For thirty-four hours the singleship had circled Pluto, and it was too long by far. Garner and Masney had been taking turns sleeping so that they could watch the scope screen for the actinic streak of a singleship taking off. There had been little talk between the ships. What talk there was was a strain for all, for every one of the five men knew that battle was very close, and not one was willing even to hint at the possibility. Now Lew’s singleship showed in the scope screen even with its drive off. Now Luke, watching although it was his off watch, watching though he knew he should sleep, watching through lids that felt like heavy sandpaper, Luke finally said the magic words.
“They’re not bluffing.”
“Why the sudden decision?”
“It’s no good, Lloyd. Bluff or no bluff, the fleet would have taken off as soon as they found the amplifier. The longer they wait, the closer we get to their velocity, and the more accurate our arrows get. They’ve been down too long. The ET has them.”
“I thought so all along. But why hasn’t he taken off?”
“In what? There’s nothing on Pluto but singleships. He can’t fly. He’s waiting for us.”
The conference was a vast relief to all. It also produced results. One result was that Woody Atwood spent a full thirty hours standing up in the airlock of the Iwo Jima.
Four million miles respectful had been good enough for the Belter fleet. It would have to do for Garner. His ship and one other came to an easy one-gee stop in mid-space. The third had taken a divergent path, and was now several hundred miles above the still-shrouded surface.
“It’s funny,” said Smoky. “Every time you decide one of our ships is expendable, it turns out to be a Belt ship.”
“Which ship would you have used, Old Smoky?”
“Don’t confuse me with logic.”
“Listen,” said Masney.
Faintly but clearly, the radio gave forth a rising and falling scream like an air raid siren.
“It’s the Lazy Eight’s distress signal,” said Anderson.
Number Six was now a robot. The Heinlein’s drive controls now operated the singleship’s drive, and Anderson pushed attitude jet buttons and pulled on the fuel throttle as he watched the Heinlein’s screen—which now looked through Number Six’s telescope. They had had to use the singleship, of course. A two-man Earth ship must be just what the ET desperately needed.
“Well, shall we take her down?”
Woody said, “Let’s see if Lew’s all right.”
Anderson guided the singleship over to where the lead ship circled Pluto, turned off the drive and used attitude jets to get even closer. At last he and four others looked directly through the frosted, jagged fragments of Lew’s control bubble. There were heat stains on the metal rim. Lew was there, a figure in a tall, narrow metal armor spacesuit; but he wasn’t moving. He was dead or paralyzed.
“We can’t do anything for him now,” said Smoky.
“Right,” said Luke. “No sense postponing the dreadful moment. Take ’er down.”
The distress signal was coming out of a field of unbroken snow.
Anderson had never worked harder in his life. Muttering ceaselessly under his breath, he held the ship motionless a mile over the distress signal while snow boiled and gave him way. Mist formed on the Heinlein’s screen, then fog. He turned on an infrared spotlight, and it helped, but not much. Smoky winced at some of the things young Anderson was saying. Suddenly Anderson was silent, and all five craned forward to see better.
The Golden Circle came out of the ice.
Anderson brought the singleship down as gently as he knew how. At the moment of contact the whole ship rang like a brass bell. The picture in the screen trembled wildly.
In the ensuing silence, a biped form climbed painfully through the topside airlock in the Golden Circle. It climbed down and moved toward them across the snow.
The honeymooner was no longer a spaceship, but she made an adequate meeting hall and hospital. Especially hospital, for of the ten men who faced each other around the crap table, only two were in good health.
Larry Greenberg, carrying a thrintun spacesuit on each shoulder, had returned to find the Golden Circle nearly buried in ice. The glassy sheathing over the top of the ship was twenty feet thick. He had managed to burn his way through the hard way, with a welder in his suit kit, but his fingers and toes were frostbitten when he uncovered the airlock. For nearly three days he had waited for treatment. He was very little pleased to find Number Six empty, but he had gotten his message across by showing the watchers at her scope screen. All’s safe; come down.
Smoky Petropoulos and Woody Atwood, doing all the work because they were still the only ones able, had moved the paralyzed Belters to the Golden Circle in the two-man ships. The four were still unable to use anything but their eyes and, now, their voices. Lew’s hands and wrists and feet and neck all had a roasted look where the skin showed through the blisters. His suit cooling system had been unable to cope with the heat during those seconds of immersion in flaming gases. If the gas hadn’t been so extremely thin, some plastic connection in his air pack or his cooling system would surely have melted—as he would tell eager listeners again and again in the years to come. But that was for later. Later, the others would remember that they had all been wearing suits because they’d been forced to break their windshields, and that if Smoky and Woody hadn’t found them that way they’d have starved in their ships. For now, they were safe.
Garner and Anderson were nearly over their induced paralysis, which now showed only in an embarrassing lack of coordination.
“So we all made it,” said Luke, beaming around at the company. “I was afraid the Last War would start on Pluto.”
“Me too,” said Lew. His voice was barely slurred. “We were afraid you wouldn’t take the hint when we couldn’t answer your calls. You might have decided that was some stupid piece of indirection.” He blinked and tightened his lips, dismissing the memory. “So what’ll we do with the spare suit?”
Now he had everybody’s attention. This was a meeting hall, and the suit was the main order of business.
“We can’t let Earth have it,” said Smoky. “They could open it. We don’t have their time stopper.” Without looking at Luke, he added, “Some inventions do have to be suppressed.”
“You could get it with a little research,” said Garner. “So—”
“Dump it on Jupiter,” Masney advised. “Strap it to the Heinlein’s hull and let Woody and me fly it. If we both come back alive you know it got dumped on schedule. Right?”
“Right,” said Lew. Garner nodded. Others in the lounge tasted the idea and found it good, despite the loss of knowledge which must be buried with the suit. Larry Greenberg, who had other objections, kept them to himself.
“All agreed?” Lew swept his eyes around the main lounge. “Okay. Now, which one is the amplifier?”
There was a full two seconds of dismayed silence.
Greenberg pointed. “The wrinkled one with both hands empty.”
Once it had been pointed out, the difference was obvious. The second suit had wrinkles and bumps and bulges; the limbs were twisted; it had no more personality than a sack. But the suit that was Kzanol—
It lay in one corner of the lounge, knees bent, disintegrator half raised. Even in the curious shape of arms and legs, and in the expressionless mirror of its face, one could read the surprise and consternation which must have been the thrint’s last emotions. There must have been fury too, frustrated fury that had been mounting since Kzanol first saw the fused, discolored spot which was the rescue switch on his second suit.
Garner tossed off his champagne, part of the stock from the honeymooner’s food stores. “So it’s settled. The Sea Statue goes back to the UN Comparative Cultures Exhibit. The treasure suit goes to Jupiter. I submit the Sun might be safer, but what the hell. Greenberg, where do you go?”
“Home. And then Jinx, I think.” Larry Greenberg wore what Lucas Garner decided was
a bittersweet smile, though even he never guessed what it meant. “They’ll never keep Judy and me away now. I’m the only man in the universe who can read bandersnatchi handwriting.”
Masney shook his head and started to laugh. He had a rumbling, helpless kind of laugh, as infectious as mumps. “Better not read their minds, Greenberg. You’ll end up as a whole space menagerie if you aren’t careful.”
Others took up the laughter, and Larry smiled with them, though only he knew how true were Masney’s words.
Or had Garner guessed? The old man was looking at him very strangely. If Garner guessed that, two billion years ago, Kzanol had taken a racarliw slave as a pet and souvenir—
Nonsense.
So only Larry would ever know. If the suit were opened it could start a war. With controlled hydrogen fusion as common today as electrical generators had been a century and a half back, any war might be the very last. So the suit had to go to Jupiter; and the doomed racarliw slave had to go with it, buried in dead, silent stasis for eternity.
Could Larry Greenberg have sacrificed an innocent sentient, even for such a purpose? To Larry plus dolphin plus thrint, it wasn’t even difficult.
Just a slave, whispered Kzanol. Small, stupid, ugly: worth half a commercial at best.
Can’t defend himself, thought Charley. He has no rights.
Larry made a mental note never to tell Judy, even by accident, and then went on to more pleasant thoughts.
What was he thinking? Garner wondered. He’s dropped it now; I might as well stop watching him.
But I’d give my soul if I could read minds for an hour, if I could pick the hour.
AT THE BOTTOM OF A HOLE
After more than a century of space travel, Man’s understanding of his own solar system was nearly complete. So he moved on to industrial development.
The next hundred years saw the evolution of a civilization in space. For reasons of economy the Belters concentrated on the wealth of the asteroids. With fusion-driven ships they could have mined the planets; but their techniques were more universally applicable in free fall and among the falling mountains. Only Mercury was rich enough to attract the Belt miners.
For a time Earth was the center of the space industries. But the lifestyles of Belter and flatlander were so different that a split was inevitable. The flatland phobia—the inability to tolerate even an orbital flight—was common on Earth, and remained so. And there were Belters who would never go anywhere near a planet.
Between Earth and the Belt there was economic wrestling, but never war. The cultures needed each other. And they were held together by a common bond: the conquest of the stars. The ramrobots—the unmanned Bussard ramjet probes—were launched during the mid twenty-first century.
By 2100 AD, five nearby solar systems held budding colonies: the worlds were Jinx, Wunderland, We Made It, Plateau, and Down. None of these worlds was entirely Earthlike. Those who programed the ramrobots had used insufficient imagination. Some results are detailed in this collection.
On Earth, three species of cetacean had been recognized as intelligent and admitted to the United Nations. Their lawsuit against the former whaling nations had not been resolved, and in fact never was. The cetaceans enjoyed the legal gymnastics too much ever to end it.
LN
Twelve stories below the roof gardens were citrus groves, grazing pastures, and truck farms. They curved out from the base of the hotel in neat little squares, curved out and up, and up, and up and over. Five miles overhead was the fusion sunlight tube, running down the radius of the slightly bulging cylinder that was Farmer’s Asteroid. Five miles above the sunlight tube, the sky was a patchwork of small squares, split by a central wedding ring of lake and by tributary rivers, a sky alive with the tiny red glints of self-guided tractors.
Lucas Garner was half-daydreaming, letting his eyes rove the solid sky. At the Belt government’s invitation he had entered a bubbleworld for the first time, combining a vacation from United Nations business with a chance at a brand new experience—a rare thing for a man seventeen decades old. He found it pleasantly kooky to look up into a curved sky of fused rock and imported topsoil.
“There’s nothing immoral about smuggling,” said Lit Shaeffer.
The surface overhead was dotted with hotels, as if the bubbleworld were turning to city. Garner knew it wasn’t. Those hotels, and the scattered hotels in the other bubbleworld, served every Belter’s occasional need for an Earthlike environment. Belters don’t need houses. A Belter’s home is the inside of his pressure suit.
Garner returned his attention to his host. “You mean smuggling’s like picking pockets on Earth?”
“That’s just what I don’t mean,” Shaeffer said. The Belter reached into his coverall pocket, pulled out something flat and black, and laid it on the table. “I’ll want to play that in a minute. Garner, picking pockets is legal on Earth. Has to be, the way you crowd together. You couldn’t enforce a law against picking pockets. In the Belt smuggling is against the law, but it isn’t immoral. It’s like a flatlander forgetting to feed the parking meter. There’s no loss of self-respect. If you get caught you pay the fine and forget it.”
“Oh.”
“If a man wants to send his earnings through Ceres, that’s up to him. It costs him a straight thirty percent. If he thinks he can get past the goldskins, that too is his choice. But if we catch him we’ll confiscate his cargo, and everybody will be laughing at him. Nobody pities an inept smuggler.”
“Is that what Muller tried to do?”
“Yah. He had a valuable cargo, twenty kilos of pure north magnetic poles. The temptation was too much for him. He tried to get past us, and we picked him up on radar. Then he did something stupid. He tried to whip around a hole.
“He must have been on course for Luna when we found him. Ceres was behind him with the radar. Our ships were ahead of him, matching course at two gee. His mining ship wouldn’t throw more than point five gee, so eventually they’d pull alongside him no matter what he did. Then he noticed Mars was just ahead of him.”
“The hole.” Garner knew enough Belters to have learned a little of their slang.
“The very one. His first instinct must have been to change course. Belters learn to avoid gravity wells. A man can get killed half a dozen ways coming too close to a hole. A good autopilot will get him safely around it, or program an in-and-out spin, or even land him at the bottom, God forbid. But miners don’t carry good autopilots. They carry cheap autopilots, and they stay clear of holes.”
“You’re leading up to something,” Garner said regretfully. “Business?”
“You’re too old to fool.”
Sometimes Garner believed that himself. Sometime between the First World War and the blowing of the second bubbleworld, Garner had learned to read faces as accurately as men read print. Often it saved time—and in Garner’s view his time was worth saving.
“Go on,” he said.
“Muller’s second thought was to use the hole. An in-and-out spin would change his course more than he could hope to do with the motor. He could time it so Mars would hide him from Ceres when he curved out. He could damn near touch the surface, too. Mars’s atmosphere is as thin as a flatlander’s dreams.”
“Thanks a lot. Lit, isn’t Mars UN property?”
“Only because we never wanted it.”
Then Muller had been trespassing. “Go on. What happened to Muller?”
“I’ll let him tell it. This is his log.” Lit Shaeffer did something to the flat box, and a man’s voice spoke.
April 20, 2112
The sky is flat, the land is flat, and they meet in a circle at infinity. No star shows but the big one, a little bigger than it shows through most of the Belt, but dimmed to red, like the sky.
It’s the bottom of a hole, and I must have been crazy to risk it. But I’m here. I got down alive. I didn’t expect to, not there at the end.
It was one crazy landing.
Imagine a universe h
alf of which has been replaced by an ocher abstraction, too distant and far too big to show meaningful detail, moving past you at a hell of a clip. A strange, singing sound comes through the walls, like nothing you’ve ever heard before, like the sound of the wings of the angel of death. The walls are getting warm. You can hear the thermosystem whining even above the shriek of air whipping around the hull. Then, because you don’t have enough problems, the ship shakes itself like a mortally wounded dinosaur.
That was my fuel tanks tearing loose. All at once and nothing first, the four of them sheered their mooring bars and went spinning down ahead of me, cherry red.
That faced me with two bad choices. I had to decide fast. If I finished the hyperbola I’d be heading into space on an unknown course with what fuel was left in my inboard cooling tank. My lifesystem wouldn’t keep me alive more than two weeks. There wasn’t much chance I could get anywhere in that time, with so little fuel, and I’d seen to it the goldskins couldn’t come to me.
But the fuel in the cooling tank would get me down. Even the ships of Earth use only a little of their fuel getting in and out of their pet gravity well. Most of it gets burned getting them from place to place fast. And Mars is lighter than Earth.
But what then? I’d still have two weeks to live.
I remembered the old Lacis Solis base, deserted seventy years ago. Surely I could get the old lifesystems working well enough to support one man. I might even find enough water to turn some into hydrogen by electrolysis. It was a better risk than heading out into nowhere.
Right or wrong, I went down.
The stars are gone, and the land around me makes no sense. Now I know why they call planet dwellers “flatlanders.” I feel like a gnat on a table.
I’m sitting here shaking, afraid to step outside.
Beneath a red-black sky is a sea of dust punctuated by scattered, badly cast glass ashtrays. The smallest, just outside the port, are a few inches in diameter. The largest are miles across. As I came down the deep-radar showed me fragments of much larger craters deep under the dust. The dust is soft and fine, almost like quicksand. I came down like a feather, but the ship is buried to halfway up the lifesystem.