Neutron Star Read online

  “And you picked piracy? Why not blackmail?”

  “I thought of that—”

  “I should hope so! Can you imagine what the puppeteers would pay to keep that secret?”

  “Yes. That’s what stopped me. Rich Mann, how much would you have asked for in one lump sum?”

  “A round billion stars and immunity from prosecution.”

  “Okay. Now look at it from the puppeteer point of view. That billion wouldn’t buy them complete safety, because you might still talk. But if they spent a tenth of that on detectives, weapons, hit men, et cetera, they could shut your mouth for keeps and also find and hit anyone you might have talked to. I couldn’t figure any way to make myself safe and still collect, not with that much potential power against me.

  “So I thought of piracy.

  “Eight of us had gone in, but I was the only one who’d guessed just what we’d stumbled into. I let the others in on it. Some had friends they could trust, and that raised our number to fourteen. We bought a ship, a very old one, and renovated it. She’s an old slowboat’s ground-to-orbit auxiliary fitted out with a new hyperdrive; maybe you noticed?”

  “No. I saw how old she was.”

  “We figured even if the puppeteers recognized her, they’d never trace her. We took her back to the puppeteer system and waited.”

  A flickering light glimmered outside the bubble wall. Any second now the logs would catch… Mann tried to relax.

  “Pretty soon a ship came in. We waited till it was too deep in the system’s gravity well to jump back into hyperspace. Then we matched courses. Naturally they surrendered right away. We went in in suits so they couldn’t describe us even if they could tell humans apart. Would you believe they had six hundred million stars in currency?”

  “That’s pretty good pay. What went wrong?”

  “My idiot crew wouldn’t leave. We’d figured most of the ships coming into the puppeteer system would be carrying money. They’re misers, you know. Part of being a coward is wanting security. And they do most of their mining and manufacturing on other worlds, where they can get labor. So we waited for two more ships, because we had room for lots more money. The puppeteers wouldn’t dare attack us inside their own system.” Captain Kidd made a sound of disgust. “I can’t really blame the men. In a sense they were right. One ship with a fusion drive can do a hell of a lot of damage just by hovering over a city. So we stayed.

  “Meanwhile the puppeteers registered a formal complaint with Earth.

  “Earth hates people who foul up interstellar trade. We’d offered physical harm to a puppeteer. A thing like that could cause a stock-market crash. So Earth offered the services of every police force in human space. Hardly seems fair, does it?”

  “They ganged up on you. But they still couldn’t come after you, could they? The puppeteers would have to tell the police how to find their system. They’d hardly do that; not when some human descendant might attack them a thousand years from now.”

  The Jinxian dialed himself a frozen daiquiri. “They had to wait till we left. I still don’t know how they tracked us. Maybe they’ve got something that can track a gravity warp moving faster than light. I wouldn’t put it past them to build it just for us. Anyway, when we angled toward Jinx, we heard them telling the police of We Made It just where we were.”

  “Ouch.”

  “We headed for the nearest double star. Not my Idea; Hermie Preston’s. He thought we could hide in the dust clouds in the trojan points. Whatever the puppeteers were using probably couldn’t find us in normal space.” Two thirsty gulps had finished his daiquiri. He crumpled the cup, watched it evaporate, dialed another. “The nearest double star was Mira Ceti. We hardly expected to find a planet in the trailing trojan point, but as long as it was there, we decided to use it.”

  “And here you are.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll be better off when you’ve found a way to hide that ship.”

  “We had to find out about you first, Rich Mann. Tomorrow we’ll sink the Puppet Master in the ocean. Already we’ve shut off the fusion drive. The lifters work by battery, and the cops can’t detect that.”

  “Fine. Now for the billion-dollar—”

  “No, no, Rich Mann. I will not tell you where to find the puppeteer planet. Give up the whole idea. Shall we join the campfire group?”

  Mann came joltingly alert. How had the stage trees lasted this long? Thinking fast, he said, “Is your autokitchen as good as mine?”

  “Probably not. Why?”

  “Let me treat your group to dinner, Captain Kidd.”

  Captain Kidd shook his head, smiling. “No offense, Rich Mann, but I can’t read your kitchen controls, and there’s no point in tempting you. You might rashly put someth—”

  WHAM!

  The living bubble bulged inward, snapped back. Captain Kidd swore and ran for the airlock. Mann stayed seated, motionless, hoping against hope that the Jinxian had forgotten him.

  WHAM! WHAM! Flares of light from the region of the campfire. Captain Kidd frantically punched the cycle button, and the opaque inner door closed on him. Mann came to his feet, running.

  WHAM! The concussion hurt his ears and set the bubble rippling. Burning logs must be flying in all directions. The airlock recycled, empty. No telling where the Jinxian was; the outer door was opaque too. Well, that worked both ways.

  WHAM!

  Mann searched through the airlock locker, pushing sections of spacesuit aside to find the lift belt. It wasn’t there. He’d been wearing it; they’d taken it off him after they shot him down.

  He moaned: a tormented, uncouth sound to come from a cultured Wunderlander. He had to have a lift belt.

  WHAMWHAMWHAM. Someone was screaming far away.

  Mann snatched up the suit’s chest-and-shoulder section and locked it around him. It was rigid vacuum armor, with a lift motor built into the back. He took an extra moment to screw down the helmet, then hit the cycle button.

  No use searching for weapons. They’d have taken even a variable-knife.

  The Jinxian could be just outside waiting. He might have realized the truth by now.

  The door opened…. Captain Kidd was easy to find, a running misshapen shadow and a frantic booming voice. “Flatten out, you yeastheads! It’s an attack!” He hadn’t guessed. But he must know that the We Made It police would use stunners.

  Mann twisted his lift control to full power.

  The surge of pressure took him under the armpits. Two standard gem sent blood rushing to his feet, pushed him upward with four times Wunderland’s gravity. A last stage log exploded under him, rocked him back and forth, and then all was dark and quiet.

  He adjusted the attitude setting to slant him almost straight forward. The dark ground sped beneath him. He moved northeast. Nobody was following him—yet.

  Captain Kidd’s men would have been killed, hurt, or at least stunned when the campfire exploded in their faces. He’d expected Captain Kidd to chase him, but the Jinxian couldn’t have caught him. Lift motors are all alike, and Mann wasn’t as heavy as the Jinxian.

  He flew northeast, flying very low, knowing that the only landmarks big enough to smash him were the spires to the west. When he could no longer see the ships’ lights, he turned south, still very low. Still nobody followed him. He was glad he’d taken the helmet; it protected his eyes from the wind.

  In the blue dawn he came awake. The sky was darker than navy blue, and the light around him was dim, like blue moonlight. Little Mira was a hurtingly bright pinpoint between two mountain peaks, bright enough to sear holes in a man’s retinae. Mann unscrewed his helmet, adjusted the pink goggles over his eyes. Now it was even darker.

  He poked his nose above the yellow moss. The plain and sky were empty of men. The pirates must be out looking for him, but they hadn’t gotten here yet. So far so good.

  Far out across the plain there was fire. A stage tree rose rapidly into the black sky, minus its roots and flowers, the wooden f
langes at its base holding it in precarious aerodynamic stability. A white rope of smoke followed it up. When the smoke cut off, the tree became invisible…until, much higher, there was a puff of white cloud like a flak burst. Now the seeds would be spreading across the sky.

  Richard Mann smiled. Wonderful, how the stage trees had adapted to the loss of their masters. The Slavers had raised them on wide plantations, using the solid-fuel rocket cores inside the living bark to lift their ships from places where a fusion drive would have done damage. But the trees used the rockets for reproduction, to scatter their seeds farther than any plant before them.

  Ah, well … Richard Mann snuggled deeper into the yellow woolly stuff around him and began to consider his next move. He was a hero now in the eyes of humanity-at-large. He had badly damaged the pirate crew. When the police landed, he could count on a reward from the puppeteers. Should he settle for that or go on to bigger stakes?

  The Puppet Master’s cargo was bigger stakes, certainly. But even if he could take it, which seemed unlikely, how could he fit it into his ship? How escape the police of We Made It?

  No. Mann had another stake in mind, one just as valuable and infinitely easier to hide.

  What Captain Kidd apparently hadn’t realized was that blackmail is not immoral to a puppeteer. There are well-established rules of conduct that make blackmail perfectly safe both for blackmailer and victim. Two are that the blackmailer must submit to having certain portions of his memory erased, and must turn over all evidence against the victim. Mann was prepared to do this if he could force Captain Kidd to tell him where to find the puppeteer system.

  But how?

  Well, he knew one thing the Jinxian didn’t…

  Little Mira rose fast, arc blue, a hole into hell. Mann remained where he was, an insignificant mote in the yellow vegetation below one of the spires Captain Kidd had remarked on last night. The spire was a good half mile high. An artifact that size would seem impossibly huge to any but an Earthman. The way it loomed over him made Mann uncomfortable. In shape it was a slender cone with a base three hundred feet across. The surface near the base was gray and smooth to touch, like polished granite.

  The yellow vegetation was a thick, rolling carpet. It spread out around the spire in an uneven circle half a mile in diameter and dozens of feet deep. It rose about the base in a thick turtleneck collar. Close up, the stuff wasn’t even discrete plants. It looked like a cross between moss and wool, dyed flagrant yellow.

  It made a good hiding place. Not perfect, of course; a heat sensor would pick him out in a flash. He hadn’t thought of that last night, and now it worried him. Should he get out, try to reach the sea?

  The ship would certainly carry a heat sensor, but not a portable one. A portable heat sensor would be a weapon, a nighttime gunsight, and weapons of war had been illegal for some time in human space.

  But the Puppet Master could have stopped elsewhere to get such implements. Kzinti, for example.

  Nonsense. Why would Captain Kidd have needed portable weapons with night gunsights? He certainly hadn’t expected puppeteers to fight hand-to-hand! The stunners were mercy weapons; even a pirate would not dare kill a puppeteer, and Captain Kidd was no ordinary pirate.

  All right. Radar? He need only burrow into the moss/wool. Sight search? Same answer. Radio? Mental note: Do not transmit anything.

  Mental note? There was a dictaphone in his helmet. He used it after pulling the helmet out of the moss/wool around him.

  Flying figures. Mann watched them for a long moment, trying to spot the Jinxian. There were only four, and he wasn’t among them. The four were flying northwest of him, moving south. Mann ducked into the moss.

  “Hello, Rich Mann.”

  The voice was low, contorted with fury. Mann felt the shock race through him, contracting every muscle with the fear of death. It came from behind him!

  From his helmet.

  “Hello, Rich Mann. Guess where I am?”

  He couldn’t turn it off. Spacesuit helmet radios weren’t built to be turned off: a standard safety factor. If one were fool enough to ignore safety, one could insert an “off” switch; but Mann had never felt the need.

  “I’m in your ship, using your ship-to-suit radio circuit. That was a good trick you played last night. I didn’t even know what a stage tree was till I looked it up in your library.”

  He’d just have to endure it. A pity he couldn’t answer back.

  “You killed four of my men and put five more in the autodoc tanks. Why’d you do it, Rich Mann? You must have known we weren’t going to kill you. Why should we? There’s no blood on our hands.”

  You lie, Mann thought at the radio. People die in a market crash. And the ones who live are the ones who suffer. Do you know what it’s like to be suddenly poor and not know how to live poor?

  “I’ll assume you want something, Rich Mann. All right. What? The money in my hold? That’s ridiculous. You’d never get in. You want to turn us in for a reward? Fat chance. You’ve got no weapons. If we find you now, we’ll kill you.”

  The four searchers passed far to the west, their headlamps spreading yellow light across the blue dusk. They were no danger to him now. A pity they and their fellows should have been involved in what amounted to a vendetta.

  “The puppeteer planet, of course. The modern El Dorado. But you don’t know where it is, do you? I wonder if I ought to give you a hint. Of course you’d never know whether I was telling the truth…”

  Did the Jinxian know how to live poor? Mann shuddered. The old memories came back only rarely; but when they came, they hurt.

  You have to learn not to buy luxuries before you’ve bought necessities. You can starve learning which is which. Necessities are food and a place to sleep, shoes and pants. Luxuries are tobacco, restaurants, fine shirts, throwing away a ruined meal while you’re learning to cook, quitting a job you don’t like. A union is a necessity. Boosterspice is a luxury.

  The Jinxian wouldn’t know about that. He’d bad the money to buy his own ship.

  “Ask me politely, Rich Mann. Would you like to know where I found the puppeteer system?”

  Mann had leased the Explorer on a college grant. It had been the latest step in a long climb upward. Before that…

  He was half his lifetime old when the crash came. Until then boosterspice had kept him as young as the ageless idle ones who were his friends and relatives. Overnight he was one of the hungry. A number of his partners in disaster had ridden their lift belts straight up into eternity; Richard Schultz-Mann had sold his for his final dose of boosterspice. Before he could afford boosterspice again, there were wrinkles in his forehead, the texture of his skin had, changed, his sex urge had decreased, strange white patches had appeared in his hair, there were twinges in his back. He still got them.

  Yet always he had maintained his beard. With the white spike and the white streak it looked better than ever. After the boosterspice restored color to his hair, he dyed the patches back in again.

  “Answer me, Rich Mann!”

  Go ride a bandersnatch.

  It was a draw. Captain Kidd couldn’t entice him into answering, and Mann would never know the pirate’s secret. If Kidd dropped his ship in the sea, Mann could show it to the police. At least that would be something.

  Luckily Kidd couldn’t move the Explorer. Otherwise he could take both ships half around the planet, leaving Mann stranded.

  The four pirates were far to the south. Captain Kidd had apparently given up on the radio. There were water and food syrup in his helmet; Mann would not starve.

  Where in blazes were the police? On the other side of the planet?

  Stalemate.

  Big Mira came as a timorous peeping Tom, poking its rim over the mountains like red smoke. The land brightened, taking on tinges of lavender against long, long navy blue shadows. The shadows shortened and became vague.

  The morality of his position was beginning to bother Dr. Richard Mann.

  In attacking the
pirates, he had done his duty as a citizen. The pirates had sullied humanity’s hard-won reputation for honesty. Mann had struck back.

  But his motive? Fear had been two parts of that motive. First, the fear that Captain Kidd might decide to shut his mouth. Second, the fear of being poor.

  That fear had been with him for some time.

  Write a book and make a fortune! It looked good on paper. The thirty-light-year sphere of human space contained nearly fifty billion readers. Persuade one percent of them to shell out half a star each for a disposable tape, and your four-percent royalties became twenty million stars. But most books nowadays were flops. You had to scream very loud nowadays to get the attention of even ten billion readers. Others were trying to drown you out.

  Before Captain Kidd, that had been Richard Schultz-Mann’s sole hope of success.

  He’d behaved within the law. Captain Kidd couldn’t make that claim; but Captain Kidd hadn’t killed anybody.

  Mann sighed. He’d had no choice. His major motive was honor, and that motive still held.

  He moved restlessly in his nest of damp moss/wool. The day was heating up, and his suit’s temperature control would not work with half a suit.

  What was that?

  It was the Puppet Master, moving effortlessly toward him on its lifters. The Jinxian must have decided to get it under water before the human law arrived.

  …Or had he?

  Mann adjusted his lift motor until he was just short of weightless, then moved cautiously around the spire. He saw the four pirates moving to intersect the Puppet Master. They’d see him if he left the spire. But if he stayed, those infrared detectors …

  He’d have to chance it.

  The suit’s padded shoulders gouged his armpits as he streaked toward the second spire. He stopped in midair over the moss and dropped, burrowed in it. The pirates didn’t swerve.

  Now he’d see.

  The ship slowed to a stop over the spire he’d just left.

  “Can you hear me, Rich Mann?”