by Larry Niven
The previous evening, Nessus had come by the “guest suite.” Just a social call, he had explained. Just seeing that you have everything you need. Then Nessus and Baedeker had talked for a long time. They sang in odd cadences and in an eerie, not-quite-minor key, the conversation somehow raising Sigmund’s hackles.
He was no expert, but it hadn’t sounded like any Puppeteer language he had ever heard.
After Nessus left, Sigmund had asked Baedeker what that had been about. “Personal,” had been the answer. Settling their old scores, Sigmund had hoped at the time. But why now?
Nessus sidled closer. “Sigmund, you do not look well. Perhaps you need some time alone to absorb this information. We can reconvene later.”
“That might be for the best,” Sigmund said. He stumbled for effect while climbing to his feet. Let everyone think him muddled with grief.
Contact with Earth wasn’t going to happen—not, anyway, with help from the Puppeteers. Vesta’s lie was meant to cut off all debate on that point. But if not Earth, then who?
Nessus had unreasonable confidence in Sigmund—which was how Sigmund had ended up on New Terra. That same misplaced trust, presumably, was why Nessus had offered Sigmund an out just now. The sad truth was, obtaining Earth’s help had been his last plan.
But though Sigmund didn’t have a plan, neither did he know how to quit. . ..
34
With an inward sigh, Kirsten extended an arm out of the sleeper field and groped in the dark for the touchpoint. She wasn’t going to sleep tonight. Eric tossed fitfully, but at least he was asleep. She didn’t chance disturbing him by whispering to Jeeves to collapse the field. She found the touchpoint, rolled beyond the reach of the force field, and reactivated it before Eric stirred.
A generalized fear kept her up most nights. How could she not fear, with the Pak hurtling toward everyone she held dear? Beginning with her and Eric’s own precious children.
To that generalized dread, a more immediate problem had been added. Sigmund was overdue checking in.
She dressed in the dark, grabbed her comm unit from the desk, and slipped out the hatch into the nightshift-dim corridor. She whispered, “Jeeves. Any word from Sigmund?”
No answer. An audio sensor gone bad, she thought. She repeated herself into her comm unit.
Jeeves answered the same way. “Sorry, Kirsten. No word. It may not mean anything.”
Sigmund had guessed the Citizens would keep him incommunicado throughout discussions. The absence of contact might mean nothing. Her gut said otherwise.
Hearth and New Terra maintained an open network channel, more for the interplanetary grain trade than the occasional official dealings between governments. If Sigmund had a comm unit, Kirsten felt certain, he would have contacted Don Quixote by now via a relay through New Terra.
Her gut also growled for a snack. She rounded a corner, toward the relax room—
And jerked to a halt. She raised the comm to her lips. “Jeeves! Why is the emergency hatch closed? Deck three, just beyond my cabin.”
“You’re mistaken, Kirsten,” Jeeves answered imperturbably.
What? “I’m looking right at it, Jeeves. It’s down. Sealed.”
“Take the corridor around the other way. What do you see on the other side?”
Why didn’t Jeeves use a security camera? She didn’t ask. She could do as he suggested just as quickly.
Only she couldn’t cross. “The emergency hatch outside Sigmund’s cabin is also down.”
“Then it’s not an isolated glitch, Kirsten. The security system shows those hatches open. Cameras and proximity sensors both.”
Together with all the sound pickups. The nonfunctioning audio sensor outside her cabin would not be the only one.
Kirsten’s heart pounded. She almost asked, where is Thssthfok? Where are the Gw’oth? Either question was pointless. With the security system compromised, Jeeves could not know.
She had to protect the ship from capture. “Eric’s in our cabin. Wake him. Then raise gravity to six gees everywhere but our cabin and this segment of this corridor.”
A moment later, a faint but grating alarm seeped from her cabin door. And a moment after that, the deck fell out from under her.
Gravity was gone.
THSSTHFOK PROCEEDED TO THE BRIDGE, systematically softening emergency hatches and hardening them behind him. In any event, he headed opposite shipboard gravity. Pak ships always placed bridges forward. Absent knowledge of human design practices, he reasoned that his distant relatives would, also.
Hardening the hatches slowed him down, but overriding emergency hatch controls would slow any pursuers much longer. On the remote chance something kept him from capturing the ship, he meant to keep secret his ability to pass through doors and walls. Because he would not stop until this ship was his.
The glow panels overhead were dimmed for sleep. He expected to reach the bridge undetected. From there he would depressurize the middle decks, trapping the humans in their cabins until he wanted them.
And then the gravity vanished.
AGAINST THE WEARYING PULL OF SHIP’S GRAVITY, in the discomfort of his protective suit, Er’o labored at the compact fabrication bench in the habitat water lock. Ship’s air presently filled the work space. Another few shifts and the newest sensors would be complete. Ol’t’ro felt confident these instruments would yield important new data on the operation of hyperdrive.
With that trace of meld memory, Er’ o’s aches faded to mere annoyances. He extended a tubacle, adjusting the fine-motion calipers. Motors in his exoskeleton hummed as it moved.
And then gravity disappeared.
A surprised twitch sent Er’o drifting upward in the water lock. His dorsal side rebounded gently off the water-lock roof.
He engaged suit magnets and stretched tubacles toward the water-lock deck. In rapid succession, as each limb tip struck, clangs rang through the water in his suit. “What is happening?” he radioed into the habitat.
Th’o answered first. “Happening? What do you mean?”
Because floating in water was indistinguishable from microgravity. No one in the habitat, unless they happened to be checking sensors, would have noticed the change.
“Jeeves,” Er’o called over the suit’s audio output, “why is gravity off?” No answer. Er’o switched radio frequencies to the intercom channel. “This is Er’o. Anyone, why is gravity off?”
UNSEEN AROUND THE CORNER, a cabin door crashed open. “Over here, Eric,” Kirsten called.
He came into view a moment later, walking on the stripe down the center of the deck. He wore sticky slippers. He handed her a pair. “What the tanj is happening?”
She popped a cover plate to get at the emergency-hatch control circuits. If the hatch held back vacuum, the pressure differential would keep it sealed whatever she tried. “Jeeves didn’t see the hatches come down.”
“So someone has compromised security,” he completed her thought, and then raised his voice. “Jeeves, did you kill gravity?”
“Use your comm,” she told Eric. “Audio pickups are off, too. So we can’t hear whoever is behind this.”
Eric repeated his question over a comm link.
“Indirectly,” Jeeves answered. “I tried to raise gravity, and the circuits blew.”
“This is Er’o,” she heard over the intercom. “Anyone, why is the gravity off?”
Gw’oth or Pak? Kirsten looked helplessly at Eric. “We’re losing the ship, Eric, and we don’t even know to whom.”
At her insistent probing, a status light flickered from red to green. The emergency hatch began to rise. She caught a glimpse of—what?
A naked heel disappearing around a corner. Toward the stairs to the bridge level.
Gw’oth didn’t have heels.
“Thssthfok is loose and almost to the bridge,” she shouted into her comm unit. “Stay put, Er’o.” That left open the question what she and Eric could do.
If Thssthfok shut himself into the
bridge, they were doomed.
THE DAY OF THSSTHFOK’S CAPTURE, humans had coerced him out of his battle armor with painfully intense artificial gravity. During his first reconnaissance, his captors had immobilized him with gravity. If they detected him now, they would attempt the same.
That was unacceptable.
He would have preferred to hold ship’s gravity constant, but explorations near his cell had not uncovered any gravity-control circuitry. Logically, those controls were on the bridge. He had had to settle for a simpler intervention, only requiring access to nearby circuit breakers. Once he modified the breakers, any significant increase in power drain would open them.
Accidental discovery of his escape was always an unavoidable risk. Thssthfok wasted no time regretting that accident when it happened. And so the loss of artificial gravity was unfortunate but, under the circumstances, necessary and of his own doing
Above all else, he meant to keep the structural modulator secret—for his next escape, if it came to that. Manually hardening every partition after he passed through was taking too much time. He opened the modulator handle and slightly altered the internal wiring. The projected field now wobbled microscopically. Softened material would, in the course of enough random thermal motions, regress to a chaotic, more rigid state. Reversion would be a matter of a few day-thousandths.
Reacting as anticipated, the humans had set Thssthfok—and themselves—adrift. In the time it took to modify his tool, air currents returned him halfway down the hallway he had just crossed on foot.
His captors would have magnetic boots and sticky footwear to anchor themselves. He had neither. That, too, Thssthfok had anticipated.
The brief touch of a structural modulator merely made a surface sticky. He began a swimming motion, stretching out one hand for a new spot to tweak even as his other hand, sticking to a treated surface, pulled him forward. The method worked as well as he had hoped: faster and with better control than simply bouncing off walls. He had been unable to test the technique while the gravity remained on.
Thssthfok had heard voices, unintelligible through closed emergency hatches but recognizable as Eric and Kirsten. Now the intercom came on. “This is Er’o. Anyone, why is the gravity off?”
Who was Er’o? An artificial entity, like Jeeves? Another human? Or one of the two-headed beasts? And if one unsuspected individual was aboard, there could be more.
Thssthfok half swam, half pulled himself to a stairwell. Its hatch also functioned as an emergency partition. He softened it, pulled himself through the temporarily viscous partition—pop!—and resumed his journey.
Toward—he hoped—the bridge.
IN OR OUT? Er’o stood in the water lock, pondering his choices.
The choice was made for him.
“Hyperdrive startup in five seconds,” Jeeves announced in his confirming-an-order intonation. “Commencing countdown. Five . . .”
Neither Eric nor Kirsten nor Jeeves could have expected the Gw’oth to understand the implications. No one had explained anything about hyperdrive to them. But Ol’t’ro, working from subtle measurements and unintentional hints, had made significant progress.
And Don Quixote was within a singularity, deep inside a gravity well.
Thssthfok must have escaped. Rather than let him capture Don Quixote, the humans meant to destroy the ship!
The Gw’oth would not have any say in the matter. They had agreed, early in this adventure, to share in its perils. They had accepted human command.
They had not agreed to be hurled into some alternate-dimensional limbo.
“One second!” Er’o radioed to the intercom. He wished that Ol’t’ro, not he, had the responsibility for saving them. But he was suited up to move about the ship, and their fate would be sealed sooner than a meld could take form. And before anyone could suit up to help him.
What did he know? That Thssthfok was loose. On past escapes, the humans had used artificial gravity to immobilize the Pak. Instead, gravity was off. Thssthfok must have cut it.
Silence had replaced the countdown, but the numbers continued in Er’ o’s thoughts. Three . . .
Jeeves had surely followed his programming in announcing a countdown—and Eric or Kirsten had ordered him to stop lest Thssthfok overhear anything useful. The count doubtless continued.
Two. . .
Er’o flipped his radio transmitter to the ship’s public comm channel. “No! Accelerate with thrusters!” How much gravity could the humans take? The question didn’t arise for the Gw’oth, effectively weightless anyway in their water-filled habitat. Except for Er’o himself, and there was no time to worry about that. He guessed. “Ten times normal.”
One. . .
Kirsten said, speaking rapidly, “Jeeves, wait. Er’o is right. We’ll pin down Thssthfok with acceleration.”
“And mash ourselves,” Eric replied. “Is that how you want to go?”
Crushing weight, unable to move—it would a lingering, horrible death. Er’o shuddered. But it did not have to be that way.
He radioed, “I’m in my pressure gear. With the suit’s mechanical assistance function, I’ll be mobile despite the acceleration. I know you have stunners. Tell me where to find one. Once I disable Thssthfok, Jeeves can throttle back.”
Silence.
Er’o knew what Eric and Kirsten were thinking. By revealing their weapons, they risked the Gw’oth, instead, taking over the ship. At such a delicate juncture, it would not help Er’ o’s case to assert they would have built weapons already if they so chose.
If they survived this crisis, perhaps they would.
The silence stretched, and in that stillness Er’o contemplated his unexpected mortality. As one within a Gw’otesht, he had thought himself/themselves all but eternal. But that was hardly the case. . ..
The countdown in his thoughts remained frozen at one.
“All right,” Eric said over the public channel. “Jeeves, belay my earlier order. Thrusters at six gees, now!”
THSSTHFOK SWAM ONTO ANOTHER DECK. This deck was the smallest yet, and had only three doors. One by one he softened a door and poked his head within. Door three revealed the bridge. And in the large view port—
It was like nothing he had ever seen, or even imagined.
In the moment he stared, a tremendous force struck him. He was smashed, gasping, to the floor—
While his head remained embedded in the door.
The rim of the opening cut into the leathery skin of his neck. Very soon, form and shape would begin reasserting themselves. At best, he would be trapped, choking, head and shoulders on opposite sides. At worst, the door, retaking its former shape, would sever his head. Pulling his head from the stiffer-by-the-moment door was the hardest thing Thssthfok had ever done.
He collapsed onto the deck, exhausted.
Moving so he could see his hands was even harder. The structural modulator folded into a compact shape—no broader than his smallest finger, and not quite as long—the better to hide in his cell. Somehow, he managed to fold and swallow the tool. If he survived—and if the modulator, bathed in stomach acid, did not short-circuit and transform his insides to gruel—nature’s course would return the device to him. Or block his intestines and kill him slowly.
Thssthfok lay, panting, on the hard deck.
He had not heard the pop of the softened door resealing after he pulled himself free. Because of his gasping for breath? Somehow he turned his head to peer up the bridge door.
A hole gaped, its lower edge swollen. Restored artificial gravity or acceleration—he did not know which, but it hardly mattered—had overwhelmed surface tension faster than the door material could recongeal.
The humans would look for an explanation. He had to mislead them.
Straining, Thssthfok pulled himself upright. He rammed fingers through an air-duct grille and twisted until its fasteners snapped. Moments later, from decks below, metal shards went clang. He forced the broken grille into the duct. The bent grille sc
raped noisily until gravity wedged it somewhere deep within the ventilation system.
Limbs trembling, chest heaving, Thssthfok slumped back onto the deck. He had given the humans someplace to look for a door-melting tool. Let them search for a long time.
The hatch to the stairwell creaked open. An armored, five-limbed—something, perhaps knee-high to an adult Pak, lumbered through. Er’o? Except for the exoskeleton, the alien’s gear was transparent. Bubbles rose within; the alien was a water breather. And it was hideous, like five giant snakes fused at their tails.
The only odors were artificial: metals, lubricant, and synthetic hydrocarbons. Somehow that was worse than the thing’s true, unrevealed reek. Its skin changed colors, patterns swirling, as Thssthfok watched.
Its motorized exoskeleton whining in protest, the alien raised a tentacle. Viewed tip on, the tentacle was hollow. Deep within the tube, beyond tiers of sharp teeth, a ring of baleful eyes stared at Thssthfok.
From calipers mounted to the tentacle’s armored covering, the maw of a gun—ridiculously large for the beast—also gaped at Thssthfok.
Then everything hummed and went away.
35
Saying good-bye to Sigmund was going to be hard. No one could have been more surprised than Baedeker.
“You’re going to pluck yourself bald,” Sigmund said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
How could Sigmund be so calm? Did he not wonder why the meeting with the Hindmost had not reconvened? Did he not understand the significance of rooms without comm, without stepping discs, of guards outside their door and following them everywhere they went?
Of course he understood. This was Sigmund.
Baedeker stopped tugging at his mane. Disfiguring himself hardly alleviated his guilt. Maybe confession would. “I’m not going back with you.”
Sigmund stood at the guest suite’s floor-to-ceiling window wall, looking out over an unnerving drop down to the sea. Only it would not unnerve a human, would it? “That’s what you and Nessus have been talking about, I suppose.”