler must die.
It was midnight before Doug decided what to do. His secretary was long gone, which puzzled him until he realized what time it was. But he could do the work himself. He knew how to handle a tape. He dictated an application to buy “one ramship at standard prices. Purpose: to leave Earth. (No point in saying where he intended to go. Loeffler might have left spies anywhere.) He put the tape in an envelope and dropped it in a mailbox on his way home.
Greg had had his answer in three days. By Monday, Doug would own a Skyhook ship. And then…
“Hi, fans,” Doug Hooker called as he entered the outer office. Ranks of secretaries returned the greeting. They noticed nothing odd about him. He always walked that way, eyes straight ahead, walk fast and slightly hurried, rebuffing friendship before it was offered.
He entered his office, put his hands in the 'doc, waited for an estimated two minutes, withdrew them. Have to call Jurgenson, he thought, and then sneered at the triviality of the thought. He had better things to do. Where was that UN envelope?
There. He opened it, took out the credit-card-sized tape and inserted it in his desk player.
The refusal jarred him to his bones. He played it again, refusing to accept it—and again. It was true. He’d been turned down.
The implications were terrifying. Doug had had three days to think things over. With every hour the nature of Loeffler’s plot had become clearer… and had involved more people. Loeffler must have had an enormous amount of help.
But Doug had never dreamed that the UN was part of the plot!
He’d have to be very careful. He might have given himself away already.
February 26th, AD. 2571, East New York.
Somebody had stolen a Skyhook ramship.
The call came shortly after noon from a lovely, frightened woman who said she was the president’s personal secretary. “It was Mr. Hooker’s ship,” she explained. “He was thinking of designing an improved model. He ordered a complete working-model of the ship they’re using now. This morning it was gone!”
Loughery asked, “Did the model have gas boosters?” He was thinking, Of course it had boosters, it couldn’t take off without them, not without fusing Kansas City. But maybe a truck hauled it away?
“Yes, it had boosters.”
“Why?”
“Mr. Hooker wanted it complete in every detail.”
“Oh, Lord.” Loughery rubbed the back of his head. The idiot! Wanted a complete model, did he? Now there was a fusion ship loose somewhere in the solar system. Cut a few safety relays, turn off the fusion shield, and any fusion ship becomes an exploding fusion-bomb. “We’ll send someone over right away. Is Mr. Hooker there?”
“He didn’t arrive this morning.”
“Well, give me his home address. And if he shows up, have him call here immediately.”
The pieces began to fall together.
First, Skyhook. The area was well guarded; it would have been difficult for anyone to get in without being spotted. There was no human guard, but any unauthorized entry would have been photographed a dozen times. There would have been alarms.
Second, the Belt called. Several million people owned most of the solar system and a political power equal to that of the UN. They were furious. A fusion ship had left Earth without proper notification and was now boring through space toward the system’s edge, paying no attention to laser calls. Loughery promised payment of damages. It was all he could do.
Nobody found Hooker. If he was at home, he wasn’t answering phone calls.
The gas boosters found their way home. Loughery’s men took charge of them immediately, inspecting them for clues. Reentry had not burned the fingerprints off their shiny surfaces. The fingerprints were Hooker’s—some of them.
Loughery filed a request for a warrant to search Hooker’s house. It began to look as if Hooker had stolen his own ship.
On the afternoon of the twenty-seventh, somebody found Hooker’s request to buy a ramship. It had been turned down for several good reasons. For one, Hooker had named neither destination nor purpose. For another, the UN was careful about passing fusion drives out to anyone who might ask; whereas Hooker—
Loughery felt the hair stir on the back of his neck, Hooker was a potential paranoid.
Jurgenson called that evening. By then Loughery was in Kansas City. He went right over to interview Jurgenson personally.
“He was using too much of this guck,” said Jurgenson. He indicated two phials, both bone dry. “That’s bad. I got other people who use stuff like this, people who need special guck or something goes wrong in their heads. When they got troubles, they use more guck than usual.”
“But there’s a warning light.”
Jurgenson wrung his hands. “It’s my fault. I put in a bad light. It worked when I tried it. I can’t understand why it went bad.”
“Who was Hooker’s doctor?”
“Human? I don’t know. Miss Peterson might.”
Loughery asked Miss Peterson.
By then the search warrant had come through. What privacy there was on a crowded Earth was highly regarded; search warrants were not passed around like advertising posters. Hooker’s home turned out to be the top of a skyscraper in downtown Kansas City.
Hooker had left a note, a long one. It said that since Hooker had no friends and no particular purpose in life, he had decided to spend the rest of his life on a project all his own. He was going to try to reach the edge of the universe. He did not expect to succeed. The ramship would keep him alive indefinitely, but indefinitely was not forever. Yet he intended to try.
It was a sanely spoken tape. Syntax was in order; Hooker’s voice seemed calm. Hooker’s expressed purpose was the only crazy thing about it. But Hooker was guaranteed crazy, wasn’t he?
Loughery called the Belt again. Hooker’s ship was well out of the inner system, far enough so that the Belt could stop monitoring him; there was little chance of his deadly drive-flame crossing anyone’s path before it dissipated. Yes, he was headed roughly toward the galactic rim.
It checked, thought Loughery. Hooker would have been better advised to head straight out along the galactic axis; there was less junk to get in his way. But perhaps he hadn’t thought of that.
The excitement began to settle. Loughery had other problems. But there was one last thing he could do about the Hooker problem, and eventually he thought of it.
“Keep a monitor on Hooker,” he told the Belt Political Section. “We’ll pay the standard fee. We want to know if he turns back or if he changes course toward some inhabited world.”
And that would do it, he thought. Eventually Hooker would use the ship’s 'doc. That simple. It would cure him. Then he would either turn back to Earth, to face a charge of stealing a fusion motor, or he would move on to one of the colonies. Probably the latter. Stealing a fusion motor was a capital crime on Earth. But they could deal with him, offer him amnesty for the return of the ship.
Three weeks later the word came. The actinic spark that was Hooker’s drive had definitely shifted toward Tau Ceti. Loughery had to admit that Plateau was a good choice.
Plateau had suffered badly from the organ-bank problem in the two centuries before alloplasty, the science of putting foreign materials in the human body, had overtaken the techniques of organ transplant. All the inhabited worlds had gone through that stage. Its worst feature was that there was only one way to get the most important organic transplants.
On Plateau a small ruling class had held the power of life and death over its citizens. Life, because with unlimited access to the organ banks one could live centuries. Death, because any crime could be made a capital crime whenever the organ banks ran short. The citizens would not complain. They wanted to live centuries.
Then alloplasty had caught up. Now there were no organ banks at all on Plateau and no capital punishment.
Loughery sent a laser to Plateau, warning them that a stolen ship was due to land there. He wasn’t sure which would get there first, the laser or the ship. Ramships were fast.
March, AD. 2571, Ship's Time.
The ship flew itself, of course. All Doug had to do was take it below the plane of the Belt, leave it alone for a couple of weeks, then aim for Tau Ceti. The two weeks were misdirection. With the note he had left, they might convince the police that he was going off to nowhere and would never bother them again.
He kept busy watching for goldskin ships, Belt police; reading instruction booklets over and over; getting familiar with his machines. It wasn’t until he had passed Pluto’s orbit that he began to relax.
Nobody was after him as far as he could tell. Not that they could have done anything; you can’t stop a ship in space. You can only destroy it. But he was reassured. He had broken free of his long bondage. And now … the long wait. Tau Ceti was eleven point nine lightyears away. It would take less subjective time than that with the velocities he would eventually reach, but still…
He frowned. He hadn’t been in a 'doc in some time. It would be stupid to get sick and die just when vengeance was within his grasp.
He climbed into the 'doc tank and went to sleep.
The 'doc found it necessary to make drastic changes in his metabolism. Hooker felt very strange when he woke. The strangeness seemed to be in his thinking, and that made it horrible. He felt slow, stupid. He could no longer remember why he wanted to kill Greg. He remembered only that his lifelong friend had done him a great wrong.
He thought of turning back. But he couldn’t do that; he’d end in the organ banks for stealing this ship.
Should he try another colony world? It was a confusing question. His mind was full of confusing questions. But it was obvious that Mount Lookitthat was his best bet, regardless of what happened when he got there. Plateau was the only world of Man that did not impose the death penalty. If they decided he’d committed a crime, he’d get medical treatment.
His head buzzed. Perhaps he needed medical treatment. But the ship’s 'doc could do anything.
He went on.
And as the weeks passed, a strange thing happened. He remembered his grudge against Greg Loeffler, and he realized something that sent cold chills of rage through him. They’d booby-trapped the 'doc!
No, it was worse than that. Somehow, long ago, Greg Loeffler and his minions had managed to booby-trap every 'doc on Earth. For all of his life Hooker had been using the 'docs. And each time he did, the 'docs had made alterations in his mind and body to keep him docile.
What could he do? His very life depended on the 'doc!
It took him a few days to get over his sense of panic, or perhaps he merely got used to it. Then he went to work. There was a thick instruction booklet for repairing the 'doc. Hooker memorized it. When he felt he was ready, he began to disconnect things. It was difficult to decide what to cut out. Finally he tackled it from the other direction: what to leave running. Anesthetics, of course, and the luxuries: manicures, haircuts, massage. Vitamins, antibiotics, all diagnostic machinery, surgical repair—except in the region of the head. He didn’t dare leave that! Anticholesterol, synthetic blood components, alloplasty components and insertion tools.
He finished in two months. The 'doc should be incapable of anything that could damage his mind. But still he was afraid of it.
He tried it anyway. He was insane, definitely, but not stupid.
When he woke up, he knew that the 'doc was safe.
Year 2583.8 AD, Plateau.
Plateau was a silver ball hanging serene in the heavens. Hooker stopped nearby, not too near, and not in any particular orbit. He began to scan the surface.
Where was Mount Lookitthat?
He couldn’t find it. He turned ship to circle the planet, an irritating delay for an impatient man. Then he thought of turning on his radio. He’d turned it off because Plateau’s voices of authority kept trying to tell him what to do. Now he could use their directional signal.
“—calling Douglas Hooker. Douglas Hooker, will you please answer? Do you need help? The United Nations claims you are flying a stolen ship. Is this true? You will need reentry craft to land. Are you able to establish an orbit so that they can find you? Douglas Hook—”
Hooker frowned down at the silver field in his scope screen. That was where Mount Lookitthat ought to be, according to his directional finder. So where was it?
Overcast, of course. By water vapor. There must be fog there or rain.
Hooker smiled and moved in.
He dropped fast into the mist beyond the void edge. If there were finders on him, he was caught; but what could they do about him? They couldn’t approach him with anything manned. His ramscoop field was as deadly as earlier models, save for that “dead pocket.” All he had to do was turn it on.
He heard nothing on the radio. They weren’t sending in his direction. Good. And he was somewhere off the void edge of Mount Lookitthat.
He’d passed through Loeffler’s laser message just about a year ago, ship’s time. It was mealymouthed friendliness
, all of it, obviously designed to lull Hooker’s suspicions. All the same, it was a bad mistake on Loeffler’s part. It included pictures of his house and environs.
Loeffler’s house resembled his old home on Earth. It was large, almost ostentatiously large; and it seemed designed to fit its surroundings, as if it had grown from the land. Loeffler no longer lived on a cliff. He had chosen a spot in hilly country, set a few hundred feet back from the void edge in one direction and from a river in another. The river had etched itself a canyon over the millennia, and that canyon led to the void edge.
Hooker kept his ship submerged in the mist. His drive must be giving off a hellish glow, but he hoped he was far enough down for the mist to hide it. He angled his ship toward the invisible Mount Lookitthat and moved slowly in that direction. Look for a waterfall.
It might not show at this level. It might turn to spray and evaporate high above.
Something black and formless loomed in the lesser blackness. Simultaneously, Hooker’s radar beeped. Something black and huge, indefinitely huge… Hooker backed ship and raised the thrust. The ship shot up. Up and up. The mist began to thin… and Hooker had his first look at the side of Mount Lookitthat. It seemed infinite. It went on and on, up and down and sideways, like the surface of a world tilted from horizontal to vertical.
(After four hours of hopeless searching, the pilot of Plateau’s first colony slowboat had seen Mount Lookitthat rising suddenly out of an endless white furry plain. “Lookitthat!” he’d said, four hundred years ago, in the voice of one punched in the stomach.)
Hooker took his ship straight up the fluted side. Mist boiled and churned below him. Now he got his first look at Plateau’s big soft sun. Tau Ceti was smaller and cooler than Sol, so that Plateau had to huddle closer for warmth, making the star look bigger from Plateau’s surface. But Hooker had been travelling for more than four years of ship’s time. He’d all but forgotten what a sun looked like.