The World of Ptavvs (21 page)

"Not unless he's telepathic."

It was a tricky decision for a clerk. Maser messages cost like uranium, less because of the power needed and the wear and tear on the delicate machines than because of the difficulty of finding the .target. But only Garner could decide whether an undependable "hunch" was important to him. The clerk risked his job and sent the message.

The fire had slowed now. Most of the unburned hydrogen had been blown before the fire, until it was congested into a cloud mass opposite on Pluto from the resting place of the *Golden Circle*. Around that cloud bank raged a hurricane of awesome proportions. Frozen rain poured out of the heavens in huge lens-shaped drops, hissing into the nitrogen snow. The layers above nitrogen were gone, vaporized, gas diluting the hydrogen which still poured in. On the borderline hydrogen burned fitfully with halogens, and even with nitrogen to form ammonia, but around most of the great circle the fires had gone out. Relatively small, isolated conflagrations ate their way toward the new center. The "hot" water ice continued to fall. When it had boiled the nitrogen away it would begin on the oxygen. And then there would be a fire.

At the center of the hurricane the ice stood like a tremendous Arizona butte. Even the halogens were still frozen across its flat top, thousands of square miles of fluorine ice with near-vacuum above. Coriolis effects

held back the burning wind for a time.

On the other side of the world, Kzanol stepped out of the *Golden Circle*.

He turned once to look back. The honeymoon ship was flat on her belly. Her landing gear was retracted, and a wide, smooth crater was centered under the drive exhaust cone. Star-hot hydrogen had leaked from the fusion tube for some time after its fuel was cut off. The fuselage was twisted, though not broken. Her forward wings had been jarred open, and now hung broken from their sockets. One tip of the triangular major wing curled up where it had stabbed against rock-hard ice.

She was doomed, she was useless. Kzanol walked on. The thrintun space suit was a marvelous assemblage of tools. No changes had been made in it for centuries before Kzanol's time, for the design had long been perfect, but for an unsuspected flaw in the emergency systems, and the naive thrintun had never reached that level of sophistication which produces planned obsolescence. The temperature inside the suit was perfect, even a little warmer than in the ship.

But the suit could not compensate for the wearer's imagination. Kzanol felt the outer chill as his ship fell behind. Miles-thick blankets of nitrogen and oxygan snow had boiled away here, leaving bubbly permafrost which showed dark and deep green in the light of his helmet lamp. There was fog, too, not dense but very deep, a single bank that stretched halfway around the world. The fog narrowed his universe to a circular patch of bubbly ice.

Moving in great, easy flying hops, he reached the first rise of the crescent in forty minutes. It was six miles from the ship. The crescent was now a slightly higher rise of permafrost, scarred and pitted from the fire that had crossed it. Kzanol's portable radar, borrowed from the *Circle*'s lockers, showed his goal straight ahead at the limit of its range. About a mile ahead, and almost a thousand feet deep in permafrost.

Kzanol began to climb the slope.

***

"We're out of arrows," the man in Number Two ship said gloomily. He meant missiles. "How do we protect ourselves?"

Lew said, "We'll be on our way home before Garner comes within sniffing distance of Pluto. The best he can do is shoot at us as we pass. His arrows aren't good enough to hit us when we're moving that fast, except by accident. He knows it. He won't even try, because it might start the Last War."

"He may decide the stakes are high enough."

"Danimit, Tartov, what choice have we got? Garner must not be allowed to leave here with that amplifier! If he does, we'll see a period of slavery such as nobody has even dreamd of up to now," Lew exhaled noisily through his nostrils. "We've got to go down and destroy the thing by hand. Land on the dawn side and mount an expedition. Hexter, can you dismount a ship's radar so it'll still work?"

"Sure, Lew. But it'll take two men to carry it."

Tartov said, "You miss my point. Of course we've got to wreck the damn amplifier. But how can we prove to Garner that we did wreck it? Why should he trust us?"

Lew ran spatulate fingers through tangled cotton hair. "My apologies, Tartov. That's a damn good question. Comments?"

***

Kzanol aimed the disintegrator thirty degrees downward and flipped the firing switch.

The tunnel formed fast. Kzanol couldn't see how fast. for there was nothing but darkness inside after the first second. A minor hurricane blew out of the tunnel. He leaned against the wind as against a wall. In the narrow cone of the beam the "wind" was clear, but beyond the edge it was a dust storm. The wind was dust, too, icy dust torn to particles of two and three molecules each by the mutual repulsion of the nuclei.

After ten minutes Kzanol decided the tunnel must be getting too wide. The opening was less than a foot across; he used the disintegrator to enlarge it. Even when he turned off the digging tool he couldn't see very far into it.

After a moment he walked into the darkness.

***

With his left hand Larry reached out and shook the pilot's shoulder. Nothing. It was like a wax figure. He would probably have felt the same way. But the man's cheek was cool. He was not paralyzed, but dead.

Somewhere in the back of his mind was Judy. It was different from the way it had been in the past. Now, he believed it. Even when separated by over three billion miles, he and Judy were somehow aware of each other. But no more than that.

He couldn't tell her anything. He couldn't warn her that the Bug Eyed Whoosis was hours or minutes from owning the Earth.

The pilot couldn't help him. He had had an instant to make a choice, that professional hauler of millionaires, and he had made first a right choice and then a wrong one. He had decided to die, killing everyone aboard ship, and that was right. But he should have turned off the fusion shield, not the fuel feed! Now he was dead, and Kzanol was loose.

It was his fault. Without Larry Greenberg, Kzanol would have been blasted to gas when he made turnover for Pluto. He'd never have known the suit was on Pluto! The knowledge was galling.

Where was his mind shield? Two hours ago he had held an impenetrable telepathic wall, a shield that had stood up to Kzanol's most furious efforts. Now he couldn't remember how he'd done it. He was capable of it, he knew that, and if he could hold it.

No, it was gone. Some memory, some thrintun memory. Well, let's see. He'd been in Masney's office when the thrint had screamed at everybody to shut off their minds. His mind shield had-- but it had already been there. Somehow he had already known how to use it. He had known ever since.

***

Sunflowers eight feet across. They turned round and round, following the sun as it circled the plantation at Kzathxt's??? pole. Great silver paraboloid platters sending concentrated sunlight to their dark green photosynthetic nodes. Flexible mirrors mounted on thick bulging stalks, mirrors that could ripple gently to put the deadly focus wherever they wanted it: on a rebellious slave or a wild animal or an attacking enemy thrint. That focus was as deadly as a laser cannon, and the sunflowers never missed. For some reason they never attacked members of the House they protected.

In the grounded luxury liner, Larry Greenberg tingled. Fish on fire! The sunflowers must have been controlled by the tnuctipun house slaves! He had not the slightest proof, but he knew. On a day in the past, every sunflower in the galaxy must have turned on its owner. He thought, We thrintun-- those thrintun really set themselves up. Suckers!

Remembering again, he saw that the sunflowers weren't as big as they looked. He was seeing them from Kzanol's viewpoint. Kzanol one and a half feet tall, a child of eight thrintun years. Kzanol half grown.

***

The maser beam reached for Pluto, spreading itself wide, dropping ever so slightly in frequency as it climbed out of the Sun's gravitational well. By the time it reached its target more than five hours had passed, and the wave front was a quarter of a million miles across.

Pluto didn't stop it. Pluto barely left a noticeable hole. There was enormous power behind this beam. The beam went on into the void, moving almost straighi toward the galactic center, thinned by dust clouds and distance. It was picked up centuries later by beings who did not resemble humanity in the least. They were able to determine the shape of the conical beam, and to determine its apex. But not accurately enough.

In its wake, Tartov said, "You were ,right, Lew. There's no fire where we're going."

"That's that, then. You three go on down. I'll warp into an orbit."

"We really ought to draw again, you know."

"Nuts, Mabe. Think how much I'll win at poker after using up all my bad luck out here. Got my orbit, Tartov?"

"Hook in your idiot savant and I'll give it the data direct."

"Autopilot on."

BEEP.

Lew felt his ship turning as the sound of the beep ended. The spears of fusion light alongside him began to

dwindle in size. Could they manage without him? Sure, they were Belters. If danger came it would come here, in orbit.

He said, "All ships. Good luck. Don't take any stupid chances."

"Hexter calling. Something on the Earth channel, Lew."

Lew used his frequency dial. "Can't find it."

"It's a little lower--"

"Oh. Typical. Dammit, it's in code. Why should it be in code?"

"Maybe they've got little secrets," Tartov suggested.

"Whatever it is, it's bound to be a good reason to finish this fast."

"Yeah. Look, you go ahead and land. I'll send this to Ceres for decoding. It'll take twelve hours to get an answer, but what the hell."

***

Why should it be in code?

Lit Sheeffer would have known.

Even now, sitting in his office deep in the rock of Ceres, with the bubble of Confinement winding its snail-slow orbit thirty miles overhead, Lit was preparing a note of apology to the United Nations. It was the hardest work he'd ever done! But there seemed, no way out.

A week and a half ago there had been a maser message from Neptune. Garner's story was true: he had gone to Neptune in pursuit of a wildly dangerous ET. Lit had scowled and ordered an immediate end to the harassment of Earth shipping.

But the damage was done. For two weeks the Belt had persecuted Earth's meager shipping; had used codes in maser transmissions, even in solar weather forecasts, in violation of a century's tradition; had used their espionage network so heavily that its existence became insultingly obvious. Secretiveness and suspicion were the rule as never before.

Earth had retaliated in kind.

Now the Belt had stopped using codes, but Earth had not.

Did the coded messages contain vital information? Almost certainly not, Lit would have guessed. Certain messages decoded at random bore him out. But the Belt couldn't be sure, which, of course, was the whole point.

And Belt ships were searched at Earth's ports, with insulting thoroughness.

This mistrust had to be stopped now. Lit gritted his teeth and continued writing.

***

The message started to repeat, and Lloyd switched it off with a decisive click.

"She felt him die," said Luke. "She didn't know it, but she felt him die."

His thoughts ran on without???. She'd felt him die. What was it that let some people know things they couldn't possibly know? There seemed to be more and more of them lately Luke had never been remotely psychic, and he'd envied the lucky few who could find lost rings or lost criminals without the slightest effort, with no more explanation than, "I thought you might have dropped it in the mayonnaise," or, "I had a hunch he was hiding in the subway, living off the tenth-mark peanut machines." Parapsychologists with their special cards had proven that psy powers exist; and had gone no further than that, in close to two hundred years, except for psionics devices like the contact machine. "Psionics," to Luke, meant "I don't know how the damn thing works."

How did Judy know that the *Golden Circle* had crashed? You couldn't know the answer, so you hung a tag on it. Telepathy.

"And even then," said Luke, not knowing that he spoke. "she managed to fool herself. Marvelous!"

"Did she?"

Luke's head jerked up and around. Lloyd was scared and not trying to hide it. He said, "The *Golden Circle* was a tough ship. Her drive was in her belly, remember? Her belly was built to stand fusion heat. And the explosion was below her."

Luke felt his own nerves thrill in sympathetic fear.

"We'll find out right now," he said, and touched the control panel. "All ships, listen in. Anderson, what do you know about the *Golden Circle*?"

"Yeah, I heard it too. It could be; it just could be. The people who built the honeymooners knew damn well that one accident or one breakdown could ruin a billion-mark business. They built the ships to stand up to anything. The *Golden Circle*'s life system is smaller in proporton than the life system of any ship here, just because they put so much extra weight in the walls and in the failsafe systems."

In a dull voice, Smoky said, "And we're out of it."

"Hell we are. That message was in code. Lloyd, get the maser pointed at Pluto. We've got to warn the Belters. Smoky, is there a Mayday signal we can use?"

"No need. They'll hear you. It's too late anyway."

"What do you mean?"

"They're going down."

***

Kzanol walked slowly through a tunnel which gleamed dull white where the light fell. With practice he had learned to stay the right distance behind the disappearing far wall, following his disintegrator beam, so that he walked in a sloppy cylinder six feet in diameter. The wind-roared past him and ceased to be wind; it was flying dust and ice particles, flying in vacuum and low gravity, and it packed the tunnel solidly behind him.

The other suit was two hundred feet beyond the end of the sloping tube.