“You’re right. That’s not funny.”
“I’m in dead earnest. And don’t forget to compensate for low gravity.”
“How are you going to give the word with a mouthful of saliva?”
“Just spit when I do. Okay?”
Jason’s shot brushed the kzin’s furry scalp. Anne-Marie’s caught him square in the ear. The kzin came to his feet with a howl. Then, as both humans cleared their throats again, the kzin moved like lightning. The air stiffened about their heads.
The Kzin contemptuously returned to his crouch against a wall.
It became hard to breathe.
Blinking was a slow, excruciating process. Talking was out of the question. Warm air, laden with CO2, did not want to dissipate. It stayed before their faces, waiting to be inhaled again and again. The Kzin watched them struggle.
Jason forced his eyes closed. Blinking had become too painful. He tried to remember that he’d planned this, that it had worked perfectly. Their heads and bodies were now entirely enclosed by the police web.
Now here’s my plan.
“The puppeteer ran east,” said Chuft-Captain. And he turned west. He didn’t want to kill the puppeteer without knowing it.
The weapon was hard and awkward in his hand. He was a little afraid of it, and a little ashamed of being afraid: a hangover from that awful moment when the weapon spoke. There were ghost legends among the kzinti. Some of the most fearsome spoke of captured weapons haunted by their dead owners.
Nobles weren’t supposed to be superstitious, not out loud.
A computer that could learn new languages was logical. The only way to reach the setting for the matter-conversion beam had been to ask the computer setting, and that was logical too. A matter-conversion beam was a dangerous secret.
Briefly, Chuft-Captain wondered about that. It seemed that for an honorable kzin every recent change was a change for the worse. The conquest of space had ended when kzinti met humans. Then had come the puppeteers with their trade outposts; any kzin who attacked a puppeteer invariably found himself not harmed physically, but ruined financially. No kzin could fight power like that. Would the tnuctip weapon reverse these changes?
There had been a time, between the discoveries of atomic power and the gravity polarizer, when it seemed the kzinti species would destroy itself in wars. Now the kzinti held many worlds, and the danger was past. But was it? A matter-conversion beam…
There is no turning away from knowledge.
Haunted weapons…
He stopped on a rise of permafrost some distance from the ship. By now half the sky was blood red. An arm of the hydrogen spiral was sweeping across the world, preparing to engulf it. Hours or days from now the arm would pass, moving outward on the wings of photon pressure, leaving the world with a faintly thicker atmosphere.
But we’ll be long gone by then, Chuft-Captain thought. Already he was looking ahead to the problem of reaching Kzin. If human ships caught the Traitor’s Claw entering Kzin’s atmosphere, the kzinti would clearly be violating treaty rules. But they weren’t likely to be caught, not if Flyer did everything right.
“Chuft-Captain, this setting has no gunsight.”
“No? You’re right, it doesn’t.” He considered. “Perhaps it was meant only for large targets. A world seen from close up. The explosion was fierce.”
“Or its accuracy may be low. Or its range. I wonder. Logically the tnuctipun should have included at least a pair of notches for sighting.”
Something’s wrong. The danger instinct whispered in his ear. “Superstition,” he snarled, and raised the weapon stiffly, aiming well above the horizon. “Let us find the answer,” he said.
In this area of Cue Ball the ice had melted and refrozen. It was as flat as a calm lake.
Nessus had stopped at the edge. He’d faced around, stopped again, held the pose for several minutes, then faced back and started across the flat, red-tinged ice. Muscles rippled beneath his pressure suit.
It wasn’t as if he expected to help his human employees. They had gotten themselves into this. And he had neither weapons nor allies nor even stealth to aid him. A human infantryman could have crawled on his belly, but Nessus’ legs weren’t built that way. On a white plain with no cover he had to trot upright, bouncing gaily in the low gravity.
His only weapon was his hind leg.
Thinking that, he remembered the jarring impact as he had planted his foot in the kzin’s side. Two hundred and forty pounds of charging puppeteer applied over five square inches of clawed space boot. The shock wave had jarred up through thigh and hip and spine, jerked at his skull and continued along the necks to snap his teeth shut with a sharp double click. Like kicking a mountain, a soft but solid mountain.
The next instant he was running, really terrified for the first time in his life. But behind him the Kzin had vented a long whistling scream and folded tightly around himself…
Nessus went on. He’d trotted across the frozen lake without seeing kzinti or kzinti ship. Now the ice was beginning to swell and dip. He’d reached the periphery of the blast area. Now there was a touch of yellow light ahead. Small and faint, but unmistakably yellow against the pink ice.
Ship lights.
He went on. He’d never know why. He’d never admit it to himself.
Thock! Hind boot slamming solidly into hard meat. Whistling shriek of agony between sharp-filed carnivore teeth.
He wanted to do it again. Nessus had the blood lust.
He went up a rise, moving slowly, though his feet wanted to dance. He was weaponless, but his suit was a kind of defense. No projectile short of a fast meteorite could harm him. Like a silicone plastic, the pressure suit was soft and malleable under gentle pressures, such as walking, but it instantly became rigid all over when something struck it.
He topped the rise.
The ship lights might have come from the Court Jester. They didn’t. Nessus saw the airlock opening, and he charged down the slope so the next rise hid him from view.
The kzinti ship was down. They must have landed with the gravity polarizer; otherwise he would have seen them. If they had then captured Jason on foot, he might still be alive. He might not. The same went for Anne-Marie.
Now what? The kzinti ship was beyond this next rise of ice. At least one kzin was outside. Were they looking for him? No, they’d hardly expect him here!
He had reached the trough between the two swells. They were long and shallow and smooth, like waves near an ocean shoreline.
The top of the swell behind Nessus suddenly sparkled with harsh blue-white sunlight.
Nessus knew just what to do, and he did it instantly. No point in covering his cranial bulge with his necks; he’d only get his larynxes crushed. The padding would protect his brain, or it wouldn’t. He folded his legs under him and tucked his heads tight between his forelegs. He didn’t have to think about it. The puppeteer’s explosion reflex was no less a reflex for being learned in childhood.
He saw the light, he curled into a ball, and the ground swell came. It batted him like a beach ball. His rigid, form-fitting shell retained his shape. It could not prevent the ground swell from slamming him away, nor his brain from jarring under its thick skull and its extra padding.
He woke on his back with his legs in the air. There was a tingly ache along his right side and on the right sides of his necks and legs. Half his body surface would be one bruise tomorrow. The ground still heaved; he must have been unconscious for only a moment.
He clambered shakily to his feet. The claws were an enormous help on the smooth ice. He shook himself once, then started up the rise.
Suddenly and silently the kzinti ship topped the rise. A quarter of a mile down the swell it slid gracefully into space in a spray of ice. It was rotating on its axis, and Nessus could see that one side was red hot. It skimmed through the near-vacuum above the trough, seeming to drift rather than fall. It hit solidly on the shallow far rise and plowed to a stop.
Still uprigh
t. 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.”
The Slaver weapon is “soft” as Salvador Dali used the word: it changes shape. Those are “soft” watches in Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory.”
See “The Lost Ideas” for details on how this typical early-Niven puzzle story became a Star Trek animation called “The Slaver Weapon.” I thought hard before giving the Kzinti to the Star Trek universe. I did it because I thought it would be fun to see what others would do with them. And I was right!
• • •
• • •
Yet the paintings had impact…the tour stopped before a street scene. Here a Brown-and-white had climbed on a car and was apparently haranguing a swarm of Browns and Brown-and-whites, while behind him the sky burned sunset-red. The expressions were all the same flat smile, but Renner sensed violence and looked closer. Many of the crowd carried tools, always in their left hands, and some were broken. The city itself was on fire.
“It’s called ‘Return to Your Tasks.’ You’ll find that the Crazy Eddie theme recurs constantly,” said Sally’s Motie.
THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE, 1974
THE BORDERLAND OF SOL
The organ bank problem remained an important social factor for most of the colony worlds. On Jinx it was unimportant; there was too much empty land for felons to flee to. On Plateau it created a hideous social stratification, vestiges of which remained long after ramrobot packages ended the organ bank problem itself.
Sol had its own problems. The Kzinti had discovered and conquered Wunderland and were on their way to Earth.
For a time the situation was touchy. Sol held off the Kzinti by virtue of two accidents: the timely development of manned Bussard ramjets (“The Ethics of Madness”) and the existence of giant laser cannon in the outer asteroids. These had been used to launch light-sail craft to Bussard ramjet speeds; now they were turned on the Kzinti. The Kzinti were amazed and hurt. Their telepaths had reported a species given over entirely to peace.
While Sol battled the Kzinti, an Outsider ship had arrived at We Made It. The Outsiders were interstellar traders, fragile, cold beings. They sold the secret of the faster-than-light drive to the human colony on We Made It. Two years later, a ship powered by the Outsider hyperdrive arrived in Sol system. The crew had not known of the war. They were amazed at their heroes’ welcome.
It was the Outsiders’ faster-than-light drive that ended the first Man–Kzin War. The second, third, and fourth are hardly worth discussing. The Kzinti always had a tendency to attack before they were quite ready.
The hyperdrive also opened up known space. There were other intelligent species around: Grogs, Bandersnatchi, Pierson’s Puppeteers, Kdatlyno. An interstellar, interspecies civilization developed…and tales of that time are
told in Neutron Star, the other known space collection.
Beowulf Shaeffer was a child of that time. A wandering crashlander, he was generally too lazy to stay out of trouble, but bright enough to think his way out once he was in. It was he who discovered that the galactic core was exploding…that within twenty thousand years, humanity would have to move elsewhere.
The following is the fifth of the tales of Beowulf Shaeffer.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Three months on Jinx, marooned.
I played tourist for the first couple of months. I never saw the high-pressure regions around the ocean because the only way down would have been with a safari of hunting tanks. But I traveled the habitable lands on either side of the sea, the East Band civilized, the West Band a developing frontier. I wandered the East End in a vacuum suit, toured the distilleries and other vacuum industries, and stared up into the orange vastness of Primary, Jinx’s big twin brother.
I spent most of the second month between the Institute of Knowledge and the Camelot Hotel. Tourism had palled.
For me that’s unusual. I’m a born tourist. But—
Jinx’s one point seven eight gravities put an unreasonable restriction on elegance and ingenuity in architectural design. The buildings in the habitable bands all look alike: squat and massive.
The East and West Ends, the vacuum regions, aren’t that different from any industrialized moon. I never developed much of an interest in touring factories.
As for the ocean shorelines, the only vehicles that go there go to hunt Bandersnatchi. The Bandersnatchi are freaks: enormous, intelligent white slugs the size of mountains. They hunt the tanks. There are rigid restrictions to the equipment the tanks can carry, covenants established between men and Bandersnatchi, so that the Bandersnatchi win about forty percent of the duels. I wanted no part of that.
And all my touring had to be done in three times the gravity of my homeworld.
I spent the third month in Sirius Mater, and most of that in the Camelot Hotel, which has gravity generators in most of the rooms. When I went out, I rode a floating contour couch. I passed like an invalid among the Jinxians, who were amused. Or was that my imagination?