The World of Ptavvs (9 page)

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 running 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 at-thuds 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 Belt-er couldn't keep a twowheeler upright against Confinement's shifting Coriolis force. The scooter took him down a steep gradient which leveled off into plowed fleids, greenhouses, toiling farm machinery, woods 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 in-side, 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 lifesupport 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 Gamer 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 crossed 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. Gamer inhaled deeply of cool air, then went back out.

Ontside 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.

They were all in one ward. Miday, Sandier, Buzin, Katz-- there were twenty-eight of them, the men who had been closest to Kzanol when he threw his tantrum. Seven were buried in plastic cocoons. The alien had forgotten to order them to cover, and they had been in the way of the blast when the Golden Circle took off. The others were under sleep-inducers. Their faces twisted sometimes with the violence of their dreams.

"I'm Jim Skarwold," said a blond, chubby man in an intern's uniform. "I've heard of you, Mr. Garner. Is there anything I can do for you?"

"There better be." Garner sent his glance down the line of treatment tanks. "Can any of these men stand a dose of scopolamine? They may have information I need."

"Scop? I don't think so. Mr. Garner, what happened to them? I took some psychiatry in college, but I never heard of anything like this. It isn't- withdrawal from reality, it isn't straight or crooked fear. They're in despair, but not like other people.

"I was told they got this way from contact with an ET. If you could tell me more about it, I'd have a better chance of treating them."

"Right. Here's what I know," said Garner. He told the doctor everything that had happened since the statue was retrieved from the ocean. The doctor listened in silence.

"Then it isn't just a telepath," he said when Garner finished. "It can control minds. But what could, it have ordered them to do that would produce this?" He gestured at the row of sleeping patients.

"Nothing. I don't think he was giving orders at the time. He just got a helluva shock and started feeling out loud." Luke dropped a huge hand on the doctor's shoulder, and Skarwold twitched his surprise at the weight. "Now, if I were planning to treat them, I'd find out first who they think they are. Themselves? Or the alien? The ET may have superimposed his own emotional pattern on theirs, or even his memory pattern.

"Being me, and an Arm, I want to know why both Greenberg and the ET separately stole spaceships and went rocketing off. They must know they've got interplanetary ships, not interstellar colony craft. Is there an alien base somewhere in the solar stystem? What are they after?

"Perhaps we can scratch both problems at the same time, Dr. Skarwold."

"Yes," said Skarwold slowly. "Perhaps you're right. Give me an hour to find the man with the strongest heart."

That was why Luke always carried paperbacks in the glove compartment of his chair. His career involved a lot of waiting.

Arthur T. Katz, qualified ramjet-rocket booster pilot (types C, D, and H-1), thrashed violently. His arms flailed without purpose. He began to make noises.

"It'll be a few minutes," said Skarwold. "He's out of the sleep-inducer, but he has to wake up naturally."

Garner nodded. He was studying the man intently, with his eyes narrowed and his lips tightened slightly. He might have been watching a strange dog, wondering whether it wanted to lick his face or tear his throat out.

Katz opened his eyes. They became very round, then closed desperately tight. Cautiously Katz opened them again. He screamed and waved his arms meaninglessly in the air. Then he started to choke. It was horrible to watch. Whenever he somehow managed to catch his breath he would gasp for air for a few seconds, open his mouth, and begin to choke again. He was terrified, and, thought Garner, not merely because he might suffocate.