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  “I wonder if you don’t think of yourself in just that way.”

  The rammer was astonished. “Me? Nonsense. I am a simple rammer. But I find man-shaped spacecraft easier to believe in than golden giants walking on emptiness.”

  “More comforting, too.”

  “Yes.” The rammer shuddered. “It came up very fast, so that I must damp the magnification to keep him in view. His middle finger was two joints longer than ours, and the thumbs were of different sizes. His eyes were set freakishly far apart, and too low in the head. They glowed red with their own light. His mouth was a wide, lipless horizontal line.

  “Not once did I think to avoid the intruder. We could not have reached a collision course by accident. I assumed that he had altered course to follow me, and would alter course again to protect us.

  “He was on me before I knew it. I had flipped the magnification down another notch, and when I looked the setting was at zero. I looked up at the sparse red stars, and found a golden dot as it exploded into a golden man.

  “I blinked, of course. When my eyes opened he was reaching for me.”

  “For you?”

  The rammer nodded convulsively. “For the pod of my ship. He was much larger than the pod, or rather, his ship was.”

  “You still thought it was a ship?” I would not have asked; but he kept changing the pronoun.

  “I was looking for windows in the forehead and the chest. I did not find them. He moved like a very large man.”

  “I hate to suggest it,” I said, “not knowing your religion. Could there be gods?”

  He jumped as if stung. “Nonsense.”

  “How about superior beings? If we’ve evolved beyond the chimpanzees, couldn’t—”

  “No. Absolutely not,” said the rammer. “You don’t understand modern xenology. Do you not know that we and the Monks and the Smithpeople are all of equal intelligence? The Smithpeople are not remotely humanoid in shape, yet it makes no difference. When a species begins to use tools, evolution stops.”

  “I’ve heard that argument, but—”

  “When a species begins to use tools, environment no longer shapes that species. The species shapes its environment to suit itself. Beyond this the species does not develop. It even begins to take care of its feeble-minded and its genetically deficient.

  “No, he could have better tools than mine, this intruder, but he could not be my intellectual superior. He was certainly nothing to worship.”

  “You seem awfully sure of that,” I snapped.

  Instantly I regretted it; for the rammer shivered and wrapped his arms around his chest. The gesture was ludicrous and pitiful at the same time, for his arms swept up an armful of folded skin and hugged it to him. “I needed to be sure. The intruder had taken my main pod in his hand and pulled me toward—toward his ship.

  “I was glad of my crash straps. Without them I’d have bounced about like a pea in a dryer. As it was, I blacked out for an instant. When I opened my eyes I faced a great red iris with a black pupil.

  “He looked me over with care. I…forced myself to look back. He had no ears, no chin. A bony ridge divided his face where a nose might have been, but there were no nostrils…

  “He pulled back for a better view of the main pod. This time I was not jolted. He must have realized that the jolting could hurt me, and done something to prevent it. Perhaps he made his ship inertialess.

  “I saw him lift his eyes momentarily to see over my pod.

  “You must remember that I was facing back along my own wake, back toward Horvendile, to where most of the stars had been red-shifted to black.” The rammer was picking his words with care and patience. They came so slowly that I wanted to squirm. “I was not looking at the stars. But…suddenly there were a million clustered stars, and they were all white and bright.

  “I did not understand. I put side and forward views on the screen. The stars looked the same in all directions. Still I did not understand.

  “Then I turned back to the intruder. He was walking away across the sky.

  “You must understand that as he walked, he receded at much faster than walking speed. Accelerating. In a few seconds he was invisible. I looked for signs of an exhaust, but there was none.

  “Then I understood.” The rammer lifted his head. “Where is the boy?”

  “Boy?”

  The rammer looked about him, his blue eyes searching. Children and adults looked back curiously, for he was a weird sight. He said, “I do not see the boy. Could he have left?”

  “Oh, that boy. Sure, why not?”

  “There is something I must see.” The rammer eased his weight forward onto his bare and battered feet. I followed him as he crossed the gravel path, followed him onto the grass. And the rammer resumed his tale.

  “The intruder had examined me and my ship with care. He had made himself and my ship inertialess, or otherwise cushioned us against acceleration. Then he had cancelled our velocity relative to Koschei.”

  “But that wasn’t enough,” I objected. “You’d still die.”

  The rammer nodded. “Still I was glad to see him go, at first. He was terrifying. And his last mistake was almost a relief. It proved that he was—human is not the word I want. But he could make mistakes.”

  “Mortal,” I said. “He was mortal.”

  “I do not understand. But never mind. Think of the power of him. In a year and a half, at point six gravities, I had accelerated to a velocity which the intruder cancelled in no more than a second. I preferred death to his dreadful company. At first.

  “Then I became afraid. It seemed unjust. He had found me halfway between stars, stranded, waiting to die. He had half-saved me—and then left me to die, no better off than before!

  “I searched for him with the scope. Perhaps I could signal him, if I knew where to aim my com laser…But I could not find him.

  “Then I became angry. I—” The rammer swallowed. “I screamed insults after him. I blasphemed in seven different religions. The more distant he was, the less I feared him. I was reaching my stride when—when he returned.

  “His face was outside my main window, his red eyes looked into mine, his strange hand was reaching for my main pod. My collision alarm was just beginning to sound, it had happened so suddenly. I screamed out—I screamed…” He stopped.

  “What did you scream?”

  “Prayers. I begged for forgiveness.”

  “Oh.”

  “He took my ship in his hand. I saw the stars explode in front of me.”

  We had reached the shade of a dark oak, one so old and so spread out that its lower limbs needed the support of iron pipes. A family picnicking beneath the tree watched our approach.

  “Explode?”

  “That lacks accuracy,” the rammer apologized. “What happened was this: the stars became very much brighter, at the same time converging toward a point. They flared horribly. I was blinded. The intruder must have shifted me to within a meter-per-second of lightspeed.

  “I rubbed my hand hard across my eyes. With my eyes closed, I felt acceleration. It remained constant while I waited for my eyes to recover. Through experience I was able to estimate its force at ten meters per second squared.”

  “But that’s—”

  “One gravity. When I could see again, I found myself on a yellow plain beneath a glaring blue sky. My pod was red hot, and was already sagging around me.”

  “Where did he put you?”

  “On Earth, in a refertilized part of North Africa. My pod was never built for such things. If Earth’s gravity collapsed it, then re-entry should have torn it to pieces. But the intruder must have taken care of that too.”

  I am a peoplewatcher, an expert. I can crawl into a man’s mind without letting him know I exist. I never lose at poker. And I knew the rammer was not lying.

  We stood beside the dark oak. The lowermost limb grew almost parallel to the ground, and was supported by three iron pipes. Long as were the rammer’s arms, he could no
t have wrapped them around that limb. Its bark was rough and gray and powdery, and it smelled of dust. The top of it was level with the rammer’s chin.

  “You’re a very lucky man,” I said.

  “No doubt. What is that?”

  Black and furry, an inch and a half long; one end wiggling in blind curiosity as it moved along the bark.

  “A caterpillar. You know, there’s no computing the odds you ran against being alive now. You don’t seem very cheerful about it.”

  “I was…but think about it,” said the rammer. “Think what the intruder must have reasoned out, to do what he did.

  “He looked through the main window to examine me as well as he could. I was tied to a chair by crash straps, and his sensors had to see through thick impact quartz designed for transparency in the other direction. He could see me, but only from the front. He could examine the ship, but it was damaged, and he had to guess to what extent.

  “First he must have reasoned that I could not slow my ship without the ramscoop web. But he must also have deduced the presence of reserve fuel to decelerate me to zero speed from the lowest speed at which my ramscoop can operate. It is apparent that I must have it. Thus he stopped me dead, or nearly so, and left me to go home the slow way, using only my re-entry reserve fuel.

  “After he had left me, he must have realized that I would be dead of age before I ended such a trip. Imagine how thorough his examination of me must have been! So he came back for me.

  “By projecting my line of flight he must have known where I was going. But could I live there with a damaged ship? He did not know.

  “And so he looked me over more carefully, deduced the star and planet where I must have evolved, and he put me there.”

  “That’s pretty farfetched,” I said.

  “Yes! The solar system was twelve light-years distant, yet he reached it in an instant! But that is not the point…” The rammer let his voice trail off. He seemed oddly fascinated by the black caterpillar, which was now defying gravity as it explored a vertical wall of bark. “He placed me not only on Earth, but in North Africa. He deduced not only my planet of origin, but the region where I had evolved.

  “I stayed in my pod for two hours before I was found. Your United Nations police took a record of my mind, but they do not believe what they found. A ramship pod cannot be towed to Earth without radar finding it. Further, my ramscoop web is all over the desert. Even the hydrogen balloons survived the reentry. They think that it must be a hoax, that I was brainwashed as part of that hoax.”

  “And you? What do you think?”

  Again the rammer’s face tightened into jigsaw-puzzle lines. “I had convinced myself that the intruder was no more than another spacecraft pilot—a passerby who stopped to help, as some persons will stop to help if your car battery fails far from a city. His power might be greater than mine. He might be wealthier, even within the context of his own culture. We were of different species. Yet he had stopped to help a member of the great brotherhood, for we were both spacemen.”

  “Because your modern xenology says he couldn’t have been your superior.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I can pick a few holes in that theory.”

  “Can you?”

  I ignored his disinterest. “You claim that evolution stops when a species starts building tools. But suppose two tool-users evolved on the same world? Then evolution might go on until one race was dead. We might have had real problems if the dolphins had had hands.”

  “It may be.” He was still watching the caterpillar: an inch and a half of black fur exploring the dark bark. My ear brushed the bark as I faced him, and I smelled the damp wood.

  “Then again, not all human beings are alike. There are Einsteins and there are morons. Your passerby might have been of a race that varies more. Make him a super-Einstein—”

  “I had not thought of that. I had assumed that his deductions were made with the aid of a computer. At first.”

  “Then, a species could evolve itself. If they once started fiddling with their genes, they might not stop until their children were mile-high giants with a space drive stuck up their spines. What the hell is so interesting about the caterpillar?”

  “You did not see what the boy did?”

  “Boy? Oh. No, I didn’t.”

  “There was a…caterpillar moving along the gravel walk. People passed. None looked down. The boy came, and he stooped to watch.”

  “Oh!”

  “Presently the boy picked up the caterpillar, looked about him, then came here and put the caterpillar safely on the limb.”

  “And you fainted.”

  “I should not have been so affected by what, after all, is no more than a comparison. I would have cracked my skull had you not caught me.”

  “A poor return for the golden one, if you had.”

  The rammer did not smile. “Tell me…if an adult had seen the caterpillar, instead of a boy—”

  “Probably he’d have stepped on it.”

  “Yes, I thought so.” The rammer put his tongue in his cheek, which stretched incredibly. “He is nearly upside down. I hope he will not fall off.”

  “It won’t.”

  “Do you think he is safe there?”

  “Sure. Don’t worry about it”

  • • •

  • • •

  Water droplets come in all sizes here. Clouds may hold everything from fine mist, to globules the size of a fist, to spheroids that house all manner of life. The biggest “pond” we’ve seen massed ten million metric tons or so; but the tide from Levoy’s Star had pulled it into two lobes and the differential winds were tearing it apart.

  The ecology of the ponds is one rather than many. Life is queer and wonderful, but in every pond we have examined it is the same life. Ponds are temporary; pond life must occasionally migrate. In the Smoke Ring even the fish can fly.

  THE SMOKE RING, 1987

  DOWN IN FLAMES

  The following requires some explanation. At least!

  On January fourteenth, 1968, Norman Spinrad and I were at a party thrown by Tom and Terry Pinckard. We were filling coffee cups when Spinny started this whole thing.

  “You ought to drop the Known Space series,” he said. “You’ll get stale.” (Quotes are not necessarily accurate.)

  I told him I was writing stories other than “Known Space” stories, and that I would give up the series as soon as I ran out of things to say within that framework. Which would be soon.

  “Then why don’t you write a story that tears it to shreds? Don’t just abandon ‘known space.’ Destroy it!”

  “But how?” I never did ask why. Norman and I think alike in some ways.

  “Start with the premise that the whole thing is a shuck. There never was a chain reaction of novae in the galactic core. There aren’t any thrintun. It’s all a gigantic hoax. Write it that way. Then,” said Spinny, “if the fans write letters threatening to lynch you, you write back saying, ‘It’s only a story…’”

  We found a corner, and during the next four hours we worked out the details. Some I rejected. Like, he wanted to make the tnuctipun into minions of the Devil. (Yes, the Devil.) Like, he wanted me to be inconsistent. Why? Maybe to demonstrate my contempt for the story.

  The incredible thing is that when we finished, we did indeed have a consistent framework. It’s as complex as watchwork, more complex perhaps than WORLD OF PTAVVS, which was probably overcomplex; but it is consistent.

  The structure it turns upside down already amounts to about 250,000 words. It includes three books (WORLD OF PTAVVS, A GIFT FROM EARTH, and the eight stories in NEUTRON STAR), and several stories published in Galaxy, including “The Adults” (Galaxy, June 1967). If you haven’t read these (with the exception of A GIFT FROM EARTH, which is optional; published as “Slowboat Cargo” in If) then what follows will not make much sense.

  What follows is, first, a list of the basic ideas behind “Down in Flames”: changes in the structure of
the “Known Space” series; and second, a rough plot outline.

  I never got further than that. Along about April, I ran into an idea called a Dyson sphere. It gripped my imagination, and I designed a compromise structure which is in some ways superior: the Niven ring. It is the basis for a story called RINGWORLD.

  RINGWORLD makes “Down in Flames” obsolete. The assumptions behind RINGWORLD are different assumptions. So “Down in Flames” becomes part of the limbo of unwritten stories, and nobody would ever have known about it were it not for Tom Reamy and Trumpet. Have fun.

  PRELIMINARY OUTLINE:

  Beowulf Shaeffer never went to the galactic core.

  The alleged Quantum II hyperdrive ship in “At the Core” was a hoax. For eight months that ship rested somewhere in the West End of Jinx, while Beowulf Shaeffer thought he was making a round trip of 30,000 light-years. The puppeteer-built machinery he thought was hyperdrive equipment was cover-up for the real machinery: 3D movie projectors, sensory mechanisms, artificial gravity, et cetera.

  The core is not exploding.

  The thrintun/Slaver species never existed.

  The tnuctipun are real enough; but they did not exist a billion and a half years ago. They are contemporary.

  The puppeteers are in their pay.

  They accepted employment because they dared not refuse the tnuctipun, which species is even more mean and vicious than I thought. And I never really liked them.

  Obviously the puppeteers are not fleeing the radiation wave from the Core explosion. They are fleeing the tnuctipun. Another reason they accepted employment: they needed the funds to flee.

  Kzanol is neither robot nor android. He is, now get this, he is a product of tnuctipun biological engineering: a tailored species with only one member! His memories are heavily detailed science fiction.

  Many of the stasis boxes, ostensibly left behind after the Slaver War a billion and a half years ago, are false. Others are for real. The genetically tailored plants and animals are real.