Where in blazes were the police? On the other side of the planet?
Stalemate.
Big Mira came as a timorous peeping Tom, poking its rim over the mountains like red smoke. The land brightened, taking on tinges of lavender against long, long navy blue shadows. The shadows shortened and became vague.
The morality of his position was beginning to bother Dr. Richard Mann.
In attacking the pirates, he had done his duty as a citizen. The pirates had sullied humanity’s hard-won reputation for honesty. Mann had struck back.
But his motive? Fear had been two parts of that motive. First, the fear that Captain Kidd might decide to shut his mouth. Second, the fear of being poor.
That fear had been with him for some time.
Write a book and make a fortune! It looked good on paper. The thirty-light-year sphere of human space contained nearly fifty billion readers. Persuade one percent of them to shell out half a star each for a disposable tape, and your four-percent royalties became twenty million stars. But most books nowadays were flops. You had to scream very loud nowadays to get the attention of even ten billion readers. Others were trying to drown you out.
Before Captain Kidd, that had been Richard Schultz-Mann’s sole hope of success.
He’d behaved within the law. Captain Kidd couldn’t make that claim; but Captain Kidd hadn’t killed anybody.
Mann sighed. He’d had no choice. His major motive was honor, and that motive still held.
He moved restlessly in his nest of damp moss/wool. The day was heating up, and his suit’s temperature control would not work with half a suit.
What was that?
It was the Puppet Master, moving effortlessly toward him on its lifters. The Jinxian must have decided to get it under water before the human law arrived.
…Or had he?
Mann adjusted his lift motor until he was just short of weightless, then moved cautiously around the spire. He saw the four pirates moving to intersect the Puppet Master. They’d see him if he left the spire. But if he stayed, those infrared detectors…
He’d have to chance it.
The suit’s padded shoulders gouged his armpits as he streaked toward the second spire. He stopped in midair over the moss and dropped, burrowed in it. The pirates didn’t swerve.
Now he’d see.
The ship slowed to a stop over the spire he’d just left.
“Can you hear me, Rich Mann?”
Mann nodded gloomily to himself. Definitely, that was it.
“I should have tried this before. Since you’re nowhere in sight, you’ve either left the vicinity altogether or you’re hiding in the thick bushes around those towers.”
Should he try to keep dodging from spire to spire? Or could he outfly them?
At least one was bound to be faster. The armor increased his weight.
“I hope you took the opportunity to examine this tower. It’s fascinating. Very smooth, stony surface, except at the top. A perfect cone, also except at the top. You listening? The tip of this thing swells from an eight-foot neck into an egg-shaped knob fifteen feet across. The knob isn’t polished as smooth as the rest of it. Vaguely reminiscent of an asparagus spear, wouldn’t you say?”
Richard Schultz-Mann cocked his head, tasting an idea.
He unscrewed his helmet, ripped out and pocketed the radio. In frantic haste he began ripping out double handfuls of the yellow moss/wool, stuffed them into a wad in the helmet, and turned his lighter on it. At first the vegetation merely smoldered, while Mann muttered through clenched teeth. Then it caught with a weak blue smokeless flame. Mann placed his helmet in a mossy nest, setting it so it would not tip over and spill its burning contents.
“I’d have said a phallic symbol, myself. What do you think, Rich Mann? If these are phallic symbols, they’re pretty well distorted. Humanoid but not human, you might say.”
The pirates had joined their ship. They hovered around its floating silver bulk, ready to drop on him when the Puppet Master’s infrared detectors found him.
Mann streaked away to the west on full acceleration, staying as low as he dared. The spire would shield him for a minute or so, and then…
“This vegetation isn’t stage trees, Rich Mann. It looks like some sort of grass from here. Must need something in the rock they made these erections out of. Mph. No hot spots. You’re not down there after all. Well, we try the next one.”
Behind him, in the moments when he dared look back, Mann saw the Puppet Master move to cover the second spire, the one he’d left a moment ago, the one with a gray streak in the moss at its base. Four humanoid dots clustered loosely above the ship.
“Peekaboo,” came the Jinxian’s voice. “And good-bye, killer.”
The Puppet Master’s fusion drive went on. Fusion flame lashed out in a blue-white spear, played down the side of the pillar and into the moss/wool below. Mann faced forward and concentrated on flying. He felt neither elation nor pity, but only disgust. The Jinxian was a fool after all. He’d seen no life on Mira Ceti-T but for the stage trees, He had Mann’s word that there was none. Couldn’t he reach the obvious conclusion? Perhaps the moss/wool had fooled him. It certainly did look like yellow moss, clustering around the spires as if it needed some chemical element in the stone.
A glance back told him that the pirate ship was still spraying white flame over the spire and the foliage below. He’d have been a cinder by now. The Jinxian must want him extremely dead. Well—
The spire went all at once. It sat on the lavender plain in a hemisphere of multicolored fire, engulfing the other spires and the Jinxian ship; and then it began to expand and rise. Mann adjusted his attitude to vertical to get away from the ground. A moment later the shock wave slammed into him and blew him tumbling over the desert.
Two white ropes of smoke rose straight up through the dimming explosion cloud. The other spires were taking off while still green! Fire must have reached the foliage at their bases.
Mann watched them go with his head thrown back and his body curiously loose in the vacuum armor. His expression was strangely contented. At these times he could forget himself and his ambitions in the contemplation of immortality.
Two knots formed simultaneously in the rising smoke trails. Second stage on. They rose very fast now.
“Rich Mann.”
Mann flicked his transmitter on. “You’d live through anything.”
“Not I. I can’t feel anything below my shoulders. Listen, Rich Mann, I’ll trade secrets with you. What happened?”
“The big towers are stage trees.”
“Uh?” Half question, half an expression of agony.
“A stage tree has two life cycles. One is the bush, the other is the big multistage form.” Mann talked fast, fearful of losing his audience. “The forms alternate. A stage tree seed lands on a planet and grows into a bush. Later there are lots of bushes. When a seed hits a particularly fertile spot, it grows into a multistage form. You still there?”
“Yuh.”
“In the big form the living part is the tap root and the photosynthetic organs around the base. That way the rocket section doesn’t have to carry so much weight. It grows straight up out of the living part, but it’s as dead as the center of an oak except for the seed at the top. When it’s ripe, the rocket takes off. Usually it’ll reach terminal velocity for the system it’s in. Kidd, I can’t see your ship; I’ll have to wait till the smoke—”
“Just keep talking.”
“I’d like to help.”
“Too late. Keep talking.”
“I’ve tracked the stage trees across twenty light-years of space. God knows where they started. They’re all through the systems around here. The seed pods spend hundreds of thousands of years in space; and when they enter a system, they explode. If there’s a habitable world, one seed is bound to hit it. If there isn’t, there’s lots more pods where that one came from. It’s immortality, Captain Kidd. This one plant has traveled farther than mankind, and it’s much older. A
billion and a—”
“Mann.”
“Yah.”
“Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nil. I don’t know its name on the star charts. Shall I repeat that?”
Mann forgot the stage trees. “Better repeat it.”
“Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nothing. Hunt in that area till you find it. It’s a red giant, undersized. Planet is small, dense, no moon.”
“Got it.”
“You’re stupid if you use it. You’ll have the same luck I did. That’s why I told you.”
“I’ll use blackmail.”
“They’ll kill you. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said. Why’d you kill me, Rich Mann?”
“I didn’t like your remarks about my beard. Never insult a Wunderlander’s asymmetric beard, Captain Kidd.”
“I won’t do it again.”
“I’d like to help.” Mann peered into the billowing smoke. Now it was a black pillar tinged at the edges by the twin sunlight. “Still can’t see your ship.”
“You will in a moment.”
The pirate moaned…and Mann saw the ship. He managed to turn his head in time to save his eyes.
This is the story that joined early Known Space to late Known Space; and all for the sake of a practical joke. Stage tree logs belong to the Slaver Empire and thus to WORLD OF PTAVVS. Easy interstellar travel belonged to the Beowulf Shaeffer era.
I wanted to watch a bonfire made from stage tree logs. In a previous life I expect I was a pyromaniac.
Some day I will come to a WorldCon wearing a proper asymmetric beard. I’ve been planning this for some time…and never quite found the courage.
• • •
• • •
From LUCIFER’S HAMMER
[with JERRY POURNELLE]
LUCIFER’S HAMMER began as an alien invasion novel.
Jerry and I had written two novels together: THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE and INFERNO. The editor who bought both for Pocket Books was Bob Gleason.
One day Jerry got a phone call from New York. He told me about it later. “Bob Gleason thinks we should write a novel about an alien invasion of Earth.”
I laughed long and hard. “I hope you broke it to him gently that it’s been done.”
“Yeah, but he says it hasn’t been done well since The War of the Worlds.”
Gleason had convinced Jerry. Jerry convinced me. We began planning the invasion of Earth.
We needed an intelligent species who would have the horsepower to cross several-to-many light-years and arrive with intent to conquer an unknown planet. Not a trivial problem. A species with that much energy at hand would be better advised to make more room for themselves: to build O’Neall colonies or Dyson shells, instead of crossing interstellar space to be shot at. By the time they got here, they’d want Jupiter, not Earth.
One bit of military strategy was instantly obvious. With an interstellar spacecraft capable of carrying enough troops and weaponry to conquer a world, and enough people to hold what they’ve taken, they can damn sure move a medium asteroid.
So we wrote it into the outline: a major asteroid impact, with all the predictable results. We examined a globe I keep in my office and decided to let the invaders drop it in the Indian Ocean, then invade South Africa. [Jerry had been to South Africa.]
Meanwhile Bob Gleason had moved to Playboy Books.
We sent him our outline anyway. His answer was, “Forget aliens. Write about giant meteoroid impact.”
Two points now. First, if the asteroid isn’t being guided, then that’s a whole different game. Second, the Earth is at least as likely to be hit by a comet nucleus as by an asteroid. Earth has been tracing its orbit for five billion years. Most of the asteroids that could hit us did it early. Life on Earth may have been destroyed more than once—and we worked all of this out before the Alvarezes got into the act. More on them later.
We picked a comet because I like comets, because I already knew quite a lot about them, and for visuals. Our unhappy protagonists would see it coming. We called it Lucifer’s Hammer, and never argued about the title. The discoverer of the comet we named Tim Hamner, for the comet itself.
Impact craters are always circular. One afternoon we spun that globe of the Earth and put circles around everything that looked vaguely circular. I put two interlocked circles on the Gulf of Mexico. A few years later, some geologists announced their theory that a pair of asteroid strikes had carved the seabed there.
My father and stepmother owned part of a working ranch near Centerville. Five families traded it off as a vacation spot. Jerry and I borrowed the place and visited it twice, for research. The River Valley Ranch became the Stronghold.
Some of our friends entered the book as characters. Frank Gasperik became Mark Czescu. We’d heard Frank play his song, “Culture”; we bought the right to publish it. Dan Alderson became Dan Forrester; we asked him for advice on what he would do if the Hammer fell.
When we sent Bob Gleason a partial draft, he suggested alterations that drove us nearly berserk.
Bob came out to California. Mellowed by a fine dinner at Mon Grenier (our favorite restaurant, mentioned in the book), we returned to the house. We left all wives downstairs and went up to my office to fight.
Jerry and I hit him in stereo. We didn’t want any of his changes. Bob was forced to agree with us on every point.
After Bob went home, we talked it over, then…
Most editors can’t tell you how to fix a problem; but where the editor sees a problem, something needs fixing. We followed Bob’s way about half the time. We made corrections every time.
HAMMER was six months overdue. It always seems a book is taking too long. We worked hard during that Christmas season: a thing I resented. I didn’t become a writer to work!
Wherever I’ve quoted from a collaboration in this book, it is always true that that passage was rewritten by both of us until it was right. Here I give examples, but take it for granted elsewhere.
The Hot Fudge Sundae lecture emerged from one of our crazier planning sessions. Jerry played with his hand calculator and it just rolled out.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
“Tell us, what would happen if the comet did hit us? Suppose we got unlucky.”
“You mean the head? The nucleus? Because it looks as if we might actually pass through the outer coma. Which is nothing more than gas.”
“No, I mean the head. What happens? The end of the world?”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that. Probably the end of civilization.”
There was silence in the room for a moment. Then for another. “But,” Harvey said, his voice puzzled, “Dr. Sharps, you told me that a comet, even the head, is largely foamy ice with rocks in it. And even the ice is frozen gases. That doesn’t sound dangerous.” In fact, Harvey thought, I asked to get it on the record.
“Several heads,” Dan Forrester said. “At least it looks that way. I think it’s beginning to calve already. And if it does it now, it will do it later. Probably. Maybe.”
“So it’s even less dangerous,” Harvey said.
Sharps wasn’t listening to Harvey. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Calving already?”
Forrester’s grin widened. “Ook ook.”
Then he noticed Harvey Randall again. “You asked about danger,” he said. “Let’s look at it. We have several masses, largely the same material that boils off to form the coma and the tail: fine dust, foamy frozen gases, with pockets where the really volatile stuff has been long gone, and maybe a few rocks embedded in there. Hey—” Randall looked up at Forrester.
Forrester was grinning his cherubic smile. “That’s probably why it’s so bright already. Some of the gases are interacting. Think what we’ll see when they really get to boiling near the Sun! Ook ook.”
Sharps was getting that thoughtful, lost look again. Harvey said quickly, “Dr. Sharps—”
“Oh. Yes
, certainly. What happens if it hits? Which it won’t. Well, what makes the nucleus dangerous is that it’s big, and it’s coming fast. Enormous energies.”
“Because of the rocks?” Harvey asked. Rocks he could understand. “How big are those rocks?”
“Not very,” Forrester said. “But that’s theory—”
“Right.” Sharps was aware of the camera again. “That’s why we need the probe. We don’t know. But I’d guess the rocks are small, from the size of a baseball to the size of a small hill.”
Harvey felt relief. That couldn’t be dangerous. A small hill?
“But of course that doesn’t matter,” Sharps said. “They’ll be embedded in the frozen gases and water ice. It would all hit as several solid masses. Not as a lot of little chunks.”
Harvey paused to think that over. This film would take careful editing. “It still doesn’t sound dangerous. Even nickel-iron meteors usually burn out long before they hit the ground. In fact, in all history there’s only been one recorded case of anyone being harmed by a meteor.”
“Sure, that lady in Alabama,” Forrester said. “It got her picture in Life. Wow, that was the biggest bruise I ever saw. Wasn’t there a lawsuit? Her landlady said it was her meteor because it ended up in her basement.”
Harvey said, “Look. Hamner-Brown will hit atmosphere a lot harder than any normal meteorite, and it’s mostly ice. The masses will burn faster, won’t they?”
He saw two shaking heads: a thin face wearing insectile glasses, and a thick bushy beard above thick glasses. And over against the wall Mark was shaking his head too. Sharps said, “They’d bore through quicker. When the mass is above a certain size, it stops being important whether Earth has an atmosphere or not.”
“Except to us,” Forrester said, deadpan.
Sharps paused a second, then laughed. Politely, Harvey thought, but it was done carefully. Sharps took pains to avoid offending Forrester. “What we need is a good analogy. Um…” Sharps’s brow furrowed.
“Hot fudge sundae,” said Forrester.
“Hah?”
Forrester’s grin was wide through his beard. “A cubic mile of hot fudge sundae. Cometary speeds.”