A Gift From Earth Read online

  She continued braking. The universe stretched on again; the stars resumed their normal shapes and colors. Eleven point nine light-years from Sol, one hundred million miles above the star Tau Ceti, the machine came to an effective stop. Her ramscoop went permanently off. variety of senses began searching the sky. They stopped. Locked.

  Again she moved. She must reach her destination on the remaining fuel in her insystem tank.

  Tau Ceti is a G8 star, about four hundred degrees cooler than Sol and only 45 percent as strong as its output of light. The world of Mount Lookitthat orbits sixty-seven million miles away, a moonless world in a nearly circular path.

  The ramrobot moved in on Mount Lookitthat the world. She moved cautiously, for there were fail-safe factors in her computer program. Her senses probed.

  Surface temperature: 600 degrees Fahrenheit, with little variation. Atmosphere: opaque, dense, poisonous near the surface. Diameter: 7650 miles.

  Something came over the horizon. In visible light it seemed an island in a sea of fog. A topography like a flight of broad, very shallow steps, flat plateaus separated by sheer cliffs. But Ramrobot #143 sensed more than visible light. There was Earth-like temperature, breathable air at an Earthlike pressure.

  And there were two radio homing signals.

  The signals settled it. Ramrobot #143 didn't even have to decide which to answer, for they were coming from only a quarter of a mile apart. They came, in fact, from Mount Lookitthat's two slowboats, and the distance between them was bridged by the sprawling structure of the Hospital, so that the spacecraft were no longer spacecraft but odd-looking towers in a sort of bungalow-castle. But the ramrobot didn't know that and didn't need to.

  There were signals. Ramrobot #143 started down.

  The floor vibrated gently against the soles of his feet, and from all around came muted, steady thunder. Jesus Pietro Castro strode down the twisting, intermeshing, labyrinthine passages of the Hospital.

  Though he was in a tearing hurry, it never occurred to him to run. He was not in the gymnasium, after all. Instead he moved like an elephant, which cannot run but can walk fast enough to trample a running man. His head was down; his stride was as long as his legs could reach. His eyes looked ominously out from under prominent brow ridges and bushy white eyebrows. His bandit's moustache and his full head of hair were also white and bushy, forming a startling contrast to his swarthy skin. Implementation police sprang to attention as he passed, snapping out of his way with the speed of pedestrians dodging a bus. Was it his rank they feared or his massive, unstoppable bulk? Perhaps even they didn't know.

  At the great stone arch which was the main entrance to the Hospital, Jesus Pietro looked up to see a sparkling blue-white star overhead. Even as he found it, it winked out. Moments later the all-pervading thunder died away.

  A jeep was waiting for him. If he'd had to call for one, someone would have been very sorry. He got in, and the Implementation chauffeur took off at once, without waiting for orders. The Hospital fell behind, with its walls and its surrounding wasteland of defenses.

  The ramrobot package was floating down on its parachutes.

  Other cars were in flight, erratically shifting course as their drivers tried to guess where the white dot would come down. It would be near the Hospital of course. The ramrobot would have aimed for one or another of the ships; and the Hospital had grown like something living, like a growth of architectural coral, between the two former spacecraft.

  But the wind was strong today.

  Jesus Pietro frowned. The parachute would be blown over the edge of the cliff. It would end not on Alpha plateau, where the crew built their homes and where no colonist could be tolerated, but in the colonist regions beyond.

  It did. The cars swooped after it like a flock of geese, following it over the four-hundred-foot cliff that separated Alpha Plateau from Beta Plateau, where forests of fruit trees alternated with fields of grain and vegetables and meadows where cattle gazed. There were no homes on Beta, for the crew did not like colonists so close. But colonists worked there, and often they played there.

  Jesus Pietro picked up his phone. "Orders," he said. "Ramrobot package one-forty-three is landing in Beta, sector ... twenty-two or thereabouts. Send four squads in after us. Do not under any circumstances interfere with cars or crew, but arrest any colonist you find within half a mile of the package. Hold them for questioning only. And get out here fast."

  The package skimmed over half an acre of citrus trees and came down at the far edge.

  It was a grove of lemon and orange trees. One of the later ramrobot packages had carried the grove's genetically altered ancestors, along with other miracles of terrestrial biological engineering. These trees would not harbor any parasites at all. They would grow anywhere. They would not compete for growth with other similarly altered citrus trees. Their fruit remained precisely ripe for ten months out of the year; and when they dropped the fruit to release the seeds, it was at staggered intervals, so that at any time five trees out of six held ripe fruit.

  In their grim need for sunlight the trees had spread their leaves and branches into an opaque chain, so that being in the grove was like being in a virgin forest. Mushrooms grew here, imported unchanged from Earth.

  Polly had already picked a couple of dozen. If anyone had asked, she had gone into the citrus woods to pick mushrooms.

  By the time her hypothetical questioner arrived, she would have hidden her camera.

  Considering that the tending season was a month away, a remarkable number of colonists were abroad on Beta Plateau. In woods, on the plains, climbing cliffs for exercise, hundreds of men and women were on excursions and picnics. An alert Implementation officer would have found their distribution improbably even. Too many would have been recognized as Sons of Earth.

  But the ramrobot package chose to land in Polly's area.

  She was near the edge of the woods when she heard the thump. She moved swiftly but quietly in that direction. With her black hair and darkly tanned skin she was nearly invisible in the forest dusk. She crawled between two tree trunks, moved behind another, and peered out.

  A large cylindrical object lay on the grass beyond. A string of five parachutes writhed away before the wind.

  So that's what they look like, she thought. It seemed so small to have come so far ... but it must be only a tiny portion of the total ramrobot. The major portion would be on its way home.

  But it was the package that counted. The contents of a ramrobot package were never trivial. For six months, ever since the maser message arrived, the Sons of Earth had been planning to capture ramrobot capsule #143. At worst, they could ransom it to the crew. At best, it might be something to fight with.

  She almost stepped out of the woods before she saw the cars. At least thirty of them, landing all around the ramrobot package.

  She stayed hidden.

  His soldiers would not have recognized Jesus Pietro, but they would have understood. All but two or three of the men and women around him were purebred crew. Their chauffeurs, including his own, had prudently stayed in their cars. Jesus Pietro Castro was obsequious, deferential, and very careful not to joggle an elbow or to step on a toe or even to find himself in somebody's path.

  As a result, his vision was blocked when Millard Parlette, a real descendant of the first Captain of the Planck, opened the capsule and reached in. He did see what the ancient held up to the sunlight, the better to examine it.

  It was a rectangular solid with rounded edges, and it had been packed in a resilient material which was now disintegrating. The bottom half was metal. The top was a remote descendant of glass, hard as the cheaper steel alloys, more transparent than a windowpane. And in the top half floated something shapeless.

  Jesus Pietro felt his mouth fall open. He looked harder. His eyelids squinted, his pupils dilated. Yes, he knew what this was. It was what the maser message had promised six months ago.

  A great gift, and a great danger.

  "Th
is must be our most carefully guarded secret," Millard Parlette was saying in a voice like a squeaky door. "No word must ever leak out. If the colonists saw this, they'd blow it out of all proportion. We'll have to tell Castro to — Castro! Where the Mist Demons is Castro?"

  "Here I am, sir."

  __________

  Polly fitted the camera back in its case and began to work her way deeper into the woods. She'd taken several pictures, and two were telescopic shots of the thing in the glass case. Her eyes hadn't seen it clearly, but the film would show it in detail.

  She went up a tree with the camera about her neck. The leaves and branches tried to push her back, but she fought through, deeper and deeper into the protecting leaves. When she stopped, there was hardly a square inch of her that didn't feel the gentle pressure. It was dark as the caves of Pluto.

  In a few minutes the police would be all through here. They would wait only until the crew was gone before converging on this area. It was not enough that Polly be invisible. There must be enough leaves to block any infrared fight leaving her body.

  She could hardly blame herself for losing the capsule. The Sons of Earth had been unable to translate the maser message, but the crew had. They knew the capsule's worth. But so did Polly — now. When the eighteen thousand colonists of Mount Lookitthat knew what was in that capsule ...

  Night came. The Implementation police had collected all the colonists they could find. None had seen the capsule after it came down, and all would be released after questioning. Now the police spread out with infrared detectors. There were several spots of random heat in Polly's grove, and all were sprayed with sonic stunners. Polly never knew she'd been hit. When she woke next morning, she was relieved to find herself still in her perch. She waited until high noon, then moved toward the Beta-Gamma Bridge with her camera hidden under the mushrooms.

  2: The Sons of Earth

  From the bell tower of Campbelltown came four thunderous ringing notes. The sonic wave-fronts marched out of town in order, crossing fields and roads, diminishing as they came. They overran the mine with hardly a pause. But men looked up, lowering their tools.

  Matt smiled for the first time that day. Already he could taste cold beer.

  The bicycle ride from the mine was all downhill. He reached Cziller's as the place was beginning to fill up. He ordered a pitcher, as usual, and downed the first glassful without drawing breath. A kind of bliss settled on him, and he poured his second glass carefully down the side to avoid a head. He sat sipping it while more and more freed workmen poured into the taproom.

  Tomorrow was Saturday. For two days and three nights he could forget the undependable little beasties who earned him his living.

  Presently an elbow hit him in the neck. He ignored it: a habit his ancestors had brought from crowded Earth and retained. But the second time the elbow poked him, he had the glass to his lips. With beer dripping wetly down his neck, be turned to deliver a mild reproof.

  "Sorry," said a short dark man with straight black hair. He had a thin, expressionless face and the air of a tired clerk. Matt looked more closely.

  "Hood," he said.

  "Yes, my name is Hood. But I don't recognize you." The man put a question in his voice.

  Matt grinned, for he liked flamboyant gestures. He wrapped his fingers in his collar and pulled his shirt open to the waist. "Try again," he invited.

  The clerkish type shied back, and then his eyes caught the tiny scar on Matt's chest.

  "Keller."

  "Right," said Matt, and zipped his shirt up.

  "Keller. I'll be d-damned," said Hood. You could tell somehow that he saved such words for emergencies. "It's been at least seven years. What have you been doing lately?"

  "Grab that seat." Hood saw his opportunity and was into the stool next to Matt before the occupant was fully out of it. "I've been playing nursemaid to mining worms. And you?"

  Hood's smile suddenly died. "Er — you don't still hold that scar against me, do you?"

  "No!" Matt said with explosive sincerity. "That whole thing was my fault. Anyway it was a long time ago."

  It was. Matt had been in the eighth grade that fall day when Hood came into Matt's classroom to borrow the pencil sharpener. It was the first time he'd ever seen Hood: a boy about Matt's size, though obviously a year older, an undersized, very nervous upperclassman. Unfortunately the teacher was out of the room. Hood had marched the full length of the room, not looking at anyone, sharpened his pencil, and turned to find his escape blocked by a mob of yelling, bounding eighth graders. To Hood, a new arrival at the school, they must have looked like a horde of cannibals. And in the forefront was Matt, using a chair in the style of an animal trainer.

  Exit Hood, running, wild with terror. He had left the sharpened point of his pencil in Matt's chest.

  It was one of the few times Matt had acted the bully. To him, the scar was a badge of shame.

  "Good," said Hood, his relief showing. "So you're a miner now?"

  "Right, and regretting it every waking hour. I rue the day Earth sent us those little snakes."

  "It must be better than digging the holes yourself."

  "Think so? Are you ready for a lecture?"

  "Just a second." Hood drained his glass in a heroic gesture. "Ready."

  "A mining worm is five inches long and a quarter inch in diameter, mutated from an earthworm. Its grinding orifice is rimmed with little diamond teeth. It ingests metal ores for pleasure, but for food it has to be supplied with blocks of synthetic stuff which is different for each breed of worm — and there's a breed for every metal. This makes things complicated. We've got six breeds out at the mine site, and I've got to see that each breed always has a food block within reach."

  "It doesn't sound too complicated. Can't they find their own food?"

  "In theory, sure. In practice, not always. But that's not all. What breaks down the ores is a bacterium in the worm's stomach. Then the worm drops metal gains around its food block, and we sweep them up. Now, that bacterium, dies very easily. If the bacterium dies, so does the worm, because there's metal ore blocking his intestines. Then the other worms eat his body to recover the ore. Only, five times out of sit it's the wrong ore."

  "The worms can't tell each other apart?"

  "Flaming right they can't. They eat the wrong metals, they eat the wrong worms, they eat the wrong food blocks; and when they do everything right, they still die in ten days. They were built that way because their teeth wear out so fast. They're supposed to breed like mad to compensate, but the plain truth is they don't have time when they're on the job. We have to keep going back to the crew for more."

  "So they've got you by the gonads."

  "Sure. They charge what they like."

  "Could they be putting the wrong chemical cues in some of the food blocks?"

  Matt looked up, startled. "I'll bet that's just what they're doing. Or too little of the right cues; that'd save them money at the same time. They won't let us grow our own, of course. The — "

  Matt swallowed the word. After all, he hadn't seen Hood in years. The crew didn't like being called names.

  "Time for dinner," said Hood.

  They finished the beer and went to the town's one restaurant. Hood wanted to know what had happened to his old school friends, or schoolmates; Hood had not made friends easily. Matt, who knew in many cases, obliged. They talked shop, both professions. Hood was teaching school on Delta. To Matt's surprise, the introverted boy had become an entertaining storyteller. He had kept his dry, precise tone, and it only made his jokes funnier. They were both fairly good at their jobs, and both making enough money to live on. There was no real poverty anywhere on the Plateau. It was not the colonists' money the crew wanted, as Hood pointed out over the meat course.

  "I know where there's a party," Hood said over coffee.

  "Are we invited?"

  "Yes.

  Matt had nothing planned for the night, but be wanted reassurance. "Party crashers welcom
e?"

  "In your case, party crashers solicited. You'll like Harry Kane. He's the host."

  "I'm sold."

  The sun dipped below the edge of Gamma Plateau as they rode up. They left their bicycles in back of the house. As they walked around to the front, the sun showed again, a glowing red half-disk above the eternal sea of cloud beyond the void edge. Harry Kane's house was just forty yards from the edge. They stopped a moment to watch the sunset fade, then turned toward the house.

  It was a great sprawling bungalow, laid out in a rough cross, with the bulging walls typical of architectural coral. No attempt had been made to disguise its origin. Matt had never before seen a house which was not painted, but he had to admire the effect. The remnants of the shaping balloon, which gave all architectural coral buildings their telltale bulge, had been carefully scraped away. The exposed walls had been polished to a shining pink sheen. Even after sunset the house glowed softly.

  As if it were proud of its thoroughly colonist origin.

  Architectural coral was another gift of the ramrobots. A genetic manipulation of ordinary sea coral, it was the cheapest building material known. The only real cost was in the plastic balloon that guided the growth of the coral and enclosed the coral's special airborne food. All colonists lived in buildings of coral. Not many would have built in stone or wood or brick even were it allowed. But most attempted to make their dwellings look somewhat like those on Alpha plateau. With paint, with wood and metal and false stone-sidings, with powered sandpaper disks to flatten the inevitable bulges, they tried to imitate the crew.

  In daylight or darkness Harry Kane's house was flagrantly atypical.

  The noise hit them as they opened the door. Matt stood still while his ears adjusted to the noise level — a survival trait his ancestors had developed when Earth's population numbered nineteen billion, even as it did that night, eleven point nine light-years away. During the last four centuries a man of Earth might as well have been stone deaf if he could not carry on a conversation with a thousand drunks bellowing in his ears. Matt's people had kept some of their habits too. The great living room was jammed, and the few chairs were largely being ignored.