The World of Ptavvs Page 4

  Judy leaned back in the soft seat. She was tired, even though she couldn’t sleep.

  The enormous pillar that was UCLA blazed with light; but these were night lights, to protect the structure from aircraft. Yet—a level halfway up was three times as bright as the rest. Judy guessed which level this was, even before the cab started down. As they swooped toward the landing balcony she noticed other details.

  The big square vehicle was an ambulance, one with large capacity. Those little cars with the extended motor housings were police. There were tiny figures moving around.

  Automatically Kzanol lit his last cigarette. His mouth and throat were raw; was that normal? He remembered that it wasn’t, except when he had been smoking far too much.

  …And then the Time of Ripening would come. Suddenly everyone would be in a hurry; Dad and Grandpa would return to the house very late and bone-tired, and the slaves never rested at all. All day and night there was the sound of trees being felled, and the low whirr of the stripping plant.

  Before he was old enough to help, he used to sit beneath the guardian sunflowers and watch the trees go into the stripping plant. They would go in looking like any other mpul tree: perfectly straight, with the giant green flower at the top, and the dark blue stalk ending in a tapering tap root. In the stripping plant the flower and the soft bark and the tap root would be removed. The logs would come out shining in the sun, with nothing left but the solid fuel rocket core and the thin iron-crystal skin beneath the bark. Then the logs would be shipped to all the nearby civilized worlds, in ships which lifted on other stage tree logs.

  But first there was the testing. A log was selected at random and fitted into the testing block. Grandfather and Dad would be standing by, each looking like he had sucked a sour gnal. They watched with single-minded concentration as the log was fired, ready to disapprove a whole crop at the slightest sign of misfire. Kzanol used to try to imitate their expressions. The little tnuctip technicians would be running around setting instruments and looking harried and important. They seemed too small to be intelligent animals, but they were. Their quaint biological science had mutated the stage trees out of worthless mpul trees. They had created the sunflowers which guarded the house: a hedge of twelve-foot trunks, each bearing a flexible silver mirror to focus sunlight on the green photosynthetic node, or to shift that focus onto an attacking enemy. Tnuctipun had built the gigantic, mindless yeast-eating whitefoods which fed the family and the carnivorous tnuctipun themselves. They had been given more freedom than any other slave race, because they had proven the worth of their freethinking brains.

  A tnuctip would set off the log. The flame would shoot out over the valley, blue-white and very straight, darkening at the end to red smoke, while instruments measured the log’s precise thrust and Grandfather smiled in satisfaction. The flame shook the world with its sound, so that little Kzanol used to fear that the thrust was increasing the planet’s spin…

  Kzanol/Greenberg reached to knock the ash off his last cigarette and saw his second-to-last burning in the ash tray, two-thirds smoked. He hadn’t done that since high school! He cursed a thrintun curse and almost strangled on it; his throat positively wasn’t built for overtalk.

  He wasn’t gaining anything with his reminiscing, either.

  Wherever in the universe he was, he still had to reach a spaceport. He needed the amplifier. Later he could figure out why there were aliens on F124, and why they thought they had been here longer than was possible. He started the motor and punched for Topeka, Kansas.

  He’d have to steal a ship anyway. It might as well be an armed ship (since this region of space was lawless by definition, having no thrintun), and there was a military spaceport near Topeka.

  Wait a moment, he thought. This couldn’t be F124. There were too many planets! F124 had only eight, and here there were nine.

  Now that he was started he noticed other discrepancies. The asteroid belt of F124 had been far thicker, and her moon had had a slight rotation, he remembered. He was in the wrong system!

  Merely a coincidence! Kzanol grinned. And what a coincidence! The habitable planet, the ringed planet, the ordered sizes of the worlds…come to think of it, he was the only thrint ever to have found two slave planets. He would be the richest being in the galaxy! He didn’t care, now, if he never found the map. But, of course, he still needed the amplifier.

  Judy felt that she was on the verge of a tantrum. “But can’t they talk at all?” she begged, knowing she was being unreasonable.

  Los Angeles Police Chief Lloyd Masney’s patience was wearing thin. “Mrs. Greenberg,” he said heavily. “You know that Doctor Jansky is having his eyes and face replaced at this moment. Also a wide patch of skin on his back, which was taken off almost down to the spinal cord. The others are almost as badly off. Dr. Snyder has no eye damage, but the part of his face that he didn’t cover with his hands is being replaced, and the palms of his hands, and some skin from his back. Knudsen did have his spinal cord opened, and some ribs too. The autodoc won’t let us wake any of them up, even under police priority, except for Mr. Trimonti. He is being questioned while the ’doc replaces skull and scalp from the back of his head. He has had a bad shock, and he is under local anesthetic, and you may not disturb him! You may hear the transcription of our interview when we have it. Meanwhile, may I offer you some coffee?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Judy. She thought he was giving her a chance to get a grip on herself, and was grateful. When he came back with the coffee she sipped it for a few moments, covertly studying the police chief.

  He was a burly man who walked like he had bad feet. No wonder if he did; his hands and feet were both tiny in proportion to the rest of his body. He had straight white hair and a dark complexion. His bushy mustache was also white. He seemed almost as impatient as she. She had not yet seen him sit in normal fashion; now his legs were draped over one arm of his swivel chair while his shoulders rested against the other.

  “Have you any idea where he is now?” She couldn’t restrain herself.

  “Sure,” Masney said unexpectedly. “He just crossed the Kansas-Colorado border at a height of nine thousand feet. I guess he doesn’t know how to short out his license sender. But then, maybe he just didn’t bother.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t like cities,” said the old man in the corner. Judy had thought he was asleep. He had been introduced as Lucas Garner, an Arm of the UN. Judy waited for him to go on, but he seemed to think he had explained himself. Masney explained for him.

  “You see, we don’t advertise the fact that all our override beamers are in the cities. I figure that if he knows enough to go around the cities, which he’s been doing, he must know enough to short out his license so that we can’t follow him. Luke, have you got some reason to think he doesn’t like cities?”

  Luke nodded. Judy thought he looked like the oldest man in the world. His face was as wrinkled as Satan’s. He rode a ground-effect travel chair as powerful as a personal tank. “I’ve been expecting something like this for years,” he said. “Lloyd, do you remember when the Fertility Laws went into force, and I told you that a lot of homicidal nuts would start killing bachelors who had gotten permits to have children? And it happened. This is like that. I thought it might happen on Jinx, but it happened here instead.

  “Larry Greenberg thinks he’s an alien.”

  Judy was stunned. “But he’s done this before,” she protested.

  “No.” Garner drew a lit cigarette from the arm of his chair. “He hasn’t. He’s worked with men and dolphins. Now he’s run into something he can’t take. I’ve got a hunch what it is, and I’d give my wheel chair”—Judy looked, but it didn’t have wheels—“to know if I’m right.

  “Mrs. Greenberg. Has your husband ever been asked to read the mind of a telepath?”

  Mutely Judy shook her head.

  “So,” said Garner. Again he looked like he’d gone to sleep, this time with a cigarette burning between his fingers. His hands w
ere huge, with muscles showing beneath the loose, mottled skin, and his shoulders belonged on a blacksmith. The contrast between Garner’s massive torso and his helpless, almost fleshless legs made him look a little like a bald ape. He came to life, sucked in a massive dose of smoke, and went on talking.

  “Lloyd’s men got here about fifteen minutes after Larry Greenberg left. Trimonti called the cops, of course; nobody else could move. Lloyd himself was here in another ten. When he saw the wounds on the men Greenberg shot, he called me in Brussels.

  “I’m an Arm, a member of the UN Technological Police. There was a chance the weapon that made those wounds would have to be suppressed. Certainly it needed investigation. So my first interest was the weapon.

  “I don’t suppose either of you ever heard of Buck Rogers? No? Too bad. Then I’ll just say that nothing in our present technology could have led to a weapon like this.

  “It does not destroy matter, which is reassuring. Rewriting one law of physics is worse than trying to eat one peanut. The weapon scatters matter. Lloyd’s men found traces of blood and flesh and bone forming a greasy layer all over the room. Not merely microscopic traces, but clumps too small to see at all.

  “Trimonti’s testimony was a godsend. Obviously the Sea Statue dropped the weapon, and Greenberg used it. Why?”

  Masney rumbled, “Get to the point, Luke.”

  “Okay, here it comes. The contact helmet is a very complicated psionics device. One question the psychologists have wondered about is this. Why don’t the contact men get more confused when extraneous memories pour in? Usually there’s a few minutes of confusion, and then everything straightens out. They say it’s because the incoming memories are weak and fuzzy, but that’s only half an answer. It may even be a result, not a cause.

  “Picture it. Two men sit down under crystal-iron helmets, and when one of them gets up he has two complete sets of memories. Which one is him?

  “Well, one set remembers a different body from the one he finds himself in. More important, one set remembers being a telepath and the other doesn’t! One set remembers sitting down under a contact helmet with the foreknowledge that when her gets up he will have two sets of memories. Naturally the contact man will behave as if that set were his own. Even with eight or ten different memory sets, the contact man will automatically use his own.

  “Well, let’s say the Sea Statue is a telepath. Not a telepathy-prone, like Larry Greenberg, but a full telepath, able to read any mind whenever be chooses. Suddenly all bets are off. Greenberg wakes with two sets of memories, and one set remembers reading hundreds of other minds, or thousands! Got it?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes,” said Judy. “I warned him something was going to happen. But what can we do?”

  “If he doesn’t pass over a city soon we’ll have to send up interceptors. We’d better wait ’til Snyder gets out of the ’doc.”

  Kzanol dropped the car again half an hour later. He had been wondering about the peculiar gritty feeling in his eyes, and when he felt he was about to lose consciousness he became frightened. Then his Greenberg memories told him what was wrong. He was sleepy.

  He didn’t even waste time worrying about it. Kzanol was getting used to the humiliations that came with Greenberg’s body. He put the car down in a plowed field and slept.

  He woke at first light and took the car up at once. And then, incredibly, he began to enjoy himself. Towns and cities appeared before the speeding car, and he circled them cautiously; but the countryside began to attract his attention. The fields of grain and alfalfa were strange in their small size and checkerboard design. There was other vegetation, and he dropped low to examine the trees. Trees with shapeless woolly green heads instead of flowers. Trees that sometimes hugged the ground as if fearing the sky. Perhaps the winds were dangerous on this world. Trees that almost never grew completely straight. They were weird and asymmetrical and beautiful, and the Greenberg memory could tell him little about them; Greenberg was a city man. He curved out of his way to see them. He dipped low over quaint houses with peaked roofs, delighted by their novel architecture, and he wondered again about Earth’s weather. Greenberg, jogged this time, remembered a Kansas tornado. Kzanol was impressed.

  Kzanol was as happy as a tourist. True, he was even more uncomfortable, for he was hungry and thirsty and in need of nicotine or gnals. But he could ignore these minor discomforts; he was a thrint, he knew that a gnal would be deadly poison, and it had been Greenberg’s fixed belief that he could stop smoking whenever he pleased. Kzanol believed him and ignored the craving. Normally he would trust anything he found in the Greenberg memory.

  So he gawked at the scenery like any tourist doing something new and different.

  After two hours it began to pall. The problem of where in space he was was worrying him again. But he saw the solution already. The Topeka Public Library was the place to go. If a nearby solar system had been found which was nearly identical with this one, he would find it listed there. The Belt telescopes, unhampered by atmospheric distortion, were able to see planets circling other suns; and the interstellar ramscoop robots had been searching out man-habitable systems for nearly a century. If the F124 system had not yet been found, it was beyond the reach of terran ships, and he might as well decently commit suicide.

  Amazing, how nearly alike were the F124 system and the solar system. There were the two habitable binary thirds, the giant fifths, the asteroid belts, similar in position if not in density, the correspondence of size and position of the first eight planets of each system, the ringed sixth—it was almost too much to believe.

  Oh, Powerloss. Kzanol/Greenberg sighed and cracked his knuckles, badly frightening himself. It was too much to believe. He didn’t believe it.

  Suddenly he was very tired. Thrintun was very far away in an unknown direction. The amplifier helmet, and everything else he owned, were probably equally unreachable in a completely different direction. His Power was gone, and even his body had been stolen by some terrifying slave sorcery. But worst of all, he had no idea what to do next!

  A city rose in the distance. His car was making straight for it. He was about to steer around it when he realized it must be Topeka. So he put his head in his arms and wished he could lose consciousness again. The strength seemed to have leaked out of him.

  This had to be F124.

  But it couldn’t be. The system had an extra world and not enough asteroids.

  But, he remembered, Pluto was supposed to be a stowaway in the solar system. There was its queer orbit, and some mathematical discrepancy in its size. Perhaps it was captured by Sol before he awakened.

  But in three hundred years? Highly unlikely.

  Kzanol raised his face, and his face showed terror. He knew perfectly well that three hundred years was his lower limit; the brain board had given him a three-hundred-year journey using half the ship’s power. He might have been buried much longer than that.

  Suppose he accepted Pluto. What about the slave race, happily living where there should have been only yeast, covering the oceans a foot deep, or at most whitefoods, big as brontosaurs and twice as pretty, wandering along the shorelines feeding on mutated scum?

  He couldn’t explain it, so he dropped it.

  But the asteroid belt was certainly thinner than it had been. True, it would have thinned out anyway in time, what with photon pressure and solar wind pushing dust and the smaller particles outward into deep space, and collisions with the bigger planets removing a few rocks, and even some of the most eccentric asteroids being slowed and killed by friction with the solar atmosphere—which must extend well past Earth. But that was not a matter for a few hundred years. Or even thousands. Or hundreds of—

  And he knew.

  Not hundreds of years, or hundreds of thousands. He had been at the bottom of the sea while the solar system captured a new planet, and lost a good third of its asteroid belt, while oceans of food yeast mutated and went bad, and mutated again, and again…At the bottom of the sea he had wai
ted while yeast became grass and fish and now walked on two legs like a thrint.

  A billion years wouldn’t be long enough. Two billion might do it.

  He was hugging his knees with both arms, almost as if he were trying to bury his head between them. A thrint couldn’t have done that. It was not the pure passage of time that frightened him so. It was the loss of everything he knew and loved, even his own race. Not only Thrintun the world, but also Thrint the species, must be lost in the past. If there had been thrintun in the galaxy they would have colonized Earth long ages ago.

  He was the last thrint.

  Slowly he raised his head, to stare, expressionless, at the wide city beneath him.

  He could damn well behave like a thrint.

  The car had stopped. He must be over the center of Topeka. But which way was the spaceport? And how would he get in? Greenberg, worse luck, had had no experience in stealing spacecraft. Well, first find out where it was, and then…

  The ship was vibrating. He could feel it with those ridiculously delicate fingertips. There was sound too, too high to hear, but he could feel it jangling in his nerves. What was going on?

  He went to sleep. The car hung for a moment longer, then started down.

  “They always stack me in the rear of the plane,” Garner grumbled.

  Lloyd Masney was unsympathetic. “You’re lucky they don’t make you ride in the baggage compartment—seeing as you refuse to leave that hot rod there alone.”

  “Well, why not? I’m a cripple!”

  “Uh huh. Aren’t the Ch’ien treatments working?”

  “Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. My spinal cord is carrying some messages again. But walking ten paces around a room twice a day just about kills me. It’ll be another year before I can walk downtown and back. Meanwhile my chair rides with me, not in the luggage compartment. I’m used to it.”

  “You’ll never miss that year,” Masney told him. “How old are you now, Luke?”