A Gift From Earth Read online

  But a ten-year-old crew child would never have lifted a car without flipping the "Gyroscope" switch.

  As usual, but much later than usual, Jesus Pietro had breakfast in bed. As usual, Major Jansen sat nearby, drinking coffee, ready to run errands and answer questions.

  "Did you get the prisoners put away all right?"

  "Yes, sir, in the vivarium. All but three. We didn't have room for them all."

  "And they're in the organ banks?'

  "Yes, Sir."

  Jesus Pietro swallowed a grapefruit slice. "Let's hope they didn't know anything important. What about the deadheads?"

  "We separated out the ones without ear mikes and turned them loose. Fortunately we finished before six o'clock. That's when the ear mikes evaporated."

  "Evaporated, forsooth! Nothing left?"

  "Doctor Gospin took samples of the air. He may find residues."

  "It's not important. A nice trick, though, considering their resources," said Jesus Pietro.

  After five minutes of uninterrupted munching and sipping sounds, he abruptly wanted to know, "What about Keller?"

  "Who, Sir?"

  "The one that got away."

  And after three phone calls Major Jansen was able to say, "No reports from the colonist areas. Nobody's volunteered to turn him in. He hasn't tried to go home, or to contact any relative or anyone he knows professionally. None of the police in on the raid recognize his face. None will admit that someone got past him."

  More silence, while Jesus Pietro finished his coffee., Then, "See to it that the prisoners are brought to my office one at a time. I want to find out if anyone saw the landing yesterday."

  "One of the girls was carrying photos, Sir. Of package number three. They must have been taken with a scopic lens."

  "Oh?" For a moment Jesus Pietro's thoughts showed clear behind a glass skull. Millard Parlette! If he found out — "I don't know why you couldn't tell me that before. Treat it as confidential. Now get on with it. No, wait a minute," he called as Jansen turned to the door. "One more thing. There may be basements that we don't know about. Detail a couple of echo-sounder teams for a house-to-house search on Delta and Eta Plateaus."

  "Yes, sir. Priority?"

  "No, no, no. The vivarium's two deep already. Tell them to — take their time."

  The phone stopped Major Jansen from leaving. He picked it up, listened, then demanded, "Well, why 'call here? Hold on." With a touch of derision he reported, "A car approaching, sir, being flown in a reckless manner. Naturally they had to call you personally."

  "Now why the — mph. Could it be the same make as the car in Kane's basement?"

  "I'll ask." He did. "It is, sir."

  "I should have known there'd be a way to get it out of the basement. Tell them to bring it down."

  Geologists (don't give me a hard time about that word) believed that Mount Lookitthat was geologically recent. A few hundreds of thousands of years ago, part of the planet's skin had turned molten. Possibly a convection current in the interior had carried more than ordinarily hot magma up to melt the surface; possibly an asteroid had died a violent, fiery death. A slow extrusion had followed, with, viscous magma rising and cooling and rising and cooling until a plateau with fluted sides and an approximately flat top stood forty miles above the surface.

  It had to be recent. Such a preposterous anomaly could not long resist the erosion of Mount Lookitthat's atmosphere.

  And because it was recent, the surface was jagged. Generally the northern end was higher, high enough to hold a permanent sliding glacier, and too high and too cold for comfort. Generally rivers and streams ran forth, to join either the Muddy or the Long Fall, both of which had carved deep canyons for themselves through the Southland. Both canyons ended in spectacular waterfalls. the tallest in the known universe. Generally the rivers ran south; but there were exceptions, for the surface of Mount Lookitthat was striated, differentiated, a maze of plateaus divided by cliffs and chasms.

  Some plateaus were flat; some of the cliffs were straight and vertical. Most of these were in the south. In the north the surface was all tilted blocks and strange lakes with deep, pointed bottoms, and the land would have been cruel to a mountain goat. Nonetheless these regions would be settled someday, just as the Rocky Mountains of Earth were now part of suburbia.

  The slowboats had landed in the south, on the highest plateau around. The colonists had been forced to settle lower down. Though they were the more numerous, they covered less territory, for the crew had cars, and flying cars can make a distant mountain-home satisfactory where bicycles will not. Yet Alpha Plateau was Crew Plateau, and for many it was better to live elbow to elbow with one's peers than out in the boondocks in splendid isolation.

  So Alpha Plateau was crowded.

  What Matt saw below him were all houses. They varied enormously in size, in color, in style, in building material. To Matt, who had lived out his life in architectural coral, the dwellings looked like sheer havoc, like debris from the explosion of a time machine. There was even a clump of deserted, crumbling coral bungalows, each far bigger than a colonist's home. Two or three were as large as Matt's old grade school. When architectural coral first came to the Plateau, the crew had reserved it for their own use. Later it had gone permanently out of style.

  None of the nearby buildings seemed to be more than two stories tall. Someday there would be skyscrapers if the crew kept breeding. But in the distance two squat towers rose from a shapeless construction in stone and metal. The Hospital, without a doubt. And straight ahead.

  Matt was beginning to feel the strain of flying. He had to divide his attention between the dashboard, the ground, and the Hospital ahead. It was coming closer, and he was beginning to appreciate its size. Each of the empty slowboats had been built to house six crew in adequate comfort and fifty colonists in stasis.

  Each slowboat also included a cargo hold, two water-fueled reaction motors and a water fuel tank. And all of this had to be fitted into a hollow double-walled cylinder the shape of a beer can from which the top and bottom have been removed with a can opener. The slowboats had been circular flying wings. In transit between worlds they had spun on their axes to provide centrifugal gravity; and the empty space inside the inner hull, now occupied only by two intersecting tailfins, had once held two throwaway hydrogen balloons.

  They were big. Since Matt could not see the inner emptiness which the crew called the Attic, they looked far bigger. Yet they were swamped by the haphazard-looking stone construction of the Hospital. Most of it was two stories high, but there were towers which climbed halfway up the ships' hulls. Some would be power stations, others — he couldn't guess. Flat, barren rock surrounded the Hospital in a half-mile circle, rock as naked as the Plateau had been before the slowboats brought a carefully selected ecology. From the edge of the perimeter a thin tongue of forest reached across the rock to touch the Hospital.

  All else had been cleared away. Why, Matt wondered, had Implementation left that one stretch of trees?

  A wave of numbness hit him and passed, followed by a surge of panic. A sonic stun-beam For the first time he looked behind him. Twenty to thirty Implementation police cars were scattered in his wake.

  It hit him again, glancingly. Matt shoved the 1-3 throttle all the way in. The car dipped left, tilted forty-five degrees or more before he moved to steady it. He shot away to the left, gathering speed toward the void edge of Alpha Plateau.

  The numbness reached him and locked its teeth. They had been trying to force him to land; now they wanted him to crash before he could go over the edge. His sight blurred; he couldn't move. The car dropped, sliding across space toward the ground and toward the void.

  The numbness ebbed. He tried to move his hands and got nothing but a twitch. Then the sonic found him again, but with lessened intensity. He thought he knew why. He was outracing the police because they did not care to sacrifice altitude for speed, to risk striking the lip of the void edge. That was a game for the de
sperate.

  Through blurred eyes he saw the dark cliff-edge come up at him. He missed it by yards. He could move again, jerkily, and he turned his head to see the cars dropping after him. They must know they'd lost him, but they wanted to see him fall.

  How far down was the mist? He'd never known. Miles, certainly. Tens of miles? They'd hover above him until he disappeared behind the mist. He couldn't go back to the Plateau; they'd stun him, wait, and scrape up what was left after the crash. There was only one direction he could go now.

  Matt flipped the car over on its back.

  The police followed him down until their ears began to pop. Then they hovered, waiting. It was minutes before the fugitive car faded from sight, upside down all the way, a receding blurred dark mote trailing a hairline of shadow through the mist, flickering at the edge of human vision. Gone.

  "Hell of a way to go," someone said. It went over the intercom, and there were grunts of agreement.

  The police turned for home, which was now far above them. They knew perfectly well that their cars were not airtight. Almost, but not quite. Even in recent years men had taken their cars below the Plateau to prove their courage and to gauge what level they could reach before the air turned poisonous. That level was far above the mist. Someone named Greeley had even tried the daredevil stunt of dropping his car with the fans set to idle, falling as far as he could before the poison mist could leak into his cabin. He had dropped four miles, with the hot, noxious gasses whistling around the door, before he had had to stop. He had been lucky enough to get back up before he passed out. The Hospital had had to replace his lungs. On Alpha Plateau he was still a kind of hero.

  Even Greeley would never have flipped his car over and bored for the bottom. Nobody would, not if he knew anything about cars. It might come apart in the air!

  But that wouldn't occur to Matt. He knew little about machinery. Earth's strange pets were necessities, but machinery was a luxury. Colonists needed cheap houses and hardy fruit trees and rugs that did not have to be made by hand. They did not need powered dishwashers, refrigerators, razors, or cars. Complex machinery had to be made by other machines, and the crew were wary of passing machines to colonists. Such machinery as they had was publicly owned. The most complex vehicle Matt knew was a bicycle. A car wasn't meant to fly without gyroscopes, but Matt had done it.

  He had to get down to the mist to hide himself from the police. The faster he fell, the farther he'd leave them behind.

  At first the seat pressed against him with the full force of the fans; about one-and-a-half Mount Lookitthat gravities. The wind rose to a scream, even through the soundproofing. Air held him back, harder and harder, until it compensated for the work of the fans; and then he was in free fall. And still he fell faster! Now the air began to cancel gravity, and Matt tried to fall to the roof. He had suspected that he was making the car do something unusual, but he didn't know how unusual. When the wind resistance started to pull him out of his seat, he snatched at the arms and looked frantically for something to hold him down. He found the seat belts. Not only did they hold him down, once he managed to get them fastened; they reassured him. Obviously they were meant for just this purpose.

  It was getting dark. Even the sky beneath his feet was darkening, and the police cars were not to be seen. Very well. Matt pushed the fan throttles down to the Idle notches.

  The blood rushing to his head threatened to choke him. He turned the car right side up. Pressure jammed him deep in his seat with a force no man had felt since the bruteforce chemical rockets, but he could stand it now. What he couldn't endure was the heat. And the pain in his ears. And the taste of the air.

  He pulled the throttles out again. He wanted to stop fast.

  Come to that, would he know when he stopped? This around him was not a wispy kind of mist, but a dark blur giving no indication of his velocity. From above, the mist was white; from below, black. Being lost down here would be horrible. At least he knew which way was up. It was fractionally lighter in that direction.

  The air tasted like flaming molasses.

  He had the throttles all the way out. Still the gas crept in. Matt pulled his shirt over his mouth and tried to breathe through that. No good. Something like a black wall emerged from the mist-blur, and he tilted the car in time to avoid crashing against the side of Mount Lookitthat. He stayed near the black wall, watching it rush past him. He'd be harder to see in the shadow of the void edge.

  The mist disappeared. He shot upward through sparkling sunlight. When he thought he was good and clear of the foul mist, and when he couldn't stand to breathe hot poison for another second, he put the window down. The car whipped to the side and tried to turn over. A hurricane roared through the cabin. It was hot and thick and soupy, that hurricane, but it could be breathed.

  He saw the edge of the Plateau above him, and he pushed the throttles in a little to slow down. His stomach turned a flip-flop. For the first time since he'd gotten into the car, he had time to be sick. His stomach tried to turn over, his head was splitting from the sudden changes in pressure, and the Implementation sonics were having their revenge in twitching, jerking muscles. He kept the car more or less upright until the edge of the Plateau came level with him. There was a stone wall along the edge here. He eased the car sideways, eased it back when he was over the wall, tilted it by guess and hope until he was motionless in the air, then let it drop.

  The car fell about four feet. Matt opened the door but stopped himself from getting out. What he really wanted to do was faint, but he'd left the fans idling. He found the "Neutral..., Ground ... Air" toggle and shoved it forward without much care. He was tired and sick, and he wanted to lie down.

  The toggle fell in the "Ground" slot.

  Matt stumbled out the door ... stumbled because the car was rising. It rose four inches off the ground and began to slide. During his experimenting Matt must have set the ground altitude, so that the car was now a ground-effect vehicle. It slid away from him as he tried to reach for it. He watched on hands and knees as it glided away across the uneven ground, bounced against the wall and away, against the wall and away. It circled the end of the wall and went over the edge.

  Matt flopped on his back and closed his eyes. He didn't care if he never saw a car again.

  The motion sickness, the sonic aftereffects, the poisoned air he'd breathed, the pressure changes ... they gripped him hard, and he wanted to die. Then, by stages, they began to let go. Nobody found him there. A house was nearby, but it had a vacant look. After some time Matt sat up and took stock of himself.

  His throat hurt. There was a strange, unpleasant taste in his mouth.

  He was still on Alpha Plateau. Only crew would go to the trouble of building walls along a void edge. So he was committed. Without a car he could no more leave Alpha Plateau than he could have arrived there in the first place.

  But the house was architectural coral. Bigger than anything he was used to, it was still coral. Which meant that it should have been deserted about forty years.

  He'd have to risk it. He needed cover. There were no trees nearby, and trees were dangerous to hide in; they would probably be fruit trees, and someone might come. apple-picking. Matt got up and moved toward the house.

  4: The Question Man

  The Hospital was the control nexus of a world. It was not a large world, and the settled region totalled a mere 20,000 square miles; but that region needed a lot of control. It also required considerable electricity, enormous quantities of water to be moved up from the Long Fall River, and a deal of medical attention. The Hospital was big and complex and diversified. Two fifty-six-man spacecraft were its east and west corners. Since the spacecraft were hollow cylinders with the airlocks opening to the inside (to the Attic, as that inner space had been called when the rotating ships were between stars and the ship's axis was Up), the corridors in that region were twisted and mazelike and hard to navigate.

  So the young man in Jesus Pietro's office had no idea where he
was. Even if he'd managed to leave the office unguarded, he'd have been hopelessly lost. And he knew it. That was all to the good.

  "You were on the dead-man switch," said Jesus Pietro.

  The man nodded. His sandy hair was cut in the old Belter style, copied from the even older Mohawk. There were shadows under his eyes as if from lack of sleep, and the lie was borne out by a slump of utter depression, though he had been sleeping since his capture in Harry Kane's basement.

  "You funked it," Jesus Pietro accused. "You arranged to fall across the switch so that it wouldn't go off."

  The man looked up. Naked rage was in his face. He made no move, for there was nothing he could do.

  "Don't be ashamed. The dead-man switch is an old trick. It almost never gets used in practice. The man in charge is too likely to change his mind at the last second. It's a — "

  "I fully expected to wake up dead!" the man shouted.

  " — natural reaction. It takes a psychotic to commit suicide. No, don't tell me all about it. I'm not interested. I want to hear about the car in your basement."

  "You think I'm a coward, do you?"

  "That's an ugly word."

  "I stole that car."

  "Did you?" The skeptical tone was genuine. Jesus Pietro did not believe him. "Then perhaps you can tell me why the theft went unnoticed."

  The man told him. He talked eagerly, demanding that Jesus Pietro recognize his courage. Why not? There was nobody left to betray. He would live as long as Jesus Pietro Castro was interested in him, and for three minutes longer. The organ bank operating room was three minutes walk away. Jesus Pietro listened politely. Yes, he remembered the car that had tauntingly circled the Plateau for five days. The young crew owner had given him hell for letting it happen. The man had even suggested--demanded — that one of Castro's men drop on the car from above, climb into the cockpit, and bring it back. Jesus Pietro's patience had given out, and he had risked his life by politely offering to help the young man perform the feat.