In its wake—
Tartov said, “You were right, Lew. There’s no fire where we’re going.”
“That’s that, then. You three go on down. I’ll warp into an orbit.”
“We really ought to draw again, you know.”
“Nuts, Mabe. Think how much I’ll win at poker after using up all my bad luck out here. Got my orbit, Tartov?”
“Hook in your idiot savant and I’ll give it the data direct.”
“Autopilot on.”
BEEP.
Lew felt his ship turning as the sound of the beep ended. The spears of fusion light alongside him began to dwindle in size. Could they manage without him? Sure, they were Belters. If danger came it would come here, in orbit. He said, “All ships. Good luck. Don’t take any stupid chances.”
“Hexter calling. Something on the Earth channel, Lew.”
Lew used his frequency dial. “Can’t find it.”
“It’s a little low.”
“Oh. Typical…Dammit, it’s in code. Why should it be in code?”
“Maybe they’ve got little secrets,” Tartov suggested. “Whatever it is, it’s bound to be a good reason to finish this fast.”
“Yeah. Look, you go ahead and land. I’ll send this to Ceres for decoding. It’ll take twelve hours to get an answer, but what the hell.”
Why should it be in code?
Lit Shaeffer would have known.
Even now, sitting in his office deep in the rock of Ceres, with the bubble of Confinement winding its snail-slow orbit thirty miles overhead, Lit was preparing a note of apology to the United Nations. It was the hardest work he’d ever done! But there seemed, no way out.
A week and a half ago there had been a maser message from Neptune. Garner’s story was true: he had gone to Neptune in pursuit of a wildly dangerous ET. Lit had scowled and ordered an immediate end to the harassment of Earth shipping.
But the damage was done. For two weeks the Belt had persecuted Earth’s meager shipping; had used codes in maser transmissions, even in solar weather forecasts, in violation of a century’s tradition; had used their espionage network so heavily that its existence became insultingly obvious. Secretiveness and suspicion were the rule as never before. Earth had retaliated in kind.
Now the Belt had stopped using codes, but Earth had not.
Did the coded messages contain vital information? Almost certainly not, Lit would have guessed. Certain messages decoded at random bore him out. But the Belt couldn’t be sure, which, of course, was the whole point.
And Belt ships were searched at Earth’s ports, with insulting thoroughness.
This mistrust had to be stopped now. Lit gritted his teeth and continued writing.
The message started to repeat, and Lloyd switched it off with a decisive click.
“She felt him die,” said Luke. “She didn’t know it, but she felt him die.”
His thoughts ran on without him…She’d felt him die. What was it that let some people know things they couldn’t possibly know? There seemed to be more and more of them lately. Luke had never been remotely psychic, and he’d envied the lucky few who could find lost rings or lost criminals without the slightest effort, with no more explanation than, “I thought you might have dropped it in the mayonnaise,” or, “I had a hunch he was hiding in the subway, living off the tenth-mark peanut machines.” Parapsychologists with their special cards had proven that psy powers exist; and had gone no further than that, in close to two hundred years, except for psionics devices like the contact machine. “Psionics,” to Luke, meant “I don’t know how the damn thing works.”
How did Judy know that the Golden Circle had crashed? You couldn’t know the answer, so you hung a tag on it. Telepathy.
“And even then,” said Luke, not knowing that he spoke. “she managed to fool herself. Marvelous!”
“Did she?”
Luke’s head jerked up and around. Lloyd was scared and not trying to hide it. He said, “The Golden Circle was a tough ship. Her drive was in her belly, remember? Her belly was built to stand fusion heat. And the explosion was below her.”
Luke felt his own nerves thrill in sympathetic fear. “We’ll find out right now,” he said, and touched the control panel. “All ships, listen in. Anderson, what do you know about the Golden Circle?”
“Yeah, I heard it too. It could be; it just could be. The people who built the honeymooners knew damn well that one accident or one breakdown could ruin a billion-mark business. They built the ships to stand up to anything. The Golden Circle’s life system is smaller in proportion than the life system of any ship here, just because they put so much extra weight in the walls and in the failsafe systems.”
In a dull voice, Smoky said, “And we’re out of it.”
“Hell we are. That message was in code. Lloyd, get the maser pointed at Pluto. We’ve got to warn the Belters. Smoky, is there a Mayday signal we can use?”
“No need. They’ll hear you. It’s too late anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re going down.”
Kzanol walked slowly through a tunnel which gleamed dull white where the light fell. With practice he had learned to stay the right distance behind the disappearing far wall, following his disintegrator beam, so that he walked in a sloppy cylinder six feet in diameter. The wind roared past him and ceased to be wind; it was flying dust and ice particles, flying in vacuum and low gravity, and it packed the tunnel solidly behind him.
The other suit was two hundred feet beyond the end of the sloping tube.
Kzanol looked up. He turned off the disintegrator and stood, stiffly furious, waiting. They had dared! They were just beyond control range, too far away and moving in fast, but they were decelerating as they closed in. He waited, ready to kill.
Mature consideration stopped him. He needed a ship in which to leave Pluto; his own was shot to heat death. Those above him were single seaters, useless to him, but he knew that other ships were coming. He must not frighten them away.
He would let these ships land.
Lew’s singleship hung nose down over the surface of Pluto. He’d set the gyros that way. The ship would be nose down for a long time, perhaps until the gyros wore out. Yet he could see nothing. The planetary surface was hidden beneath a curtain of boiling storm clouds.
He knew that he had passed Cott’s Crescent some minutes ago. He had heard the hum of an open intership circuit. Now, coming toward him over the curved horizon, was a storm within a storm: the titanic whirling hurricane he had passed over twice already. Pluto takes months to rotate. Only a monumental flow of air, air newly created, rushing around from the other side of the planet, could have carried enough lateral velocity to build such a sky whirlpool from mere Coriolis effects. Flames flickered in its roiling rim; but the center was a wide circle of calm, clear near-vacuum all the way down to the icy plateau.
Over the radio came the sound of Garner’s voice.
“…Please answer at once so we’ll know you’re all right. There is a real chance that the ET survived the crash, in which case—”
“Now you’re telling me, you know-it-all son of a bitch!” Lew couldn’t talk. His tongue and his lips were as frozen as the rest of his voluntary muscles. He heard the message all the way through, and he heard it repeated, and repeated. Garner sounded more urgent than he had ten minutes ago.
The hurricane was almost below him now. He looked straight down into the eye.
From one of the murky fires in the rim of the eye, a tongue reached inward.
It was like the first explosion, the one he’d watched through the telescope. But this wasn’t the telescope! The whole plateau was lost in multicolored flame in the first twenty seconds. With the leisurely torpor of a sleepy ground sloth on a cold morning, the fire stood up and reached for him. It was fire and ice, chunks of ice big enough to see, ice burning as it rose in the clutch of the height and might, a blazing carnivore reaching to swallow him.
Viprin race. Bowed skeletal shapes
like great albino whippets seemed to skim the dirt surface of the track, their jet nacelle nostrils flaring, their skins shining like oil, racing round and round the audience standing breathless in the center of the circle. The air was thick with Power: thousands of thrintun desperately hurling orders at their favorites, knowing perfectly well that the mutant viprin didn’t have the brains to hear. Kzanol on one of the too-expensive seats, clutching a lavender plastic cord, knowing that this race, this race meant the difference between life as a prospector and life as a superintendent of cleaning machinery. He would leave here with commercials to buy a ship, or with none.
Larry dropped it. It was too late in Kzanol’s life. He wanted to remember much earlier. But his brain seemed filled with fog, and the thrintun memories were fuzzy and hard to grasp. As Kzanol/Greenberg he had had no trouble with his memory, but as Larry he found it infuriatingly vague.
The earliest thing he could remember was that scene of the sunflowers.
He was out of cigarettes. The pilot might have some in his pocket, but Larry couldn’t quite reach it. And he was hungry; he hadn’t eaten in some ten hours. A gnal might help. Definitely one would help, for it would probably kill him in seconds. Larry tore a button from his shirt and put it in his mouth. It was round and smooth, very like a gnal.
He sucked it and let his mind dissolve.
Three ships rested on the other side of what remained of Cott’s Crescent. In the control bubbles the pilots sat motionless, waiting for instructions and thinking furious, futile thoughts. In the fourth…Kzanol’s eating tendrils stood away from his mouth as he probed.
It was rather like probing his own memory of the crash. A brightly burning wind, a universe of roaring, tearing flame and crushing shocks.
Well, it wasn’t as if he needed Lew. Kzanol turned his disintegrator on and began walking. Something bright glimmered through the dark ice wall.
“They don’t answer,” said Lloyd.
Luke let himself sag against the constant one-gee deceleration. Too little, too late…the Belt was beaten. And then his eyes narrowed and he said, “They’re bluffing.”
Masney turned inquiringly.
“Sure. They’re bluffing, Lloyd. They’d be fools not to. We handed them such a perfect chance! Like four spades up in a five stud hand. The perfect opportunity to get us fighting the wrong enemy.”
“But we’d be getting this same scary silence if they were really caught.”
Luke spoke jerky phrases as the answers came. “Right. We get quiet radios either way. But we get the same answer either way, too. Shoot to kill. Either the fleet is on its way back with amplifier, or the ET has it and is on its way to conquer the Earth. Either way, we have to attack.”
“You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Tell me.”
“We’ll have to kill Atwood and Smoky first. And Anderson.”
“O-o-oh. Right, about Atwood. He’d never let us shoot at his friends, whether they’re slaves or not. But we can hope Anderson can control Smoky.”
“How’s your coordination?”
“My—?” Luke pondered his uncertain, shaky hands and newly clumsy fingers, his lack of control over his sphincter muscles. Paralysis hangover. “Right again. Smoky’d make mincemeat of Anderson.” A gusty sigh. “We’ll have to blow both ships.”
“Luke, I want a promise.” Masney looked like Death. He was an old man in his own right, and he had been starved for some time. “I want you to swear that the first smell we get of the thought amplifier, we destroy it. Not capture, Luke. Destroy!”
“All right, Lloyd. I swear.”
“If you try to take it home, I’ll kill you. I mean it.”
His finger, an oversized finger in an oversized mouth with tiny needle teeth. He was on his side, more a lump of flesh than anything else, and he sucked his finger because he was hungry. He would always be hungry.
Something huge came in, blocking light. Mother? Father. His own arm moved, jerking the finger contemptuously away, scraping it painfully on the new teeth. He tried to put it back, but it wouldn’t move. Something forceful and heavy told him never to do that again. He never did.
No mind shield there. Funny, how sharp that picture was, the memory of early frustration.
Something…
The room was full of guests. He was four thrintun years old, and he was being allowed out for the first time. Shown proudly by his father. But the noise, the telepathic noise, was too loud. He was trying to think like everybody at once. It frightened him. Something terrible happened. A stream of dark brown semiliquid material shot out of his mouth and spread over the wall. He had defecated in public.
Rage, red and sharp. Suddenly he had no control over his limbs; he was running, stumbling toward the door. Rage from his father and shame from himself—or from his father? He couldn’t tell. But it hurt, and he fought it, closed his mind to it. Father went like a blown flame, and the guests too, and everybody was gone. He was all alone in an empty world. He stopped, frightened. The other minds came back.
His father was proud, proud! At the age of four little Kzanol already had the Power!
Larry grinned a predatory grin and got up. His vac suit—? In the lounge, on one of the seats. He got it and screwed it down and went out.
Kzanol tugged at the great bright bulk until it came out of the ice. It looked like a great rippled goblin lying on its back.
The ice had packed the tunnel solidly behind him; air tight, in fact. That was fortunate. Kzanol had used compressed air from his own suit to pressurize his icy chamber. He frowned at the dials on his upper chest, then took his helmet off.
The air was cold and thin. But now he needn’t carry the amplifier helmet back to the ship. He could put it on here.
He looked down at the suit and realized that he’d want help getting it back. Kzanol turned his Attention to Larry Greenberg. He found a blank.
Greenberg was nowhere.
Had he died? No, surely Kzanol would have sensed that.
This wasn’t good, not even a little bit good. Greenberg had warned him that he would try to stop him. The slave must be on his way now, with his mind shield in full working order. Fortunately the amplifier would stop him. It would control a full-grown thrint.
Kzanol reached down to turn the suit on its face. It was…not heavy, but massive…but it moved.
It was snowing. In the thin air the snow fell like gravel thrown by an explosion. It fell hard enough to kill an unprotected man. Where it hit it packed itself into a hard surface, just crunchy enough for good walking.
Luckily Greenberg didn’t have to see. He could sense exactly where Kzanol was and he walked confidently in that direction. His suit wasn’t as good as Kzanol’s. The cold seeped gently through his gauntlets and boots. He’d suffered worse than this on skiing trips, and loved it.
Then the Power came lashing at his brain. His mind shield went up hard. The wave was gone in a moment. But now he couldn’t find Kzanol. The thrint had put up his mind shield. Larry stopped, bewildered, then went on. He had a compass, so he would not walk in circles. But Kzanol must now know he was coming.
Gradually the afterimage pushed into his mind. In every sense, in eye and ears and touch and kinesthetic nerves, he felt what Kzanol had been doing when his Power lashed out.
He’d been bending over the second suit.
It was too late.
He couldn’t run; the vac suit wasn’t built for it. He looked around in a rising tide of desperation, and then, because there was no help for it, he walked on.
Walk. Knock the ice off your faceplate, and walk.
Walk until you’re Told to stop.
Half an hour later, an hour after he’d left the ship, he began to see powdery snow. It was light and fluffy, very different from the falling icy bullets. It was the residue of Kzanol’s digging. He could use it as a guide.
The powder snow grew deeper and deeper, until suddenly it reared as a towering mountain of packed snow. When he tried to
climb it Larry kept slipping down the side in a flurry of snow. But he had to get up there! When Kzanol opened the suit it would be all over. He kept climbing.
He was halfway up, and nearly exhausted, when the top began to move. Snow shot out in a steady stream and fell in a slow fountain. Larry slid hastily down for fear of being buried alive.
The snow continued to pour out. Kzanol was digging his way back…but why wasn’t he wearing the helmet?
The fountain rose higher. Particles of ice, frozen miles up in Pluto’s burned and cooling atmosphere, pelted through the drifting fountain and plated itself on Larry’s suit. He kept moving to keep his joints free. Now he wore a sheath of translucent ice, shattered and cracked at the joints.
And suddenly he guessed the answer. His lips pulled back in a smile of gentle happiness, and his dolphin sense of humor rose joyfully to the surface.
Kzanol climbed out of the tunnel, tugging the useless spare suit behind him. He’d had to use the disintegrator to clear away the snow in the tunnel, and he’d had to climb it at a thirty-degree rise, dragging a bulk as heavy as himself and wearing a space suit which weighed nearly as much. Kzanol was very tired. Had he been human, he would have wept.
The sight of the slope down was almost too much. Plow his feet through that stuff—? But he sighed and sent the spare suit rolling down the mountainside. He watched it hit the bottom and stay, half buried. And he followed it down.
The ice fell faster than ever, hundreds of thousands of tons of brand new water freezing and falling as the planet tried to regain its equilibrium state, forty degrees above absolute zero. Kzanol stumbled blind, putting one big chicken foot in front of the other and bracing for the jar as it fell, keeping his mind closed because he remembered that Greenberg was around somewhere. His mind was numb with fatigue and vicarious cold.
He was halfway down when the snow rose up and stood before him like a thrintun giant. He gasped and stopped moving. The figure slapped one mitten against its faceplate and the thick ice shattered and fell. Greenberg! Kzanol raised the disintegrator.
Almost casually, with a smile that was purest dolphin, Larry reached out a stiff forefinger and planted it in Kzanol’s chest.