04-Protector Read online

  The KNOWN SPACE Universe

  Tales of Known Space 1: Human Space

  World of Ptavvs

  Flatlander (Gil Hamilton)

  Protector

  A Gift From Earth

  Tales of Known Space 2: Known Space

  Crashlander (Beowulf Shaeffer)

  Ringworld

  Ringworld Engineers

  The Ringworld Throne

  Ringworld's Children

  Fleet of Worlds

  Juggler of Worlds

  Destroyer of Worlds

  Betrayer of Worlds

  Fate of Worlds

  The Man-Kzin Wars

  A shorter version of this novel

  appeared under the title, "The Adults,"

  in Galaxy Magazine, June 1967.

  (with 4 illustrations by Virgil Finlay)

  A Del Rey Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  September 1973

  Cover by H. R. Van Dongen

  Orbit Cover by Peter Jones

  Del Rey cover by Donato Giancola

  Contents

  PHSSTHPOK

  Virgil Finlay's 'Phssthpok'

  Chapter 1

  Nick Sohl mining

  Chapter 2

  Brennan and the Outsider

  Chapter 3

  Nick Sohl and Luke Garner

  INTERLUDE

  VANDERVECKEN

  PROTECTOR

  PHSSTHPOK

  Genesis, Chapter 3, King James version:

  22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever:

  23 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

  24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

  1

  He sat before an eight-foot circle of clear twing, looking endlessly out on a view that was less than exciting.

  Even a decade ago those stars had been a sprinkling of dull red dots in his wake. When he cleared the forward view, they would shine a hellish blue, bright enough to read by. To the side, the biggest had been visibly flattened. But now there were only stars, white points sparsely scattered across a sky that was mostly black. This was a lonely sky. Dust clouds hid the blazing glory of home.

  The light in the center of the view was not a star. It was big as a sun, dark at the center, and bright enough to have burned holes in a man’s retinae. It was the light of a Bussard ramjet, burning a bare eight miles away. Every few years Phssthpok spent some time watching the drive, just to be sure it was burning evenly. A long time ago he had caught a slow, periodic wavering in time to prevent his ship from becoming a tiny nova. But the blue-white light had not changed at all in the weeks he’d been watching it.

  For most of a long, slow lifetime the heavens had been crawling past Phssthpok’s porthole. Yet he remembered little of that voyage. The time of waiting had been too devoid of events to interest his memory. It is the way with the protector stage of the Pak species, that his leisure memories are of the past, when he was a child and, later, a breeder, when the world was new and bright and free of responsibilities. Only danger to himself or his children can rouse a protector from his normal dreamy lassitude to a fighting fury unsurpassed among sentient beings.

  Phssthpok sat dreaming in his disaster couch.

  The cabin’s attitude controls were beneath his left hand. When he was hungry, which happened once in ten hours, his knobby hand, like two fistfuls of black walnuts strung together, would reach into a slot on his right and emerge with a twisted, fleshy yellow root the size of a sweet potato. Terrestrial weeks had passed since Phssthpok last left his disaster couch. In that time he had moved nothing but his hands and his jaws. His eyes had not moved at all.

  Before that there had been a period of furious exercise. It is a protector’s duty to stay fit.

  Even a protector with nobody to protect.

  The drive was steady, or enough so to satisfy Phssthpok. The protector’s knotted fingers moved, and the heavens spun about him. He watched the other bright light float into the porthole. When it was centered he stopped the rotation.

  Already brighter than any star around it, his destination was still too dim to be more than a star. But it was brighter than Phssthpok had expected, and he knew that he had let time slip away from him. Too much dreaming! And no wonder. He’d spent most of twelve hundred years in that couch, staying immobile to conserve his food supply. It would have been thirty times that but for relativistic effects.

  Despite what looked to be the most crippling case of arthritis in medical history, despite weeks spent like a paralytic, the knobby protector was instantly in motion. The drive flame went mushy; expanded; began to cool. Shutting down a Bussard ramjet is almost as tricky as starting one. At ramjet speeds the interstellar hydrogen comes on as gamma rays. It would have to be guided away by magnetic fields, even if it were not being burned as fuel.

  He had reached the most likely region of space. Ahead was the most likely star. Phssthpok’s moment of success was hard upon him. The ones he had come to help (if they existed at all; if they hadn’t died out in all this time; if they circled this star and not one less likely) wouldn’t be expecting him. Their minds were nearly animal. They might or might not use fire, but they certainly wouldn’t have telescopes. Yet they were waiting for him... in a sense. If they were here at all, they had been waiting for two and a half million years.

  He would not disappoint them.

  He must not.

  A protector without descendants is a being without purpose. Such an anomaly must find a purpose, and quickly, or die. Most die. In their minds or their glands a reflex twitches, and they cease to feel hunger. Sometimes such a one finds that he can adapt the entire Pak species as his progeny; but then he must find a way to serve that species. Phssthpok was one of the lucky few.

  It would be terrible if he failed.

  Nick Sohl was coming home.

  The quiet of space was around him, now that his ears had learned to forget the hum of the ship’s drive. Two weeks’ worth of tightly coiled stubble covered his jaw and the shaved scalp on either side of his cottony Belter crest. If be concentrated he could smell himself. He had gone mining in Saturn’s rings, with a singleship around him and a shovel in his hand (for the magnets used to pull monopoles from asteroidal iron did look remarkably like shovels). He would have stayed longer; but he liked to think that Belt civilization could survive without him for just about three weeks.

  A century ago monopoles had been mere theory, and conflicting theory at that. Magnetic theory said that a north magnetic pole could not exist apart from a south magnetic pole, and vice-versa. Quantum theory implied that they might exist independently.

  The first permanent settlements had been blooming among the biggest Belt asteroids when an exploring team found monopoles scattered through the nickel-iron core of an asteroid. Today they were not theory, but a thriving Belt industry. A magnetic field generated by monopoles acts in an inverse linear relationship rather than an inverse square. In practical terms, a monopole-based motor or instrument will reach much further. Monopoles were valuable where weight was a factor, and in the Belt weight was always a factor. But monopole mining was still a one man operation.

  Nick’s luck had been poor. Saturn’s rings were not a good region for monopoles anyway; too much ice, too little metal. The electromagnetic field around his cargo box probably held no more than two full shovelfuls of north magnetic poles. Not much of a catch for a couple of weeks backbreaking labor... but still worth good money at
Ceres.

  He’d have been satisfied to find nothing. Mining was an excuse the First Speaker for the Belt Political Section used to escape from his cramped office buried deep in the rock of Ceres, from the constant UN-Belt squabbles, from wife and children, friends and acquaintances, enemies and strangers. And next year, after frantic weeks spent catching up with current events, after the next ten months spent manipulating the politics of the solar system, he would be back.

  Nick was building up speed for the trip to Ceres, with Saturn a fantastic bauble behind him, when he saw his mining magnet swing slowly away from the cargo box. Somewhere to his left was a new and powerful source of monopoles.

  A grin split his face like lightning across a black sky. Better late than never! Too bad he hadn’t found it on the way out; but he could sell it once he’d located it... which would take doing. The needle wavered between two attractions, one of which was his cargo box.

  He invested twenty minutes focusing a com laser on Ceres. “This is Nick Sohl, repeating, Nicholas Brewster Sohl. I wish to register a claim for a monopole source in the general direction of—“ He tried to guess how much his cargo was affecting the needle. “—of Sagittarius. I want to offer this source for sale to the Belt government. Details follow, half an hour.”

  He then turned off his fusion motor, climbed laboriously into suit and backpac, and left the ship carrying a telescope and his mining magnet.

  The stars are far from eternal, but for man they might as well be. Nick floated among the eternal stars, motionless though falling toward the tiny sun at tens of thousands of miles per hour. This was why he went mining. The universe blazed like diamonds on black velvet, an unforgettable backdrop for golden Saturn. The Milky Way was a jeweled bracelet for all the universe. Nick loved the Belt from the carved-out rocks to the surface domes to the spinning inside-out bubble worlds; but most of all he loved space itself.

  A mile from the ship he used ‘scope and mining magnet to fix the location of the new source. He moved back to the ship to call in. A few hours from now he could take another fix and pin the source by triangulation.

  When he reached the ship the communicator was alight. The gaunt fair face of Martin Shaeffer, Third Speaker, was talking to an empty acceleration couch.

  “—Must call in at once, Nick. Don’t wait to take your second fix. This is urgent Belt business. Repeating. Martin Shaeffer calling Nick Sohl aboard singleship Hummingbird—“

  Nick refocused his laser. “Lit, I’m truly honored. A simple clerk would have sufficed to record my poor find. Repeating.” He set the message to repeat, then started putting away tools. Ceres was light-minutes distant.

  He did not try to guess what emergency might need his personal attention. But he was worried.

  Presently the answer came. Lit Shaeffer’s expression was strange, but his tone was bantering. “Nick, you’re too modest about your poor find. A pity we’re going to have to disallow it. One hundred and four miners have already called in to report your monopole source.”

  Nick gaped. One hundred and four? But he was in the outer system... and most miners preferred to work their own mines anyway. How many had not called in?

  “They’re all across the system,” said Lit. “It’s a hell of a big source. As a matter of fact, we’ve already located it by parallax. One source, forty AU out from the sun, which makes it somewhat further away than Pluto, and eighteen degrees off the plane of the solar system. Mitchikov says that there must be as big a mass of south magnetic monopoles in the source as we’ve mined in the past century.”

  Outsider! thought Nick. And: Pity they’ll disallow my claim.

  “Mitchikov says that big a source could power a really big Bussard ramjet —a manned ramrobot.” Nick nodded at that. Ramrobots were robot probes to the nearby stars, and were one of the few sources of real UN-Belt cooperation. “We’ve been following the source for the past half-hour. It’s moving into the solar system at just over four thousand miles per second, freely falling. That’s well above even interstellar speeds. We’re all convinced it’s an Outsider.

  “Any comments?

  “Repeating—“

  Nick switched it off and sat for a moment, letting himself get used to the idea. An Outsider!

  Outsider was Belter slang for alien; but the word meant more than that. The Outsider would be the first sentient alien ever to contact the human race. It (singular) would contact the Belt instead of Earth, not only because the Belt held title to most of the solar system but because those humans who had colonized space were clearly more intelligent. There were many hidden assumptions in the word, and not every Belter believed them all.

  And the emergency had caught Nick Sohl on vacation. Censored dammit! He’d have to work by message laser. “Nick Sohl calling Martin Shaeffer, Ceres Base. Yes, I’ve got comments. One, it sounds like your assumption is valid. Two, stop blasting the news all over the system. Some flatlander ship might pick up the fringes of a message beam. We’ll have to bring them in on it sooner or later, but not just yet. Three, I’ll be home in five days. Concentrate on getting more information. We won’t have to make any crucial decisions for awhile.” Not until the Outsider entered the solar system, or tried sending messages of its own. “Four—“ Find out if the son of a bitch is decelerating! Find out where he’ll stop! But he couldn’t say any of that. Too specific for a message laser. Shaeffer would know what to do. “There is no four. Sohl out.”

  The solar system is big and, in the outer reaches, thin. In the main Belt, from slightly inside Mars’s orbit to slightly outside Jupiter’s, a determined man can examine a hundred rocks in a month. Further out, he’s likely to spend a couple of weeks coming and going, just to look at something he hopes nobody else has noticed.

  The main Belt is not mined out, though most of the big rocks are now private property. Most miners prefer to work the Belt. In the Belt they know they can reach civilization and civilization’s byproducts: stored air and water, hydrogen fuel, women and other people, a new air regenerator, autodocs and therapeutic psychomimetic drugs.

  Brennan didn’t need drugs or company to keep him sane. He preferred the outer reaches. He was in Uranus’s trailing Trojan point, following sixty degrees behind the ice giant in its orbit. Trojan points, being points of stable equilibrium, are dust collectors and collectors of larger objects. There was a good deal of dust here, for deep space, and a handful of rocks worth exploring.

  Had he found nothing at all, Brennan would have moved on to the moons, then to the leading Trojan point. Then home for a short rest and a visit with Charlotte; and, because his funds would be low by then, a paid tour of duty on Mercury, which he would hate.

  Had he found pitchblende he would have been in the point for months.

  None of the rocks held enough radioactives to interest him. But something nearby showed the metallic gleam of an artifact. Brennan moved in on it, expecting to find some Belt miner’s throwaway fuel tank, but looking anyway. Jack Brennan was a confirmed optimist.

  The artifact was the shell of a solid fuel rocket motor. Part of the Mariner XX, from the lettering.

  The Mariner XX, the ancient Pluto fly-by. Ages ago the ancient empty shell must have drifted back toward the distant sun, drifted into the thin Trojan-point dust and coasted to a stop. The hull was pitted with dust holes and was still rotating with the stabilizing impulse imparted three generations back.

  As a collector's item the thing was nearly beyond price. Brennan took phototapes of it in situ before he moved in to attach himself to the flat nose and used his jet backpac to stop the rotation. He strapped it to the fusion tube of his ship, below the lifesystem cabin. The gyros could compensate for the imbalance.

  In another sense the bulk presented a problem.

  He stood next to it on the slender metal shell of the fusion tube. The antique motor was half as big as his mining singleship, but very light, little more than a metal skin for its original shaped-core charge. If Brennan had found pitchblende the single
ship would have been hung with cargo nets under the fuel ring, carrying its own weight in radioactive ore. He would have returned to the Belt at half a gee. But with the Mariner relic as his cargo he could accelerate at the one gee which was standard for empty singleships.

  It might just give him the edge he’d need.

  If he sold the tank through the Belt, the Belt would take thirty percent in income tax and agent’s fees. But if he sold it on the Moon, Earth’s Museum of Spaceflight would charge no tax at all.

  Brennan was in a good position for smuggling. There were no goldskins out here. His velocity over most of his course would be tremendous. They couldn’t begin to catch him until he approached the Moon. He wasn’t hauling monopoles or radioactives; the magnetic and radiation detectors would look right through him. He could swing in over the plane of the system, avoiding rocks and other ships.

  But if they did get him they’d take one hundred percent of his find. Everything.

  Brennan smiled to himself. He’d risk it.

  Phssthpok’s mouth closed once, twice, three times. A yellow tree-of-life root separated into four chunks, raggedly, because the edges of Phssthpok’s beak were not sharp. They were blunt and uneven, like the top of a molar. Phssthpok gulped four times.

  He had hardly noticed the action. It was as if his hand, mouth and belly were on automatic, while Phssthpok watched the scope screen.

  Under 10^4 magnification the screen showed three tiny violet points.

  Looking around the edge of the scope screen Phssthpok could see only the bright yellow star he’d called GO Target #1. He’d been searching for planets. He’d found one, a beauty, the right size and approximate temperature, with a transparent water-bearing atmosphere and an oversized moon. But he’d also found myriads of violet points so small that at first hed thought they were mere flashes in his retinae.