“No. But I could have stressed the warning.”
“As long as there was a warning. Now, do you understand the logic behind Hooker’s sentence?”
“I’m afraid not. He got two years imprisonment for negligent homicide, with simultaneous psychotherapy and conditioning. Psychotherapy is a lost art on Earth, by the way. I don’t question why he only got two years, but why negligent homicide?”
“There’s the crux. He wasn’t guilty of murder, was he?”
“I’d say Yes.”
“But we say he was insane. That’s a legitimate plea.”
“Then why was he punished?”
“For letting himself become insane. He knew he was a potential paranoid; all he had to do was stay in reach of a working autodoc. And he didn’t. Four people died. Negligent homicide.”
Loughery nodded. His head was spinning.
“What isn’t here on the tape is the follow-up. Loeffler tried to kill Hooker.”
“Oh?”
“Hooker left in a ramship. Loeffler went after him. They had a big duel with com lasers. Now, let’s suppose Hooker had won that battle and killed Loeffler. What then?”
“Self-defense.”
“Not at all. Murder.”
“But why?”
“Loeffler was insane. And he was insane as a direct result of Hooker’s crime, not through Loeffler’s own negligence. Hooker could run or hide or yell for help or talk Loeffler into accepting treatment. He could not strike back. If he’d killed Loeffler, he’d have gotten fifty years for murder.”
“Maybe I should be a farmer. What did happen?”
“I wouldn’t know. Neither of them ever came back to Plateau.”
120,000 APPROX.
Fifty years?
The flap of a gnat’s wing.
The long chase was nearing its end. At first Hooker had gained on his pursuer, for Loeffler’s ramscoop was not getting as much hydrogen as Hooker’s. Loeffler’s ship was in the shadow of Hooker’s. At one time they had been light-years apart. But now Loeffler’s ship was gaining, for Hooker’s ship had reached terminal velocity.
There had to be a limit on the velocity of a fusion-powered ramship. It was this: when the exhaust velocity of the fusion drive was no greater than the velocity of the interstellar hydrogen hitting the ramscoop, the ship could go no faster. Hooker had reached that limit tens of thousands of years ago. And so had his pursuer.
But Loeffler’s ship was using hydrogen that had, slipped through Hooker’s ramscoop. The hydrogen wasn’t hitting Loeffler’s ramscoop field as hard. It had absorbed velocity from Hooker’s.
Loeffler was close behind.
The chase could end within decades.
Once upon a time Hooker had hoped Loeffler would give up and turn around. Surely he would realize that Hooker could not be caught! But the years had stretched to decades, and every year Loeffler waited meant four years trying to get back to Wunderland. He’d have had to decelerate before he could begin the long flight home, and deceleration would take as many decades as he had spent fleeing. So Hooker had spent two hours a day before the scope screen, watching the stars crawl past year by year, waiting for Loeffler to turn around.
The years had stretched into centuries, and still Hooker spent two hours a day watching the rear scope screen. Now there were no more stars ahead, but only the distant muddled dots of galaxies, and the stars behind were taking on a vagueness like curdled milk. And when the centuries had become millennia, Hooker no longer believed his enemy would let him go. But still he spent two hours per ship’s day before the scope screen, watching the galaxy drop away.
He was totally a man of habits now. He had not had an original thought in centuries. The ship’s clock governed his life in every detail, taking him to the autodoc or the kitchen or the gym or the steam room or the bedroom or the bathroom. You’d have thought he was an ancient robot following a circular tape, no longer able to respond to outside stimuli.
He looked more like an aged robot than an aged man. From a distance he would have looked twenty. The doc had taken good care of him, but there were things the doc could not do. The oldest living man had been short of four hundred years old when that machine was made. Moscow Motors had had no way of knowing what a man would need when his life could be measured in tens of thousands of years. So the face was young; but the veneer was cracked, and the muscles no longer showed any kind of expression, and the habit patterns of the man were deeply grooved into the DNA memory processes of the brain.
By now the chase meant nothing to Hooker. In any case he should have been incapable of original thought.
They had come up along the galactic axis. Hooker, looking into the scope screen, saw the galaxy face-on. It was not bright, but it was wide. The galaxy showed like varicolored dyes poured into viscous ink, red dye and yellow and blue and green, but mostly red. Then the whole mass swirled around the center of the pot, so that the center glowed all colors—a continuous mass of stars packed so closely as to blot out the blackness behind, but it was not bright. There is dust even in intergalactic space. Nearly one hundred thousand light-years of dust shaded the galaxy from Hooker’s view. The arms were almost black, the glowing areas spotted with black gaps and dust clouds. Everything was reddened and dimmed by Doppler shift.
He could not see Loeffler.
Habit used his fingers to magnify the view, slowly. The galaxy, already wide enough to fill the scope screen, expanded. In the core, individual, red giant stars appeared, bigger than anything in the arms. A blue-white spot appeared, and grew.
It grew until it filled the screen. There was a black dot in the center. And that grew too.
Hooker had watched for nearly an hour before the thought stirred in his brain. That hadn’t happened for a long time, but it did happen. Hooker’s memory capacity was nearly full, but his brain was in good working order, and he was guaranteed sane.
I wonder how much damage I did.
The thought threatened to skip away, but he grabbed for it, sensing somehow that it might be important. I held my com laser on him for hours. I may have damaged him. I’ve never seen him broadside; I’d have no way of knowing. But if his ship is badly hurt, I could finish the job with my laser. It never burned out. His did.
He’d have to wait until Loeffler got closer. The thought slipped away … and returned two days later. I wonder how much damage I did?
How would I find out?
Every day he remembered the problem. A month and a half after he had first thought of it, he thought of the answer.
He could turn the ship side-ways to fire the fusion drive laterally. Loeffler would imitate him to keep him from sneaking past and home. That would put Loeffler broadside to him.
He had done it once before, trying to make turnover for Wunderland. But Loeffler had been too far away for the scope to show details. If he did it now…
He did.
Then he focused one of the side scopes on Loeffler, enlarged the image as far as it would go, and waited.
The time came when he should have gone to the steam room. He was half out of his seat, but he couldn’t leave. Loeffler hadn’t turned yet. The ships were light-hours apart. Hooker forced himself to sit down and to stay down, gripping the arms of the control chair with both hands. His teeth began to chatter. He shivered. A deadening cold spread through him. He sneezed.
The shivering and the sneezing continued for a long time, then passed. Steam-room time was over.
Loeffler began to turn.
And Hooker knew why he had never turned for home.
There was no lifesystem at all. The lifesystem had always been the most fragile part of the ship. Aeons ago Hooker’s laser had played over Loeffler’s lifesystem and melted it to slag. Nothing was left but tattered shards, polished at the edges by gas molecules slipping through the ramscoop shield.
Loeffler hadn’t died fast. He’d had time to program the autopilot to arrange a collision course with Hooker’s ship.
Lo
effler might have given up the chase long ago, but the autopilot never would, never could.
Hooker turned off his scope screen and went down to the steam room. His schedule was shot to hell. He was still trying to readjust when, years later, Loeffler’s ramscoop field swept across his ship like an invisible wing.
Two empty ships drove furiously toward the edge of the universe, all alone.
THE HANDICAPPED
WE FLEW ON skycycles over a red desert, under the soft red sun of Down. I let Jilson stay ahead. He was my guide, and I hadn’t been flying a skycycle long. I’m a flatlander. I had spent most of my life in the cities of Earth, where any flying vehicle is illegal unless fully automated.
I liked flying. I wasn’t good at it yet, but there was plenty of room for mistakes with the desert so far below.
“There,” said Jilson, pointing.
“Where?”
“Down there. Follow me.” His skycycle swung easily to the left and began to slow and drop. I followed more clumsily, overcorrecting and dropping behind. Eventually I spotted something.
“That little cone?”
“That’s it.”
From up here the desert looked lifeless. It wasn’t, any more than the deserts of most inhabited worlds are lifeless. Down there, invisible at this height, were spiky dry plants with water stored in their cores; flowers that bloomed after a rain and left their seeds to wait a year or ten years for the next rainfall; insect-things with four legs, unjointed; skinny warm-blooded quadrupeds from the size of a fox on down, who were always hungry.
There was a five-foot hairy cone with a bald, rounded top. Only its shadow made it visible as we dropped toward it. Its lank hair was the exact color of the reddish sand.
We landed next to it and got off.
I was beginning to think I’d been played for a fool. The thing didn’t look like an animal. It looked like a big cactus. Sometimes a cactus had hair just like that.
“We’re behind it,” said Jilson. He was dark and massive and taciturn. On Down there was no such animal as the professional guide. I’d talked Jilson into taking me out into the desert for a fair fee, but it hadn’t bought his friendship. I think he was trying to make that clear. “Come around in front,” he said.
We circled the hairy cone, and I started to laugh.
The Grog showed just five features.
Where it touched flat rock, the base of the cone was some four feet across. Long, straight hair brushed the rock like a floor-length skirt. A few inches up, two small, widely separated paws poked through the curtain of hair—the size and shape of a Great Dane’s forepaws, but naked and pink. A yard higher two more paws poked through, but on these the toes were extended to curving, useless fingers. Finally, above the forepaws was a yard-long lipless gash of a mouth, half-hidden by hair, curved very slightly upward at the corners. No eyes. The cone looked like some Stone Age carved idol or like a cruel cartoon of a feudal monk.
Jilson waited patiently for me to stop laughing. “It’s funny,” he admitted with reluctance. “But it’s intelligent. There’s a brain under that bald top, bigger than yours and mine combined.”
“It’s never tried to communicate with you?”
“Not with me nor with anyone else.”
“Does it make tools?”
“With what? Look at its hands!” He regarded me with amusement. “This is what you wanted to see, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. I came a long way for nothing.”
“Anyway, now you’ve seen it.”
I laughed again. Eyeless, motionless, my potential customer sat like a fat lap dog in begging position. “Come on,” I said, “let’s go back.”
A fool’s errand. I’d spent two weeks in hyperspace to get here. The fare would come out of business expenses, but ultimately I’d pay it; I’d own the business one day.
Jilson took his check without comment, folded it twice and stuck it in his lighter pocket. He said, “Buy you a drink?”
“Sure.”
We left our rented skycycles at the Downtown city limit and boarded a pedwalk. Jilson led the way from crossing to crossing until we were sliding past a great silver cube with a wriggling blue sign: CZILLER’S HOUSE OF IRISH COFFEE. Inside, the place was still a cube, a one-story building forty meters high. Padded horseshoe-shaped sofas covered the entire floor, so close you could hardly squeeze between them, each with its little disk of a table nestling in the center. From the floor a tinsel abstraction rose like a great tree, spreading its wide, glittering arms protectively over the customers, rising forty meters to touch the ceiling. The bartending machinery was halfway up the tree.
“Interesting place,” said Jilson. “These booths were built to float.” He waited for me to express surprise. When I didn’t, he went on: “It didn’t work out. Lovely idea though. The chairs would swoop through the air; and if the people at two tables wanted to meet, they’d slide their booths together and lock them magnetically.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It was fun. The guy who thought it up must have forgot that people come to a bar to get drunk. They’d crash the booths together like bumper cars. They’d go as high as they could and then pour out their drinks. The people underneath didn’t like that, and maybe there’d be a fight. I remember seeing a guy get thrown out of a booth. He’d have been dead if that tinsel centerpiece hadn’t caught him. I hear another guy did die; he missed the branches.”
“So they grounded the booths.”
“No. First they tried to make the course automatic. But you could still pour drinks on the people below, and there was more skill in it. It got to be a game. Then one night some idiot figured out how to short the autopilot, but he forgot the manual controls had been disconnected. His booth landed on another and injured three important people. Then they grounded the booths.”
A floating tray served us two chilled glasses and a bottle of Blue Fire 2728. The bar was two-thirds empty this early, and quiet. When the freeze-distilled wine was half gone, I explained why they call Blue Fire the “Crashlander’s Peacemaker”: the shape of the flexible plastic bottle, narrow-necked with a flaring mouth, plus the weight of the fluid inside make it a dandy bludgeon.
Jilson was turning almost garrulous now that I was no longer his employer. I was talking a lot too. Not that I felt like it; it was just—well, hell, here I was, light-years from Earth and business and the good people I knew, way out at the edge of human space. Down: a former Kzinti world, mostly empty, with a few scattered dots of civilization and a few great scars of old war, a world where the farmers had to use ultraviolet lamps to grow crops because of that red dwarf sun. Here I was. I was going to enjoy it if it killed me.
I was enjoying it. Jilson was good company, and the Blue Fire didn’t hurt at all. We ordered another bottle. The noise level rose as cocktail hour drew near.
“Something I’ve been wondering,” said Jilson. “Mind if we talk business?”
“No. Whose business?”
“Yours.”
“Not at all. Why ask?”
“It’s traditional, to us. Some people don’t like giving away their tricks of the trade. Others like to forget work completely after hours.”
“That makes sense. What’s the question?”
“Why do you pronounce Handicapped as though it had a capital H?”
“Oh. Well, if I said it with a small h, you’d think I meant humans, wouldn’t you? Potential paranoids, albino crashlanders, boosterspice allergics, people with missing limbs and resistance to transplants—handicapped like that.”
“Yah.”
“Whereas what I deal with are sentient beings who evolved with minds but with nothing that would serve as hands.”
“O-oh. Like dolphins?”
“Right. Are there dolphins on Down?”
“Hell yes. Who else would run our fishing industry?”
“You know those things you pay them off in? They look like a squirt-jet motorboat motor with two padded metal hands attached.”
“The Dolphin’s Hands. Sure. We sell ’em other stuff, tools and sonic things to move fish around, but the Dolphin’s Hands are what they mainly need.”
“I make them.”
Jilson’s eyes jerked up. Then … I could feel him withdrawing, backing off as he realized that the man across from him could probably buy Down. Damn! But the best I could do now was ignore the fact.
“I should have said, My father’s company makes them. One day I’ll direct Garvey Limited, but my great grandfather will have to die first. I doubt he ever will.”
Jilson smiled, with little strain. “I know people like that.”
“Yah. Some people seem to dry out as they get older. They get dryer and tougher instead of getting fat, until you think they’ll never change again; and they seem to get more and more energetic, like there’s a thermonuclear source inside them. Gee-Squared is like that. A great old man. I don’t see enough of him.”
“You sound proud of him. Why does he have to die?”
“It’s like a custom. Dad’s running the company now. If he gets in trouble, he can go to his father, who ran the company before him. If Gee-Prime can’t handle it, they both go to Gee-Squared.”
“Funny names.”
“Not to me. That’s like a tradition too.”
“Sorry. What are you doing on Down?”
“We don’t deal only with dolphins.” The Blue Fire made me want to lecture. “Look, Jilson. We know of three sentient beings without hands. Right?”
“More than that. Puppeteers use their mouths. Outsiders—”
“But they build their own tools, dammit. I’m talking about beasts who can’t even crack themselves a fist-ax or hold a lighter: dolphins, bandersnatchi, and that thing we saw today.”
“The Grog. Well?”
“Well, don’t you see that there must be Handicapped species all over the galaxy? Minds but no hands. I tell you, Jilson, it gives me the shivers. For as long as we expand to other stars, we’re going to meet more and more handless, toolless, helpless civilizations. Sometimes we won’t even recognize them. What are we going to do about them?”
“Build Dolphin’s Hands for them.”