by Larry Niven
“Not from outside the field,” Tokugawa agreed. “The thing is, they mounted the generator on a spike that extended way in front of the ship, and used the field as a nonmagnetic ramscoop. Everything went in just fine, but when it tried to get out the aft side of the field, it slowed way down and gathered at the middle. That was what got fed into the fusion drive. Worked great in the tests, and they kept solid objects out of the path with an early version of the medium ionizer all later ramships use, a big blue laser aimed forward from inside the field. Came out as X rays, vaporized everything. I guess the kzinti noticed the laser, attacked, and got fried like the ones we met. I was afraid that was the end pointed at us. Instead we got the exhaust accelerator.”
“Why was it so big?”
“Generation ship, sir. They were planning to go outside the plane of the galaxy and terraform planets, setting down colonies every century or so. The starting crew was three hundred, and they meant to expand to six thousand on each leg, retaining the best gene patterns in the crew for the next trip. They had embryo banks, seeds, bacteria, the works, mostly in stasis. They must have used the accelerator on the planet,” he added.
Persoff frowned. “Explain?”
“They couldn’t have had much choice about where to stop. The planet here would have been the right distance from the primary, but with no collision and no moon it would have been more like Venus or the lowlands of Plateau. If they separated the landing vessels and stocked them as lifeboats, they could have expanded the accelerator around the planet, so it radiated heat five hundred times as fast as it absorbed it. Let me see—Doctor, this computer link doesn’t work.”
“You’re injured,” came her voice.
“My hand is fine. See?” There was an exclamation and the sound of a smack. “Ow. Thanks. Now, yes, nine or ten years would be enough time for the carbonates to form, then they’d have the field timed to shut off, and seed algae and so forth.”
“You sound like you were there.”
“Oh, it’s an old idea. John Smith, an exile on Mars, came up with it before the First War as a way of terraforming Venus. He wanted to leave part of the atmosphere out to let the nitrogen boil off, then add water, and helium to keep the water from breaking down, like Jinx has.”
In spite of the urgency of the situation, Persoff had to ask, “Where was he going to get that much water?”
“Callisto.”
“The Jovian moon? The ships would roast in Jupiter’s radiation belts.”
“No ships. He wanted to hit Venus with Callisto. Ion thrusters. For some reason he couldn’t get the UN interested in moving a planet almost as big as Mars past Earth’s orbit.”
Kershner made a noise Persoff would normally have considered medically alarming, and put his face on his control board. Persoff was trying not to grin himself. “I would think not.”
“No. Anyway, Smith should be happy to hear it works, if we can get the news to him.”
“He’s still alive?”
“Was when we left. He’s one of those people who does really well in low gee. Has some weird medical condition that prevents osteoporosis, actually has to have excess calcium cleaned out of his cells on a regular basis. I’ve heard it suggested that’s inherited from our Pak ancestors.”
Persoff was not about to get into that can of worms. “Thanks. So the survivors planted these trees. Good.”
“Trees? Good lord, that’s a lot of trees. —Sir, we didn’t damage any, did we?” Tokugawa sounded badly worried.
“No. You think they’re sacred or something?”
“The Galaxias complement were handpicked, so I doubt they’d have fallen that far back, but I’m sure they’re deeply revered.”
“Well, it’s not as if we have to cut them all down or something,” Persoff said. “Get some rest. I have to check on my ship.” He signed off and said, “Damage and system reports.”
“What do you mean, we have to cut them all down?”
McCabe, the strongest man aboard, and conceivably the strongest anywhere who wasn’t from Jinx, hunched in on himself as if expecting to be hit. “The only way we can get off this planet is a launch catapult, sir. The planer is fried, and a lot of the hull is unsound. What we have to do is cobble together something that’ll get a work crew up to that hulk in orbit and strip the accelerator field generator for parts. That should allow us to fix the planer up there. The thing is, we don’t have the resources to construct an aerodynamic vehicle in less than years. We have to go straight to space all at once. No room to launch on fusion drive, because the ram’s shot, so we’d have to use the singleships for thrust, and they’re so hot the backwash would slaughter everything for miles. And they can fuse protons, so we sure can’t launch from the water. So we have to slap something together and fling it up there and leave the main fusion plant on the ground.”
“How many years would an aerospace ship take?” Persoff said.
“That depends on how many local inhabitants there are, and how fast they can learn. If they’re as smart as the Shogun says—”
“Who?”
“Uh, Tokugawa, sir. It’s kind of a running joke in Supply.”
“Go on.”
“If they’re that smart, I’d say we can have an infrastructure in place in ten years. Otherwise we’re looking at a couple of generations while we get the population up.”
“And building a spaceship would be faster than that?”
“We’ve already got spaceships, sir,” McCabe said. “They’re just not built to fly inside an atmosphere. I was going to use three fighter drives to let the orbiter maneuver in space. —And then of course we’ll also have to reassemble the Yorktown.”
Persoff sighed. Then he frowned, looked straight up, and stared very hard at the ceiling, as if seeing through it. Slowly, he said, “How long would it take to install the hyperdrive in a ship that still has a working ram?” He looked at the storesmaster again.
McCabe gaped at him, then pulled out a flaptop, unrolled it, and began working the problem out. “We’d have to do hull and systems repairs to the hulk at the same time, but it’s still less than the time we’ll spend building the catapult,” he finally said. “Maybe ten percent of what it’ll take to refit our own ship. Which we could put aboard and repair there.”
“Get together with Curtis in Engineering and work out what you need to do.” When McCabe winced, Persoff said, “What’s wrong?”
“He yells all the time.”
“That’s because he won’t accept a transplant for his hearing problem. He was running the communications in Munchen during the Hollow Moon incident. The pulse, when it went up, blew out one eardrum. Stayed at his post with blood running down his neck and the gain turned up for the other ear, so it screwed that one up too. They patched the drum, but if he ever sounds like he’s really angry, just ask to see his medals. That should keep him distracted for about half an hour.”
“He’s that proud of them?”
“There’s that many. Since you’ve got clearance for this mission, I’ll authorize you to hear the story of what really happened. Don’t ask him unless you want to hear it all, and really don’t ask unless you want to know something you won’t ever be able to tell anyone. I had to learn it to assess his value for this mission, and I wish I hadn’t. Go see him now.”
McCabe saluted and left, looking thoughtful. He was the only crewman who still fully adhered to military courtesy after all this time. He didn’t ask anyone else to, and his response to those who’d made fun of him had always been, “Permission to speak freely?” Nobody granted it twice, because they never made fun of him again after granting it once. His lecture on the purpose and value of military courtesy was sensible, cogent, and, when you considered that it was delivered by a man who might well be able to rip your arm off, gradually terrifying as it developed its theme: military courtesy allows trained expert killers to work together in difficult conditions without unnecessary loss of personnel.
There were others who ha
d resumed using it, but only around McCabe.
About ten percent of each end of the island was loose rocks, which, since it was volcanic rock and there were no volcanoes on the island, meant it had been put there. Persoff had set the ship down near the west end, about halfway between where the trees ended and the rocks began. The trees at this end of the rows were saplings, while those near the east end must have been planted almost as soon as the colonists had landed.
Nobody had sighted any humans on the island, and nobody could figure out why. After Tokugawa’s reaction, Persoff had no intention of starting to chop down trees until he’d talked to the locals, so he was planning parties to explore other islands and find some. They’d need cars and stunners, and the stunners were the bottleneck; not many had been included in the ship’s manifest, and regs required officers on watch to wear them. Curtis had built three more from spares for the ones they had, but Persoff had wanted to send out at least six parties. There were lots of islands.
The bad part of being a commanding officer was making everyone think you weren’t working hard. He was supposed to be relaxed and confident. One of the things that troubled him badly was the fact that all through the first night, the ship in orbit had been displaying lights. Bright ones. It wasn’t the power available that worried him, since the ship dated after the invention of both black magic and electronic batteries, and half of it was in unfiltered sunlight all the time. It was the fact that its beacon had stopped transmitting when the lights began. The ship was displaying a flexible response to circumstances. Not inconceivably it had recorded their landing site. It might well be charging its com laser.
Other than abandoning the ship and scattering to the four winds, there wasn’t a thing they could do about that.
After the first night, Persoff had left his exec, Thurston, in charge, and taken a car to East Point so he could fret over the preparations uninterrupted and without making everyone panicky.
So that was where he was when the canoe showed up.
It was an awfully big canoe. If it had been another shape or style he’d have thought of it as a ship, but the oars and the hull’s lack of boards constrained his thinking.
As it came to shore, he realized that it hadn’t constrained its maker’s thinking. It had the look of a dugout, but it was almost twice as wide as the biggest tree on the island, and there surely couldn’t be any trees twice that age on the planet. The ones behind him must have been planted the day they got here, which was surely no earlier than 2305, and more likely later. The accelerator trick, if they’d used it, wouldn’t have given trees more time to grow, it would have killed them from lack of sunlight. Therefore they had stuck the trunks of two or more trees together to make this, well enough to keep the leaks down to something manageable.
It came directly toward him, and as it got close he still couldn’t see any seams. They must be awfully good at making canoes by now, but this was unbelievable.
On the other hand, selection for starship personnel had been even tougher then than it was now, and the next man after Persoff on the promotion list at the Manhattan Space Academy in Kansas had just won the Wisowaty Award for resource management. (At last update he was part of the supply liaison to the Belt Fleet, and had once succeeded in impressing them. It was no small thing, to impress a Belter when it came to making effective use of resources.)
There was a man at the prow, calling back to another man at the stern, and they seemed to be the only ones facing forward. Pilot and steersman, he guessed. The sides were too high to see much but heads and shoulders of anyone but those two men. All the rowers had longer hair than the men. The standing men wore shirts, but the shoulders of the rowers were bare.
The men were also beardless, and that abruptly stuck him as an accomplishment. They certainly had no docs to depilate them here. A history teacher at MSA had had Persoff’s class remove their facial hair with the sharpened steel wafers that had once been used for this, and his respect for the courage of the men he now saw was considerable.
The canoe struck the beach and continued up it further than he would have imagined possible. The pilot jumped ashore as soon as it stopped, turned, and called out, “Ropes!”
All the rowers jumped out. They were twenty nude women, and they hauled the canoe further up the beach until the pilot said, “Rest!” They dropped the ropes and ran to play in the surf. The steersman came forward and jumped out, and the two men, both in shirt and shorts (how had they made them?) came toward Persoff. They were both gnawing carrots. “Have a carrot,” said the steersman, holding out a spare.
Not wishing to offend, Persoff, who hadn’t eaten a carrot since he was big enough to spit, said, “Thanks,” and took a bite. It tasted a lot better than he remembered. Of course, he was used to them cooked.
“We’ve got maybe ten seconds,” said the pilot. “Is your mind being read? He’d have stopped when you bit it.”
Persoff stopped chewing to stare, then said, “No. You were expecting kzinti?”
The two looked at each other, then at Persoff. “Yes,” said the pilot. “You’re wearing clothes, but if they were rational enough to use cover they might think of that too. It’s my job to think of things like that. I’m Tom, the Johnson for this vessel. This is Ron, our Denver.”
“Micah Persoff, Captain, commanding officer of the carrier Yorktown.”
The two local men looked astonished, then came to attention and saluted.
Persoff returned their salutes. “It’s lucky for me you showed up so soon. I was here planning missions to find the colonists.”
“Colonists?” said Tom.
“We came here because the ship signaled us that someone had landed,” said Ron.
“What do you mean, ‘colonists’? We’re stranded.” Tom appeared to be getting upset.
Persoff shook his head. “Force of habit. I tend to think of settlements off Earth as colonies. We need to talk with you about getting off the planet again.”
Tom nodded shortly. “Of course. Ron, give the All Clear.”
Ron turned to the canoe and bellowed, at a volume Persoff found painful, “It’s okay!”
Eighteen men, all chewing, stood up and began methodically unloading their crossbows. The women, serious now, returned to the canoe, where men who were done early began tossing them clothing.
Persoff stared, put it together, and said, “You were going to ambush the kzinti?”
“If they were here,” said Tom. “They wouldn’t read a female’s mind right away.”
“How would you ambush them in ten seconds?”
“Oh, Ron would have knocked you out.”
Persoff looked at Ron, who had a low-gee build and seemed skinny at that. “How?”
His head hurt less than he would have expected, and he was lying before a brand-new hut, near a campfire, surrounded by women. “How many fingers do you see?” said the nearest, holding up a hand.
“Five,” he said, “three of them folded.”
“Talks like a Johnson,” said another woman. She was prettier than the one who’d spoken first, and that was odd, because they all had about the same set of features. “Good stock, I bet.”
“Well, he’s starship crew,” said yet another.
“I still think the basic stock might be deteriorating. They send off all the best.”
“And I still say—Hey, he’s right here, we can ask. Captain Micah Persoff, does the UN Fertility Board store sperm samples of men who go out to fight the kzinti, and make the samples available from the ones who did really well?”
Persoff was still a little stunned, and it took him a moment to follow the question. Then he said, “Yeah, any citable accomplishment is an automatic Birthright. Women who use donations get low numbers in the queue, too.”
“See!”
“How’d you figure that out?” he said.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise you’d all have been eaten before you got here.”
“They still could have r
epopulated from colony worlds,” said a woman who’d spoken before.
“Lightspeed and too busy.”
“Loyalty and conditioning!”
“Alienation.”
Others had begun chiming in, and it was getting loud. Persoff said, “What happened to me?”
“Oh, you got knocked out,” said the woman who’d spoken first, all the rest shutting up.
“I’d figured out that much, but how?”
A man’s voice—Tom—broke in. “Lateral impact near the left end of the mandible turns the head far enough to jar the brain stem.” He got into view, raised his hand, and snapped his fingers. “Shuts you off like a bucket of wet sand on a small fire. But without the steam.”
“Speaking of which,” said the first woman.
“I thought he’d be waking up soon—not yet, in fact; he’s tough—and he should have some things explained to him. And first he should have an apology. Captain, a Denver is identified by decisive action. Unfortunately it isn’t always preceded by thought. Often that’s a good thing, since it lets a Denver act without fear. Not always. I’m not familiar with your habits of speech, so once it was clear you were alone I should have had him stand further from you. I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted. How did he get so fast? I didn’t even see him move.”
“That’s because he did it when you blinked. An early hint of the Denver gene complex is when a child seems unobservant but, now and then, somehow does some difficult thing exactly right. Which is not the same as doing the right thing. Incidentally, would it be possible to analyze people’s DNA when your ship is back in operation? Working all this stuff out by inductive reasoning is quite a burden.”
“You Johnsons do fine,” said a woman.
“I never said otherwise. It’s just hard.”
Several women cleared their throats, and Tom looked like he’d suddenly remembered something he should never have forgotten. “Sorry. Captain, is your neck in pain? We can’t do real regeneration, but I used the things we do have that improve healing ability.”