The World of Ptavvs Read online

  He had no choice. The remarkable thing was that humans would do so; that they would scheme and fight to do so. The space urge was a madness upon them—a madness which should be cured quickly, lest they waste this world’s resources.

  This prospecting trip, Kzanol thought wryly, is taking longer than I dreamed. And then, not at all wryly: Will I ever see Thrintun again?

  Well, at least he had time to burn. As long as he was here, he might as well see what a human called a luxury liner.

  He was impressed despite himself.

  There were thrintun liners bigger than the Golden Circle, and a few which were far bigger; but not many carried a greater air of luxury. Those that did carried the owners of planets. The ramjets under the triangular wing were almost as big as some of the military ships on the field. The builders of the Golden Circle had cut corners only where they wouldn’t show. The lounge looked huge, much bigger than it actually was. It was paneled in gold and navy blue. Crash couches folded into the wall to give way to a bar, a small dance floor, a compact casino. Dining tables rose neatly and automatically from the carpeted floor, inverting themselves to show dark-grained plastic-oak. The front wall was a giant tridee screen. When the water level in the fuel tanks became low enough, an entrance from the lounge turned the tank into a swimming pool. Kzanol was puzzled by the layout until he realized that the fusion drive was in the belly. Ramjets would lift the ship to a safe altitude, but from then on the fusion drive would send thrust up instead of forward. The ship used water instead of liquid hydrogen, not because the passengers needed a pool, but because water was safer to carry and provided a reserve oxygen supply. The staterooms were miracles of miniaturization.

  There were, thought Kzanol, ideas here that he could use when he got back to civilization. He sat down in one of the lounge crash couches and began leafing through some of the literature stuffed into the backs. One of the first things he found, of course, was a beautifully colored picture of Saturn as seen from the main dance bubble of the Titan Hotel.

  Of course he recognized it. He began to ask eager questions of the men around him.

  The truth hit him all at once.

  Kzanol/Greenberg gasped, and his shield went up with a clang. Masney wasn’t so fortunate. He shrieked and clutched his head, and shrieked again. In Topeka, thirty miles away, unusually sensitive people heard the scream of rage and grief and desolation.

  At Menninger’s, a girl who had been catatonic for four years forced doughy leg muscles to hold her erect while she looked around her. Someone needed help; someone needed her.

  Lucas Garner gasped and stopped his chair with a jerk. Alone among the pedestrians around him, who were behaving as if they had very bad headaches, Garner listened. There must be information buried in all that emotion! But Garner learned nothing. He felt the sense loss becoming his own, sapping his will to live until he felt he was drowning in a black tide.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” said Kzanol/Greenberg in a calm, reassuring, very loud voice. The loudness, hopefully, would carry over Masney’s screaming. “You can feel it but it doesn’t hurt. Anyway, you have enormous courage, more than you have ever had in your whole life.” Masney stopped screaming, but his face was a mask of suffering. “All right,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “Sleep.” He brushed Masney’s face with his fingertips. Masney collapsed. The car continued weightlessly across the concrete, riding its cushion of air, aiming itself at the cylindrical shell that was the Lazy Eight III. Kzanol/Greenberg let it go. He couldn’t operate the controls from the back seat, and Masney was in no shape to help. He could have cut the air cushion, by stretching, but only if he wanted to die.

  The mental scream ended. He put his hand on Masney’s shoulder and said, “Stop the car, Lloyd.” Masney took over with no sign, physical or mental, of panic. The car dropped gently to the ground two yards from the outer hull of the giant colony ship.

  “Sleep,” said Kzanol/Greenberg, and Masney slept. It would probably do him good. He was still under hypnosis, and would be deeper when he awakened. As for Kzanol/Greenberg, he didn’t know what he wanted. To rest and think perhaps. Food wouldn’t hurt him either, he decided. He had recognized the mind that screamed its pain over hail of Kansas, and he needed time to know that he was not Kzanol, thrint, lord of creation.

  By and by there was a roar like a fusor exploding. Kzanol/Greenberg saw a wave of flaming smoke pour across the concrete, then gradually diminish. He couldn’t imagine what it was. Cautiously he lowered his mind shield and found out.

  Jato units. Kzanol was going after the second suit.

  Ships and scopes and Confinement Asteroid—by these you may measure the Belt.

  A century ago, when the Belt was first being settled, the ships used ion drives and fission batteries and restarting chemical attitude jets. Now they use fusion tubes, based on a method of forcing the inner surface of a crystal-zinc tube to reflect most forms of energy and matter. The compact air converter has replaced tanked air and hydroponics, at least for months-long hops, though the interstellar colony ships must grow plants for food. Ships have become smaller, more dependable, more versatile, cheaper, far faster, and infinitely more numerous. There are tens of thousands of ships in the Belt.

  But there are millions of telescopes. Every ship carries at least one. Telescopes in the Trojan asteroids watch the stars, and Earth buys the films with seeds and water and manufactured products, since Earth’s telescopes are too near the Sun to avoid distortion by gravity bend and solar wind. Telescopes watch Earth and Moon, and these films are secret. Telescopes watch each other, recomputing the orbit of each important asteroid as the planets pull it from its course.

  Confinement Asteroid is unique.

  Early explorers had run across a roughly cylindrical block of solid nickel-iron two miles long by a mile thick, orbiting not far from Ceres. They had marked its path and dubbed it S-2376.

  Those who came sixty years ago were workmen with a plan. They drilled a hole down the asteroid’s axis, filled it with plastic bags of water, and closed both ends. Solid fuel jets spun S-2376 on its axis. As it spun, solar mirrors bathed it in light, slowly melted it from the surface to the center. When the water finished exploding, and the rock had cooled, the workmen had a cylindrical nickel-iron bubble twelve miles long by six in diameter.

  It had been expensive already. Now it was more so. They rotated the bubble to provide half a gee of gravity, filled it with air and with tons of expensive water covered the interior with a mixture of pulverized stony meteorite material and garbage seeded with select bacteria. A fusion tube was run down the axis, three miles up from everywhere: a very special fusion tube, made permeable to certain wavelengths of light. A gentle bulge in the middle created the wedding-ring lake which now girdles the little inside-out world. Sunshades a mile across were set to guard the poles from light, so that snow could condense there, fall of its own weight, melt, and run in rivers to the lake.

  The project took a quarter of a century to complete.

  Thirty-five years ago Confinement freed the Belt of its most important tie to Earth. Women cannot have children in free fall. Confinement, with two hundred square miles of usable land, could house one hundred thousand in comfort; and one day it will. But the population of the Belt is only eight hundred thousand; Confinement’s score hovers around twenty thousand, mostly women, mostly transient, mostly pregnant.

  Lars held a raw carrot in one hand and the knob of a film scanner in the other. He was running six hours of film through the machine at a rate which would have finished the roll in fifteen minutes. The film had been taken through one of the Eros cameras, all of which now pointed at Earth.

  For most of the next week, Eros would be the closest asteroid to Earth. The films would be running constantly.

  Suddenly Lars stopped chewing. His hand moved. The film ran back a little. Stopped.

  There it was. One frame was whited out almost to the corners.

  Lars moved the film to a larger scanner and began runnin
g it through, slowly, starting several frames back. Twice he used the magnifying adjustment. Finally he muttered, “Idiots.”

  He crossed the room and began trying to find Ceres with a maser.

  The duty man picked up the earphones with his usual air of weary patience. He listened silently, knowing that the source was light-minutes away. When the message began to repeat he thumbed a button and said, “Jerry, find Eros and send the following. Recording. Thank you, Eros, your message received in full. Well get right on it, Lars. Now I’ve got news for you.” The man’s colorless voice took on a note of relish. “From Tanya. The ’doc says in seven months you’ll be the father of healthy twin girls. Repeat, twin girls…”

  Carefully, with a constant tapping of fingers on attitude jet buttons, Lit Shaeffer brought his ship into dock at Confinement’s pole. A constant thirty miles below, Ceres was a pitted boulder spotted with glassy-looking bubbles of flexible transparent plastic. He rested for a little—docking was always tricky, and Confinement’s rotation was unsettling even at the axis—then climbed out the lock and jumped. He landed in the net above the nearest of the ten personnel airlocks. Like a spider on a web, he climbed down to the steel door and crawled in. Ten minutes later, after passing through twelve more doors, he reached the locker room.

  A mark piece rented him a locker and he stowed his suit and jet pack inside, revealing himself as a scrawny giant with dark, curly hair and a mahogany tan confined strictly to his face and hands. He bought a paper coverall from a dispenser. Lit and Marda were among the several hundred Belters who did not become nudists in a shirtsleeve environment. It marked them as kooks, which was not a bad thing in the Belt.

  The last door let him out behind the heat shield, still in free fall. A spring lift took him four miles down to where he could get a tricycle motor scooter. Even Belters couldn’t keep a two-wheeler upright against Confinement’s shifting Coriolis force. The scooter took him down a steep gradient which leveled off into plowed fields, greenhouses, toiling farm machinery, woods and streams and scattered cottages. In ten minutes he was home.

  No, not really home. The cottage was rented from what there was of a Belt government. A Belter’s home is the interior of his suit. But with Marda waiting inside, dark and big-boned and just beginning to show her pregnancy, it felt like homecoming.

  Then Lit remembered the coming fight. He hesitated a moment, consciously relaxing, before he rang.

  The door disappeared, zzzip. They stood facing each other.

  “Lit,” said Marda, flatly, as if there was no surprise at all. Then, “There’s a call for you.”

  “I’ll take care of that first.”

  In the Belt as on Earth, privacy was rare and precious. The phone booth was a transparent prism, soundproof. Lit sneaked a last look at Marda before he answered the call. She looked both worried and determined.

  “Hello, Cutter. What’s new?”

  “Hello, Lit. That’s why I’m calling,” said the duty man at Ceres. Cutter’s voice was colorless as always. So was his appearance. Cutter would have looked appropriate dispensing tickets or stamps from behind a barred window. “Lars Stiller just called. One of the honeymoon specials to Titan just took off without calling us. Any comments?”

  “Comments? Those stupid, bubbleheaded—” The traffic problem in space was far more than a matter of colliding spacecraft. No two spacecraft had ever collided, but men had died when their ships went through the exhaust of a fusion motor. Telescopic traffic checks, radio transmissions, rescue missions, star and asteroid observations could all be thrown out of whack by a jaywalker.

  “That’s what I said, Lit. What’ll we do, turn ’em back?”

  “Oh, Cutter, why don’t you go to Earth and start your own government?” Lit rubbed his temples hard with both hands, rubbing away the tension. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Marda’s having trouble, and it’s bugging me. But how can we turn back thirty honeymooning flatlanders, each a multimillionaire? Things are tense enough now. Want to start the Last War?”

  “I guess not. Sorry to hear about Marda. What’s wrong?”

  “She didn’t get here in time. The baby’s growing too fast.”

  “That’s a damn shame.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the honeymooner?”

  Lit turned his thoughts away from the coming storm. “Assign somebody to watch her and broadcast her course. Then write up a healthy bill for the service and send it to Titan Enterprises, Earth. If it isn’t paid in two weeks we send a copy to the UN and demand action.”

  “Figures. ’Bye, Lit.”

  Conceived in free fall, gestated in free fall for almost three months, the child was growing too fast. The question could smash a marriage: Let the ’doc abort now? Or wait, slow the child’s growth with the appropriate hormone injections, and hope that it wouldn’t be born a monster?

  But there was no such hope.

  Lit felt like he was drowning. With a terrible effort he kept his voice gentle. “There’ll be other children, Marda.”

  “But will there? It’s so risky, hoping I can get to Confinement before it’s too late. Oh, Lit, let’s wait until we’re sure.”

  She’d waited three months between ’doc checks! But Lit couldn’t say so now, or ever. Instead he said, “Marda, the autodoc is sure, and Dr. Siropopolous is sure. I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking. We could take a house right here in Confinement until you’re pregnant again. It’s been done before. Granted it’s expensive—”

  The phone rang.

  “Yes?” he barked. “Cutter, what’s wrong now?”

  “Two things. Brace yourself.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “One. The honeymooner is not going to Titan. It seems to be headed in the direction of Neptune.”

  “But—Better give me the rest of it.”

  “A military ship just took off from Topeka Base. It’s chasing the honeymooner, and they didn’t call us this time either!”

  “That’s more than peculiar. How long is the honeymooner on its way?”

  “An hour and a half. No turnover yet, but of course it could be headed for any number of asteroids.”

  “Oh, that’s just great.” Lit closed his eyes for a moment. “It almost sounds like something’s wrong with the honeymooner, and the other ship’s trying a rescue mission. Could something have blown in the life-support system?”

  “I’d guess not, not in the Golden Circle. Honeymooners have fail-safe on their fail-safe. But you’d better hear the punch line.”

  “Fire.”

  “The military ship took off from the field on its fusion drive.”

  “Then—” There was only one conceivable answer. Lit began to laugh. “Somebody stole it!”

  Cutter smiled thinly. “Exactly. Once again, shall we turn either of them back?”

  “Certainly not. For one thing, if we threaten to shoot we may have to do it. For another, Earth is very touchy about what rights they have in space. For a third, this is their problem, and their ships. For a fourth, I want to see what happens. Don’t you get it yet, Cutter?”

  “My guess is that both ships have been stolen.” Cutter was still smiling.

  “No, no. Too improbable. The military ship was stolen, but the honeymooner must have been sabotaged. We’re about to witness the first case of space piracy!”

  “O-o-oh. Fifteen couples, and all their jewels, plus, uh, ransom—you know, I believe you’re right!” And Lit Shaeffer was the first man in years to hear Cutter laugh in public.

  In the dead of August the Kansas countryside was a steam bath with sunlamps. Under the city’s temperature umbrella it was a cool, somewhat breezy autumn, but the air hit Luke Garner like the breath of Hell as his chair shot through the intangible barrier between Cool and Hot. From there he traveled at top speed, not much caring if his chair broke down as long as he could get into an air conditioned hospital.

  He stopped at the spaceport checkpoint, was cleared immediately, and crosse
d the concrete like a ram on a catapult. The hospital stood like a wedge of Swiss cheese at the edge of the vast landing field, its sharp corner pointed inward. He got inside before heat stroke could claim him.

  The line before the elevator was discouragingly long. His chair was rather bulky; he would need an elevator almost to himself. And people were no longer over-polite to their elders. There were too many elders around these days. Garner inhaled deeply of cool air, then went back out.

  Outside the doors he fumbled in the ashtray on the left arm of his chair. The motor’s purr rose to a howl, and suddenly it wasn’t a ground-effect motor any more. If Masney could see him now! Six years ago Masney had profanely ordered him to get rid of the illegal power booster or be run in for using a manually operated flying vehicle. Anything for a friend, Luke had reasoned, and bad hidden the control in the ashtray.

  The ground dwindled. The edge of the building shot downward past him: sixty stories of it. Now he could see the scars left by Greenberg and Masney. The wavering fusion flame had splashed molten concrete in all directions, had left large craters and intricate earthworm-track runnels, had crossed the entrance to a passenger tunnel and left molten metal pouring down the stairs. Men and machines were at work cleaning up the mess.

  The sun deck was below him. Luke brought the travel chair down on the roof and scooted past startled sunbathing patients and into the elevator.

  Going down it was dead empty. He got out on the fifty-second floor and showed his credentials to a nurse.