Still upright. Steam began to surround it as it sank into melting ice.
Nessus approached without fear. Surely any Kzin inside was dead, and any human too. But could he get in?
The outer airlock door was missing, ripped from its hinges. The inner door must have been bent, for it leaked a thin fog from the edges. Nessus pushed the cycle button and waited.
The door didn’t move.
The puppeteer cast an eye around the airlock. There must be telltales to sense whether the outer door was closed and whether there was pressure in the lock. There was one, a sensitized surface in the maimed outer doorway. Nessus pushed it down with his mouth.
Air sprayed into the enclosure, turned to fog, and blew away. Nessus’ other head was casting about for a pressure sensor. He found it next to the air outlet. He swung alongside it and leaned against it so that his suit trapped the air. He leaned into the pressure.
The inner door swung open. Nessus fought to maintain his position against the roaring wind. When the door was fully open, he dodged inside. The door slammed just behind him.
Now. What had happened here?
The Kzinti lifesystem was a howling hurricane of air replacing what he’d let out. Nessus poked into the kitchen, the control section, and two privacy booths without seeing anything. He moved down the hall and looked into what he remembered would be the interrogation room. Perhaps here…
He froze.
Anne-Marie and Jason were in the police web. Obviously; because both were standing, and both were unconscious. They appeared undamaged. But the Kzin!
Nessus felt the world swim. His heads felt lighter than air. He’d been through a lot … He turned his eyes away. It occurred to him that the humans must be unconscious from lack of oxygen. The police web must surround them completely, even to their heads. Otherwise the shock would have torn their heads off. Nessus forced himself to move to the police web. He kept his eyes resolutely away from the Kzin.
There were the controls. Was that the power switch? He tried it. The humans drifted gracefully to the floor. Done.
And Nessus found his eyes creeping back to the Kzin.
He couldn’t look away.
The carnivore had struck like a wet snowball thrown with awful force. He was a foot up the wall, all spread out on a border of splashed circulatory fluid, and he stuck.
Nessus fainted. He woke up, still standing because of the normal tone of his relaxed muscles, to find Anne-Marie shaking him gently and trying to talk to him.
“I’m worried about him,” said Anne-Marie.
Jason turned away from the Jester’s control panel. “He can get treatment on Jinx. There are puppeteers in Sirius Mater.”
“That’s still a week away. Isn’t there anything we can do for him? He spends all his time in his room. It must be awful to be manic-depressive.” She was rubbing the stump where the emergency doc had amputated her arm—a gesture Jason hated. It roused guilt feelings. But she’d get a new arm on Jinx.
“I hate to tell you,” he said, “but Nessus isn’t in a depressive stage. He stays in his room because he’s avoiding us.”
“Us?”
“Yah. I think so.”
“But Jay! Us?”
“Don’t take it personally, Anne. We’re a symbol.” He lowered his head to formulate words. “Look at it this way. You remember when Nessus kicked the Kzin?”
“Sure. It was beautiful.”
“And you probably know he was nerving himself to fire on the Kzinti ship if I gave him the tnuctipun weapon. Finally, you know that he came voluntarily to the Kzinti ship. I think he was going to fight them if he got the chance. He knew they’d captured me, and he knew they had the weapon. He was ready to fight.”
“Good for him. But Jay—”
“Dammit, honey, it wasn’t good for him. For him, it was purest evil. Cowardice is moral for puppeteers. He was violating everything he’d ever learned!”
“You mean he’s ashamed of himself?”
“That’s part of it. But there’s more. It was the way we acted when we woke up.
“You remember how it was? Nessus was standing and looking at what was left of the Kzinti pilot. You had to shake him a few times before he noticed. Then what did he find out? I, Jason Papandreou, who had been his friend, had planned the whole thing. I had known that the boss Kzin and the Slaver expert were walking to their deaths because the computer form of the weapon had given them the self-destruct setting and told them it was the matter-conversion beam. I knew that, and I let them walk out and blow themselves to smithereens. I tricked the pilot into putting our heads in the police web, but I left him outside to die. And I was proud of it! And you were proud of me!
“Now do you get it?”
“No. And I’m still proud of you.”
“Nessus isn’t. Nessus knows that we, whom he probably thought of as funny-looking puppeteers—you may remember we were thinking of him as almost human—he knows we committed a horrible crime. Worse, it was a crime he was thinking of committing himself. So he’s transferred his shame to us. He’s ashamed of us, and he doesn’t want to see us.”
“How far to Jinx?”
“A week.”
“No way to hurry?”
“I never heard of one.”
“Poor Nessus.”
FLATLANDER
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL girl aboard turned out to have a husband with habits so solitary that I didn’t know about him until the second week. He was about five feet four and middle-aged, but he wore a hellflare tattoo on his shoulder, which meant he’d been on Kzin during the war thirty years back, which meant he’d been trained to kill adult Kzinti with his bare hands, feet, elbows, knees, and whatnot. When we found out about each other, he very decently gave me a first warning and broke my arm to prove he meant it.
The arm still ached a day later, and every other woman on the Lensman was over two hundred years old. I drank alone. I stared glumly into the mirror behind the curving bar. The mirror stared glumly back.
“Hey. You from We Made It. What am I?”
He was two chairs down, and he was glaring. Without the beard he would have had a round, almost petulant face…I think. The beard, short and black and carefully shaped, made him look like a cross between Zeus and an angry bulldog. The glare went with the beard. His square fingers wrapped a large drinking bulb in a death grip. A broad belly matched broad shoulders to make him look massive rather than fat.
Obviously he was talking to me. I asked, “What do you mean, what are you?”
“Where am I from?”
“Earth.” It was obvious. The accent said Earth. So did the conservatively symmetrical beard. His breathing was unconsciously natural in the ship’s standard atmosphere, and his build had been forged at one point zero gee.
“Then what am I?”
“A flatlander.”
The glare heat increased. He’d obviously reached the bar way ahead of me. “A flatlander! Dammit, everywhere I go I’m a flatlander. Do you know how many hours I’ve spent in space?”
“No. Long enough to know how to use a drinking bulb.”
“Funny. Very funny. Everywhere in human space a flatlander is a schnook who never gets above the atmosphere. Everywhere but Earth. If you’re from Earth, you’re a flatlander all your life. For the last fifty years I’ve been running about in human space, and what am I? A flatlander. Why?”
“Earthian is a clumsy term.”
“What is WeMadeItian?” he demanded.
“I’m a crashlander. I wasn’t born within fifty miles of Crashlanding City, but I’m a crashlander anyway.”
That got a grin. I think. It was hard to tell with the beard. “Lucky you’re not a pilot.”
“I am. Was.”
“You’re kidding. They let a crashlander pilot a ship?”
“If he’s good at it.”
“I didn’t mean to pique your ire, sir. May I introduce myself? My name’s Elephant.”
“Beowulf Shaeffer.”
br /> He bought me a drink. I bought him a drink. It turned out we both played gin, so we took fresh drinks to a card table…
When I was a kid, I used to stand out at the edge of Crashlanding Port watching the ships come in. I’d watch the mob of passengers leave the lock and move in a great clump toward customs, and I’d wonder why they seemed to have trouble navigating. A majority of the starborn would always walk in weaving lines, swaying and blinking teary eyes against the sun. I used to think it was because they came from different worlds with different gravities and different atmospheres beneath differently colored suns.
Later I learned different.
There are no windows in a passenger spacecraft. If there were, half the passengers would go insane; it takes an unusual mentality to watch the blind-spot appearance of hyperspace and still keep one’s marbles. For passengers there is nothing to watch and nothing to do, and if you don’t like reading sixteen hours a day, then you drink. It’s best to drink in company. You get less lushed, knowing you have to keep up your side of a conversation. The ship’s doc has cured more hangovers than every other operation combined, right down to manicures and haircuts.
The ship grounded at Los Angeles two days after I met Elephant. He’d made a good drinking partner. We’d been fairly matched at cards, he with his sharp card sense, I with my usual luck. From the talking we’d done, we knew almost as much about each other as anyone knows about anyone. In a way I was sorry to see him leave.
“You’ve got my number?”
“Yah. But like I said, I don’t know just what I’ll be doing.” I was telling the truth. When I explore a civilized world, I like to make my own discoveries.
“Well, call me if you get a chance. I wish you’d change your mind. I’d like to show you Earth.”
“I decline with thanks. Good-bye, Elephant. It’s been fun.”
Elephant waved and turned through the natives’ door. I went on to face the smuggler baiters. The last drink was still with me, but I could cure that at the hotel. I never expected to see Elephant again.
Nine days ago I’d been on Jinx. I’d been rich. And I’d been depressed.
The money and the depression had stemmed from the same source. The puppeteers, those three-legged, two-headed professional cowards and businessmen, had lured me into taking a new type of ship all the way to the galactic core, thirty thousand light-years away. The trip was for publicity purposes, to get research money to iron out the imperfections in the very ship I was riding.
I suppose I should have had more sense, but I never do, and the money was good. The trouble was that the Core had exploded by the time I got there. The Core stars had gone off in a chain reaction of novas ten thousand years ago, and a wave of radiation was even then (and even now) sweeping toward known space.
In just over twenty thousand years we’ll all be in deadly danger.
You’re not worried? It didn’t bother me much, either. But every puppeteer in known space vanished overnight, heading for Finagle knows what other galaxy.
I was depressed. I missed the puppeteers and hated knowing I was responsible for their going. I had time and money and a black melancholia to work off. And I’d always wanted to see Earth.
Earth smelled good. There was a used flavor to it, a breathed flavor, unlike anything I’ve ever known. It was the difference between spring water and distilled water. Somewhere in each breath I took were molecules breathed by Dante, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Heinlein, Carter, and my own ancestors. Traces of past industries lingered in the air, sensed if not smelled: gasoline, coal fumes, tobacco and burnt cigarette filters, diesel fumes, ale breweries. I left the customs house with inflated lungs and a questing look.
I could have taken a transfer booth straight to the hotel. I decided to walk a little first.
Everyone on Earth had made the same decision.
The pedwalk held a crowd such as I had never imagined. They were all shapes and all colors, and they dressed in strange and eldritch ways. Shifting colors assaulted the eye and sent one reeling. On any world in human space, any world but one, you know immediately who the natives are. Wunderland? Asymmetrical beards mark the nobility, and the common people are the ones who quickly step out of their way. We Made It? The pallor of our skins in summer and winter, in spring and fall, the fact that we all race upstairs, above the buried cities and onto the blooming desert, eager to taste sunlight while the murderous winds are at rest. Jinx? The natives are short, wide, and strong; a sweet little old lady’s handshake can crush steel. Even in the Belt, within the solar system, a Belter strip haircut adorns both men and women. But Earth—!
No two looked alike. There were reds and blues and greens, yellows and oranges, plaids and stripes. I’m talking about hair, you understand, and skin. All my life I’ve used tannin-secretion pills for protection against ultraviolet, so that my skin color has varied from its normal pinkish-white (I’m an albino) to (under blue-white stars) tuxedo black. But I’d never known that other skin-dye pills existed. I stood rooted to the pedwalk, letting it carry me where it would, watching the incredible crowd swarm around me. They were all knees and elbows. Tomorrow I’d have bruises.
“Hey!”
The girl was four or five heads away, and short. I’d never have seen her if everyone else hadn’t been short, too. Flatlanders rarely top six feet. And there was this girl, her hair a topological explosion in swirling orange and silver, her face a faint, subtle green with space-black eyebrows and lipstick, waving something and shouting at me.
Waving my wallet.
I forced my way to her until we were close enough to touch, until I could hear what she was saying above the crowd noise.
“Stupid! Where’s your address? You don’t even have a place for a stamp!”
“What?”
She looked startled. “Oh! You’re an offworlder.”
“Yah!” My voice would give out fast at this noise level.
“Well, look…” She shoved her way closer to me. “Look, you can’t go around town with an offworlder’s wallet. Next time someone picks your pocket he may not notice till you’re gone.”
“You picked my pocket?”
“Sure! Think I found it? Would I risk my precious hand under all those spike heels?”
“How if I call a cop?”
“Cop? Oh, a stoneface.” She laughed merrily. “Learn or go under, man. There’s no law against picking pockets. Look around you.”
I looked around me, then looked back fast, afraid she’d disappear. Not only my cash but my Bank of Jinx draft for forty thousand stars was in that wallet. Everything I owned.
“See them all? Sixty-four million people in Los Angeles alone. Eighteen billion in the whole world. Suppose there was a law against picking pockets? How would you enforce it?” She deftly extracted the cash from my wallet and handed the wallet back. “Get yourself a new wallet, and fast. It’ll have a place for your address and a window for a tenth-star stamp. Put your address in right away, and a stamp, too. Then the next guy who takes it can pull out the money and drop your wallet in the nearest mailbox—no sweat. Otherwise you lose your credit cards, your ident, everything.” She stuffed two hundred-odd stars in cash between her breasts, flashing me a parting smile as she turned.
“Thanks,” I called. Yes, I did. I was still bewildered, but she’d obviously stayed to help me. She could just as easily have kept wallet and all.
“No charge,” she called back, and was gone.
I stopped off at the first transfer booth I saw, dropped a half star in the coin slot, and dialed Elephant.
The vestibule was intimidating.
I’d expected a vestibule. Why put a transfer booth inside your own home, where any burglar can get in just by dialing your number? Anyone who can afford the lease on a private transfer booth can also afford a vestibule with a locked door and an intercom switch.
There was a vestibule, but it was the size of a living room, furnished with massage chairs and an autovendor. There was an intercom, b
ut it was a flat vidphone, three hundred years old, restored at perhaps a hundred times its original cost. There was a locked door; it was a double door of what looked like polished brass, with two enormous curved handles, and it stood fifteen feet high.
I’d suspected Elephant was well off, but this was too much. It occurred to me that I’d never seen him completely sober, that I had in fact turned down his offer of guidance, that a simple morning-after treatment might have wiped me from his memory. Shouldn’t I just go away? I had wanted to explore Earth on my own.
But I didn’t know the rules!
I stepped out of the booth and glimpsed the back wall. It was all picture window, with nothing outside—just fleecy blue sky. How peculiar, I thought, and stepped closer. And closer.
Elephant lived halfway up a cliff. A sheer mile-high cliff.
The phone rang.
On the third ear-jarring ring I answered, mainly to stop the noise. A supercilious voice asked, “Is somebody out there?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said. “Does someone named Elephant live here?”
“I’ll see, sir,” said the voice. The screen had not lit, but I had the feeling someone had seen me quite clearly.
Seconds crawled by. I was half minded to jump back in the transfer booth and dial at random. But only half; that was the trouble. Then the screen lit, and it was Elephant. “Bey! You changed your mind!”
“Yah. You didn’t tell me you were rich.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Well, no, of course not.”
“How do you expect to learn things if you don’t ask? Don’t answer that. Hang on, I’ll be right down. You did change your mind? You’ll let me show you Earth?”
“Yes, I will. I’m scared to go out there alone.”
“Why? Don’t answer. Tell me in person.” He hung up.
Seconds later the big bronze doors swung back with a bone-shaking boom. They just barely got out of Elephant’s way. He pulled me inside, giving me no time to gape, shoved a drink in my hand, and asked why I was afraid to go outside.
I told him about the pickpocket, and he laughed, He told me about the time he tried to go outside during a We Made It summer, and I laughed, though I’ve heard of outworlders being blown away and to Hades doing the same thing. Amazingly, we were off again. It was just like it had been on the ship, even to the end of Elephant’s anecdote. “They called me a silly flatlander, of course.”