N-Space

by Larry Niven

  My cake was gone, and the conversation here was turning chaotic. I got up. Behind me Tom Findlay was saying, “But they’d have to find our starships some way. Maybe a large metallic mass moving faster than light would put out heavy Cherenkov radiation…”

  I played for an hour and lost a dollar twenty. Presently Carol put her head around the corner, caught my eye, showed her teeth and snapped them at me several times in rapid succession. I nodded and cashed in.

  It means, “I’m starving. Let’s collect some people and go eat.”

  There was still a group around Tom Findlay. I caught bits and pieces of sentences. They were talking about the things you could do with neutronium, if you could get it in four-foot globs and had the technology to move it around. I broke in to ask if anyone was hungry, and got Hal Grant that way.

  We looked up our host (our hostess had gone home with her date), thanked him for a great party, told him we might be back in an hour or so, and asked if he’d like to come along. The guests could take care of themselves, and he knew it, but he declined anyway.

  Joy Benjamin was outside sitting on the wall, breathing. There was precious little oxygen left inside. She joined us too. We drove off to find a place we knew of, an all-night pizza place.

  Sometimes they get forgotten instantly. Sometimes they go on and on. This latest of Findlay’s brainstorms was one of Those. I came back from the counter carrying a tremendous deluxe pizza, and Hal Grant was saying, “See, that way you wouldn’t need a Project Ozma, or an FTL spacecraft detector either.” And both women were nodding, rapt.

  Joy Benjamin was young and pretty and a bit pudgy, and her front teeth showed when she smiled. It all gave her a cuddly, innocent look that I had never found occasion to mention to my wife; but if she had been in the group around Findlay I would have noticed her. She must have gotten her details at second hand. She looked up as I set the pizza down, and said, “He’s got a point. You know about Tom Findlay’s Multiple Eden Hypothesis?”

  “Yes.”

  “This planet puts out as much radio flux as a small star,” she said seriously. “The overlords could put a detector on the Moon and then just wait for us to invent radios.”

  “That means they must be on their way here now,” my wife put in.

  Hal smiled sardonically, an effect he couldn’t have managed without the beard. “Maybe they’re already here. There were flying saucers all over the place when radio was really popular, before everybody had two television sets.”

  “It’s been done, that bit about a detector on the Moon. In 2001. Put it on Mars.”

  “Okay, it’s on Mars. The point is, with the radio detector they can get here after we develop as much intelligence as we’re going to, but before we can pollute ourselves to death or bomb ourselves to death. After all, they probably weren’t trying to develop anything supremely intelligent. Just bright enough to take orders.”

  “How young you are, to be so cynical.”

  It took him a moment to decide I was kidding. He said, “Someday, Howards,” and shook his head sorrowfully, contemplating awful carnage. He went to work on the pizza.

  It was delicious. I wish I’d paid more attention, because it was the last time I ever tasted pizza. We ate on a wooden bench, and used up an inch-high stack of paper napkins. Off in one corner, a man with garters on his sleeves played a player piano.

  “So we can expect them any minute.” Joy made whirring noises and moved her hands expressively. “Big ships in the sky, coming down to ssscoop us up.”

  “Or little ships to take samples.”

  “If they were the flying saucers, they must have rejected us already,” Hal put in. “They’ve been here too long. They’d have started major scooping operations long ago.”

  And if we’d dropped it there, we’d be home now.

  There are tunes that go round and round in your head, driving you nuts, driving others nuts because you’re humming under your breath. There are ideas you can’t leave alone. You toy with them, or they toy with you…I got my fair share of the pizza and a bit more. While we were waiting for Carol to finish, I said, “Suppose they did reject us. Suppose we didn’t meet their presumably exacting standards. What then?”

  “They’d destroy the Earth,” Joy said instantly.

  “Typical bloodthirsty female.”

  Hal said, “Maybe they’d start us over. Give us IQ tests. Pick a thousand off the top. Settle us on a new planet.”

  “Then destroy the Earth.”

  “Maybe. Maybe even settle us back on Earth, after clearing it for us.”

  Grant’s “us” had not escaped me. He would be one of the thousand, and so would his friends. I let it pass. Truth to tell, I was flattered.

  The pizza was gone, and much of the cardboard disc beneath it. We piled in the car and started back to George’s place.

  Carol ended a reflective silence. “Does it seem to anyone that there are more written tests around than there used to be? Army IQ tests, motivational research, testing for jobs, even the forms for computer dating. Now—”

  We started laughing. Hal said, “Are you still on that?”

  “Well, they have to test us some way.”

  “It’s a lovely idea, but I can’t bring myself to trust those IQ tests. I know too much psychology. There’s not a printed test that’s good for anything, especially at the top of the scale.”

  “What, then?”

  “There Are Aliens Among Us,” Hal Grant intoned. “Or their agents. And they choose by intuition and superior judgment. You, and you—”

  “Hey,” I said, hit by a lovely idea. “Hey. You know who would make a great intelligence tester?”

  “Who?”

  “Tom Findlay! He’s a walking, talking intelligence test. Remember what he was talking about just before we left? Blobs of neutron star matter—”

  “That’s lovely stuff, neutronium. It’s unreasonably heavy. If you just let it sit, it’s got to be a shiny sphere. The surface gravity would flatten any surface roughness, see? If you toss a glob of the stuff at an enemy spaceship, it’ll just drift through the hull and leave a gaping hole and come out a fraction of an inch thicker. Spin it and you don’t get an ellipsoid, you get like a flying saucer, a ball with a rim around it. It’s all theoretical, of course.”

  “See what I mean?”

  Behind me in the darkened car, Hal Grant said, “I guess so. Findlay makes you think. If you can’t think, you go away. After awhile there’s nobody left talking to Findlay except people who like playing with ideas. He’s a filter. Then I suppose he tags the best of us and off we go, right?”

  “Right. Well, nobody’s disappeared yet.”

  “Nobody that was noticed. How many of us do you know, away from these parties? Sometimes I run across Jack Keenan in the supermarket, but that’s it. All we know for sure is, we haven’t been picked yet.” Grant laughed uneasily. “Maybe we’d better not go back to George’s.”

  The feel of the car changed drastically. I hit the brake fast, but it was hardly necessary; we were only starting to move from a dead stop. A moment ago we’d been doing seventy.

  I heard the sea before I saw it: breakers crunching ahead of us, flashing white in the headlights. If I’d kept the throttle down we’d have driven right into them. The freeway lighting had become a pale pink glow far across the sea; dawn or dusk, I couldn’t tell. We were in soft dry sand. It might have been a California beach, and our car sitting mired in sand might have been a television commercial or a practical joke, except that it wasn’t.

  “S-s-sonofabitch took me at my word,” said Hal Grant. Then, “This can’t be real. Can it?”

  Joy was furious. “He was listening to us! That—eavesdropper!”

  I got out.

  It felt like sand. It crunched beneath my feet, like sand. How could it be part of another world? But the sinking feeling in my belly felt like an elevator starting down. Terror? Or low gravity?

  I threw back my head and screamed, “Find
lay!”

  And he was there, grinning out of a metal cagework affair. “Figured it out, did you?”

  “Christ no, Findlay! What’s going on here? We’re terribly confused! One minute we were driving along the freeway, and the next we’re here at Hermosa Beach!”

  First he was flabbergasted. Then he burst out laughing. Well, it had been worth a try.

  So was my next move. His head was thrown back and his beard was raised, and I stepped forward fast and hit him in the throat, putting all my weight behind it.

  Not murder. Justice. And we needed that cage affair to get home.

  It was like hitting a padded pillar. My head snapped forward, my teeth came together with a sharp click, and something gave agonizingly in my shoulder. Tom Findlay must have weighed over a ton.

  He stopped laughing, gradually. “Very good. Nobody’s ever adjusted quite that fast. Let’s say you pass with honors,” he said. “And here’s your diploma.”

  It appeared beside him in the cage: a black disc on edge, two feet high. He caught it before it could topple, and he sent it rolling out. I let it go past me.

  Grant had come up behind me. In resignation he said, “Where are we?”

  “A lot of use you’ll get out of that! I’ll tell you anyway. It’s the second planet out from Alpha Centauri A. If you were hoping for double suns and wild new constellations, you can forget it. We used the closest available water world.”

  “Gonna be dull,” said Hal. He’d given up.

  So had I. I inhaled; the air smelled incredibly clean. A door slammed behind me. The women. God, don’t let them beg. I said, “So they came and sampled us and found us wanting. So they’re doing it over with another five hundred Edens. So where do you come in, Findlay? They aren’t human, are they?”

  “Not by a long way,” said Findlay, with reverence. “Neither am I. I’m a robot. I’m also the ideal they’re aiming for, in case you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Now, now.”

  “If you’re just what they want, why do they need us?”

  “I’m expensive. Robots don’t breed. You can forget about genetic engineering, too. It’s immoral. I don’t know why. It’s enough that they think so. Anything else?”

  “We were doing seventy on the freeway,” said Hal. “What happened to the momentum?”

  “You were also doing about twenty miles per second with respect to this beach. We just took it all in one vector sum. What else? Oh, you won’t be separated. This Eden will hold all four of you. We did it that way last time, too. The Eden story is only a myth.”

  “Are there any others?” Carol cried. “What direction are they.”

  But he was gone, and the metal frame around him. We were alone on a beach, four of us and a car, in the growing light of dawn.

  “This thing is sticky,” Hal said suddenly. He was holding the black disc that Findlay had rolled past me. He looked at his hand, then licked a finger. “Right. It’s a memento, his signature, as it were. What can you say about chocolate covered manhole covers?”

  “Don’t get it sandy,” my wife said briskly. “We can eat the chocolate. It’s the only thing on this world that we know we can eat.”

  All characters were members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society at the time of writing. All of the oddball ideas are derived from Tom Digby—“Digby-isms”—except the central one, the theory of multiple Edens, which is mine.

  The LASFS liked the story to this extent at least: Jack Harness presented a parchment scroll to me at a banquet. It says: THE AMERICAN DENTAL ASSOCIATION SAYS THEY ARE BAD FOR CHILDREN’S TEETH. And somebody made up a miniature chocolate covered manhole cover. It appears as one of the gifts at the LASFS Christmas Gift Exchange, every year. From time to time the chocolate coating needs replacing.

  • • •

  • • •

  “East takes you out. Out takes you west. West takes you in. In takes you east. North and south bring you back” The laws of motion within the Smoke Ring are also the rules of orbital mechanics.

  THE GHOST SHIPS, unpublished

  CLOAK OF ANARCHY

  “Cloak of Anarchy” was written for Jerry Pournelle’s 2020 vision, to explain why I am not a Libertarian.

  It’s the only story John W. Campbell ever bought from me; and it may be the last story he bought.

  It caused me to be involved in a duel.

  “Cloak of Anarchy” required a character who was capable of knocking out all the monitoring devices in King’s Free Park, turning a fake anarchy into a real anarchy, and would do it. What I needed was a combination of Russell Seitz [who lives on the East Coast, and who tends to carry advanced technological toys in his pockets] and Don Simpson [a West Coast fan who uses technology to create his own art forms]. I combined them into “Ron Cole.”

  I must have done it right. All the East Coast fans recognized Russell. All the West Coast fans recognized Don.

  Comes the Los Angeles World Science Fiction Convention. We were at a room party. I recognized Russell Seitz. “Hi, Russell!”

  “You used me in a story.”

  “Yeah!”

  “You, er, didn’t ask permission.”

  I’m spoiled, maybe. I expect such a thing to be taken as flattery. I disengaged myself. A few minutes later I ran across Gordon Dickson.

  “Hi, Gordy!”

  “Russell Seitz has asked me to speak for him in an affair of honor.”

  Oooops! Through the humming in my ears I said, “I expect I should choose a second to speak for me.”

  Gordy agreed.

  I looked around and there was Ben Bova. Ben had published “Cloak of Anarchy” in Analog. Choosing Ben meant that I would have to do less explaining.

  Gordy explained that a venerable dueling law set a limit on the bore size of weapons. “We’ll have to settle for magnums.”

  Champagne corks?

  Ara Pashinian is a world traveler who shows occasionally at world conventions. He kindly offered us his roomy suite “to test-fire the propellants.”

  Gordy and Russell disappeared to get weaponry Russell had brought along. In Ara’s suite Ben and I discussed strategy. “Don’t argue about the weaponry,” Ben said. “Remember, Russell Seitz is the world’s sixth nuclear power!”

  Oooops! It was true. As one of the Board of Trustees of a Boston museum, Russell had built a Titan II missile from parts he acquired from junkyards for under a thousand dollars.

  “Not to worry,” Ben said. “I know some Air Force people. I can promise instant massive retaliation the instant you’re dead.”

  Marilyn is an admirer of Georgette Heyer’s tales of the English Regency period. She knew what to do. She threw her arms around me crying, “Give up this madness! You’ll be killed!”

  But time was passing, and where were Russell and Gordy?

  Here they came, bursting through the door in full 7th century Samurai armor! [Remember the Boston museum?] Ben cried, “No, no, no! No armor during the duel!”

  “During the duel, no armor,” Gordy said. “During the negotiations we take no chances.”

  Which raised a question. The badges at that convention were metal disks three inches across. Did they constitute armor? We decided they did not; they would be worn.

  Our seconds test-fired the champagne bottles. It was decided that Russell and I would take two paces, turn and fire. And we drank the propellants.

  By High Dawn [designated as 1:00 PM] I had bought replacement champagne. I went up to the swimming pool to fight for my honor. I didn’t realize that I’d replaced cork corks with more dangerous plastic corks. I wore a bathing suit, thinking I might want a swim too.

  I’d forgotten my big metal badge. Marilyn noticed and loaned me hers. I pinned it where it might do me some good. My genitalia were now labelled as the property of Marilyn Niven.

  Russell appeared. He noticed the harder plastic corks, but said nothing. “Given the known propensities of my opponent—” he said, and pinned h
is badge between his shoulder blades.

  We squared off, took two paces, faced each other—

  I twisted the wire open. Worked it off. Peeled away the foil. Went to work on the cork with my thumbs. Easy does it, don’t want to break the cork…Looked up, and Russell was ready.

  He fired past my shoulder.

  I went back to work. Ease the cork loose. Russell was standing at attention, expressionless. The cork was easing out…faster than I thought. I fired through his hair.

  And we drank the propellants.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Square in the middle of what used to be the San Diego Freeway, I leaned back against a huge, twisted oak. The old bark was rough and powdery against my bare back. There was dark green shade shot with tight parallel beams of white gold. Long grass tickled my legs.

  Forty yards away across a wide strip of lawn was a clump of elms, and a small grandmotherly woman sitting on a green towel. She looked like she’d grown there. A stalk of grass protruded between her teeth. I felt we were kindred spirits, and once when I caught her eye I wiggled a forefinger at her, and she waved back.

  In a minute now I’d have to be getting up. Jill was meeting me at the Wilshire exits in half an hour. But I’d started walking at the Sunset Boulevard ramps, and I was tired. A minute more…

  It was a good place to watch the world rotate.

  A good day for it, too. No clouds at all. On this hot blue summer afternoon, King’s Free Park was as crowded as it ever gets.

  Someone at police headquarters had expected that. Twice the usual number of copseyes floated overhead, waiting. Gold dots against blue, basketball-sized, twelve feet up. Each a television eye and a sonic stunner, each a hookup to police headquarters, they were there to enforce the law of the Park.

  No violence.

  No hand to be raised against another—and no other laws whatever. Life was often entertaining in a Free Park.

  North toward Sunset, a man carried a white rectangular sign, blank on both sides. He was parading back and forth in front of a square-jawed youth on a plastic box, who was trying to lecture him on the subject of fusion power and the heat pollution problem. Even this far away I could hear the conviction and the dedication in his voice.