04-Protector Read online

  They were real, and they moved. Some moved no faster than planetary objects; others, hundreds of times faster than escape velocity for the system. They glowed intensely hot, the color of a neutron star in its fourth week of life, when its temperature is still in the millions of degrees.

  Obviously they were spacecraft. At these speeds, natural objects would have been lost to interstellar space within months. Probably they used fusion drives. If so, and judging from their color, they burned hotter and more efficiently than Phssthpok’s own.

  They seemed to spend most of their time in space. At first he’d hoped they were some form of space-born life, perhaps related to the starseeds of the galactic core. But as he drew nearer the yellow sun he’d bad to abandon the idea. All the sparks had destinations, from the myriad small orbiting rocks to the moons and planets of the inner system. One frequent target was the world with the water atmosphere, the one hed classified as Pak-habitable. No lifeform native to space could have taken its gravity or its atmosphere.

  That planet, GO Target #1-3, was the biggest such target, though the spacecraft touched many smaller bodies. Interesting. If the pilots of those fusion craft had developed on GO Target #1-3, they would naturally prefer lighter gravities to heavier.

  But the ones he sought hadn’t the minds to build such craft. Had something alien usurped their places?

  Then he and his thousands had given their long lives to extract only a sterile vengeance.

  Phssthpok felt fury building in him. He held it back. It needn’t be the answer. GO Target #1 was not the only likely target. Probability was only twenty-eight percent. He could hope that the ones he had come to help circled another star.

  But he’d have to check.

  There is a minimum speed at which a Bussard ramjet will operate, and Phssthpok was not far above it. He had planned to coast through the system until he found something definite. Now he would have to use his reserve fuel. He had already found a blue-white spark moving at high velocity toward the inner system. He should be able to match its course.

  Nick landed Hummingbird, hurriedly issued orders for unloading and sale of his cargo, and went underground. His office was some two miles beneath the rocky bubble-dotted surface of Ceres, buried deep in the nickel-iron substrate.

  He hung his suit and helmet in the vestibule of his office. There was a painting on the front of the suit, and he patted it affectionately before he went in. He always did that.

  Most Belters decorated their suits. Why not? The interior of his suit was the only place many a Belter could call home, and the one possession he had to keep in perfect condition. But even in the Belt, Nick Sohl’s suit was unique.

  On an orange background was the painting of a girl. She was short; her head barely reached Nick’s neck ring. Her skin was a softly glowing green. Only her lovely back showed across the front of the suit. Her hair was streaming bonfire flames, flickering orange with touches of yellow and white, darkening into red-black smoke as it swept across the girl’s left shoulder. She was nude. Her arms were wrapped around the suit’s torso, her hands touching the air pac on its back; her legs embraced the suit’s thighs, so that her heels touched the backs of the flexible metal knee joints. It was a very beautiful painting, so beautiful that it almost wasn’t vulgar. A pity the suit’s sanitary outlet wasn’t somewhere else.

  Lit lounged in one of the guest chairs in Nick’s office, his long legs sprawling far across the rug. He was attenuated rather than big. Too much of his childhood had been spent in free fall. Now he could not fit into a standard pressure suit or spacecraft cabin; and wherever he sat, he looked like he was trying to take over.

  Nick dropped into his own chair and closed his eyes for a moment, getting used to the feel of being First Speaker again. With his eyes still closed he said, “Okay, Lit. What’s been happening?”

  “Got it all here.” Rustle of paper. “Yah. The monopole source is coming in over the plane of the solar system, aimed approximately at the sun. As of an hour ago, it was two point two billion miles out. For a week after we spotted it it showed a steady acceleration of point nine two gee, largely lateral and braking thrust to warp its course around the sun. Now it’s mainly deceleration, and the thrust has dropped to point one four gee. That aims it through Earth’s orbit.”

  “Where will Earth be then?”

  “We checked that. If he goes back to point nine two gee at-- this point, he’ll be at rest eight days from now.

  “And that’s where Earth will be.” Lit looked grim. “All of this is more than somewhat approximate. All we really know is that he’s aimed at the inner system.”

  “But Earth is the obvious target. Hardly fair. The Outsider’s supposed to contact us, not them. What have you done about anything?”

  “Mostly observations. We’ve got photos of what looks like a drive flame. A fusion flame, somewhat cooler than ours.”

  “Less efficient, then... but if he’s using a Bussard ramjet, he’s getting his fuel free. I suppose he’s below ramjet speeds now, though.”

  “Right.”

  “He must be huge. Could be a warship, Lit. Using that big a monopole source.”

  “Not necessarily. You know how a ramrobot works? A magnetic field picks up interstellar hydrogen plasma, guides it away from the cargo pod and constricts it so that the hydrogen undergoes fusion. The difference is that nobody can ride them because too much hydrogen gets through as radiation. In a manned ship you’d need enormously greater control of the plasma fields.”

  “That much more?”

  “Mitchikov says yes, if he came from far enough away. The further he came, the faster he must have, been going at peak velocity.”

  “Um.”

  “You’re getting paranoid, Nick. Why would any species send us an interstellar warship?”

  “Why would anyone send us a ship at all? I mean, if you’re going to be humble about it... Can we contact that ship before it reaches Earth?”

  “Oddly enough, I thought of that. Mitchikov has several courses plotted. Our best bet is to start a fleet from the trailing Jupiter Trojans sometime within the next six days.”

  “Not a fleet. We want the Outsider to see us as harmless. Do we have any big ships in the Trojans?”

  “The Blue Ox. She was about to leave for Juno, but I commandeered her and had her cargo tank cleared.”

  “Good. Nice going.” The Blue Ox was a mammoth fluid cargo carrier, as big as one of the Titan Hotel’s luxury liners, though not as pretty. “We’ll want a computer, a good one, not just a ship’s autopilot. Also a tech to run it, and some spare senses for the machine. I want to use it as a translator, and the Outsider might talk by eye-blinks or radio or modulated current. Can we maybe fit a singleship into the Ox’s cargo hold?”

  “What for?”

  “Just in case. Well give the Ox a lifeboat. If the Outsider plays rough someone might get away.”

  Lit did not say paranoia, but he was visibly restraining himself.

  “He’s big,” Nick said patiently. “His technology is powerful enough to get him across interstellar space. He could be friendly as a puppy, and someone could still say something wrong.” He picked up the phone and said, “Get me Achilles, main switchboard.”

  It would take awhile for the operator to focus a laser on Achilles. Nick hung up to wait. And the phone went off jarringly in his hand.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Traffic Control,” said the phone. “Cutter. Your office wanted anything on the big monopole source.”

  Nick opened the volume control so Shaeffer could hear. “Right. What?”

  “It’s matching course with a Belt ship. The pilot doesn’t seem to be evading contact.”

  Sohl’s lips tightened. “What kind of ship?”

  “We can’t tell from this distance. Probably a mining singleship. They’ll be matching orbit in thirty-seven hours twenty minutes, if neither of them change their minds.”

  “Keep me posted. Set nearby telescopes on wa
tch. I don’t want to miss anything.” Nick rang off. “You heard?”

  “Yah. Finagle’s First Law.”

  “Can we stop that Belter?”

  “I doubt it.”

  It could have been anyone. It turned out to be Jack Brennan.

  He was several hours from turnover en route to Earth’s Moon. The Mariner XX’s discarded booster rode his hull like an undernourished Siamese twin. Its whistle was still fixed in the flat nose, the supersonic whistle whose pitch had controlled the burning of the solid fuel core. Brennan had crawled inside to look, knowing that any damage might lower the relic’s value.

  For a used one-shot, the relic was in fine shape. The nozzle had burned a little unevenly, but not seriously so; naturally not, given that the probe had reached its destination. The Museum of Spaceflight would pay plenty for it.

  In the Belt, smuggling is illegal but not immoral. Smuggling was no more immoral to Brennan than forgetting to pay a parking meter would have been to a flatlander. If you got caught you paid the fine and that was that.

  Brennan was an optimist. He didn’t expect to be caught.

  He had been accelerating for four days at just short of one gee. Uranus’s orbit was far behind him; the inner system far ahead. He was going at a hell of a clip. There were no observed relativity effects, he wasn’t going that fast, but his watch would need resetting when he arrived.

  Have a look at Brennan. He masses one hundred and seventy-eight pounds per one gee, stands six feet two inches tall. Like any Belter, he looks much like an undermuscled basketball player. Since he has been sitting in that control couch for most of four days, he is beginning to look and feel crumpled and weary. But his brown eyes are clear and steady, twenty-twenty, having been corrected by microsurgery when he was eighteen. His straight dark hair is an inch-wide strip running from forehead to nape along a brown polished scalp. He is white; which is to say that his Belter tan is no darker than Cordovan leather; as usual it covers only his hands and his face and scalp above the neck. Elsewhere he is the color of a vanilla milkshake.

  He is forty-five years old. He looks thirty. Gravity has been kind to the muscles of his face, and growth salve to the potential bald spot at the crown of his head. But the developing fine lines around his eyes stand out clearly now, since he has been wearing a puzzled frown for the past twenty hours. He has become aware that something is following him.

  At first he’d thought it was a goldskin, a Ceres cop. But what would a goldskin be doing this far from the sun?

  Even at second glance it could not have been a goldskin. Its drive flame was too fuzzy, too big, not bright enough. Third glance included a few instrument readings. Brennan was accelerating, but the stranger was decelerating, and still had enormous velocity. Either it had come from beyond Pluto’s orbit, or its drive must generate tens of gees. Which gave the same answer.

  The strange light was an Outsider.

  How long had the Belt been waiting for him? Let any man spend some time between the stars, even a flatland moonship pilot, and someday he would realize just how deep the universe really was. Billions of light years deep, with room for anything at all. Beyond doubt the Outsider was out there somewhere; the first alien species to contact Man was going about its business beyond the reach of Belt telescopes.

  Now the Outsider was here, matching courses with Jack Brennan.

  And Brennan wasn’t even surprised. Wary, yes. Even frightened. But not surprised, not even that the Outsider had chosen him. That was an accident of fate. They had both been beading into the inner system from roughly the same direction.

  Call the Belt? The Belt must know by now. The Belt telescope net tracked every ship in the system; the odds were that it would find any wrong-colored dot moving at the wrong speed. Brennan bad expected them to find his own ship, had gambled that they wouldn’t find it soon enough. Certainly they’d found the Outsider. Certainly they were watching it; and by virtue of that fact they must be watching Brennan too. In any case Brennan couldn’t laser Ceres. A flatland ship might pick up the beam. Brennan didn’t know Belt policy on Earth-Outsider contacts.

  The Belt must act without him.

  Which left Brennan with two decisions of his own.

  One was easy. He didn’t have a snowman’s chance of smuggling anything. He would have to alter course to reach one of the major asteroids, and call the Belt the first chance he had to advise them of his course and cargo.

  But what of the Outsider?

  Evasion tactics? Easy enough. Axiomatically, it is impossible to stop a hostile ship in space. A cop can match course with a smuggler, but he cannot make an arrest unless the smuggler cooperates—or runs out of fuel. He can blow the ship out of space, or even ram with a good autopilot; but how can he connect airlocks with a ship that keeps firing its drive in random bursts? Brennan could head anywhere, and all the Outsider could do was follow or destroy him.

  Running would be sensible. Brennan did have a family to protect. Charlotte could take care of herself. She was an adult Belter, as competent to run her own life as Brennan himself, though she had never found enough ambition to earn her pilot’s license. And Brennan had paid the customary fees in trust for Estelle and Jennifer. His daughters would be raised and educated.

  But he could do more for them. Or he could become a father again... probably with Charlotte. There was money strapped to his hull. Money was power. Like electrical or political power, its uses could take many forms.

  Contact the alien and he might never see Charlotte again. There were risks in being the first to meet an alien species.

  And obvious honors.

  Could history ever forget the man who met the Outsider?

  Just for a moment he felt trapped. As if fate were playing games with his lifeline... but he couldn’t turn this down. Let the Outsider come to him. Brennan held his course.

  The Belt is a web of telescopes. Hundreds of thousands of them.

  It has to be that way. Every ship carries a telescope. Every asteroid must be watched constantly, because asteroids can be perturbed from their orbits, and because a map of the solar system has to be up-to-date by seconds. The light of every fusion drive has to be watched. In crowded sectors ships can run through each other’s exhausts if someone doesn’t warn them away; and the exhaust from a fusion motor is deadly.

  Nick Sohl kept glancing up at the screen, down at the stack of dossiers on his desk, up at the screen... The screen showed two blobs of violet-white light, one bigger than the other, and vaguer. Already they could both appear on the same screen, because the asteroid taking the pictures was almost in line with their course.

  He had read the dossiers several times. Ten of them; and each might be the unknown Belter who was now approaching the Outsider. There had been a dozen dossiers. In the outer offices men were trying to locate and eliminate these ten as they had already found two, by phone calls and com lasers and dragnets.

  Since the ship wasn’t running, Nick had privately eliminated six of the dossiers. Two had never been caught smuggling: a mark of caution, whether he’d never smuggled or never been caught. One he knew; she was a xenophobe. Three were old-timers; you don’t get to be an oldtimer in the Belt by taking foolish chances. In the Belt the Finagle-Murphy Laws are only half a joke.

  One of four miners had had the colossal arrogance to appoint himself humanity’s ambassador to the universe. Serve him right if he blows it, thought Nick. Which one?

  A million miles short of Jupiter’s orbit, moving well above the plane of the solar system, Phssthpok matched velocities with the native ship and began to close in.

  Of the thousands of sentient species in the galaxy, Phssthpok and Phssthpok’s race had studied only their own. When they ran across other species, as in the mining of nearby systems for raw materials, they destroyed them as quickly and safely as possible. Aliens were dangerous, or might be, and Pak were not interested in anything but Pak. A protector’s intelligence was high; but intelligence is a tool to be used toward
a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.

  Phssthpok was working strictly from ignorance. All he could do was guess.

  At a guess, then, and assuming that the oval scratch in the native ship’s hull was really a door, the native would be not much taller and not much shorter than Phssthpok. Say, three to seven feet tall, depending on how much elbow room it needed. Of course the oval might not be designed for the native’s longest length, as for the biped Phssthpok. But the ship was small; it wouldn’t hold something too much larger than Phssthpok.

  One look at the native would tell him. If it was not Pak, he would need to ask it questions. If it was—

  There would still be questions, many of them. But his search would be over. A few ship’s days to reach GO Target #1-3, a short time to learn their language and explain how to use what he’d brought, and he could stop eating.

  It showed no awareness of Phssthpok’s ship. A few minutes and he would be alongside, yet the stranger made no move—cancel. The native had turned off its drive. Phssthpok was being invited to match courses.

  Phssthpok did. He wasted neither motion nor fuel; he might have spent his whole life practicing for this one maneuver. His lifesystem pod coasted alongside the native ship, and stopped.

  His pressure suit was on, but he made no move. Phssthpok dared not risk his own person, not when he was so close to victory. If the native would only step out on the hull...

  Brennan watched the ship come alongside.

  Three sections, spaced eight miles apart. He saw no cable joining them. At this distance it might be invisibly thin. The biggest, most massive section must be the drive: a cylinder with three small cones jutting at angles from the tail. Big as it was, the cylinder must be too small to hold fuel for an interstellar voyage. Either the Outsider had dropped expendable tanks along the way, or... a manned ramrobot?