N-Space

by Larry Niven

  Morris stood up abruptly. “Are they in the phone book?”

  “Sure.”

  Morris moved.

  I waited until he was in the phone booth before I asked, “Any new thoughts on what you ate last night?”

  Louise looked at me closely. “You mean the pill? Why so solemn?”

  “We’ve got to find out before Morris does.”

  “Why?”

  “If Morris has his way,” I said, “they’ll classify my head Top Secret. I know too much. I’m likely to be a political prisoner the rest of my life; and so are you, if you learned the wrong things last night.”

  What Louise did then, I found both flattering and comforting. She turned upon the phone booth where Morris was making his call, a look of such poisonous hatred that it should have withered the man where he stood.

  She believed me. She needed no kind of proof, and she was utterly on my side.

  Why was I so sure? I had spent too much of today guessing at other people’s thoughts. Maybe it had something to do with my third and fourth professions…

  I said, “We’ve got to find out what kind of pill you took. Otherwise Morris and the Secret Service will spend the rest of their lives following you around, just on the off chance that you know something useful. Like me. Only they know I know something useful. They’ll be picking my brain until Hell freezes over.”

  Morris yelled from the phone booth. “They’re coming! Forty bucks an hour, paid in advance when they get here!”

  “Great!” I yelled.

  “I want to call in. New York.” He closed the folding door.

  Louise leaned across the table. “Ed, what are we going to do?”

  It was the way she said it. We were in it together, and there was a way out, and she was sure I’d find it—and she said it all in the sound of her voice, the way she leaned toward me, the pressure of her hand around my wrist. We. I felt power and confidence rising in me; and at the same time I thought: She couldn’t do that yesterday.

  I said, “We clean this place up so we can open for business. Meanwhile you try to remember what you learned last night. Maybe it was something harmless, like how to catch trilchies with a magnetic web.”

  “Tril…?”

  “Space butterflies, kind of.”

  “Oh. But suppose he taught me how to build a faster-than-light motor?”

  “We’d bloody have to keep Morris from finding out. But you didn’t. The English words for going faster than light—hyperdrive, space warp—they don’t have Monk translations except in math. You can’t even say ‘faster than light’ in Monk.”

  “Oh.”

  Morris came back grinning like an idiot. “You’ll never guess what the Monks want from us now.”

  He looked from me to Louise to me, grinning, letting the suspense grow intolerable. He said, “A giant laser cannon.”

  Louise gasped “What?” and I asked, “You mean a launching laser?”

  “Yes, a launching laser. They want us to build it on the Moon. They’d feed our engineers pills to give them the specs and to teach them how to build it. They’d pay off in more pills.”

  I needed to remember something about launching lasers. And how had I known what to call it?

  “They put the proposition to the United Nations,” Morris was saying. “In fact, they’ll be doing all of their business through the UN, to avoid charges of favoritism, they say, and to spread the knowledge as far as possible.”

  “But there are countries that don’t belong to the UN,” Louise objected.

  “The Monks know that. They asked if any of those nations had space travel. None of them do, of course. And the Monks lost interest in them.”

  “Of course,” I said, remembering. “A species that can’t develop spaceflight is no better than animals.”

  “Huh?”

  “According to a Monk.”

  Louise said, “But what for? Why would the Monks want a laser cannon? And on our Moon!”

  “That’s a little complicated,” said Morris. “Do you both remember when the Monk ship first appeared, two years ago?”

  “No,” we answered more or less together.

  Morris was shaken. “You didn’t notice? It was in all the papers. Noted Astronomer Says Alien Spacecraft Approaching Earth. No?”

  “No.”

  “For Christ’s sake! I was jumping up and down. It was like when the radio astronomers discovered pulsars, remember? I was just getting out of high school.”

  “Pulsars?”

  “Excuse me,” Morris said overpolitely. “My mistake. I tend to think that everybody I meet is a science fiction fan. Pulsars are stars that give off rhythmic pulses of radio energy. The radio astronomers thought at first that they were getting signals from outer space.”

  Louise said, “You’re a science fiction fan?”

  “Absolutely. My first gun was a GyroJet rocket pistol. I bought it because I read Buck Rogers.”

  I said, “Buck who?” But then I couldn’t keep a straight face. Morris raised his eyes to Heaven. No doubt it was there that he found the strength to go on.

  “The noted astronomer was Jerome Finney. Of course he hadn’t said anything about Earth. Newspapers always get that kind of thing garbled. He’d said that an object of artificial, extraterrestrial origin had entered the solar system.

  “What had happened was that several months earlier, Jodrell Bank had found a new star in Sagittarius. That’s the direction of the galactic core. Yes, Frazer?”

  We were back to last names because I wasn’t a science fiction fan. I said, “That’s right. The Monks came from the galactic hub.” I remembered the blazing night sky of Center. My Monk customer couldn’t possibly have seen it in his lifetime. He must have been shown the vision through an education pill, for patriotic reasons, like kids are taught what the Star Spangled Banner looks like.

  “All right. The astronomers were studying a nearby nova, so they caught the intruder a little sooner. It showed a strange spectrum, radically different from a nova and much more constant. It got even stranger. The light was growing brighter at the same time the spectral lines were shifting toward the red.

  “It was months before anyone identified the spectrum.

  “Then one Jerome Finney finally caught wise. He showed that the spectrum was the light of our own sun, drastically blue-shifted. Some kind of mirror was coming at us, moving at a hell of a clip, but slowing as it came.”

  “Oh!” I got it then. “That would mean a light-sail!”

  “Why the big deal, Frazer? I thought you already knew.”

  “No. This is the first I’ve heard of it. I don’t read the Sunday supplements.”

  Morris was exasperated. “But you knew enough to call the laser cannon a launching laser!”

  “I just now realized why it’s called that.”

  Morris stared at me for several seconds. Then he said, “You got it out of the Monk language course.”

  “I guess so.”

  He got back to business. “The newspapers gave poor Finney a terrible time. You didn’t see the political cartoons either? Too bad. But when the Monk ship got closer it started sending signals. It was an interstellar sailing ship, riding the sunlight on a reflecting sail, and it was coming here.”

  “Signals. With dots and dashes? You could do that just by tacking the sail.”

  “You must have read about it.”

  “Why? It’s so obvious.”

  Morris looked unaccountably ruffled. Whatever his reasons, he let it pass. “The sail is a few molecules thick and nearly five hundred miles across when it’s extended. On light pressure alone they can build up to interstellar velocities—but it takes them a long time. The acceleration isn’t high.

  “It took them two years to slow down to solar system velocities. They must have done a lot of braking before our telescopes found them, but even so they were going far too fast when they passed Earth’s orbit. They had to go inside Mercury’s orbit and come up the other side of
the sun’s gravity well, backing all the way, before they could get near Earth.”

  I said, “Sure. Interstellar speeds have to be above half the speed of light, or you can’t trade competitively.”

  “What?”

  “There are ways to get the extra edge. You don’t have to depend on sunlight, not if you’re launching from a civilized system. Every civilized system has a moon-based launching laser. By the time the sun is too far away to give the ship a decent push, the beam from the laser cannon is spreading just enough to give the sail a hefty acceleration without vaporizing anything.”

  “Naturally,” said Morris, but he seemed confused.

  “So that if you’re heading for a strange system, you’d naturally spend most of the trip decelerating. You can’t count on a strange system having a launching laser. If you know your destination is civilized, that’s a different matter.”

  Morris nodded.

  “The lovely thing about the laser cannon is that if anything goes wrong with it, there’s a civilized world right there to fix it. You go sailing out to the stars with trade goods, but you leave your launching motor safely at home. Why is everybody looking at me funny?”

  “Don’t take it wrong,” said Morris. “But how does a paunchy bartender come to know so much about flying an interstellar trading ship?”

  “What?” I didn’t understand him.

  “Why did the Monk ship have to dive so deep into the solar system?”

  “Oh, that. That’s the solar wind. You get the same problem around any yellow sun. With a light-sail you can get push from the solar wind as well as from light pressure. The trouble is, the solar wind is just stripped hydrogen atoms. Light bounces from a light-sail, but the solar wind just hits the sail and sticks.”

  Morris nodded thoughtfully. Louise was blinking as if she had double vision.

  “You can’t tack against it. Tilting the sail does from nothing. To use the solar wind for braking you have to bore straight in, straight toward the sun,” I explained.

  Morris nodded. I saw that his eyes were as glassy as Louise’s eyes.

  “Oh,” I said. “Damn, I must be stupid today. Morris, that was the third pill.”

  “Right,” said Morris, still nodding, still glassy-eyed. “That must have been the unusual, really unusual profession you wanted. Crewman on an interstellar liner. Jesus.”

  And he should have sounded disgusted, but he sounded envious.

  His elbows were on the table, his chin rested on his fists. It is a position that distorts the mouth, making one’s expression unreadable. But I didn’t like what I could read in Morris’s eyes.

  There was nothing left of the square and honest man I had let into my apartment at noon. Morris was a patriot now, and an altruist, and a fanatic. He must have the stars for his nation and for all mankind. Nothing must stand in his way. Least of all, me.

  Reading minds again, Frazer? Maybe being captain of an interstellar liner involves having to read the minds of the crew, to be able to put down a mutiny before some idiot can take a heat point to the mpff glip habbabub, or however a Monk would say it; it has something to do with straining ketones out of the breathing-air.

  My urge to acrobatics had probably come out of the same pill. Free fall training. There was a lot in that pill.

  This was the profession I should have hidden. Not the Palace Torturer, who was useless to a government grown too subtle to need such techniques; but the captain of an interstellar liner, a prize too valuable to men who have not yet reached beyond the Moon.

  And I had been the last to know it. Too late, Frazer.

  “Captain,” I said. “Not crew.”

  “Pity. A crewman would know more about how to put a ship together. Frazer, how big a crew are you equipped to rule?”

  “Eight and five.”

  “Thirteen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why did you say eight and five?”

  The question caught me off balance. Hadn’t I…? Oh. “That’s the Monk numbering system. Base eight. Actually, base two, but they group the digits in threes to get base eight.”

  “Base two. Computer numbers.”

  “Are they?”

  “Yes. Frazer, they must have been using computers for a long time. Eons.”

  “All right.” I noticed for the first time that Louise had collected our glasses and gone to make fresh drinks. Good, I could use one. She’d left her own, which was half full. Knowing she wouldn’t mind, I took a swallow.

  It was soda water.

  With a lime in it. It looked just like our gin and tonics. She must be back on the diet. Except that when Louise resumed a diet, she generally announced it to all and sundry…

  Morris was still on the subject. “You use a crew of thirteen. Are they Monk or human or something else?”

  “Monk,” I said without having to think.

  “Too bad. Are there humans in space?”

  “No. A lot of two-feet, but none of them are like any of the others, and none of them are quite like us.”

  Louise came back with our drinks, gave them to us, and sat down without a word.

  “You said earlier that a species that can’t develop space flight is no better than animals.”

  “According to the Monks,” I reminded him.

  “Right. It seems a little extreme even to me, but let it pass. What about a race that develops spaceflight and then loses it?”

  “It happens. There are lots of ways a space-going species can revert to animal. Atomic war. Or they just can’t live with the complexity. Or they breed themselves out of food, and the world famine wrecks everything. Or waste products from the new machinery ruins the ecology.”

  “‘Revert to animal.’ All right. What about nations? Suppose you have two nations next door, same species, but one has space flight…”

  “Right. Good point, too. Morris, there are just two countries on Earth that can deal with the Monks without dealing through the United Nations. Us, and Russia. If Zimbabwe or Brazil or France tried it, they’d be publicly humiliated.”

  “That could cause an international incident.” Morris’s jaw tightened heroically. “We’ve got ways of passing the warning along so that it won’t happen.”

  Louise said, “There are some countries I wouldn’t mind seeing it happen to.”

  Morris got a thoughtful look—and I wondered if everybody would get the warning.

  The cleaning team arrived then. We’d used Tip Top Cleaners before, but these four dark women were not our usual team. We had to explain in detail just what we wanted done. Not their fault. They usually clean private homes, not bars.

  Morris spent some time calling New York. He must have been using a credit card; he couldn’t have that much change.

  “That may have stopped a minor war,” he said when he got back. And we returned to the padded booth. But Louise stayed to direct the cleaning team.

  The four dark women moved about us with pails and spray bottles and dry rags, chattering in Spanish, leaving shiny surfaces wherever they went. And Morris resumed his inquisition.

  “What powers the ground-to-orbit ship?”

  “A slow H-bomb going off in a magnetic bottle.”

  “Fusion?”

  “Yah. The attitude jets on the main starship use fusion power too. They all link to one magnetic bottle. I don’t know just how it works. You get fuel from water or ice.”

  “Fusion. But don’t you have to separate out the deuterium and tritium?”

  “What for? You melt the ice, run a current through the water, and you’ve got hydrogen.”

  “Wow,” Morris said softly. “Wow.”

  “The launching laser works the same way,” I remembered. What else did I need to remember about launching lasers? Something dreadfully important.

  “Wow. Frazer, if we could build the Monks their launching laser, we could use the same techniques to build other fusion plants. Couldn’t we?”

  “Sure.” I was in dread. My mouth was dr
y, my heart was pounding. I almost knew why. “What do you mean, if?”

  “And they’d pay us to do it! It’s a damn shame. We just don’t have the hardware.”

  “What do you mean? We’ve got to build the launching laser!”

  Morris gaped. “Frazer, what’s wrong with you?”

  The terror had a name now. “My God! What have you told the Monks? Morris, listen to me. You’ve got to see to it that the Security Council promises to build the Monks’ launching laser.”

  “Who do you think I am, the Secretary-General? We can’t build it anyway, not with just Saturn launching configurations.” Morris thought I’d gone mad at last. He wanted to back away through the wall of the booth.

  “They’ll do it when you tell them what’s at stake. And we can build a launching laser, if the whole world goes in on it. Morris, look at the good it can do! Free power from seawater! And light-sails work fine within a system.”

  “Sure, it’s a lovely picture. We could sail out to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. We could smelt the asteroids for their metal ores, using laser power…” His eyes had momentarily taken on a vague, dreamy look. Now they snapped back to what Morris thought of as reality. “It’s the kind of thing I daydreamed about when I was a kid. Someday we’ll do it. Today—we just aren’t ready.”

  “There are two sides to a coin,” I said. “Now, I know how this is going to sound. Just remember there are reasons. Good reasons.”

  “Reasons? Reasons for what?”

  “When a trading ship travels,” I said, “it travels only from one civilized system to another. There are ways to tell whether a system has a civilization that can build a launching laser. Radio is one. The Earth puts out as much radio flux as a small star.

  “When the Monks find that much radio energy coming from a nearby star, they send a trade ship. By the time the ship gets there, the planet that’s putting out all the energy is generally civilized. But not so civilized that it can’t use the knowledge a Monk trades for.

  “Do you see that they need the launching laser? That ship out there came from a Monk colony. This far from the axis of the galaxy, the stars are too far apart. Ships launch by starlight and laser, but they brake by starlight alone, because they can’t count on the target star having a launching laser. If they had to launch by starlight too, they probably wouldn’t make it. A plant-and-animal cycle as small as the life support system on a Monk starship can last only so long.”