by Larry Niven
He came in that Thursday morning at just ten o’clock, still wearing the smile with which he had hailed his good mornings at the other employees of Skyhook Enterprises. He hadn’t seen Greg, but Greg was always early or late—usually early. Probably at work already. Doug sat, opened the panel in his desk, and inserted his hands.
There were twin pricks in the balls of his middle fingers. The 'doc was taking a blood sample. Doug waited until the green light came on, then removed his hands. His nails gleamed.
The desk 'doc was small; it’s repertoire was limited. It could not repair injuries or exercise small unused muscles, as could a full-sized drugstore 'doc. It could detect infections and fight them with wide-spectrum antibiotics; it could supply needed vitamins; it was a fine manicurist, it could stabilize Doug Hooker’s unusual metabolism, using two phials of biochemicals stored in its innards. If it ran out of something or if it sensed the presence of some medical anomaly that should be treated, it would flash a red light.
Doug frowned at the papers in his In basket, then sighed and went to work. There was no sound from beyond his office; there was nothing to distract him. Yet he worked slowly. He couldn’t concentrate. It was not spring fever; city men didn’t get spring fever, living in a world which was mostly city. It was the feel of something impending.
It came at noon, with Greg Loeffler’s voice in the intercom.
“Doug? It’s here. Drop whatever you’re doing and come over.”
Doug put down half a sandwich and went out, walking fast. The bright morning sunlight made him blink. He took one of the carts in front of Admin and drove it across to Design. He was about to park in front when his eye caught a shadowy bulk standing four stories tall around to the side. He drove over.
Greg stood waiting for him, leaning one-armed against the huge truncated cone, grinning like a proud papa. “Isn’t she gorgeous?”
“No,” said Hooker, for it was not. “Will it work?”
“We’ll sue if it doesn’t. But we can’t test it here. We’ll have to ship it to the Moon.”
“And then?” Doug felt adrenalin flooding his veins. All the decisions had been made two years ago; yet here was the tangible result, four stories tall, a decision on the verge of proving itself. And an ancient dream.
The safe ramscoop.
For centuries the ramrobots had been exploring space at just less than the speed of light, fueled by hydrogen scooped from between stars in conical electromagnetic fields two hundred miles across. For centuries men had followed at a quarter of the speed of light, carrying their own fuel. A ramscoop’s magnetic field would kill any chordate organism within three hundred miles. No shield had ever been developed which would protect a chordate and still let the ramscoop work.
Until two years ago, when Moscow Motors had built this.
There was a “dead pocket,” a bubble in this generator’s ramscoop field. A ship could be built into that bubble, and that ship would go anywhere, with a limitless fuel supply.
Two years ago Skyhook Enterprises had bought the contract to build that ship. It was a UN project, with all the wealth of Earth behind it. Doug Hooker’s father was still president when that decision was made; only a year ago he had turned the company over to Doug and gone off to become a Belter. For a year the ramship had been Doug’s responsibility. He had given Greg Loeffler a free rein, not for the sake of a friendship fifteen years old, but because Greg was a genius at design.
“And then we fit the ramscoop to the ship and take her for a trip. The ship’s been ready for months… That’s what I was doing in April and May, Doug. On the Moon, examining the ship. It’s ready. All you have to do is get the ramscoop there.”
Doug nodded. For a moment he almost envied Greg. The ship was Skyhook’s project, Doug Hooker’s project, but it was Greg’s ship. Top to bottom. If it was successful, it would conquer all of nearby space.
He said, “How’s Joanna?”
Loeffler grinned proudly. “Out to here, and beautiful. Another month and she can go back to playing tennis. How’s Clarisse?”
“Fine, fine.”
“We haven’t gotten together in a while. How about dinner tonight? To celebrate the ramscoop.”
“Good. Where?”
“Our place. You haven’t seen our new house.”
“That’s true,” Hooker said vaguely. He was not at his best in a social situation. He was uncomfortable in crowds and with people he didn’t know. With Greg and Joanna he could relax; but not during work hours, not even with them.
“Doug?”
“Yah?”
“You and Clarisse were married long before I was. Why haven’t you had children yet? Waiting for Joanna and me to pioneer the field?”
Hooker was tempted to say, Yah, why not let you take the risks first? But then he’d be asked again. So he told the truth. “The Fertility Board turned me down.”
“Oh?” Loeffler wasn’t about to ask why, but he’d left the door open if Hooker wanted a sympathetic ear.
“Guess I’d better get back to work,” said Doug. “Will you be going to the Moon to supervise the tests?”
“If Skyhook pays the fare.”
“Slip me a requisition. And we’ll see you tonight.”
August, AD. 2557, The Rockies.
They lay in full sunlight beside the pool under Greg’s weather dome. All three were wet with water running off their bodies to form pools around them on the red tiles The woman, Joanna, was a tall, solidly built brunette with lovely legs. Of the men, Doug Hooker was still too thin for his height and not well muscled; whereas Greg Loeffler had gymnasium muscles and a loafer’s tan. They lay exhausted after the race across the pool.
Outside it would be cold, though not yet freezing. In winter, snow would surround the house and run melting from the weather dome. Greg’s house was high in the Rockies, halfway up a cliff. By its design it seemed to have grown as an organic part of the cliff. A good part of it was inside the rock.
Idly with wistfulness but no pain Doug thought Clarisse into existence alongside him. Golden hair and stiff complex hairdo, deep all-over tan, she would have fallen asleep by now in the sunlight burning through the transparent weather dome. He hadn’t seen her in ten years. She had remarried right after the divorce. Two years later she had been twice a mother.
Wistfulness, but no pain. She’d got no alimony, but she’d tried, and that had cancelled the pain of losing her. Her ghost-image died, and Doug turned over on his back.
“We’ll be leaving in a month,” said Joanna. There was a touch of regret in her voice.
“You’re out of your minds,” said Doug.
Greg got up on an elbow. “Not at all. The future isn’t on Earth any more, Doug—”
“Where is it, on Plateau? Any other world, I’d still say you were crazy. But teeny little Plateau? In five generations it’ll be as crowded as Earth!”
“Then you admit Earth’s crowded.”
“Well, yah, but that’s the price you pay for civilization.”
“I won’t pay. I’m leaving.” Greg was enjoying himself. He had rehearsed the argument over and over in past months. “By the time Plateau gets really crowded, there’ll be so many colony planets that anyone can take his pick. Meanwhile, Plateau is a nice place to be. You’ve seen the pictures.”
“Suppose they’re faked?”
“They aren’t.”
“And why risk it anyway? A dozen lightyears in a four-man ship! Suppose a meteor—”
“Suppose a goblin? For Pete’s sake, Doug! I designed these ships myself. They’re foolproof.”
Doug turned on his belly, scowling. Even he didn’t know why he kept fighting a lost cause. Greg was going, and Joanna was going; their oldest daughter, Marcia, was going, with her husband. The only reason Greg kept up his, side of the argument was the hope that Doug would change his mind and come along, which Doug would not.
But the thought of Greg and Joanna leaving filled him with nameless dread.
�
�Is the ship ready yet?”
“Yes. Since yesterday. We could leave any time.”
“Not until I inspect it,” said Doug. “You promised.”
“So I did. How about tomorrow? I’ll give you the key.”
“Good.”
Skyhook Enterprises had built that ship. By now hundreds like it were scattered across the sky, anywhere within fifteen lightyears of the solar system. Which meant that Earth’s information was up to fifteen years out of date; but as far as anyone knew, no Skyhook ramship had ever failed. Skyhook was now designing a bigger ramship, big enough to carry a thousand colonists in stasis. But the four-man Skyhook exploring-model was the only ramship now flying.
It came in three parts, easy to connect or to disconnect for inspection. Ramscoop, lifesystem, drive. And boosters, but boosters didn’t count. They didn’t count because they had been used for centuries. Rockets they were, containing helium compressed to within an inch of its life. Autopilots would guide them down after they had lifted Greg’s ship to where he could safely use the fusion motor. Hooker ignored them, as he would have ignored a bicycle in the cargo hold. Too simple, too foolproof.
He ignored the ramscoop because he wouldn’t have understood it. He ignored the fusion drive for both reasons. If there was a flaw in either of them, he would not find it.
His only chance was in the lifesystem.
It was big and roomy, that lifesystem, even for four people. Most flatlanders did not have that much room in their homes. But a claustrophobic ramship passenger could not step outside for a breath of air. The lifesystem was a cylinder with the central core running through it, the central core that joined the ramscoop to the fusion drive. Somewhere in the control panel were emergency switches which would blow the core apart to release the lifesystem as a separate unit, to fall through space awaiting an unlikely rescue.
There were two master bedrooms, soundproofed, with locks—very private. There was a gymnasium with muscle-stretchers for use in ship’s gravity or in free fall, with sunlight tubes and masseur couches and a steam bath. There was a small dining room with the kitchen controls set in one wall.
Hooker walked the ship as if he were afraid of it. He was. He still wasn’t sure why.
There was the autodoc, the most complex ever built. It would replace its own biochemicals, its own plastiskin, its own artificially grown organ-replacements; all this automatically, using materials culled from the ship’s waste collectors. It could cure anything. In theory it could keep a man young and healthy indefinitely. Skyhook Enterprises had not built this beauty. Moscow Motors, that industrial giant subsidized by the substate USSR, had taken that contract as part of the deal that won Skyhook the ship contract.
Hooker knew autodocs. He inspected the coffin and the machinery that fed it, and found no flaw.
He went through the kitchen, as much of it as he understood. This too turned waste into food. The processes were infernally complicated; but any chemical process can be reversed, given sufficient sophistication and sufficient power. The ship’s power came straight from a fusion drive with unlimited fuel.
The air plant was the simplest part of the ship. Hooker didn’t even look at it. By the time he got around to it, he was bone tired. He flopped on one of the beds and stared at the softly glowing ceiling.
As far as he could tell, there was nothing wrong with the ship. Nothing. What was the point in looking? Any flaw Douglas Hooker, the executive, could recognize could probably be fixed in five minutes.
They were going; they were practically on their way now. Greg and Joanna and Marcia and—he’d forgotten the name of Marcia’s husband. But why should he try to stop them? He had plenty of other friends. Didn’t he?
He had conjured up eleven names and was trying hard for a twelfth when it occurred to him that all eleven were people he had met through Greg and Joanna. All but two, and he hadn’t seen them since Clarisse flew to Vegas, leaving him a wedding cake on which the wax bride and bridegroom stood facing outward on opposite sides of the bottom layer. Nine people, then, whom he saw only at Joanna’s parties and “talk nights.”
He had never made friends easily. Strangers made him uncomfortable. He kept wondering what they thought of him.
Even friends. There was a barrier between him and everyone else, and the barrier was a secret. As far as he knew, only two other people on Earth knew that Hooker was a potential paranoid. There had been three; but his father had gone to the Belt to start life over, probably thinking that the more lenient Belt fertility laws would permit him to have a second child after seven years had made him a citizen. He had lasted two years. He had smoked, and his dashboard included an ash tray. One day, during the last seconds of a landing approach to some unnamed rock, he had somehow used the attitude jets in such a way as to spill ashes out of the tray and into his eyes. The rock had smashed his sight bubble and his faceplate. And now there were two people who knew Doug’s secret, but both were doctors. Clarisse had not known. She would have talked.
His secret stopped his mouth and slowed his conversation and made it innocuous. It kept him from getting drunk, for he feared his tongue would loosen. No man knows his fellow until he has seen him drunk; and no man had seen Doug Hooker drunk.
He tried to face it squarely. Doug and Joanna were taking his social life with them to Plateau.
Why not regard it as a challenge?
Hooker rolled off the bed and left the ship. He would tell the Loefflers that it was perfect, foolproof. When they were gone, he would make new friends, create his own social world. He had wrapped himself around his work for far too long.
But he was sixty-one years old, and his habits were developed.
August, AD. 2570 Kansas City.
It happened thus:
Every six months a man came to service Douglas Hooker’s desk 'doc. Paul Jurgenson was his name. He had been servicing 'docs for most of his life; 'docs of all kinds, from the huge multiple-patient emergency 'docs at aerospaceports to the desk-sized 'docs installed in planes and short-hop spacecraft and used by executives the world over. The work never bored him, for Jurgenson was not overly bright; but he was good at his job.
He came on a Thursday, the last day of the working week, and the last Thursday of August. As usual, Doug Hooker went home at noon to give him room to work. Jurgenson took the 'doc apart and began to examine the parts. He shook his head sadly when he found both of the two special-mix phials that close to empty. Hooker didn’t know it, but Jurgenson was the third man on Earth who knew his secret. He had guessed it, of course, but the guess was a certainty. You can’t hide baldness from your barber.
Jurgenson filled the phials, still saddened. Mr. Hooker always sent him a twenty-five-mark bill for a Christmas present. (A firm handled Christmas presents of that nature for Hooker, remembering for him, but Jurgenson didn’t know that.) Now it seemed that Mr. Hooker was using more antiparanoia than ever. That meant trouble in his life. Jurgenson knew that from long experience. He wished he could do something.
He replaced the hypo needles, as usual, the phials of pure alcohol, the vitamin ampoules, and the testosterone. He checked various circuits and replaced two wires; not that they were really ready to fail, but you never know. The manicure implements were self-replacing. Jurgenson frowned at the 'doc for a moment, listening to an instinct he trusted. It must have been right, for he closed the 'doc and unscrewed the red and green bulbs to look at the dates on their bases.
They were ten years old. In those days men built to last. There were laws. But ten years was old enough, even for bulbs which might last thirty. Jurgenson dropped them in the waste chute and replaced them from his kit. He tripped appropriate relays and saw that both bulbs lit.
He left, waving to Mr. Hooker’s personal secretary. They had known each other for close to half a century and never done more than say hello and good-bye to each other. Miss Peterson was a beauty. But Jurgenson thought his wife was too good for him, and had long feared she would find out. He never ph
ilandered.
December, AD. 2570.
Hooker entered the outer office. “Hi, fans,” he said, as he had said each working day for … he didn’t know how long. The answer, from several people at once, was a jumbled chorus. Hooker entered his own office at just ten o’clock.
The In basket was full. Hooker frowned at it as he shoved his hands into the 'doc. Was he making a mistake, cutting down on Skyhook’s commitments? It made paperwork simpler and thus saved money. But … sometimes Hooker felt that Skyhook was stagnating.
Other than the colony-model ramships, a few of which were now in use for the UN, Skyhook had not pioneered anything in nearly twenty years.
The Loefflers must be on Plateau by now. Had they sent him a laser message? If so, it would not get here for twelve years.
What was wrong with the 'doc? It should have released him by now.
Doug withdrew his hands. There was no resistance; no fluids dripped from his fingers; his nails shone. Oh, nuts, he said subvocally. The green light’s burned out. He made a mental note to call Jurgenson.
But he never did. It had never happened before; there were no habits to help him. And Jurgenson would be here in February. Hooker simply got used to the absence of a green light. He knew to within seconds when the 'doc was through with him.
It was the red light that had failed. The red bulb’s filament had been dead for months. It had snapped and died when Jurgenson clicked it off.
February, AD. 2571.
The change came slowly. At first Doug noticed nothing. Then, as weeks passed, it seemed to him that his thinking was becoming clearer. He didn’t know why, but he was becoming more intelligent. These things that troubled him ... they had one linking cause. Of course they must. All he had to do was find it.
His employees came at ten and went home at four, usually with Doug Hooker striding with them toward the parking lot, trying to look anonymous, returning goodbyes if they were given. On Thursday, the first of February, Hooker did not leave. He nodded when his personal secretary told him it was after hours; he smiled emptily at her when she said good night. And then he sat.