Crashlander Read online

  It was as if he’d screamed. I could hear that word echoing from side to side in my skull.

  Elephant’s booming voice was curiously soft. “Antimatter?”

  “Of course. We have no excuse, of course, but you should have realized it at once. Interstellar gas of normal matter had polished the planet’s surface with minuscule explosions, had raised the temperature of the protosun beyond any rational estimate, and was causing a truly incredible radiation hazard. Did you not even wonder about these things? You knew that the system was from beyond the galaxy. Humans are supposed to be highly curious, are they not?”

  “The hull,” said Elephant.

  “A General Products hull is an artificially generated molecule with interatomic bonds artificially strengthened by a small power plant. The strengthened molecular bonds are proof against any kind of impact and heat into the hundreds of thousands of degrees. But when enough of the atoms had been obliterated by antimatter explosions, the molecule naturally fell apart.”

  Elephant nodded. I wondered if his voice was gone for good.

  “When may we expect you to collect your indemnity? I gather no human was killed; this is fortunate, since our funds are low.”

  Elephant turned off the phone. He gulped once or twice, then turned to look me in the eye. I think it took all his strength, and if I’d waited for him to speak, I don’t know what he would have said.

  “I gloat,” I said. “I gloat. I was right; you were wrong. If we’d landed on your forsaken planet, we’d have gone up in pure light. At this time it gives me great pleasure to say, I Told You So.”

  He smiled weakly. “You told me so.”

  “Oh, I did, I did. Time after time I said, Don’t Go Near That Haunted Planet! It’s Worth Your Life And Your Soul, I said. There Have Been Signs in the Heavens, I said, To Warn Us from This Place—”

  “All right, don’t overdo it, you bastard. You were dead right all the way. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Okay. But there’s one thing I want you to remember.”

  “If you don’t understand it, it’s dangerous.”

  “That’s the one thing I want you to remember besides I Told You So.”

  And that should have ended it.

  But it doesn’t. Elephant’s going back. He’s got a little flag with a UN insignia, about two feet by two feet, with spring wires to make it look like it’s flapping in the breeze, and a solid rocket in the handle so it’ll go straight when the flag is furled. He’s going to drop it on the antimatter planet from a great height, as great as I can talk him into.

  It should make quite a bang.

  And I’m going along. I’ve got a solidly mounted tridee camera and a contract with the biggest broadcasting company in known space. This time I’ve got a reason for going!

  ✴

  GHOST: FOUR

  “But he never went back,” I said.

  “It happens I know why,” Ander said, and then the crowd drowned us out. Administration and Structure swirled together; Entertainment saw a chance and arrowed into the dance behind its dolphin. The depleted fourth team, Police, hung back in a nervous arc. All the teams looked to be milling without purpose, and from listening to Sharrol I could guess why.

  So I said, “Prey submerged.” The last of the prey turtles must have escaped into the sand. For the next few minutes I watched the game with a concentration that would have surprised Sharrol.

  This was the story I was telling Ander: If I hadn’t been led here by a woman, why was I here? I must love the game! “There! Yellow prey!” I shouted as sand stirred. An instant later the glowing mock turtle emerged outside the melee and flapped clownishly toward safety. A Police swimmer dove to capture it, his dolphin keeping station to block for him, and everyone converged too late: he was swimming like mad, and so was the prey; he was through the yellow arch at the point of a great angry cloud—

  And that was the end. I bellowed over the crowd’s roar: “Dinner!”

  “Oh?”

  “I missed brunch. I’m starving.”

  I didn’t want to fight the crowds trying to leave. We crossed the slidebridge instead, this time in comparative quiet. The booths lined below us were whirlpools in a surging sea of escapees.

  Ander’s hand was above my elbow, companionably. I was a prisoner, and that was hard to ignore. Make conversation? I asked, “Did you know there’s an ice age going on Earth?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I never even wondered. I did wonder why Cuba wasn’t much hotter than Nome.”

  Ander said, “The whole planet’s a web of superconductor cable. We had to restart the Gulf Stream five hundred years ago, and it just went from there. Nome imports heat; Cuba imports cold. Even so, Earth would be pretty cold if we weren’t getting so much power from the orbiting satellites.”

  “Uh huh. What are you going to do when the ice age turns off?”

  “Move.” Ander grinned. “Where did you go after the antimatter system?”

  “I moved in with Sharrol in Nome.”

  He looked at me. “You? Settled down like a Grog on a rock?”

  Maybe he had the right to sneer. Ander and I had toured singles nodes together on two worlds, blowing off steam after marathon work sessions. I held my temper and said, “You can spend a lifetime seeing Earth.”

  “Where do you want to eat?”

  I said, “The Pequod Grill is good.” Good and expensive, and an offworlder would have heard of it. Just the place a destitute B. Shaeffer might pick if someone else was paying. And nobody would ask me where Sharrol was.

  We had almost reached the transfer booths. Just to pull Ander’s chain, I turned suddenly into the phone booth to see if I could break his grip.

  He pulled me back effortlessly. “What?”

  “I thought I’d phone and see if the Grill’s full up,” I said, and remembered. I couldn’t use my pocket phone. It was in the wrong name.

  “I’ll do it.” He used a card. It took him ten seconds to get a reservation. There are mistakes you don’t pay for.

  We pushed into a transfer booth. He said, “So there you were, nesting—”

  I said, “It was love, stet? We weren’t lockstepped…well, we were, a little. I didn’t know any women on Earth. Sharrol had some playmates, but a lot of the men she knew were moaning and clutching themselves.” I grinned, remembering. “Rasheed. ‘Lockstepped, sure, but you can’t mean me!’ with a great dramatic wave of his arms, like he could have been joking. There were some couples we played with, but not so much of that, either, after a while. We talked about having children. Then we looked into it.”

  Ander said, “You?” I wasn’t sure how to read his expression. A little disgust, a little pity.

  I dialed the Pequod.

  We flicked in on the roof, under a rolling curve of green-black water. The daylight was fading. Ander led off toward the restaurant twelve floors down. He seemed to be familiar with the Pequod. Might even be registered here.

  Test that. “I need to visit a ’cycler, Ander. Long day.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “This way.”

  In the ’cycler he maneuvered himself between me and the door, and I let him. Amusing scenarios came to mind: If I needed a booth, he could watch the door, but what if he needed a booth? Not that it mattered. I didn’t want to escape, not until I could know I was loose. I wanted to speak of lost treasure.

  But I needed to know how much he already knew. Why was I here? Who had come with me? How? How was I surviving? I waited in the hope that he might speak of those things, and of Carlos Wu’s autodoc, too.

  So we didn’t talk much until we were settled at a table, with drinks. Ander wasn’t interested in local cuisine. He ordered beef—no imagination. I found crew snapper on the menu, billed as an order for two. Heh heh.

  I asked, “What happened to Greg Pelton’s expedition?”

  Ander said, “Antimatter planet. The more he thought about it, the more he needed to know. He kept expanding his plans until
some government gnome took notice. After that it just inflated. Government projects can do that. Everyone wants in; they always think there’s infinite money, and suddenly it’s gone from science fiction to fantasy.

  I don’t even know if Pelton’s still involved. The UN has probes in the system. Meanwhile the current plan calls for a base on the planet.”

  I laughed. “Oh, sure!”

  He grinned at me. “Set on a metal dish in stasis, inside a roller sphere also in stasis. It is antimatter, after all.”

  He wasn’t making it up. He was too amused. “Civil servants love making plans. You can’t get caught in a mistake if you’re only making plans, and it can pay your salary for life. And I shouldn’t have heard that much, Beowulf, nor should you. If a terrorist knew where to find infinite masses of antimatter, things could get sticky.”

  “And that is why you weren’t asked to ghostwrite the tour guide,” I surmised.

  Ander smiled. He said, “Back to work. You’ve met Outsiders. Would you consider them a threat?”

  “No.”

  He waited. I said, “They’re fragile. Superfluid helium metabolism and no real skeleton, I think. Any place we consider interesting, they die. But never mind that, Ander—”

  “They’ve got the technology to take accelerations that would reduce you or me to a film of neutrons.”

  “Not the point. Can you tell me why they honor contracts? They’ve got ships to run away from any obligation. I think it must be built into their brains, Ander. They honor contracts, and they keep their promises. They’re trustworthy.”

  He nodded, in no way dissatisfied. “Grogs? Are they dangerous?”

  “Tanj straight they’re dangerous.”

  He laughed. “Well, finally! Kzinti?”

  “Sure.”

  “Puppeteers. Where are they going?”

  “Anywhere they want to.” He kept looking, so I said, “Clouds of Magellan? That’s not the interesting question. The Outsiders can boost a ship or a planet to near lightspeed. Can the puppeteers do that too? Or will they have to summon Outsiders to change their course?”

  “And stop.”

  “Yeah. I’d say they have the Outsider drive. They bought it or they built it.”

  “Or they’ve got a research project that’ll get it for them.”

  “I…futz.” Hire Outsiders to push five planets up to four-fifths of lightspeed, then try to figure out how to slow them down. Was that as risky as it sounded? I began to believe it wasn’t. There was nothing dangerous in the path of the puppeteer fleet. They had thousands of years to solve the puzzle.

  Ander asked again: “Are the puppeteers a threat?”

  He had generated in me a mulish urge to defend them. “They honor their contracts.”

  “They’re manipulative bastards, Beowulf. You know that.”

  “So are the ARMs. Your people have been in my face since I reached Earth. Do you know what Sharrol and I had to go through to have children?”

  “The Fertility Board turned you down, of course.”

  “Yah.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Sharrol used to play with a Carlos Wu. Carlos had an open birthright. So we worked something out. Then I went traveling.”

  He was, from the look of him, learning far more about Beowulf Shaeffer than he had ever wanted to. He tried to stick to what he knew. “Traveling. Any contact at all with Pierson’s puppeteers during that period?”

  “No.”

  “Other aliens? Aliens the puppeteers dealt with?”

  That made me smile. “I’m a celebrity among the Kdatlyno…”

  ✴

  GRENDEL

  There were the sounds of a passenger starship.

  You learn those sounds, and you don’t forget, even after four years. They are never loud enough to distract, except during takeoff, and most are too low to hear anyway, but you don’t forget, and you wake knowing where you are.

  There were the sensations of being alone.

  A sleeper field is not a straight no-gee field; there’s an imbalance that keeps you more or less centered so you don’t float out the edge and fall to the floor. When your field holds two, you set two imbalances for the distance you want, and somehow you feel that in your muscles. You touch from time to time, you and your love, twisting in sleep. There are rustlings and the sounds of breathing.

  Nobody had touched me this night. Nothing breathed here but me. I was dead center in the sleeping field. I woke knowing I was alone, in a tiny sleeping cabin of the Argos, bound from Down to Gummidgy.

  And where was Sharrol?

  Sharrol was on Earth. She couldn’t travel; some people can’t take space. That was half our problem, but it did narrow it down, and if I wanted her, I need only go to Earth and hunt her up in a transfer-booth directory.

  I didn’t want to find her. Not now. Our bargain had been clear, and also inevitable; and there are advantages to sleeping alone. I’ll think of them in a moment.

  I found the field control switch. The sleeper field collapsed, letting me down easy. I climbed into a navy-blue falling jumper, moving carefully in the narrow sleeping cabin, statted my hair, and went out.

  Margo hailed me in the hall, looking refreshingly trim and lovely in a clinging pilot’s uniform. Her long, dark hair streamed behind her, rippling, as if underwater or in free-fall. “You’re just in time. I was about to wake everyone up.”

  “It’s only nine-thirty. You want to get lynched?”

  She laughed. “I’ll tell them it was your idea. No, I’m serious, Bey. A month ago a starseed went through the Gummidgy system. I’m going to drop the ship out a light-month away and let everybody watch.”

  “Oh. That’ll be nice,” I said, trying for enthusiasm. “I’ve never seen a starseed set sail.”

  “I’ll give you time to grab a good seat.”

  “Right. Thanks.” I waved and went on, marveling at myself. Since when have I had to work up enthusiasm? For anything?

  Margo was Captain M. Tellefsen, in charge of getting the Argos to Gummidgy sometime this evening. We’d spent many of her off-duty hours talking shop, since the Argos resembled the liners I used to fly seven years ago, before my boss, Nakamura Lines, collapsed. Margo was a bright girl, as good a spacer as I’d been once. Her salary must have been good, too. That free-fall effect is the most difficult trick a hairdresser can attempt. No machine can imitate it.

  Expensive tastes…I wondered why she’d left Earth. By flatlander standards she was lovely enough to make a fast fortune on tridee.

  Maybe she just liked space. Many do. Their eyes hold a dreamy, distant look, a look I’d caught once in Margo’s green eyes.

  This early the lounge held only six passengers out of the twenty-eight. One was a big biped alien, a Kdatlyno touch sculptor named Lloobee. The chairs were too short for him. He sat on a table, with his great flat feet brushing the floor, his huge arms resting on horn-capped knees.

  The other nonhumans aboard would have to stay in their rooms. Rooms 14-16-18 were joined and half-full of water, occupied by a dolphin. His name was Pszzzz, or Bra-a-ack, or some such impolite sound. Human ears couldn’t catch the ultrasonic overtones of that name, nor could a human throat pronounce it, so he answered to Moby Dick. He was on his way to Wunderland, the Argos’s next stop. Then there were two sessile grogs in 22 and a flock of jumpin’ jeepers in 24, with the connecting door open so the Grogs could get at the jumpin’ jeepers, which were their food supply. Lloobee, the Kdatlyno touch sculptor, had room 20.

  I found Emil at the bar. He raised a thumb in greeting, dialed me a Bloody Marriage, and waited in silence for my first sip. The drink tasted good, though I’d been thinking in terms of tuna and eggs.

  The other four passengers, eating breakfast at a nearby table, all wore the false glow of health one carries out of an autodoc tank. Probably they’d been curing hangovers. But Emil always looked healthy, and he couldn’t get drunk no matter how hard he tried. He was a Jinxian, short and wide
and bull-strong, a top-flight computer programmer with an intuitive knack for asking the right questions when everyone else has been asking the wrong ones and blowing expensive circuits in their iron idiots.

  “So,” he said.

  “So,” I responded, “I’ll do you a favor. Let’s go sit by the window.”

  He looked puzzled but went.

  The Argos lounge had one picture window. It was turned off in hyperspace, so that it looked like part of the wall, but we found it from memory and sat down. Emil asked, “What’s the favor?”

  “This is it. Now we’ve got the best seats in the house. In a few minutes everyone will be fighting for a view because Margo’s stopping the ship to show us a starseed setting sail.”

  “Oh? Okay, I owe you one.”

  “We’re even. You bought me a drink.”

  Emil looked puzzled, and I realized I’d put an edge in my voice. As if I didn’t want anyone owing me favors. Which I didn’t. But it was no excuse for being a boor.

  I dialed a breakfast to go with the drink: tuna fillet, eggs Florentine, and double-strength tea. The kitchen had finished delivering it when Margo spoke over the intercom, as follows: “Ladies and gentlemen and other guests, we are dropping out some distance from CY Aquarii so that you may watch a starseed which set sail in the system of Gummidgy last month. I will raise the lounge screen in ten minutes.” Click.

  In moments we were surrounded. The Kdatlyno sculptor squeezed in next to me, spiked knees hunched up against the lack of room, the silver tip of the horn on his elbow imperiling my eggs. Emil smiled with one side of his mouth, and I made a face. But it was justice. I’d chosen the seats myself.

  The window went on. Silence fell.

  Everyone who could move was crowded around the lounge window. The Kdatlyno’s horned elbow pinned a fold of my sleeve to the table. I let it lie. I wasn’t planning to move, and Kdatlyno are supposed to be touchy.

  There were stars. Brighter than stars seen through atmosphere, but you get used to that. I looked for CY Aquarii and found a glaring white eye.

  We watched it grow.