A Gift From Earth

by Larry Niven

  It wasn't a coat closet, of course. It held two spacesuits.

  And it wasn't easy to reach. Matt had to lean far out from the ladder to turn the knob, let the door fall open, and then jump for the opening. Leaving the cubbyhole would be just as bad when the time came.

  Spacesuits. They had hung on hooks; now they sprawled on the floor like empty men. Thick rubbery fabric, with a heavy metal neck-ring set with clamps to hold the separate helmet. Metal struts in the fabric braced the rocket backpack and the control unit under the chin.

  Would the air converter still work? Ridiculous, after three hundred years. But there might still be air in the tank. Matt found a knob in the control panel of one suit, twisted it, and got a hiss.

  So there was still stored air. The suit would protect him against gas. And the big fishbowl of a helmet would not interfere with his vision, nor his "luck."

  He snatched up the gun when the door to the corridor dropped open. A long moment later two legs came into sight of the ladder. Matt played the sonic over them. A man grunted in surprise and toppled into view, and down.

  A voice of infinite authority spoke. "You! Come out of there!"

  Matt grinned to himself. Quietly he put the gun aside and reached for the suit. A wave of dizziness made the world go dreamy. He'd been right about the gas.

  He turned the air knob on full and put his head through the neck ring. He took several deep breaths, then held his breath while he slid feet first into the suit.

  "You haven't got a chance! Come on out or we'll come in after you!"

  Do that. Matt pulled the helmet over, his head and resumed breathing. The dizziness was passing, but he had to move carefully. Especially since the suit was a size too, small for him.

  The door dropped open suddenly, and there was a spattering of mercy-slivers. A snarling face and a hand came into view, the hand firing a mercy-gun. Matt shot at the face. The man slumped, head down, but he didn't fall; someone pulled him up out of sight by his ankles.

  The air in the suit had a metallic smell thick enough to cut. Matt wrinkled his nose. Anyone else would have been satisfied with one escape from the Hospital. Who but Lucky Matt Keller would have-

  There was a roar like a distant, continuous explosion. What, Matt wondered, are they trying now? He raised the gun.

  The ship shook, and shook again. Matt found himself bouncing about like a toy in a box. Somehow he managed to brace his feet and shoulders against walls. I thought the son of a bitch was bluffing! He snatched at the stunner as it threatened to slide out into space.

  The ship jumped, slapping hard against his cheekbone, as one whole wall of the ship ripped away. The roar was suddenly louder, much louder.

  "We're too close," said Parlette.

  Hood, in the driver's seat, said, "We have to be close enough to give orders."

  "Nonsense. You're afraid someone will call you a coward. Hang back, I tell you. Let my men do the fighting; they know what they're doing. We've practiced enough."

  Hood shrugged and eased back on the 3-4 throttle. Already theirs was the last car in a swarm of more than forty, an armada of floating red taillights against the starry night. Each car carried two of Parlette's line, a driver and a gunman.

  Parlette, hovering like a vulture over the car's phone, suddenly crowed, "I've got Deirdre Lauessen! All of you, be quiet. Listen, Deirdre, this is an emergency ...."

  And the others, Harry Kane and Lydia Hancock and Jay Hood, listened while Parlette talked.

  It took him several minutes, but at last he leaned back, smiling with carnivorous white teeth. "I've done it. She'll put our accusation on the intercom. Now we'll have Implementation fighting each other."

  "You'll have a tough time justifying that accusation," Harry Kane warned him.

  "Not at all. By the time I finished, I could convince Castro himself that he was guilty of treason, malfeasance of duty, and augmented incest. Provided — " He paused for effect. "Provided we can take the Hospital. If I control the Hospital, they'll believe me. Because I'll be the only one talking.

  "The main point is this. In law I am the man in charge of the Hospital, and have been since Castro was the size of Hood. If it weren't me, it would be some other crew of course. In practice, it's Castro's Hospital, and I have to take it away from him. We have to have control before we can begin changing the government of Mount Lookitthat. But once I've got control, I can keep it."

  "Look ahead."

  "Police cars. Not many."

  "Tight formation. I wonder if that's good? None of us ever had any training in dogfights."

  "Why didn't you fight each other?"

  "We expected to fight," said Parlette. "We never expected to fight the Hospital. So we — "

  "What the Mist Demons is that?"

  Parlette was leaning far forward in his seat, his mismatched hands bracing him against the dashboard. He didn't answer.

  Harry shook his shoulder. "What is it? It looks like fire all around one end of the Hospital."

  Parlette seemed rigid with shock.

  And then one whole end of the Hospital detached itself from the main structure and moved sedately away. Orange, flame bloomed all around its base.

  "That," said Millard Parlette, "is the Planck taking off on its landing motors."

  Polly was in the upper-left-hand seat. She manipulated the controls in front of her with extreme delicacy, but still the knobs turned in short jumps. Minute flakes of rust must be coming loose somewhere in the chain of command that led from this control chair to the fission piles.

  Finally the piles were hot.

  And Polly tried the water valves.

  It seemed to her that long ago someone had decided to keep the slowboats ready for a fast takeoff. It must have been during the first years of the colony, when nobody-crew or colonist--had been sure that an interstellar colony was possible. Then — others had forgotten, and the only changes made since then had been the necessary ones.

  Until the slowboats themselves were part of the structure of the Hospital, and the interiors of the lifesystems were a maze of ladders and jury-rigs. Until the organ banks were moved entirely out of the ships, and the suspended animation rooms were closed off for good. Until the ships were nothing more than electrical generating plants — if one turned a blind eye to the interrogation room and perhaps to other secrets.

  And still the tool closets were undisturbed. And still there were spacesuits in the upended rooms, behind doors which hadn't been opened for centuries.

  And still there was water in the landing fuel tanks and uranium in the landing motors. Nobody had bothered to remove them. The water had not evaporated, not from tanks made to hold water for thirty years against interstellar vacuum. The uranium ....

  Polly valved water into the hot motors, and the ship roared. She yipped in triumph. The ship shuddered and shook along her whole length. From beneath the welded door there were muffled screams.

  There was more than one way to tell a joke! The Planck's fusion drive was dead, but the Arthur Clarke's drive must be running hot. And when Polly dived the Planck on it from the edge of atmosphere, the explosion would tear the top from Alpha Plateau!

  "Come loose," she whispered.

  The Planck pulled loose from the rock around it, rose several feet, and settled, mushily. The huge ship seemed to be bouncing, ponderously, on something soft. Polly twisted the water fuel valve to no effect. Water and pile were running at peak.

  Polly snarled low in her throat. The pile must be nearly dead; it couldn't even manage to lift the ship against Mount Lookitthat's point eight gee. If it weren't for the landing skirt guiding the blast for a ground effect, they wouldn't be moving at all!

  Polly reached far across to the seat on her right. A bar moved under her hand, and at the aft end of the Planck, two fins moved in response. The ship listed to the side and drifted back to nudge the Hospital, almost gently-once, twice.

  Live flame roared through the Hospital. It was water vapor heated beyon
d incandescence, to the point where oxygen dissociated itself from hydrogen, and it cut where it hit. Like death's hurricane it roared through the corridors, cutting its way through walls where there were no corridors. It killed men before they knew what was killing them, for the first touch of the superheated steam made them blind.

  The drive flame spread its fiery death through a third of the ground floor.

  To men inside and outside the Hospital, to men who had never met and never would, this was the night everything happened at once. Sane men locked their doors and found something to hide under while they waited for things to stop happening.

  "Laney. It must be Laney," said Jay Hood. "She got through."

  "Elaine Mattson?"

  "Right. And she got to the Planck. Can you imagine?"

  "She must have a wonderful sense of timing. Do you know what will happen when she blows the drive?"

  "Oh, my God. What'll we do?"

  "Keep flying," said Parlette. "We'd never get out of range now. We might just as well bull through with this and hope Miss Mattson realizes the colonists are winning."

  "More police cars," said Harry Kane. "Left and right, both ...."

  Polly touched the bar again. The ship tilted to the other side and began to drift ponderously away from the Hospital.

  She dared tilt the ship no farther. How much clearance did she have under the landing skirt? A foot? A yard? Ten? If the skirt touched the ground, the ship would go over on its side.

  That was not part of Polly's plan.

  Behind her the door had turned red hot. Polly glanced back with bared teeth. She moved her hands over the board, but in the end left the settings just the way they were. She'd have to circle all the way around the Hospital, but then she'd have a gliding run at the Arthur Clarke.

  And she'd hit it again and again until one ship failed.

  She never noticed when the red spot on the door turned white and burned through.

  The ship jumped three feet upward, and Matt's head snapped down against the closet floor. When he looked up, the outer hull side of the room was tearing away like tissue paper, except for the agonized scream of old metal dying. And Matt was looking straight into Castro's office.

  He couldn't think; he couldn't move. The scene had a quality of nightmare; it was beyond the rational. Magic! he thought, and, Not again!

  The Hospital was drifting away, dreamlike. His ears had gone dead, so that it all took place in an eerie silence. The ship was taking off ....

  And there was no air in his helmet. The tank had held only one last wheeze. He was suffocating. He pulled the clamps up with fingers gone limp and tingly, tossed the helmet away, and gulped air. Then he remembered the gas.

  But it was clean hot air, air from outside, howling through the gaping hole in the outer hull. He sucked at it, pulling it to him. There were spots before his eyes.

  The ship was going up and down in a seasick manner. Wavering in the drive, Matt thought, and tried to ignore it. But one thing he couldn't ignore:

  Polly had reached the controls. Apparently she was taking the ship up. No telling how high they were already; the lights of the Hospital had dwindled to the point where everything outside was uniformly black against the lighted room. They were going up, and the room was wide open to naked space, and Matt had no helmet.

  The room seemed steadier. He jumped for the ladder. The suit was awkward, but he caught the ladder and made his way down, fighting the imbalance caused by his backpack. It wasn't until he touched bottom that the backpack caught his conscious attention.

  After all, if the Planck's landing motors still worked, why not a spacesuit's backpack?

  He peered down at a control panel meant to be read by fingertips. With the helmet on, he couldn't have done it. The backpack was studded with small rocket motors; he wanted the ones on the bottom, of course.

  How high was he now?

  He tried the two buttons on the bottom, and something exploded on his back. It felt about right, as if it were trying to lift him. There was only one throttle knob. Doubtless it controlled all the jets at once, or all that were turned on at a given time.

  Well, what else did he need to know? How high was he?

  He took one last deep breath and went out the hole in the wall.

  He saw blackness around him, and he twisted the throttle hard over. It didn't move. It was already on full. Matt had something like one second to realize that the backpack was for use in space, that it probably wouldn't have lifted its own weight against gravity.

  He hit.

  Moving carefully, so as not to interfere with the men using welding torches, Major Jansen peered up into the hole in the flight-control-room door.

  They had pushed a platform into position under the door, so that two men could work at once. The platform rose and settled, rose and settled, so that the major had to brace himself with his hands flat on the ceiling. He could see raven hair over the top of a control chair, and one slender brown arm hanging down.

  Jesus Pietro, standing below, called, "How long?"

  "A few seconds," said one of the men with cutting torches. "Unless she welded the hinge side too."

  "Do you know where we're going?" called the Head. "I do."

  Major Jansen looked down, surprised. The Head sounded so odd! And he looked like an old man in poor health. He seemed unable to concentrate on what was going on. He's ready for retirement, Major Jansen thought with compassion. If we live through this ....

  "I do," Jesus Pietro repeated, and nodded to himself.

  Major Jansen turned away. He had no time to feel sympathy for the Head, not while this was going on.

  "She welded the hinge side," said one of the cutters.

  "How long?"

  "Three minutes if we work from both ends."

  The ship continued to move, drifting along on its cushion of fire.

  Fire swept along the edge of the trapped forest, leaving a line of licking red and orange flame, ignored by the embattled aircars above. Presently there were explosions among the trees, and then the whole tongue of forest was aflame.

  Now the Planck had left the defense perimeter and moved into a place of shops and houses. The crew who lived in those houses were awake, of course; nobody could have slept through that continuous roar. Some stayed where they were; some made for the street and tried to run for it. The ones who reached their basements were the ones who lived. A block-wide path of exploded, burning houses was the wake of the Planck.

  But now the houses were empty, and they didn't burn. They were of architectural coral, and they had been deserted, most of them, for upwards of thirty years ....

  "We're through, sir." The words were hardly necessary. The cutters were pushing the door aside, their hands protected by thick gloves. Major Jansen shoved through and went up the ladder with panic at his back.

  Polly's control board bewildered him. Knowing that he knew as much about flying spacecraft as anyone behind him, he continued to search for the dial or wheel or lever that would change the Planck's direction. Finally, puzzled, he looked up; and that was his undoing.

  The flight control room was long. It projected through the cargo section to where the outer and inner hulls met, and most of it was transparent. Major Jansen looked out through the outer hull, and he saw what was happening outside.

  He saw the glow of the drive flames near the bottom of his view. To the right, a coral house exploding: the last house. Not far ahead, the black line of the void edge, coming closer.

  And he froze.

  "We're going over," said Jesus Pietro, standing under him on the ladder. He showed neither surprise nor fear.

  Major Jansen screamed and buried his face in his arms.

  Jesus Pietro squeezed past him and into the left-hand seat. His decision was based on logic alone. If Major Jansen had not found the right control, then he was looking at the wrong panel; and this was the only other control panel the colonist girl could reach from where she was sitting. He found the fin
controls and tried them.

  The ship tilted back and began to slow.

  Still slowing, it drifted over the edge.

  Jesus Pietro leaned back in his seat and watched. The Planck was no longer supported by the ground effect. Jesus Pietro felt a sensation like an elevator starting down. He watched the cliff go by, faster and faster, a black shadow. Presently it was half the sky, and the other half was stars.

  Presently the stars went out.

  The ship began to grow hot. It was hot and dark outside, and the ancient walls of the Planck creaked and groaned as the pressure rose. Jesus Pietro watched, waiting.

  Waiting for Matthew Keller.

  14: Balance of Power

  He struggled half awake, desperate to escape the terror of sleep. What a wild nightmare that was!

  Then he felt fingers probing him.

  Agony! He braced and tried to draw away, putting his whole body into it. Ms whole body barely twitched, but he heard himself whimper. A cool hand touched his forehead, and a voice — Laney's? — said, "Lie back, Matt."

  He remembered it later, the next time he woke. He woke slowly this time, with the images of his memory forming around him. Again he thought, What a nightmare. But the images came clearer, too clear for a dream, and:

  His right leg and most of his right side were as numb as frozen pork. Parts of him were not numb; they ached and stung and throbbed. Again he tried to withdraw from the pain, but this time he was tied down. He opened his eyes to find himself surrounded.

  Harry Kane, Mrs. Hancock, Laney, and several others he didn't recognize all crowded around his strange bed. One was a big woman with red hands and somewhat crewish features, wearing a white smock. Matt disliked her at once. He'd seen such smocks in the organ banks.

  "He's awake." The woman in white spoke with a throaty lilt. "Don't try to move, Keller. You're all splinted up. These people want to talk to you. If you get tired, tell me right away and I'll get them out of here."