Protector

PHSSTHPOK

He sat before an eight-foot circle of clear twing, looking endlessly out on a view that was less than exciting.

Even a decade ago those stars had been a sprinkling of dull red dots in his wake. When he cleared the forward view, they would shine a hellish blue, bright enough to read by. To the side, the biggest had been visibly flattened. But now there were only stars, white points sparsely scattered across a sky that was mostly black. This was a lonely sky. Dust clouds hid the blazing glory of home.

The light in the center of the view was not a star. It was big as a sun, dark at the center, and bright enough to have burned holes in a man’s retinae. It was the light of a Bussard ramjet, burning a bare eight miles away. Every few years Phssthpok spent some time watching the drive, just to be sure it was burning evenly. A long time ago he had caught a slow, periodic wavering in time to prevent his ship from becoming a tiny nova. But the blue-white light had not changed at all in the weeks he’d been watching it.

For most of a long, slow lifetime the heavens had been crawling past Phssthpok’s porthole. Yet he remembered little of that voyage. The time of waiting had been too devoid of events to interest his memory. It is the way with the protector stage of the Pak species, that his leisure memories are of the past, when he was a child and, later, a breeder, when the world was new and bright and free of responsibilities. Only danger to himself or his children can rouse a protector from his normal dreamy lassitude to a fighting fury unsurpassed among sentient beings.

Phssthpok sat dreaming in his disaster couch.

The cabin’s attitude controls were beneath his left hand. When he was hungry, which happened once in ten hours, his knobby hand, like two fistfuls of black walnuts strung together, would reach into a slot on his right and emerge with a twisted, fleshy yellow root the size of a sweet potato. Terrestrial weeks had passed since Phssthpok last left his disaster couch. In that time he had moved nothing but his hands and his jaws. His eyes had not moved at all.

Before that there had been a period of furious exercise. It is a protector’s duty to stay fit.

Even a protector with nobody to protect.

The drive was steady, or enough so to satisfy Phssthpok. The protector’s knotted fingers moved, and the heavens spun about him. He watched the other bright light float into the porthole. When it was centered he stopped the rotation.

Already brighter than any star around it, his destination was still too dim to be more than a star. But it was brighter than Phssthpok had expected, and he knew that he had let time slip away from him. Too much dreaming! And no wonder. He’d spent most of twelve hundred years in that couch, staying immobile to conserve his food supply. It would have been thirty times that but for relativistic effects.

Despite what looked to be the most crippling case of arthritis in medical history, despite weeks spent like a paralytic, the knobby protector was instantly in motion. The drive flame went mushy; expanded; began to cool. Shutting down a Bussard ramjet is almost as tricky as starting one. At ramjet speeds the interstellar hydrogen comes on as gamma rays. It would have to be guided away by magnetic fields, even if it were not being burned as fuel.

He had reached the most likely region of space. Ahead was the most likely star. Pbssthpok’s moment of success was hard upon him. The ones he had come to help (if they existed at all; if they hadn’t died out in all this time; if they circled this star and not one less likely) wouldn’t be expecting him. Their minds were nearly animal. They might or might not use fire, but they certainly wouldn’t have telescopes. Yet they were waiting for him… in a sense. If they were here at all, they had been waiting for two and a half million years.

He would not disappoint them.

He must not.

A protector without descendants is a being without purpose. Such an anomaly must find a purpose, and quickly, or die. Most die. In their minds or their glands a reflex twitches, and they cease to feel hunger. Sometimes such a one finds that he can adapt the entire Pak species as his progeny; but then he must find a way to serve that species. Phssthpok was one of the lucky few.

It would be terrible if he failed.

Nick Sohl was coming home.

The quiet of space was around him, now that his ears had learned to forget the hum of the ship’s drive. Two weeks’ worth of tightly coiled stubble covered his jaw and the shaved scalp on either side of his cottony Belter crest. If be concentrated he could smell himself. He had gone mining in Saturn’s rings, with a singleship around him and a shovel in his hand (for the magnets used to pull monopoles from asteroidal iron did look remarkably like shovels). He would have stayed longer; but he liked to think that Belt civilization could survive without him for just about three weeks.

A century ago monopoles had been mere theory, and conflicting theory at that. Magnetic theory said that a north magnetic pole could not exist apart from a south magnetic pole, and vice-versa. Quantum theory implied that they might exist independently.

The first permanent settlements had been blooming among the biggest Belt asteroids when an exploring team found monopoles scattered through the nickel-iron core of an asteroid. Today they were not theory, but a thriving Belt industry. A magnetic field generated by monopoles acts in an inverse linear relationship rather than an inverse square. In practical terms, a monopole-based motor or instrument will reach much further. Monopoles were valuable where weight was a factor, and in the Belt weight was always a factor. But monopole mining was still a one man operation.

Nick’s luck had been poor. Saturn’s rings were not a good region for monopoles anyway; too much ice, too little metal. The electromagnetic field around his cargo box probably held no more than two full shovelfuls of north magnetic poles. Not much of a catch for a couple of weeks backbreaking labor… but still worth good money at Ceres.

He’d have been satisfied to find nothing. Mining was an excuse the First Speaker for the Belt Political Section used to escape from his cramped office buried deep in the rock of Ceres, from the constant UN-Belt squabbles, from wife and children, friends and acquaintances, enemies and strangers. And next year, after frantic weeks spent catching up with current events, after the next ten months spent manipulating the politics of the solar system, he would be back.

Nick was building up speed for the trip to Ceres, with Saturn a fantastic bauble behind him, when he saw his mining magnet swing slowly away from the cargo box. Somewhere to his left was a new and powerful source of monopoles.

A grin split his face like lightning across a black sky. Better late than never! Too bad he hadn’t found it on the way out; but he could sell it once he’d located it… which would take doing. The needle wavered between two attractions, one of which was his cargo box.

He invested twenty minutes focusing a com laser on Ceres. “This is Nick Sohl, repeating, Nicholas Brewster Sohl. I wish to register a claim for a monopole source in the general direction of—” He tried to guess how much his cargo was affecting the needle. ” — of Sagittarius. I want to offer this source for sale to the Belt government. Details follow, half an hour.”

He then turned off his fusion motor, climbed laboriously into suit and backpac, and left the ship carrying a telescope and his mining magnet.

The stars are far from eternal, but for man they might as well be. Nick floated among the eternal stars, motionless though falling toward the tiny sun at tens of thousands of miles per hour. This was why he went mining. The universe blazed like diamonds on black velvet, an unforgettable backdrop for golden Saturn. The Milky Way was a jeweled bracelet for all the universe. Nick loved the Belt from the carved-out rocks to the surface domes to the spinning inside-out bubble worlds; but most of all he loved space itself.

A mile from the ship he used ’scope and mining magnet to fix the location of the new source. He moved back to the ship to call in. A few hours from now he could take another fix and pin the source by triangulation.

When he reached the ship the communicator was alight. The gaunt fair face of Martin Shaeffer, Third Speaker, was talking to an empty acceleration couch.

“—Must call in at once, Nick. Don’t wait to take your second fix. This is urgent Belt business. Repeating. Martin Shaeffer calling Nick Sohl aboard singleship Hummingbird—”

Nick refocused his laser. “Lit, I’m truly honored. A simple clerk would have sufficed to record my poor find. Repeating.” He set the message to repeat, then started putting away tools. Ceres was light-minutes distant.

He did not try to guess what emergency might need his personal attention. But he was worried.

Presently the answer came. Lit Shaeffer’s expression was strange, but his tone was bantering. “Nick, you’re too modest about your poor find. A pity we’re going to have to disallow it. One hundred and four miners have already called in to report your monopole source.”

Nick gaped. One hundred and four? But he was in the outer system… and most miners preferred to work their own mines anyway. How many had not called in?

“They’re all across the system,” said Lit. “It’s a hell of a big source. As a matter of fact, we’ve already located it by paralax. One source, forty AU out from the sun, which makes it somewhat further away than Pluto, and eighteen degrees off the plane of the solar system. Mitchikov says that there must be as big a mass of south magnetic monopoles in the source as we’ve mined in the past century.”

Outsider! thought Nick. And: Pity they’ll disallow my claim.

“Mitchikov says that big a source could power a really big Bussard ramjet — a manned ramrobot.” Nick nodded at that. Ramrobots were robot probes to the nearby stars, and were one of the few sources of real UN-Belt cooperation. “We’ve been following the source for the past half-hour. It’s moving into the solar system at just over four thousand miles per second, freely falling. That’s well above even interstellar speeds. We’re all convinced it’s an Outsider.

“Any comments?

“Repeating—”

Nick switched it off and sat for a moment, letting himself get used to the idea. An Outsider!

Outsider was Belter slang for alien; but the word meant more than that. The Outsider would be the first sentient alien ever to contact the human race. It (singular) would contact the Belt instead of Earth, not only because the Belt held title to most of the solar system but because those humans who had colonized space were clearly more intelligent. There were many hidden assumptions in the word, and not every Belter believed them all.

And the emergency had caught Nick Sohl on vacation. Censored dammit! He’d have to work by message laser. “Nick Sohl calling Martin Shaeffer, Ceres Base. Yes, I’ve got comments. One, it sounds like your assumption is valid. Two, stop blasting the news all over the system. Some flatlander ship might pick up the fringes of a message beam. We’ll have to bring them in on it sooner or later, but not just yet. Three, I’ll be home in five days. Concentrate on getting more information. We won’t have to make any crucial decisions for awhile.” Not until the Outsider entered the solar system, or tried sending messages of its own. “Four—” Find out if the son of a bitch is decelerating! Find out where he’ll stop! But he couldn’t say any of that. Too specific for a message laser. Shaeffer would know what to do. “There is no four. Sohl out.”

The solar system is big and, in the outer reaches, thin. In the main Belt, from slightly inside Mars’s orbit to slightly outside Jupiter’s, a determined man can examine a hundred rocks in a month. Further out, he’s likely to spend a couple of weeks coming and going, just to look at something he hopes nobody else has noticed.

The main Belt is not mined out, though most of the big rocks are now private property. Most miners prefer to work the Belt. In the Belt they know they can reach civilization and civilization’s byproducts: stored air and water, hydrogen fuel, women and other people, a new air regenerator, autodocs and therapeutic psychomimetic drugs.

Brennan didn’t need drugs or company to keep him sane. He preferred the outer reaches. He was in Uranus’s trailing Trojan point, following sixty degrees behind the ice giant in its orbit. Trojan points, being points of stable equilibrium, are dust collectors and collectors of larger objects. There was a good deal of dust here, for deep space, and a handful of rocks worth exploring.

Had he found nothing at all, Brennan would have moved on to the moons, then to the leading Trojan point. Then home for a short rest and a visit with Charlotte; and, because his funds would be low by then, a paid tour of duty on Mercury, which he would hate.

Had he found pitchblende he would have been in the point for months.

None of the rocks held enough radioactives to interest him. But something nearby showed the metallic gleam of an artifact. Brennan moved in on it, expecting to find some Belt miner’s throwaway fuel tank, but looking anyway. Jack Brennan was a confirmed optimist.

The artifact was the shell of a solid fuel rocket motor. Part of the Mariner XX, from the lettering.

The Mariner XX, the ancient Pluto fly-by. Ages ago the ancient empty shell must have drifted back toward the distant sun, drifted into the thin Trojan-point dust and coasted to a stop. The hull was pitted with dust holes and was still rotating with the stabilizing impulse imparted three generations back.

As a collector’s item the thing was nearly beyond price. Brennan took phototapes of it in situ before he moved in to attach himself to the flat nose and used his jet backpac to stop the rotation. He strapped it to the fusion tube of his ship, below the lifesystem cabin. The gyros could compensate for the imbalance.

In another sense the bulk presented a problem.

He stood next to it on the slender metal shell of the fusion tube. The antique motor was half as big as his mining singleship, but very light, little more than a metal skin for its original shaped-core charge. If Brennan had found pitchblende the singleship would have been hung with cargo nets under the fuel ring, carrying its own weight in radioactive ore. He would have returned to the Belt at half a gee. But with the Mariner relic as his cargo he could accelerate at the one gee which was standard for empty singleships.

It might just give him the edge he’d need.

If he sold the tank through the Belt, the Belt would take thirty percent in income tax and agent’s fees. But if he sold it on the Moon, Earth’s Museum of Spaceflight would charge no tax at all.

Brennan was in a good position for smuggling. There were no goldskins out here. His velocity over most of his course would be tremendous. They couldn’t begin to catch him until he approached the Moon. He wasn’t hauling monopoles or radioactives; the magnetic and radiation detectors would look right through him. He could swing in over the plane of the system, avoiding rocks and other ships.

But if they did get him they’d take one hundred percent of his find. Everything.

Brennan smiled to himself. He’d risk it.

Phssthpok’s mouth closed once, twice, three times. A yellow tree-of-life root separated into four chunks, raggedly, because the edges of Phssthpok’s beak were not sharp. They were blunt and uneven, like the top of a molar. Phssthpok gulped four times.

He had hardly noticed the action. It was as if his hand, mouth and belly were on automatic, while Phssthpok watched the scope screen.

Under 10⁴ magnification the screen showed three tiny violet points.

Looking around the edge of the scope screen Phssthpok could see only the bright yellow star he’d called G0 Target #1. He’d been searching for planets. He’d found one, a beauty, the right size and approximate temperature, with a transparent water-bearing atmosphere and an oversized moon. But he’d also found myriads of violet points so small that at first he’d thought they were mere flashes in his retinae.

They were real, and they moved. Some moved no faster than planetary objects; others, hundreds of times faster than escape velocity for the system. They glowed intensely hot, the color of a neutron star in its fourth week of life, when its temperature is still in the millions of degrees.

Obviously they were spacecraft. At these speeds, natural objects would have been lost to interstellar space within months. Probably they used fusion drives. If so, and judging from their color, they burned hotter and more efficiently than Phssthpok’s own.

They seemed to spend most of their time in space. At first he’d hoped they were some form of space-born life, perhaps related to the starseeds of the galactic core. But as he drew nearer the yellow sun he’d bad to abandon the idea. All the sparks had destinations, from the myriad small orbiting rocks to the moons and planets of the inner system. One frequent target was the world with the water atmosphere, the one he’d classified as Pak-habitable. No lifeform native to space could have taken its gravity or its atmosphere.

That planet, G0 Target #1-3, was the biggest such target, though the spacecraft touched many smaller bodies. Interesting. If the pilots of those fusion craft had developed on G0 Target #1-3, they would naturally prefer lighter gravities to heavier.

But the ones he sought hadn’t the minds to build such craft. Had something alien usurped their places?

Then he and his thousands had given their long lives to extract only a sterile vengeance.

Phssthpok felt fury building in him. He held it back. It needn’t be the answer. G0 Target #1 was not the only likely target. Probability was only twenty-eight percent. He could hope that the ones he had come to help circled another star.

But he’d have to check.

There is a minimum speed at which a Bussard ramjet will operate, and Phssthpok was not far above it. He had planned to coast through the system until he found something definite. Now he would have to use his reserve fuel. He had already found a blue-white spark moving at high velocity toward the inner system. He should be able to match its course.

Nick landed Hummingbird, hurriedly issued orders for unloading and sale of his cargo, and went underground. His office was some two miles beneath the rocky bubble-dotted surface of Ceres, buried deep in the nickel-iron substrate.

He hung his suit and helmet in the vestibule of his office. There was a painting on the front of the suit, and he patted it affectionately before he went in. He always did that.

Most Belters decorated their suits. Why not? The interior of his suit was the only place many a Belter could call home, and the one possession he had to keep in perfect condition. But even in the Belt, Nick Sohl’s suit was unique.

On an orange background was the painting of a girl. She was short; her head barely reached Nick’s neck ring. Her skin was a softly glowing green. Only her lovely back showed across the front of the suit. Her hair was streaming bonfire flames, flickering orange with touches of yellow and white, darkening into red-black smoke as it swept across the girl’s left shoulder. She was nude. Her arms were wrapped around the suit’s torso, her hands touching the air pac on its back; her legs embraced the suit’s thighs, so that her heels touched the backs of the flexible metal knee joints. It was a very beautiful painting, so beautiful that it almost wasn’t vulgar. A pity the suit’s sanitary outlet wasn’t somewhere else.

Lit lounged in one of the guest chairs in Nick’s office, his long legs sprawling far across the rug. He was attenuated rather than big. Too much of his childhood had been spent in free fall. Now he could not fit into a standard pressure suit or spacecraft cabin; and wherever he sat, he looked like he was trying to take over.

Nick dropped into his own chair and closed his eyes for a moment, getting used to the feel of being First Speaker again. With his eyes still closed he said, “Okay, Lit. What’s been happening?”

“Got it all here.” Rustle of paper. “Yah. The monopole source is coming in over the plane of the solar system, aimed approximately at the sun. As of an hour ago, it was two point two billion miles out. For a week after we spotted it it showed a steady acceleration of point nine two gee, largely lateral and braking thrust to warp its course around the sun. Now it’s mainly deceleration, and the thrust has dropped to point one four gee. That aims it through Earth’s orbit.”

“Where will Earth be then?”

“We checked that. If he goes back to point nine two gee at — this point, he’ll be at rest eight days from now.

“And that’s where Earth will be.” Lit looked grim. “All of this is more than somewhat approximate. All we really know is that he’s aimed at the inner system.”

“But Earth is the obvious target. Hardly fair. The Outsider’s supposed to contact us, not them. What have you done about anything?”

“Mostly observations. We’ve got photos of what looks like a drive flame. A fusion flame, somewhat cooler than ours.”

“Less efficent, then… but if he’s using a Bussard ramjet, he’s getting his fuel free. I suppose he’s below ramjet speeds now, though.”

“Right.”

“He must be huge. Could be a warship, Lit. Using that big a monopole source.”

“Not necessarily. You know how a ramrobot works? A magnetic field picks up interstellar hydrogen plasma, guides it away from the cargo pod and constricts it so that the hydrogen undergoes fusion. The difference is that nobody can ride them because too much hydrogen gets through as radiation. In a manned ship you’d need enormously greater control of the plasma fields.”

“That much more?”

“Mitchikov says yes, if he came from far enough away. The further he came, the faster he must have been going at peak velocity.”

“Um.”

“You’re getting paranoid, Nick. Why would any species send us an interstellar warship?”

“Why would anyone send us a ship at all? I mean, if you’re going to be humble about it… Can we contact that ship before it reaches Earth?”

“Oddly enough, I thought of that. Mitchikov has several courses plotted. Our best bet is to start a fleet from the trailing Jupiter Trojans sometime within the next six days.”

“Not a fleet. We want the Outsider to see us as harmless. Do we have any big ships in the Trojans?”

“The Blue Ox. She was about to leave for Juno, but I commandeered her and had her cargo tank cleared.”

“Good. Nice going.” The Blue Ox was a mammoth fluid cargo carrier, as big as one of the Titan Hotel’s luxury liners, though not as pretty. “We’ll want a computer, a good one, not just a ship’s autopilot. Also a tech to run it, and some spare senses for the machine. I want to use it as a translator, and the Outsider might talk by eye-blinks or radio or modulated current. Can we maybe fit a singleship into the Ox’s cargo hold?”

“What for?”

“Just in case. Well give the Ox a lifeboat. If the Outsider plays rough someone might get away.”

Lit did not say paranoia, but he was visibly restraining himself.

“He’s big,” Nick said patiently. “His technology is powerful enough to get him across interstellar space. He could be friendly as a puppy, and someone could still say something wrong.” He picked up the phone and said, “Get me Achilles, main switchboard.”

It would take awhile for the operator to focus a laser on Achilles. Nick hung up to wait. And the phone went off jarringly in his hand.

“Yes?”

“This is Traffic Control,” said the phone. “Cutter. Your office wanted anything on the big monopole source.”

Nick opened the volume control so Shaeffer could hear. “Right. What?”

“It’s matching course with a Belt ship. The pilot doesn’t seem to be evading contact.”

Sohl’s lips tightened. “What kind of ship?”

“We can’t tell from this distance. Probably a mining singleship. They’ll be matching orbit in thirty-seven hours twenty minutes, if neither of them change their minds.”

“Keep me posted. Set nearby telescopes on watch. I don’t want to miss anything.” Nick rang off. “You heard?”

“Yah. Finagle’s First Law.”

“Can we stop that Belter?”

“I doubt it.”

It could have been anyone. It turned out to be Jack Brennan.

He was several hours from turnover en route to Earth’s Moon. The Mariner XX’s discarded booster rode his hull like an undernourished Siamese twin. Its whistle was still fixed in the flat nose, the supersonic whistle whose pitch had controlled the burning of the solid fuel core. Brennan had crawled inside to look, knowing that any damage might lower the relic’s value.

For a used one-shot, the relic was in fine shape. The nozzle had burned a little unevenly, but not seriously so; naturally not, given that the probe had reached its destination. The Museum of Spaceflight would pay plenty for it.

In the Belt, smuggling is illegal but not immoral. Smuggling was no more immoral to Brennan than forgetting to pay a parking meter would have been to a flatlander. If you got caught you paid the fine and that was that.

Brennan was an optimist. He didn’t expect to be caught.

He had been accelerating for four days at just short of one gee. Uranus’s orbit was far behind him; the inner system far ahead. He was going at a hell of a clip. There were no observed relativity effects, he wasn’t going that fast, but his watch would need resetting when he arrived.

Have a look at Brennan. He masses one hundred and seventy-eight pounds per one gee, stands six feet two inches tall. Like any Belter, he looks much like an undermuscled basketball player. Since he has been sitting in that control couch for most of four days, he is beginning to look and feel crumpled and weary. But his brown eyes are clear and steady, twenty-twenty, having been corrected by microsurgery when he was eighteen. His straight dark hair is an inch-wide strip running from forehead to nape along a brown polished scalp. He is white; which is to say that his Belter tan is no darker than Cordovan leather; as usual it covers only his hands and his face and scalp above the neck. Elsewhere he is the color of a vanilla milkshake.

He is forty-five years old. He looks thirty. Gravity has been kind to the muscles of his face, and growth salve to the potential bald spot at the crown of his head. But the developing fine lines around his eyes stand out clearly now, since he has been wearing a puzzled frown for the past twenty hours. He has become aware that something is following him.

At first he’d thought it was a goldskin, a Ceres cop. But what would a goldskin be doing this far from the sun?

Even at second glance it could not have been a goldskin. Its drive flame was too fuzzy, too big, not bright enough. Third glance included a few instrument readings. Brennan was accelerating, but the stranger was decelerating, and still had enormous velocity. Either it had come from beyond Pluto’s orbit, or its drive must generate tens of gees. Which gave the same answer.

The strange light was an Outsider.

How long had the Belt been waiting for him? Let any man spend some time between the stars, even a flatland moonship pilot, and someday he would realize just how deep the universe really was. Billions of light years deep, with room for anything at all. Beyond doubt the Outsider was out there somewhere; the first alien species to contact Man was going about its business beyond the reach of Belt telescopes.

Now the Outsider was here, matching courses with Jack Brennan.

And Brennan wasn’t even surprised. Wary, yes. Even frightened. But not surprised, not even that the Outsider had chosen him. That was an accident of fate. They had both been beading into the inner system from roughly the same direction.

Call the Belt? The Belt must know by now. The Belt telescope net tracked every ship in the system; the odds were that it would find any wrong-colored dot moving at the wrong speed. Brennan had expected them to find his own ship, had gambled that they wouldn’t find it soon enough. Certainly they’d found the Outsider. Certainly they were watching it; and by virtue of that fact they must be watching Brennan too. In any case Brennan couldn’t laser Ceres. A flatland ship might pick up the beam. Brennan didn’t know Belt policy on Earth-Outsider contacts.

The Belt must act without him.

Which left Brennan with two decisions of his own.

One was easy. He didn’t have a snowman’s chance of smuggling anything. He would have to alter course to reach one of the major asteroids, and call the Belt the first chance he had to advise them of his course and cargo.

But what of the Outsider?

Evasion tactics? Easy enough. Axiomatically, it is impossible to stop a hostile ship in space. A cop can match course with a smuggler, but he cannot make an arrest unless the smuggler cooperates — or runs out of fuel. He can blow the ship out of space, or even ram with a good autopilot; but how can he connect airlocks with a ship that keeps firing its drive in random bursts? Brennan could head anywhere, and all the Outsider could do was follow or destroy him.

Running would be sensible. Brennan did have a family to protect. Charlotte could take care of herself. She was an adult Belter, as competent to run her own life as Brennan himself, though she had never found enough ambition to earn her pilot’s license. And Brennan had paid the customary fees in trust for Estelle and Jennifer. His daughters would be raised and educated.

But he could do more for them. Or he could become a father again… probably with Charlotte. There was money strapped to his hull. Money was power. Like electrical or political power, its uses could take many forms.

Contact the alien and he might never see Charlotte again. There were risks in being the first to meet an alien species.

And obvious honors.

Could history ever forget the man who met the Outsider?

Just for a moment he felt trapped. As if fate were playing games with his lifeline… but he couldn’t turn this down. Let the Outsider come to him. Brennan held his course.

The Belt is a web of telescopes. Hundreds of thousands of them.

It has to be that way. Every ship carries a telescope. Every asteroid must be watched constantly, because asteroids can be perturbed from their orbits, and because a map of the solar system has to be up-to-date by seconds. The light of every fusion drive has to be watched. In crowded sectors ships can run through each other’s exhausts if someone doesn’t warn them away; and the exhaust from a fusion motor is deadly.

Nick Sohl kept glancing up at the screen, down at the stack of dossiers on his desk, up at the screen… The screen showed two blobs of violet-white light, one bigger than the other, and vaguer. Already they could both appear on the same screen, because the asteroid taking the pictures was almost in line with their course.

He had read the dossiers several times. Ten of them; and each might be the unknown Belter who was now approaching the Outsider. There had been a dozen dossiers. In the outer offices men were trying to locate and eliminate these ten as they had already found two, by phone calls and com lasers and dragnets.

Since the ship wasn’t running, Nick had privately eliminated six of the dossiers. Two had never been caught smuggling: a mark of caution, whether he’d never smuggled or never been caught. One he knew; she was a xenophobe. Three were old-timers; you don’t get to be an oldtimer in the Belt by taking foolish chances. In the Belt the Finagle-Murphy Laws are only half a joke.

One of four miners had had the colossal arrogance to appoint himself humanity’s ambassador to the universe. Serve him right if he blows it, thought Nick. Which one?

A million miles short of Jupiter’s orbit, moving well above the plane of the solar system, Phssthpok matched velocities with the native ship and began to close in.

Of the thousands of sentient species in the galaxy, Phssthpok and Phssthpok’s race had studied only their own. When they ran across other species, as in the mining of nearby systems for raw materials, they destroyed them as quickly and safely as possible. Aliens were dangerous, or might be, and Pak were not interested in anything but Pak. A protector’s intelligence was high; but intelligence is a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently.

Phssthpok was working strictly from ignorance. All he could do was guess.

At a guess, then, and assuming that the oval scratch in the native ship’s hull was really a door, the native would be not much taller and not much shorter than Phssthpok. Say, three to seven feet tall, depending on how much elbow room it needed. Of course the oval might not be designed for the native’s longest length, as for the biped Phssthpok. But the ship was small; it wouldn’t hold something too much larger than Phssthpok.

One look at the native would tell him. If it was not Pak, he would need to ask it questions. If it was -

There would still be questions, many of them. But his search would be over. A few ship’s days to reach G0 Target #1-3, a short time to learn their language and explain how to use what he’d brought, and he could stop eating.

It showed no awareness of Phssthpok’s ship. A few minutes and he would be alongside, yet the stranger made no move — cancel. The native had turned off its drive. Phssthpok was being invited to match courses.

Phssthpok did. He wasted neither motion nor fuel; he might have spent his whole life practicing for this one maneuver. His lifesystem pod coasted alongside the native ship, and stopped.

His pressure suit was on, but he made no move. Phssthpok dared not risk his own person, not when he was so close to victory. If the native would only step out on the hull…

Brennan watched the ship come alongside.

Three sections, spaced eight miles apart. He saw no cable joining them. At this distance it might be invisibly thin. The biggest, most massive section must be the drive: a cylinder with three small cones jutting at angles from the tail. Big as it was, the cylinder must be too small to hold fuel for an interstellar voyage. Either the Outsider had dropped expendable tanks along the way, or… a manned ramrobot?

Section two was a sphere some sixty feet across. When the ship finally stopped moving, this section was immediately opposite Brennan. A large circular window stared out of the sphere, so that the sphere looked like a great eyeball. It turned to follow Brennan as it moved past. Brennan found it difficult to return that uncanny stare.

He was having second thoughts. Surely the Belt government could have organized a better meeting than this…

The trailing pod — he’d had a good look as it eased past. It was egg shaped, perhaps sixty feet long by forty feet through. The big end, facing away from the drive section, was so uniformly pitted with dust grains that it looked sandblasted. The small end was pointed and smooth, almost shiny. Brennan nodded to himself. A ramscoop field would have protected the forward end from micro-meteoroids during acceleration. During deceleration its trailing position would have done the same.

There were no breaks in the egg.

There was motion within the bulging iris of the center section. Brennan strained, trying to see more… but nothing more happened.

It was a peculiar way to build a ship, he thought. The center pod must be the life support system, if only because it had a porthole and the trailing pod did not. And the drive was dangerously radioactive; otherwise why string the ship out like this? But that meant that the lifesystem was positioned to protect the trailing pod from the drive radiation. Whatever was in that trailing pod must be more important than the pilot, in the opinion of the pilot.

Either that, or the pilot and the designer had both been inept or insane.

The Outsider ship was motionless now, its drive going cold, its lifesystem section a few hundred feet away. Brennan waited.

I’m being chauvinistic, he told himself. I can’t judge an alien’s sanity by Belt standards, can I?

His lip curled. Sure I can. That ship is badly designed.

The alien stepped out onto its hull.

Every muscle in Brennan jerked as he saw it. The alien was a biped; it looked human enough from here. But it had stepped through the porthole. It stood on its own hull, motionless, waiting.

It had two arms, one head, two legs. It used a pressure suit. It carried a weapon — or a reaction pistol; there was no way to tell. But Brennan saw no backpac. A reaction pistol takes a deal more skill than a jet backpac. Who would use one in open space?

What the Finagle was it waiting for?

Of course. For Brennan.

For a wild moment he considered starting the drive now, get out of here before it was too late! Cursing his fear, Brennan moved deliberately to the door. The men who built singleships built as cheaply as possible. His ship had no airlock; there was just the door, and pumps to evacuate the lifesystem. Brennan’s suit was tight. All he had to do was open the door.

He stepped outside on sandal magnets.

The seconds stretched away as Brennan and the Outsider examined each other. It looks human enough, Brennan thought. Biped. Head on top. But if it’s human, and if it’s been in space long enough to build a starship, it can’t be as inept as this ship says it is.

Have to find out what it’s carrying. Maybe it’s right. Maybe its cargo is worth more than its life.

The Outsider jumped.

It fell toward him like a falcon diving. Brennan stood his ground, frightened, but admiring the alien’s skill. The alien didn’t use its reaction pistol. Its jump had been perfect. It would land right next to Brennan.

The Outsider hit the hull on springy limbs, absorbing its momentum like any Belter. It was smaller than Brennan: no more than five feet tall. Brennan saw dimly through its faceplate. He recoiled, a long step backward. The thing was hideously ugly. Chauvinism be damned: the Outsider’s face would stop a computer.

The one backward step didn’t save him.

The Outsider was too close. It reached out, wrapped a pressurized mitten around Brennan’s wrist, and jumped.

Brennan gasped and, too late, tried to jerk away. The Outsider’s grip was like spring steel inside its glove. They were spinning away through space toward the eyeball-shaped life support system, and not a thing Brennan could do about it.

“Nick,” said the intercom.

“Here,” said Nick. He’d left it open.

“The dossier you want is labeled ‘Jack Brennan.’ ”

“How do you know?”

“We called his woman. He has only one, a Charlotte Wiggs, and two kids. We convinced her it was urgent. She finally told us he was off searching the Uranus Trojan points.”

“Uranus… that sounds right. Cutter, do me a favor.”

“Sure. Official?”

“Yes. See to it that Hummingbird is fueled and provisioned and kept that way until further notice. Fit it with strap-on boosters. Then get a com laser focused on ARM Headquarters, New York, and keep it there. You’ll need three, of course.” For relays as the Earth rotated.

“Okay. No message yet?”

“No, just hold a laser ready in case we need it.”

The situation was so damn fluid. If he needed help from Earth he’d need it quickly and badly. The surest way to convince the flatlanders would be to go himself. No First Speaker had ever touched Earth… and he didn’t expect to now; but The Perversity of the Universe Tends Toward a Maximum.

Nick began to skim Brennan’s dossier. Too bad the man had children.

Phssthpok’s first clear memories dated from the day he woke to the fact that he was a protector. He could conjure blurred memories from before: of pain, fighting, discovering new foods, experiences in sex and affection and hate and tree climbing in the valley of Pitchok; watching curiously, half a dozen times, as various female breeders bore children he could smell were his. But his mind had been vague then.

As a protector he thought sharply and clearly. At first it had been unpleasant. He had had to get used to it. There had been others to help him, teachers and such.

There was a war, and he had graduated into it. Because he had had to develop the habit of asking questions, it had been years before he understood its history:

Three hundred years earlier several hundred major Pak families had allied to refertilize a wide desert area of the Pak world. Erosion and overgrazing had produced that desert, not war, though there were mildly radioactive patches all across it. No place on the Pak world was entirely free from war.

The heartbreakingly difficult task of reforesting had been completed a generation ago. Immediately and predictably the alliance had split into several smaller alliances, each determined to secure the land for its own descendants. By now most of the earlier alliances were gone. A number of families had been exterminated, and the surviving groups changed sides whenever expedient to protect their blood lines. Phssthpok’s blood line now held with South Coast.

Phssthpok enjoyed war. Not because of the fighting. As a breeder he’d had fights, and war was less a matter of fighting than of outwitting the enemy. At its start it had been a fusion bomb war. Many of the families had died during that phase, and part of the reclaimed desert was desert once more. Then South Coast had found a damper field to prevent fissionables from fissioning. Others had swiftly copied it. Since then the war had been artillery, poison gas, bacteria, psychology, infantry, even freelance assassination. It was a war of wits. Could South Coast counteract propaganda designed to split off the Meteor Bay region? If Eastersea Alliance had an antidote to river poison Iota, would it be easier to steal it from them or invent our own? If Circle Mountains should find an innoculation for bacterial strain Zeta-Three, how likely was it that they’d turn a mutated strain against us? Should we stick with South Coast, or could we do better with Eastersea? It was fun.

As Phssthpok learned more the game grew more complex. His own Virus QQ would kill all but eight percent of breeders but would leave their protectors unharmed… unharmed and fighting with doubled fury to salvage a smaller and less vulnerable group of strain-resistant hostages. He agreed to suppress it. Aak(pop) Family had too many breeders for the local food supply; he rejected their offer of alliance but blocked their path toward Eastersea.

Then Eastersea Alliance built a pinch field generator which could set off a fusion reaction without previous fission.

Phssthpok had been a protector for twenty-six years.

The war ended within a week. Eastersea had the recultivated desert, the part that wasn’t bare and sterile from seventy years of war. And there had been a mighty flash over the Valley of Pitchok.

The infants and breeders of Phssthpok’s line had lived in the Valley of Pitchok for unremembered generations. He had seen that awful light on the horizon and known that all his descendants were dead or sterile, that he had no blood line left to protect, that all he could do was to stop eating until he was dead.

He hadn’t felt that way since. Not until now.

But even then, thirteen centuries ago in biological time, he hadn’t felt this awful confusion. What was this pressure-suited thing at the end of his arm? Its faceplate was darkened against sunlight. It looked like a breeder, as far as he could tell from the shape of the suit. But they couldn’t have built spacecraft or pressure suits.

Phssthpok’s sense of mission had held steady for more than twelve centuries. Now it was drowning in pure confusion. Now he could regret that the Pak knew nothing of other intelligent species. The biped form might not be unique to Pak. Why should it be? Phssthpok’s shape was good designing. If he could see this native without his suit… if he could smell it! That would tell the tale.

They landed next to the porthole. The Outsider’s aim was inhumanly accurate. Brennan didn’t try to fight as the Outsider reached through the curved surface, grasped something, and pulled them both inside. The transparent material resisted movement, like invisible taffy.

In quick, jerky movements, the alien stripped off its pressure suit. The suit was flexible fabric, including the transparent bubble. There were drawstrings at the joints. With its suit off, but still maintaining its iron grip on Brennan, the alien turned to look at him.

Brennan wanted to scream.

The thing was all knobs. Its arms were longer than human, with a single elbow joint in something like the right place; but the elbow was a ball seven inches across. The hands were like strings of walnuts. The shoulders and the knees and the hips bulged like cantaloupes. The head was a tilted melon on a nonexistent neck. Brennan could find no forehead, no chin. The alien’s mouth was a flat black beak, hard but not shiny, which faded into wrinkled skin halfway between mouth and eyes. Two slits in the beak were the nose. Two human looking eyes were protected by not at all human looking masses of deeply convoluted skin, and by a projecting shelf of brow. From the beak the head sloped backward as if streamlined. A bony ridge rose from the swelling skull, adding to the impression of streamlining.

It wore nothing more than a vest with big pockets, a human-seeming garment as inappropriate as a snap-brim Fedora on Frankenstein’s monster. The swollen joints on its five-fingered hand felt like a score of ball bearings pressing into Brennan’s arm.

Thus, the Outsider. Not merely an obvious alien. A dolphin was an obvious alien, but a dolphin was not horrible. The Outsider was horrible. It looked like a cross between human and… something else. Man’s monsters have always been that. Grendel. The Minotaur. Mermaids were once considered horrors: all lovely enticing woman above, all scaly monster below. And that fitted too, for the Outsider was apparently sexless, with nothing but folds of armor-like skin between its legs.

The inset eyes, human as an octopus eye, looked deep into Brennan’s own.

Abruptly, before Brennan could make a move to fight back, the Outsider took two handfuls of Brennan’s rubberized suit and pulled them apart. The suit held, stretched, then ripped from crotch to chin. Air puffed. Brennan felt his ears pop.

No point in holding his breath. Several hundred feet of vacuum separated him from his own ship’s breathing air. Brennan sniffed cautiously.

The air was thin, and it carried a strange scent.

“You son of a bitch,” said Brennan. “I could have died.”

The Outsider didnt answer. It stripped off Brennan’s suit like peeling an orange, without unnecessary roughness but without excessive care. Brennan fought. One wrist was still manacled by the alien’s grip, but Brennan bruised his free fist against the alien’s face without causing it to do more than blink. Its skin was like leather armor. It finished stripping away the suit and held Brennan out for inspection. Brennan kicked it where its groin ought to be. The alien noticed and looked down, watched as Brennan kicked twice more, then returned to its inspection.

Its gaze moved over Brennan, head to feet, feet to head, insultingly familiar. In regions of the Belt where air and temperature were controlled, the Belters practiced nudity all their lives. Never before had Brennan felt naked. Not nude; naked. Defenseless. Alien fingers reached to probe his scalp along the sides of the Belter crest; massaged the knuckles of his hand, testing the joints beneath the skin. At first Brennan continued to fight. He couldn’t even distract the alien’s attention.

Then he waited, limp with embarrassment, enduring the examination.

Abruptly it was over. The knobby alien jumped across the room, dug briefly into a bin along one wall, came up with a folded rectangle of clear plastic. Brennan thought of escape; but his suit was in ribbons. The alien shook the thing open, ran fingers along one edge. The bag popped open as if he’d used a zipper.

The alien jumped at Brennan, and Brennan jumped away. It bought him a few seconds of relative freedom. Then knobby steel fingers closed on him and pushed him into the sack.

Brennan found that he couldn’t open it from inside. “I’ll suffocate!” he screamed. The alien made no response. It wouldn’t have understood him anyway. It was climbing back into its suit.

Oh, no. Brennan struggled to rip the sack.

The alien tucked him under an arm and moved out through the porthole. Brennan felt the clear plastic puff out around him, thinning the air inside even further. He felt ice-picks in his ears. He stopped struggling instantly. He waited with the fatalism of despair while the alien moved through vacuum, around the eyeball-shaped hull to where an inch-thick tow line stretched away toward the trailing pod.

There are few big cargo ships in the Belt. Most miners prefer to haul their own ore. The ships that haul large cargoes from asteroid to asteroid are not large; rather, they are furnished with a great many attachments. The crew string their payload out on spars and rigging, in nets or on lightweight grids. They spray foam plastic to protect fragile items, spread reflective foil underneath to ward off hot backlighting from the drive flame, and take off on low power.

The Blue Ox was a special case. She carried fluids and fine dusts; refined quicksilver and mined water, grain, seeds, impure tin scooped molten from lakes on dayside Mercury, mixed and dangerous chemicals from Jupiter’s atmosphere. Such loads were not always available for hauling. So the Ox was a huge tank with a small three-man lifesystem and a fusion tube running through her long axis; but since her tank must sometimes become a cargo hold for bulky objects, it had been designed with mooring gear and a big lid.

Einar Nilsson stood at the rim of the hold, looking in. He was seven feet tall, and overweight for a Belter; and that was overweight for anyone, for the fat had gone into his belly and the great round curve of second chin. He was all curves; there were no sharp edges on him anywhere. It had been a long time since he rode a singleship. He did not like the high gravity.

The device on his suit was a Viking ship with snarling dragon prow, floating half-submerged in the bright, milky swirl of a spiral galaxy.

Nilsson’s own small, ancient mining ship had become the Ox’s lifeboat. The slender length of its fusion tube, flared at the end, stretched almost the length of the hold. There was an Adzhubei 4-4 computer, almost new; there were machines intended to serve as the computer’s senses and speakers, radar and radio and sonics and monochromatic lights and hi-fi equipment. Each item was tethered separately, half a dozen ways, to hooks on the inner wall.

Nilsson nodded, satisfied, his graying blond Belter crest brushing the crown of his helmet. “Go ahead, Nate.”

Nathan La Pan began spraying fluid into the tank. In thirty seconds the tank was filled with foam which was already hardening.

“Close ’er up.”

Perhaps the foam crunched as the great lid swung down. The sound did not carry. Patroclus Port was in vacuum, open beneath the black sky.

“How much time we got, Nate?”

“Another twenty minutes to catch the optimum course,” said the young voice.

“Okay, get aboard. You too, Tina.”

“Sold.” The voice clicked off. Nathan was young, but he had already learned not to waste words over a phone. Einar had taken him on at the request of his father, an old friend.

The computer programmer was something else again. Einar watched her slender figure arcing toward the Ox’s airlock. Not a bad jump. Perhaps a touch too much muscle?

Tina Jordan was an expatriate flatlander. She was thirty-four years old, old enough to know what she was doing, and she loved ships. Probably she had sense enough to stay out of the way. But she had never flown a singleship. Einar tended to distrust people who did not trust themselves enough to fly alone. Well, there was no help for it; nobody else at Patroclus Base could run an Adzhubei 4-4.

The Ox would make a lateral run to put her in the path of the alien ship, then curve inward toward the sun. Einar looked away into diamond-studded darkness, in a direction almost opposite the sun. The sparse, dim points of the Trailing Trojans did not block his view. He did not expect to see the Outsider, and he didn’t. But it was there, falling to meet the Ox’s J-shaped orbit.

Three blobs in a line, a fourth hanging nearby. Nick stared at the screen, his eyes squinched almost shut so that strain lines showed like webs around his eyelids. Whatever had happened, it had happened now.

Other matters begged for the First Speaker’s attention. Dickerings with Earth on the funding of ramrobots and on apportionment of ramrobot cargoes among the four interstellar colonies. Trade matters regarding Mercurian tin. The extradition problem. He was spending too much time on this… but something kept telling him that it could be the most important event in human history.

Cutter’s voice burst jarringly from a speaker. “Nick? The Blue Ox wants to take off.”

“Fine,” said Nick.

“Okay. But I notice they aren’t armed.”

“They’ve got a fusion drive, don’t they? And oversized attitude jets to aim it. If they need more than that we’ve got a war on our hands.” Nick clicked off.

And sat wondering. Was he right? Even an H-bomb would be less effective as a weapon than the directed exhaust of a fusion drive. And an H-bomb was an obvious weapon, an insult to a peace-loving Outsider. Still…

Nick went back to Brennan’s dossier. It was thin. Belters would not accept a government that kept more than minimal tabs on them.

John Fitzgerald Brennan was very much the average Belter. Forty-five years of age. Two daughters — Estelle and Jennifer — by the same woman, Charlotte Leigh Wiggs, a professional farming machine repairwoman in Confinement. Brennan had the beginnings of a nice retirement fund, though he’d drained it twice for trust funds for his children. He had twice lost loads of radioactive ore to the goldskins. Once would have been typical. Belters laugh at inept smugglers, but a man who has never been caught may be suspected of never having tried. No guts.

Suit design: The Madonna of Port Lligat. Dali. Nick frowned. Miners sometimes lost their grip on reality, out there. But Brennan was alive and fairly well-off on his own earnings, and he’d never had an accident.

Twenty years ago he’d worked with a crew mining molten tin on Mercury. Mercury was rich with valuable nonferrous elements, though the sun’s magnetic field made special ships necessary; a solar storm could pick up a metal ship and drop it miles away. Brennan had been competent, and he’d made good money, but he’d quit after ten months and never worked with a crew again. Apparently he didn’t like working with others.

Why had he let the Outsider catch him?

Hell, Nick would have done the same. The Outsider was here in the system; somebody had to meet him. Runrung would have been an admission that Brennan couldn’t handle such a meeting.

His family wouldn’t have stopped him. They were Belters; they could take care of themselves.

But I wish he’d run, Nick thought. His fingers beat a nervous tattoo on his desk.

Brennan was all alone in a small space.

It had been a hairy, scary ride. The Outsider had jumped into space with a balloonful of Brennan, balanced itself against his mass and used its reaction pistol. They had coasted for twenty minutes. Brennan had been near suffocation before they reached the trailing pod.

He remembered the alien touching a flat-nosed tool to the hull, then pulling them both through a viscous surface that looked like metal from both sides. The alien had unzipped the balloon, turned and jumped and vanished through the wall while Brennan was still tumbling helplessly in air.

The air tasted like the cabin air, though the peculiar scent was much stronger. Brennan drew it in in great rarefied gasps. The Outsider had left the balloon behind. It floated toward him like a translucent ghost, menacing and inviting, and Brennan began to laugh, a painful sound, almost like sobbing.

He began to look around him.

The light was greener than the sunlight tubes he was used to. The only clear space was the space he floated in, as roomy as the lifesystem of his singleship. On his right were a number of squarish crates whose material was almost wood, certainly a plant of some kind. To his left, a massive rectangular solid with a lid, almost like a big deep freeze. Above and around him, the curved wall.

So he’d been right. This was a cargo hold. But half of the space in this teardrop-shaped hold was still locked off from him.

And all through the air, a peculiar scent, like an unfamiliar perfume. The smell in the lifesystem had been an animal smell, the smell of the Outsider. This was different.

Below him, behind a net of coarse weave, were things that looked like yellow roots. They occupied most of what Brennan could see of the cargo hold. Brennan jumped down at them, wrapped his fingers in the net to bring his eyes closer.

The smell became hugely more intense. He’d never smelled, imagined, dreamed anything like it.

They still looked like pale yellow roots: a cross between a sweet potato and a peeled piece of the root of a small tree. They were squat and wide and fibrous, pointed at one end and knife-flattened at the other. Brennan reached through the net, got a two-finger grip on one, tried to pull it through the net and couldn’t.

He’d had breakfast just before the Outsider pulled alongside. Yet, with no warning grumblings in his belly, suddenly he was ravenously hungry. His lips skinned back from teeth and gums. He stabbed his fingers through the net, grasped for the roots. For minutes he tried to pull one through holes that were just too small. He tore at the net, raging. The net was stronger than human flesh; it would not tear, though fingernails did. He screamed his frustration. The scream brought him to his senses.

Suppose he did get one out? What then?

EAT IT! His mouth ran saliva.

It would kill him. An alien plant from an alien world, a plant that an alien species probably saw as food. He should be thinking of a way out of here!

Yet his fingers were still tearing at the net. Brennan kicked himself away. He was hungry. The fragments of his suit were gone, left behind in the Outsider’s cabin, including the water and food-syrup nipples in his helmet. Was there water in here? Could he trust it? Would the Outsider guess that he had a use for partially burnt hydrogen?

What would he do for food?

He had to get out of here.

The plastic bag. He fielded it from the air and examined it. He found out how to seal and unseal it — from the outside. Wonderful. Wait — yes! He could turn the bag inside out, seal it from the inside. Then what?

He couldn’t move around in that plastic bag. No hands. Even in his own suit it would have been risky, jumping across eight miles of space without a backpac. He couldn’t get through the wall anyway.

He had to distract his stomach somehow.

So. Why were the contents of this hold so valuable?

How could they be worth more than the pilot, who was needed to get them to where they were going?

Might as well see what else is here.

The rectangular solid was a glossy, temperatureless material. Brennan found the handle easily enough, but he couldn’t budge it. Then the smell of the roots made a concerted attack on his hunger, and he yelled and pulled with all the strength of killing rage. The handle jarred open. It was built for Outsider strength.

The box was filled with seeds, large seeds like almonds, frozen in a matrix of frost, bitterly cold. He wrenched one loose with numbing fingers. The air about him was turning the color of cigarette smoke when he closed the lid.

He put the seed in his mouth, warmed it with saliva. It had no taste; it was merely cold, and then not even that. He spit it out.

So. Green light and strange, rich-smelling air. But not too thin, not too strange; and the light was cool and refreshing.

If Brennan liked the Outsider’s lifesystem, the Outsider would like Earth. He had brought a crop to plant, too. Seeds, roots, and… what?

Brennan kicked across the clear space to the stack of crates. Not all the strength of his back and legs would tear a crate loose from the wall. Contact cement? But a lid came up with great reluctance and a creaking noise. Sure enough, it had been glued down; the wood itself had torn away. Brennan wondered what strange plant had produced it.

Inside was a sealed plastic bag. Plastic? It looked and felt like a strong commercial sandwich wrap gone crinkly with age. What was inside felt like fine dust packed nearly solid. It was dark through the plastic.

Brennan floated near the crates, one hand gripping the torn lid. He wondered.

An autopilot, of course. The Outsider was only backup for the autopilot: it didn’t matter what happened to him, he was only a safety device. The autopilot would get this crop to where it was going.

To Earth? But a crop meant other Outsiders, following.

He had to warn Earth.

Right. Good thinking. How?

Brennan laughed at himself. Was ever a man so completely trapped? The Outsider had him. Brennan, a Belter and a free man, had allowed himself to become property. His laughter died into despair.

Despair was a mistake. The smell of the roots had been waiting to pounce.

…It was the pain that brought him out of it. His hands were bleeding from cuts and abrasions. There were sprains and blisters and bruises. His left little finger screamed its agony at him; it stuck out at a strange angle, and it swelled as he watched. Dislocated or broken. But he’d torn a hole in the net, and his right hand gripped a fibrous root.

He threw it as hard as he could and instantly curled in upon himself, hugging his knees as if to surround his pain and smother it. He was angry, he was scared. Why, that damnable smell had turned off his mind as if he were no more than a child’s toy robot!

He floated through the cargo space like a football, hugging his knees and crying. He was hungry and angry and humiliated and scared. The Outsider had seared his mind with his own unimportance. But this was worse.

Why? What did the Outsider want with him?

Something smacked him across the back of the head. In one fluid motion Brennan snatched the missile out of the air and bit into it. The root had returned to him on a ricochet orbit. It was tough and fibrous between his teeth. Its taste was as indescribable and as delicious as its scent.

In a last lucid moment Brennan wondered how long he would take to die. He didn’t much care. He bit again, and swallowed.

Phssthpok tracked a chain of answers with dogged persistence; but behind every answer there were more questions. His native captive smelled wrong: strange, animalistic. He was not of those Phssthpok had come seeking. Where were they, then?

They had not come here. The natives of G0 Target #1-3 would have offered little resistance to colonists, judging by this one sample. But protectors would have exterminated them anyway, as a precaution. Some other star, then. Where?

The natives might have astronomical knowledge enough to tell him. With ships like these they might even have reached nearby stars.

In pursuit of answers, Phssthpok poised and leapt toward the native’s vehicle. It was an hour’s jump, but Phssthpok was not hurried. With his superb reflexes he did not even need the reaction pistol.

His captive would keep. Presently Phssthpok would have to learn his language, to question him. Meanwhile he would not hurt anything. He was too terrified, and too puny. Bigger but weaker than a breeder.

The captive ship was small. Phssthpok found little more than a cramped life support system, a long drive tube, a ring-shaped liquid hydrogen tank with a cooling motor. The toroidal fuel tank was detachable, with room for several more along the slender length of the drive tube. Around the rim of the cylindrical life support system were attachments for cargo, booms and folded fine-mesh nets and retractable hooks.

Several hooks now secured a lightweight metal cylinder which showed signs of erosion. Phssthpok examined it, dismissed it without knowing its purpose. Obviously it was not needed for the ship to function.

Phssthpok found no weaponry.

He did find inspection panels in the drive tube. Within an hour he could have built his own crystal-zinc fusion tube, had he the materials. He was impressed. The natives might be more intelligent than he had guessed, or luckier. He moved up to the lifesystem and through the oval door.

The cabin included an acceleration couch, banks of controls surrounding it in a horseshoe, a space behind the couch big enough to move around in, an automatic kitchen that was part of the horseshoe, and attachments to mechanical senses of types frequently used in Pak warfare. But this was no warship. The natives’ senses must be less acute than Pak senses. Behind the cabin were machinery and tanks of fluid, which Phssthpok examined with great interest.

If these machines were well designed, then G0 Target #1-3 was habitable. Very. A bit heavy, both in air and in gravity. But — to a people who had been travelling for five hundred thousand years, it would have looked irresistible.

Had they reached here, they would have stopped.

That cut Phssthpok’s region of search in half. His target must be inward from here, back toward the galactic core. They simply had not got this far.

The life support system was most puzzling to Phssthpok. He found things he flatly didn’t understand, that he would never understand.

The kitchen, for instance. Weight was important in space. Surely the natives could have provided a lightweight food, synthetic if necessary, capable of keeping the pilot fed and healthy indefinitely. The saving in effort and fuel consumption would have been enormous when multiplied by the number of ships he’d seen. Instead they preferred to carry a variety of prepackaged foods, and a complex machine to select and prepare them. They had chosen to cool these foods against decomposition rather than reduce them to powder. Why?

Pictures, for instance. Phssthpok understood photographs, and he understood graphs and maps. But the three works of art on the back wall were neither. They were charcoal sketches. One showed the head of a native like Phssthpok’s captive, but with longer crest of hair and with odd pigmentation around eyes and mouth; the others must have been younger editions of the same uncomfortably Pak-like species. Only heads and shoulders were shown. What was their purpose?

Under other circumstances the design on Brennan’s spacesuit might have provided a clue.

Phssthpok had noticed that design and understood in part. For members of a cooperative, space-going subgroup, it would be useful to code spacesuits in bright colors. Others would recognize the pattern at great distances. The native’s design seemed overcomplex, but not enough so to rouse Phssthpok’s curiosity.

For Phssthpok would never understand art or luxury.

Luxury? A Pak breeder might appreciate luxury, but was too stupid to make it for himself. A protector hadn’t the motivation. A protector’s desires were all connected to the need to protect his blood line.

Art? There had been maps and drawings among the Pak since before Pak history. But they were for war. You didn’t recognize your loved ones by sight anyway. They smelled right.

Reproduce the smell of a loved one?

Phssthpok might have thought of that, had the painting on Brennan’s chest been anything else. That would have been a concept! A method of keeping a protector alive and functioning long after his line was dead. It could have changed Pak history. If only Phssthpok had been led to understand representational art…

But what could he make of Brennan’s suit?

Its chest was a copy in fluorescent dyes of Salvador Dali’s Madonna of Port Lligat. There were mountains floating above a soft blue sea, resisting gravity, their undersides flat and smooth. There were a woman and child, supernaturally beautiful, with windows through them. There was nothing for Phssthpok.

One thing he understood immediately.

He was being very careful with the instrument panel. He didn’t want to wreck anything before he found out how to pull astronomical data from the ship’s computer. When he opened the solar storm warning to ascertain its purpose, he found it surprisingly small. Curious, he investigated further. The thing was made with magnetic monopoles.

In one kangaroo leap Phssthpok was crossing interplanetary space. He fired half the gas charge in his reaction pistol, then composed himself to wait out the fifteen minutes of fall.

He’d jumped toward the cargo pod. It would be necessary to tie the native down against acceleration. Already a cursory inspection of the native’s ship had cut his search area in half… and now he must abandon it. The native might have knowledge even more valuable. Even so, Phssthpok bitterly regretted the need to protect his captive; for the time involved could cost him his mission and his life.

The natives used monopoles. They must have means to detect them. Phssthpok had captured a native — a hostile act. And Phssthpok’s unarmed ship used a bigger mass of south poles than were to be found in this solar system.

Probably they were after him now.

They couldn’t catch him in any reasonable time. Their drives would be more powerful; gravity on G0 Target #1-3 was about one point zero nine. But they wouldn’t have ramjet fields. Before their bigger drives could make a difference they’d be out of fuel… provided he started in time.

He braked to meet the cargo section, used his softener and oozed through the opaque twing hull. He reached for a handhold without looking, knowing where it would be, his eyes searching for the native.

He missed the handhold. He floated across the empty space while his muscles turned to jelly and melted.

The native had broken through the net and was burrowing feebly among the roots. His belly had become a hard, distended bulge. There was no sentience in his eyes.

With a kind of bewildered fury, Phssthpok thought: How can I get anything done it they keep changing the rules?

Stop that. I’m thinking like a breeder. One step at a time…

Phssthpok reached for a handhold and pushed himself down to Brennan. Brennan was limp now, his eyes half closed with the whites showing under the lids, his hand still clutching half of a root. Phssthpok set him rotating to make an examination.

All right.

Phssthpok climbed through the hull into vacuum and made his way around to the small end of the egg. There he crawled back inside, emerging in a cubicle just big enough to hold him.

Now he must find a hiding place.

No question now of leaving this solar system. He would have to abandon the rest of his ship. Let them chase the monopoles in his empty drive section.

It would be like hiding all his children in the same cave, but there was no help for that. It could have been worse. Though the instruments in the cargo pod were designed only to drop that section from orbit around some planet, the motor itself — the gravity polarizer — would take him anywhere he wanted to go within G0 Target #1’s gravity well. Except that he would have to do everything right the first time. Except that he could only land once. As a ship’s drive, the gravity polarizer had many of the virtues and faults of a paraglider. He could aim it anywhere be wanted to go, even after he’d killed his velocity, provided that he wanted to go down. The polarizer would not lift him against gravity.

Compared to the fusion drive controls, the controls around him were fiercely complicated. Phssthpok began doing things to them. The line at the small end of the egg separated in a puff of flame. The twing around him became transparent… and slightly porous; in a century it would have lost a dangerous amount of air. Phssthpok’s manlike eyes took on a glassy look. The next moves would take intense concentration. He hadn’t dared tie the captive down; or otherwise restrict him. To avoid crushing him, he would have to keep the internal and external gravities exactly balanced. The hull, which carried the polarizing field, might melt at these accelerations.

The rest of his ship floated in Phssthpok’s rear screen. He twisted two knobs hard over, and it was gone.

Where to now?

He’d need weeks to hide. He couldn’t hope to hide on G0 Target #1-3, given their technology.

But space was too open to hide in.

He could only land once. Where he came down, he’d have to stay, unless he could rig some kind of launching or signaling device.

Phssthpok began to search the sky for planets. His eyes were good, and planets were big and dim, easy to spot. The ringed gas giant would have been a good one — easy to hide in the rings — except that it was behind him. A gas giant ahead of him, with moons — too far ahead. He’d have to coast for days to reach it. The natives must be after him now. Without a telescope he’d never see them until too late.

That one. He’d studied it when he had a telescope. Small, with low gravity and a trace of atmosphere. Asteroids all around it, and too much atmosphere for vacuum cementing. With luck, it should make for deep dust pools.

He should have studied it before. There might be mining industries, or even colonies. Too late now. He had no choice; he had had no real choice in quite some time. That planet was his target. When the time came to leave he would have to hope the native could signal his kind. He didn’t like it much.

The robot was a four-foot upright cylinder floating placidly in one corner of the Struldbrugs’ Club reading room. Its muted two tone brown blended with the walls, making it almost invisible. Externally the robot was motionless. In its flared base, fans whirred silently, holding it two inches off the floor, and inside the featureless dome that was its head, scanners revolved endlessly, watching every corner of the room.

Without taking his eyes off the reading screen, Lucas Garner reached for his glass. He found it with careful fingertips, picked it up and tried to drink. It was empty. He held it aloft, wiggled it and, still without looking up, said, “Irish coffee.”

The robot was at his elbow. It made no move to take the double-walled glass. Instead, it chimed softly. Garner looked up at last, scowling. A line of lighted print flowed across the robot’s chest.

“Terribly sorry, Mr. Garner. You have exceeded your maximum daily alcohol content.”

“Cancel, then,” said Luke. “Go on, beat it.”

The robot scooted for its corner. Luke sighed — it was partly his own fault — and went back to reading. The tape was a new medical tome on “The Aging Process in Man.”

Last year he had voted with the rest to let the Club autodoc monitor the Club serving robots. He couldn’t regret it. Not a single Struldbrug was less than one hundred and fifty-four years of age, by Club law, and the age requirement went up one year for every two that passed. They needed the best and most rigid of medical protection.

Luke was a prime example. He was approaching, with little enthusiasm, his one hundred and eighty-fifth birthday. He had used a travel chair constantly for twenty years. Luke was a paraplegic, not because of any accident to his spine, but because his spinal nerves were dying of old age. Central nervous tissue never replaces itself. The disproportion between his thin unused legs and his massive shoulders and arms and huge hands made him look a little ape-like. Luke was aware of this, and rather enjoyed it.

His attention was wholly on the tape he was speedreading when he was disturbed again. A barely audible murmur of voices filled the reading room with a formless, swelling whisper. Regretfully Luke turned to look.

Someone was walking in his direction, using a purposeful stride which could not have been matched by any Struldbrug. The man had the long, narrow frame of one who has spent some years on a stretch rack. His arms and the skin below his larynx were negro dark; but his hands and his heavily lined face were the black of a starless night, a true space black. His hair was a cockatoo’s crest, an inch-wide strip of snow-white rug from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck.

A Belter had invaded the Struldbrugs’ Club. No wonder they whispered!

He stopped before Luke’s chair. “Lucas Garner?” His voice and manner were grave and formal.

“Right,” said Luke.

The man lowered his voice. “I’m Nicholas Sohl, First Speaker for the Belt Political Section. Is there someplace we can talk?”

“Follow me,” said Luke. He touched controls in the arm of his chair, and the chair rose on an air cushion and moved across the room.

He settled them in an alcove off the main hall. He said, “You really caused an uproar in there.”

“Oh? Why?” The First Speaker sprawled limp and boneless in a masseur chair, letting the tiny motors knead him into new shapes. His voice was still quick and crisp with the well known Belt accent.

Luke couldn’t decide whether be was joking. “Why? For one thing, you’re nowhere near admission age.”

“The guard didn’t say anything. He just sort of stared.”

“I can imagine.”

“Do you know what brought me to Earth?”

“I heard. There’s an alien in the system.”

“It was supposed to be secret.”

“I used to be an ARM, a member of the United Nations Police. They didn’t retire me until two years ago. I’ve still got contacts.”

“That’s what Lit Shaeffer told me.” Nick opened his eyes. “Excuse me if I’m being rude. I can stand your silly gravity lying in a ship’s couch, but I don’t like walking through it.”

“Relax then.”

“Thanks. Garner, nobody at the UN seems to realize how urgent this is. There’s an alien in the system. He’s performed a hostile act, kidnapped a Belter. He’s abandoned his interstellar drive, and we can both guess what that means.”

“He’s planning to stay. Tell me about that, will you?”

“Simple enough. You know the Outsider ship came in three easy-to-assemble parts?”

“I found out that much.”

“The trailing section must have been a re-entry capsule. We might have guessed there’d be one. Two and a half hours after Brennan and the Outsider made contact, that section disappeared.”

“Teleport?”

“No, thank Finagle. We’ve got one film panel that shows a blurred streak. The acceleration was huge.”

“I see. Why come to us?”

“Huh? Garner, this is humanity’s business!”

“I don’t like that game, Nick. The Outsider was humanity’s business the second you spotted him. You didn’t come to us until he pulled his disappearing act. Why not? Because you thought the aliens would think better of humanity if they met Belters first?”

“No comment.”

“Why tell us now? If the Belt scopes can’t find him, nobody can.”

Nick turned off his massage chair and sat up to study the old man. Garner’s face was the face of Time, a loose mask covering ancient evil. Only the eyes and teeth seemed young; and the teeth were new, white and sharp and incongruous.

But he talked like a Belter, in straight lines. He didn’t waste words and he didn’t play games.

“Lit said you were bright. That’s the trouble, Garner. We’ve found him.”

“I still don’t see the problem.”

“He went through a smuggler trap near the end of his flight. We were looking for a bird who has the habit of coasting through populated regions with his drive off. A heat sensor found the Outsider, and a camera caught a section of his course and stayed on him long enough to give us velocity, position, acceleration. Acceleration was huge, tens of gees. It’s near certain he was on his way to Mars.”

“Mars?”

“Mars, or a Mars orbit, or the moons. If it was an orbit we’d have found him by now. Ditto for the moons; they both have observation stations. Except that they belong to the UN—”

Luke began to laugh. Nick closed his eyes with a pained expression.

Mars was the junkheap of the system. In truth there were few useful planets in the solar system; Earth and Mercury and Jupiter’s atmosphere just filled the list. It was the asteroids that were important. But Mars had proved the bitterest disappointment. A nearly airless desert, covered with craters and with seas of ultrafine dust, the atmosphere almost too thin to be considered poisonous. Somewhere in Lacis Solis was an abandoned base, the remains of Man’s third and last attempt on the rusty planet. Nobody wanted Mars.

When the Free Belt Charter was signed, after the Belt had proven by embargo and propaganda that Earth needed the Belt more than the Belt needed Earth, the UN had been allowed to keep Earth, the Moon, Titan, rights in Saturn’s rings, mining and exploratory rights on Mercury, Mars and its moons.

Mars was just a token. Mars hadn’t counted until now.

“You see the problem,” said Nick. He’d turned the massage unit on again. Little muscles all over his body were giving up under Earth’s unaccustomed strain, stridently proclaiming their existence for the first time in Nick’s life. The massage helped.

Luke nodded. “Considering the way the Belt is constantly telling us to stay off their property, you can’t blame the UN for trying to get a little of its own back. We must have a couple of hundred complaints on file.”

“You exaggerate. Since the Free Belt Charter was signed we’ve registered some sixty violations, most of which were allowed and paid for by the UN.”

“What is it you want the UN to do that they aren’t doing?”

“We want access to Earth’s records on the study of Mars. Hell, Garner, the Phobos cameras might already show where the Outsider came down! We want permission to search Mars from close orbit. We want permission to land.”

“What have you got so far?”

Nick snorted. “There’s only two things they can agree on. We can search all we want to — from space. For letting us examine their silly records they want to charge us a flat million marks!”

“Pay it.”

“It’s robbery.”

“A Belter says that? Why don’t you have records on Mars?”

“We were never interested. What for?”

“What about abstract knowledge?”

“Another word for useless.”

“Then what makes you want useless knowledge enough to pay a million marks for it?”

Slowly Nick matched his grin. “It’s still robbery. How in Finagle’s name did Earth know they’d need to know about Mars?”

“That’s the secret of abstract knowledge. You get in the habit of finding out everything you can about everything. Most of it gets used sooner or later. We’ve spent billions exploring Mars.”

“I’ll authorize payment of a million marks to the UN Universal Library. Now how do we land?” Nick turned off the chair.

“I… have an idea on that.”

A ridiculous idea. Luke would not have considered it for a moment… except for his surroundings. The Struldbrugs’ Club was luxurious and quiet, soundproofed everywhere, rich with draperies. His own jarring laughter had been swallowed the instant it left his lips. People seldom laughed or shouted here. The Club was a place to rest after a lifetime of… not resting?

“Can you fly a two-man ship, Starfire make?”

“Sure. There’s no difference in the control panels. Belt ships use drives bought from Rolls-Royce, England.”

“You’re hired as my pilot at a dollar a year. I can get a ship ready in six hours.”

“You’ve flipped.”

“Not I. Look, Nick. Every so-called diplomat in the UN knows how important it is to find the Outsider. But they can’t get moving. It’s not because they’re getting their own back with the Belt. That’s only part of it. It’s inertia. The UN is a world government. It’s unwieldy by its very nature, having to rule the lives of eighteen billion people. Worse than that, the UN is made up of individual nations. The nations aren’t very powerful nowadays. Someday not too soon, even their names will be forgotten; and I’m not sure that’s a good idea… but today national prestige can get in the way. You’d be weeks getting them to agree on anything.

“Whereas there’s no law against a UN citizen going anywhere he wants to in terrestrial space, or hiring anyone he wants to. A number of our round-the-Moon pilots are Belters.”

Nick shook his head as if to clear it. “Garner, I don’t get you. You can’t think we can find the Outsider in a two man ship. Even I know about the Martian dust. He’s hidden in one of the dust seas, dissecting Jack Brennan, and there’s no way to get at him without searching the deserts inch by inch with deep-radar.”

“Right. But when the politicians realize that you’ve started searching Mars, what do you think they’ll do? You being hired as a pilot is a technicality, obvious to anyone. Suppose we did find the Outsider? The Belt would get the credit.”

Nick closed his eyes and tried to think. He wasn’t used to such circular logic. But it looked like Garner was right. If they thought he was going to Mars, with or without a flatlander for company… Nick Sohl, First Speaker for the Belt, empowered to make treaties. Ominous. They’d send a fleet to start searching first.

“So I need a flatlander to hire me as pilot. Why you?”

“I can get a ship now. I’ve got contacts.”

“Okay. Get the ship, then get a tough explorer-type flatlander. Sell him the ship. Then he hires me as his pilot, right?”

“Right. But I won’t do it.”

“Why?” Nick looked at him. “You aren’t seriously thinking of coming along?”

Luke nodded.

Nick laughed. “How old are you?”

“Too old to waste my remaining years sitting in the Struldbrugs’ Club waiting to die. Shake hands, Nick.”

“Mph? Sure, but — Yipe! All right, dammit, so you’ve got strong hands. All you flatlanders are overmuscled anyway.”

“Hey, now, I didn’t mean to push any buttons. I’m sorry. I wanted to demonstrate that I haven’t gone feeble.”

“Stipulated. Not in the hands, anyway.”

“And we won’t be using our legs. We’d be riding everywhere we went.”

“You’re crazy. Suppose your heart gave out on me?”

“It’s likely to survive me for a good long time. It’s prosthetic.”

“You’re crazy. All of you. It comes from living at the bottom of a gravity well. The gravity pulls the blood from your brains.”

“I’ll show you to a telephone. You’ll have to pay in your million marks before the UN catches on where we’re going.”

Phssthpok dreamed.

He had hidden the cargo pod deep beneath the fluid dust of the Lacis Solis region. It showed as an ochre wall beyond the twing hull. They would be safe here for as long as the life support system held out: a long, long time.

Phssthpok stayed in the cargo hold where he could watch his captive. After landing he had disassembled every machine in the cargo pod to make what repairs and adjustments were needed. Now he only watched his captive.

The native required little care. He was developing almost normally. He would be a monster, but perhaps not a cripple.

Phssthpok rested on his pile of roots and dreamed.

In a few weeks he would have completed his long, long task… or failed. In any case he could stop eating. He had been alive long enough to suit him. Soon he would end as he had nearly ended thirteen hundred shiptime years ago, at the core of the galaxy…

He had seen light flare over the Valley of Pitchok, and known that he was doomed.

Phssthpok had been a protector for twenty-six years. His remaining children in the radiation-blasted valley were twenty-six to thirty-five years of age; their own children were of all ages up to twenty-four or so. Now his lifespan would depend on who had survived the bomb. He had returned immediately to the valley to find out.

Not many breeders were left in the valley, but such as were still alive had to be protected. Phssthpok and the rest of the Pitchok families made peace, the terms being that they and their sterile breeders should have the valley until their deaths, at which time the valley would revert to Eastersea Alliance. There were ways to partially neutralize radioactive fallout. The Pitchok families used them. Then, leaving their valley and its survivors in the hands of one of their number, they had scattered.

Of the several surviving breeders, all had been tested and all had been found essentially sterile. “Essentially” being taken to mean that if they did have children, the children would be mutants. They would smell wrong. With no protector to look after their interests, they would quickly die.

To Phssthpok, the most important of his surviving descendants was the youngest, Ttuss, a female of two years.

He was on a time limit. In thirty-two years Ttuss would reach the age of change. She would become an intelligent being, and a heavily armored one, with skin that would turn a copper knife and strength to lift ten times her own weight. She would be ideally designed for the purpose of fighting, but she would have nothing to fight for.

She would stop eating. She would die, and Phssthpok would stop eating. Ttuss’s lifespan was his own.

But sometimes a protector could adopt the entire Pak species as his descendants. At least he would have every opportunity to find a purpose in life. There was always truce for a childless protector, for such had no reason to fight. And there was a place he could go.

The Library was as old as the radioactive desert which surrounded it. That desert would never be recultivated; it was reseeded every thousand years with radiocobalt so that no protector could covet it. Protectors could cross that desert; they had no gonadal genes to be smashed by subatomic particles. Breeders could not.

How old was the Library? Phssthpok never knew, and never wondered. But the section on space travel was three million years old.

He came to the Library with a number of — not friends, but associates in misery, childless former members of the Pitchok families. The Library was huge and rambling, a composite of at least three million years of Pak knowledge, crossfiled into sections according to subject. Naturally the same book often appeared in several sections. The associates divided at the entrance, and Phssthpok didn’t see any of them again for thirty-two years.

He spent that time in one vast room, a floor-to-ceiling labyrinth of bookshelves. At scattered corners there were bins of tree-of-life root kept constantly filled by attendants. There were other foodstuffs brought at seeming random: meats, vegetables, fruits, whatever was available to childless protectors who had chosen to serve the Library rather than die. Tree-of-life root was the perfect food for a protector, but he could eat nearly anything.

And there were books.

They were nearly indestructible, those books. They would have emerged like fluttering meteors from the heart of a hydrogen fusion explosion. All were written more or less in the present language, and all were constantly being recopied by librarians as the language changed. In this room the books all dealt with space and space travel.

There were treatises on the philosophy of space travel. They all seemed to make a fundamental assumption: someday the Pak race must find a new home; hence any contribution to the techniques of spaceflight contributed to the immortality of the species. Phssthpok could discount that assumption, knowing that a protector who did not believe it would never write a book on the subject. There were records of interstellar and interplanetary flights, tens of thousands of them, starting with a fantastic trip some group had made almost three million years ago, riding a hollowed-out asteroidal rock into the galactic arms in search of yellow dwarf suns. There were technical texts on anything that could possibly bear on space: spacecraft, astrogation, ecology, miniaturization, nuclear and subnuclear physics, plastics, gravity and how to use it, astronomy, astrophysics, records of the mining of worlds in this and nearby systems, diagrams for a hypothetical Bussard ramjet (in an unfinished work by a protector who had lost his appetite halfway through), ion drive diagrams, plasma theory, light-sails…

He started at the left and began working his way around.

He’d chosen the section on space travel more or less at random; it had looked less crowded than the others. The romance of space was not in Phssthpok’s soul. He kept with it rather than start over elsewhere. He might need every minute of his thirty-four years of grace no matter where be chose to work. In twenty-eight years he read every book in the Astronautics section, and still he had found nothing that drastically needed doing.

Start a migration project? It simply wasn’t that urgent. The Pak sun had at least hundreds of millions of years to live… longer than the Pak species, probably, given the constant state of war. And the chance of disaster would be high. Yellow suns were scarce in the galactic core; they would have to travel far… with the protector crew constantly fighting for control of the ship. Come to that, the cores of galaxies could sometimes explode in a chain reaction of supernovae. A migration project really should travel into the arms.

The first expedition to try that had met a horrible fate.

So. Join the Library staff? He’d thought of it many times, but the answer always came out the same. No matter what phase of the Library he concerned himself with, his life would depend on others. To retain his will to live he would need to know that all Pak would benefit from his aspect of Library work. Let there be a dry spell in new discoveries, let his faith flag, and he would find himself no longer hungry.

It was frightening not to be hungry. During the last few decades it had happened several times. Each time he would force himself to reread the communications from the Valley of Pitchok. The latest communication always told him that Ttuss had been alive when it was sent. Gradually his appetite would come back. Without Ttuss he would be dead.

He had investigated the librarians. Their lives were usually short. Joining the staff was no answer.

Find a way to keep Ttuss alive? If he could do that he would have used the method on himself.

Study theoretical astronomy? He had some ideas, but they would not help the Pak species. The Pak did not seek abstract knowledge. Mine the asteroids? The asteroids of this and nearby stars were as thoroughly mined out as the surface of the planet had often been, with the difference that convection currents in the planet’s interior eventually replaced worked-out mines. He should have gone in for metal reclamation. Now it was too late to change studies. Put plastic-bubble cities in orbit to provide more living room for breeders? Nonsense: too vulnerable to capture or accidental destruction.

One day Phssthpok’s appetite was gone. The letters from the Valley of Pitchok did not help; he didn’t believe them. He thought of returning to the valley, but he knew he would starve to death on the way. When he was sure, he sat down against a wall, the last in a line of protectors who also did not eat, who were waiting to die.

A week passed. The librarians found that two at the head of the line were dead. They picked them up, a pair of skeletons clothed in dry, wrinkled leather armor, and carried them away.

Phssthpok remembered a book.

He still had the strength to reach it.

He read carefully, with the book in one hand and a root in the other. Presently he ate the root…

The ship had been a roughly cylindrical asteroid, reasonably pure nickel-iron with stony strata running through it, about six miles long and four through. A group of childless protectors had carved it out with solar mirrors and built into it a small life-support and controls system, a larger frozen-sleep chamber, a breeder atomic pile and generator, a dirigible ion drive, and an enormous cesium tank. They had found it necessary to exterminate the protectors of a large family in order to get control of a thousand breeders. With two protectors as pilots and seventy more in frozen sleep with the thousand breeders, with a careful selection of the beneficial lifeforms of the Pak world, they set out into one arm of the galaxy.

Though their knowledge was three million years scantier than Phssthpok’s, they had good reason for choosing the galaxy’s outer reaches. They’d have a better chance of finding yellow suns out there, and a better chance to find a double planet at the right distance. Perturbations from stars an average of half a light year apart made double planets scarce in the galactic core; and there was reason to think that only an oversized moon could give any world an atmosphere capable of supporting Paklike life.

An ion drive and a certain amount of cesium… They expected to move slowly, and they did. At twelve thousand miles per second relative to the Pak sun, they coasted. They fired a laser message back at the Pak sun to tell the Library that the ion drive had worked. The blueprints were somewhere in the Library, with a list of suggested design changes.

Phssthpok was not interested. He moved on to the last section, which was nearly half a million years more recent.

It was a record of a laser message that had come plowing through the Pak system, torn and attenuated and garbled by dust clouds and distance, in a language no longer spoken. The librarians had translated it and filed it here. It must have been retranslated hundreds of times since then. Hundreds of searchers like Phssthpok must have read it, and wondered about the part of the story they could never know, and passed on…

But Phssthpok read it very carefully.

They had traveled deep into the galactic arms. Half the protectors had been gone at journey’s end, dying not of starvation or violence but of age. This was so unusual that a detailed medical description had been included as part of the message. They had passed yellow suns with no planets, others whose worlds were all gas giants. Yellow suns had gone by carrying worlds that might have been habitable; but all were too far off course to be reached on the maneuvering reserve of cesium. Galactic dust and the galaxy’s gravity had slowed their strange craft, increasing their maneuver reserve. The sky had darkened around them as suns became rare.

They had found a planet.

They had braked the ship. They had transferred what was left of the plutonium to the motors of landing craft, and gone down. The decision was not final; but if the planet failed to measure up they would have to work for decades to make their rockship spaceworthy again.

It had life. Some was inimical, but none that could not be handled. There was soil. The remaining protectors woke the breeders and turned them loose in the forests to be fruitful and multiply. They planted crops, dug mines, made machines to dig more mines, made machines to tend crops…

The black, nearly starless night sky bothered some, but they got used to it. The frequent rains bothered others, but did not hurt the breeders, so that was all right. There was room for all; the protectors did not even fight. None stopped eating. There were predators and bacteria to exterminate, there was a civilization to build, there was much to do.

With spring and summer came crops — and disaster. There was something wrong with the tree-of-life.

The colonists themselves did not understand what had gone wrong with the crop. Something had come up. It looked and tasted like tree-of-life, though the smell was wrong, somehow. But for all its effect on breeders and protectors alike, they might as well have been eating weeds.

They could not return to space. Their scant remaining store of roots represented an inflexible number of protector work-hours. They might refuel their cesium tanks, they might even build a plutonium-producing technology in the time they had left, but to find and reach another Pak-like world — no. And if they reached it, what guarantee had they that it would grow tree-of-life?

They had spent their last years building a laser beam powerful enough to pierce the dust clouds that hid them from the galactic core. They did not know that they had succeeded. They did not know what was wrong with the crop; they suspected the sparsity of a particular wavelength of starlight, or of starlight in general, though their experiments along those lines had produced nothing. They gave detailed information on the blood lines of their breeder passengers, in the hope that some of the lines might survive. And they asked for help.

Two and a half million years ago.

Phssthpok sat by the root bin, eating and reading. He would have smiled if his face had been built that way. Already he could see that his mission would involve every childless protector in the world.

For two and a half million years those breeders had been living without tree-of-life. Without any way to make the change to the protector stage. Dumb animals.

And Phssthpok alone knew how to find them.

You’re flying from New York, USA, to Piquetsburg, North Africa. Suddenly you become aware that New York is flying in one direction, Piquetsburg in another, and a hurricane wind is blowing your plane off course in still a third…

Nightmare? Well, yes. But travel in the solar system is different from travel on a planet. Each individual rock moves at its own pace, like flecks of butter in a churn.

Mars moved in a nearly circular path. Asteroids moved nearby in orbits more elliptical, catching up to the red planet or falling behind. Some carried telescopes. Their operators would report to Ceres if they saw purposeful action on the surface.

The abandoned Bussard ramjet crossed over the sun and curved inward, following a shallow hyperbola which would take it through the plane of the planets.

The Blue Ox followed an accelerating higher-order curve, a J whose upright would eventually match the Ox’s velocity and position to the Outsidees.

U Thant rose from Earth on a ram-and-wing rented from Death Valley Port. There was a lovely scenic ride up and out over the Pacific. One hundred and fifty miles up and orbiting, as required by law, Nick switched to fusion power and headed outward. He left the ram-and-wing to find its own way home.

The Earth wrapped itself around itself and dropped away. It was four days to Mars at one gee, with Ceres to tell them which asteroids to dodge.

Nick put the ship on autopilot. He was not entirely displeased with the U Thant. It was a flatlander navy job, its functions compromised by streamlining; but the equipment seemed adequate and the controls were elegantly simple. And the kitchen was excellent.

Luke said, “Okay to smoke?”

“Why not? You can’t be worried about dying young.”

“Does the UN have its money yet?”

“Sure. They must have got it transferred hours ago.”

“Fine. Call them, identify yourself, and ask for everything they’ve got on Mars. Tell them to put it on the screen, and you’ll pay for the laser. That’ll kill two birds with one stone.”

“How?”

“It’ll tell them where were going.”

“Right… Luke, do you really think this will get them moving? I know how unwieldy the UN is. There was the Müller case.”

“Look at it from another direction, Nick. How did you come to represent the Belt?”

“Aptitude tests said I had a high IQ and liked ordering people around. From there I worked my way up.”

“We go by the vote.”

“Popularity contests.”

“It works. But it does have drawbacks. What govemment doesn’t?” Garner shrugged. “Every speaker in the UN represents one nation — one section of the world. He thinks it’s the best section, filled with the best people. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been elected. So maybe twenty representatives each think they know just what to do about the Outsider, and no one of them will knuckle down to the others. Prestige. Eventually they’d work out a compromise. But if they get the idea that a civilian and a Belter could beat them to the Outsider, they’ll get off their thumbs faster. See?”

“No.”

“Oh, make your call.”

A message beam found them some time later. They began to skim Earth’s stored information on Mars.

There was quite a lot of it. It covered centuries. At one point Nick said, “I’m ready for summer vacation. Why do we have to watch all this? According to you we’re just running a bluff.”

“According to me we’re running a search, unless you have something better to do. The best time to bluff is with four aces.”

Nick switched off the screen. The lecture was on tape now; they wouldn’t miss anything. “Come, let us reason together. I paid a million marks in Belt funds for this stuff, plus additional charges for the message beam. Thrifty Sohl that I am, I feel almost compelled to use it. But we’ve been studying the Müller case for the past hour, and it all came out of Belt files!”

Eleven years ago a Belt miner named Müller had tried to use the mass of Mars to make a drastic course change. He had come too close; had been forced to land. There would have been no problem. The goldskin cops would have picked him up as soon as they had clearance from the UN. No hurry… until Müller was murdered by martians.

Martians had been a myth until then. Müller must have been amazed. But, strangling in near-vacuum, he had managed to kill half a dozen of them, using a water tank to spray death in all directions.

“Not all of it. We were the ones who studied the martian corpses you recovered,” said Garner. “We may need that information. I’m still wondering why the Outsider picked Mars. Maybe he knows about martians. Maybe he wants to contact them.”

“Much good may it do him.”

“They use spears. By me that makes them intelligent. We don’t know how intelligent, because nobody’s ever tried to talk to a martian. They could have any kind of civilization you can imagine, down there under the dust.”

“A civilized people, are they?” Nick’s voice turned savage. “They slashed Müller’s tent! They let his air out!” In the Belt there is no worse crime.

“I didn’t say they were friendly.”

The Blue Ox coasted. Behind her the alien ship was naked-eye visible and closing. It made Tina nervous to be unable to watch it. But that could work two ways; and this was the Outsider’s blind side, where three Belters worked to free Einar Nilsson’s singleship from its vast metal uterus.

“Clamps free back here,” said Tina. She was sweating. She felt the breeze on her face, as the air system worked to keep her faceplate from fogging.

Nate’s voice spoke behind her ear. “Good, Tina.”

Einar’s said, “We could have carried a fourth crewman in the singleshifs lifesystem. Damn! I wish I’d thought of it. There’d be two of us to meet the Outsider.”

“It probably won’t matter. The Outsider’s gone. That’s a dead ship.” Nonetheless Nate sounded uneasy.

“And how many crew got left behind? I never much believed the Outsider would come riding between the stars alone in a singleship. Too poetic. Never mind. Tina, give us five seconds of thrust under the fusion tube.”

Tina set her shoulders and fired her backpac jets. Other flames sprouted forward under the lifesystem hull. The old singleship drifted slowly up between the great doors.

“Okay, Nate, get aboard first. Make sure you keep the Ox between you and the Outsider at all times. We’ll have to assume he doesn’t have deep-radar.”

There was no way either of them could see Tina’s puzzled frown.

Belter women averaged around six feet tall; but Belter women tended to be willowy, slender. Tina Jordan was six feet tall and built to scale: flatlander scale. She was in good trim and proud of it. She found it annoying that Belters still took her for a flatlander.

She had left Earth at twenty-one. She had been fourteen years in the Belt, on Ceres, Juno, Mercury, at Hera Station in close orbit around Jupiter, and in the Trailing Trojans. She regarded the Belt and the solar system as her home. It did not bother her that she had never flown a singleship. Many Belters had not. The singleship miners were only one aspect of Belt industry, which included chemists, nuclear physicists, astrophysicists, politicians, astronomers, file clerks, merchants… and computer programmers.

She had heard, long ago, that there was no prejudice against women in the Belt. And it was true! On Earth women still held lower-paying jobs. Employers claimed that physical strength was needed for certain jobs, or that a woman would quit to get married at the most crucial time, or even that her family suffered when a woman worked. Things were different in the Belt; and Tina had been more surprised than elated. She had expected to be disappointed.

And now a woman and a computer programmer was the most crucial Ox’s personnel. Fear and delight. The fear was for Nate, who was too young to take such a risk; for one Belter had already met the Outsider, and nothing had been heard of him since.

But what was Nate doing aboard the singleship?

She helped Einar out of his suit — he was a mountain of flesh; he could never have lifted himself against Earth’s gravity — then let him do the same for her. She said, “I thought Nate would be the one to board the Outsider.”

Einar looked surprised. “What? No. You.”

“But—” She searched for words, and found them, to her horror. But I’m a girl. She said nothing.

“Think it through,” Einar said with forced patience. “The ship might not be empty. Boarding it could be dangerous.”

“Right.” With emphasis.

“So we give whoever boards it all the protection we’ve got. The Ox is part of that protection. I’ll keep the drive warm; it should vaporize the bastard if he tries anything, and the com laser should punch holes in him at this range. But there’s a chance the Ox will be blasted too.”

“So the singleship stands guard.” Tina made a dismissing gesture. “I worked it out that far. I thought I’d—”

“No, don’t be silly. You’ve never flown a singleship in your life. I don’t have much free choice here. I thought of leaving Nate to fly the Ox, but hell, she’s my ship, and he knows singleships. I couldn’t put you in either job.”

“I suppose not.” She was outwardly calm, but a cold lump of fear grew in her belly.

“You’d be the best choice anyway. You’re the one who will make contact with the Outsider, try to learn his language. Aside from that, you’re a flatlander. You’re physically the strongest of us.”

Tina nodded jerkily.

“You could have stayed behind, you know.”

“Oh, it’s not that. I hope you don’t think I was trying to chicken out. I just — hadn’t—”

“No, you just hadn’t bothered to think it through. You’ll get used to doing that, living in the Belt,” Einar said kindly. Damn him.

The dust of Mars is unique.

Its uniqueness is the result of vacuum cementing. Once vacuum cementing was the bugaboo of the space industries. Small space probe components which would slide easily over one another in air would weld solidly in vacuum, just as soon as the gas absorbed by their surfaces could evaporate away. Vacuum cementing fused parts in the first American satellites and in the first Soviet interplanetary probes. Vacuum cementing keeps the Moon from being fathoms deep in meteor dust. The particles weld into crunchy rock, into natural cement, under the same molecular attraction that fuses Johanssen blocks and turns the mud of sea bottoms to sedimentary rock.

But on Mars there is just enough atmosphere to stop that process, and not nearly enough to stop a meteor. Meteor dust covers most of the planet. Meteors can fuse the dust into craters, but it does not cement, though it is fine enough to flow like viscous oil.

“That dust is going to be our biggest problem,” said Luke. “The Outsider didn’t even have to dig a hole for himself. He could have sunk anywhere on Mars.”

Nick turned off the laser transmitter. It was hot from two days of use in blasting a locator beam at Earth. “He could have hidden anywhere in the system, but he picked Mars. He must have had a reason. Maybe it’s something he couldn’t do under the dust. That puts him in a crater or on a hill.”

“He’d have been spotted.” Luke keyed a photograph from the autopilot memory. It was one of a group from the smuggler trap. It showed a dimly shining metal egg with the small end pointed. The egg moved big-end first, and it moved as if rocket-propelled. But there was no exhaust, at least none that any instrument could detect.

“It’s big enough to see from space,” said Luke, “and easy to recognize, with that silver hull.”

“Yah. All right, he’s under the dust. It’ll take a lot of ships with deep-radar to find him, and even then there’s no guarantee.” Nick ran his hands back along his depilated scalp. “We could quit now. Your flatlander government has finally picked up its feet and sent us some ships. I got the impression they aren’t too happy about us joining their search.” His tone was noncommittal.

“I’d like to go on. How do you feel?”

“I’m game. Hunting strange things is what I do on my vacation.”

“Where would you start looking?”

“I don’t know. The deepest dust on the planet is in Tractus Albus.”

“He’d have been stupid to pick the deepest. He’d have picked his place at random.”

“You’ve got other ideas?”

“Lacis Solis.”

“—Oh. The old flatlander base. That’s good thinking. He might need a life support system for Brennan.”

“I wasn’t even thinking that. If he needs anything there — human technology, water, anything — there’s only one place on the planet he can go. If he’s not there we can at least pick up some dustboats—”

“Blue Ox calling U Thant. This is Blue Ox calling U Thant out of Death Valley Port.”

There would be a directional signal in that message. Nick set the autopilot to aiming his own com laser. “It’ll take a few minutes,” he said. Then, “I wonder what’s happening to Brennan.

“Can we take the deep-radar out of this heap?”

“Let’s hope. I don’t know what else we can use for a finder.”

“A metal detector. There must be one aboard.”

“This is Nicholas Brewster Sohl aboard U Thant calling any or all aboard Blue Ox. What’s new? Repeating. This is Nicholas—”

Einar flicked to transmit. “Einar Nilsson commanding Blue Ox. We have matched with the Outsider ship. Tina Jordan is preparing to board. I will switch you to TIna.” He did.

And settled back to wait.

He liked Tina. He was half certain she would find a way to get herself killed. Nate had protested mightily, but Einar’s own arguments had no holes to crawl through. He sat watching the picture transmitted from Tina’s helmet camera.

The Outsider ship looked deserted, with its attitude skewed and its tow lines slack and beginning to loop. Tina could see no motion in the lens of the big eyeball. She brought herself to a stop several yards from the port, and was pleased to note that her hands were steady on the jet firing keys.

“Tina speaking. I am outside what seems to be a control module. I can see an acceleration couch through the glass — if it’s glass — and controls around it. The Outsider must be roughly hominid.

“The drive module is too hot to get near. The control module is a smooth sphere with a big porthole, and cables trailing off in both directions. You should be able to see all this, U Thant.”

She did a slow loop around the big eyeball. Taking her time. Belters only hurried when there was need. “I can find no sign of an airlock. I’ll have to burn my way through.”

“Through the porthole. You don’t want to burn through anything explosive,” said Einar’s voice behind her ear.

The transparent stuff had a two-thousand Kelvin melting point, and a laser was obviously out of the question. Tina used a hot point, tracing a circle over and over. Gradually she wore it down. “I’m getting fog through the cracks,” she reported. “Ah, I’m through.”

A three-foot transparent disc puffed away on the last of the air, with a breath of white mist playing around it. Tina caught it and sent it gliding toward the Ox for later recovery.

Einar’s voice crackled. “Don’t try to enter yet!”

“I wasn’t.” She waited for the edges to cool. Fifteen minutes, while nothing happened. They must be getting restless aboard U Thant, she thought. Still no sign of motion inside. They had found nothing when they probed this module with the deep-radar; but the walls were thick, and something as tenuous as water, for instance, might not have shown up.

Time enough. She ducked through the hole.

“I’m in a small control cabin,” she said, and turned at the waist to give the camera a full view. Tendrils of icy fog drifted toward the hole in the porthole. “Very small. The control bank is almost primitively complex, so complex that I’m inclined to think the Outsider had no autopilot. No man could handle all these controls and adjustments. I see no more that one couch, and no aliens present but me.

“There’s a bin full of sweet potatoes, it looks like, right beside the control couch. It’s the only sign of kitchen facilities in this section. I think I’ll move on.” She tried to open the door in the back of the control room. Pressure forced it shut. She used her hot point. The door cut easily, must more so than the porthole material. She waited while the room filled with thick fog, then pushed her way in. More fog.

“This room is about as big as the control room. Sorry about the view. The place seems to be a free-fall gymnasium.” She swept her camera around the room, then crossed to one of the machines and tried to work it. It looked as though you were supposed to stand up inside it against the force of springs. Tina couldn’t budge it.

She dismounted the camera and fixed it to a wall, aimed at the exercise machine. She tried it again. “Either I’m doing this wrong,” she told her audience, “or the Outsider could pick his teeth with me. Let’s see what else there is.” She looked around. “That’s funny,” she said presently.

There was nothing else. Only the door to the control room.

A two hour search by Tina and Nate La Pan only confirmed her find. The lifesystem consisted of:

One control room the size of a singleship control room.

One free-fall gymnasium, same size.

A bin of roots.

An enormous air tank. There were no safeties to stop the flow in case of puncture. The tank was empty. It must have been nearly empty when the ship reached the solar system.

Vastly complex air cleaning machinery, apparently designed to remove even the faintest, rarest trace of biochemical waste. It had all been many times repaired.

Equally complex equipment for conversion of fluid and solid waste.

It was incredible. The single Outsider had apparently spent his time in two small rooms, eating just one kind of food, with no ship’s library to keep him entertained, and no computer-autopilot to keep him pointed right and guard his fuel supply and steer him clear of meteors. Yet the trip had taken decades, at least. In view of the complexity of the cleaning and renewal plant, the huge air tank must have been included solely to replace air lost by osmosis through the walls!

“That’s it,” Einar said finally. “Come on back, you two. We’ll take a break, and I’ll ask U Thant for instructions. Nate, put some of those roots in a pressure bag. We can analyze them.”

“Search the ship again,” Nick told them. “You may find a simplified autopilot: not a computer, just a widget for keeping the ship on course. Could you have overlooked a bolthole of some kind, anyplace where an Outsider could have hidden? In particular, try to get into the air tank. It might make a very nice emergency bolthole.” He turned the volume down and faced Luke. “They won’t find anything, of course. Can you think of anything else?”

“I’d like to see them analyze the air. Have they got the facilities?”

“Yah.”

“And the porthole glass, and the chemistry of that root.”

“They’ll finish with the root by the time this reaches them.” He turned up the volume. “After you finish analyzing what you’ve got, you might start thinking about how to tow that ship home. Stay with the ship, and keep your drive warm. If an emergency comes up, use the fusion flame immediately. Sohl out.”

He looked at the screen for some time after it had gone dark. Presently he said, “A super-singleship. Finagle’s Eyes! I wouldn’t have believed it.”

“Flown by a kind of super-Belter,” said Luke. “Solitary. Doesn’t need entertainment. Doesn’t care what he eats. Strong as King Kong. Roughly humanoid.”

Nick smiled. “Wouldn’t that make him a superior species?”

“I wouldn’t deny it. And I’m deadly serious on that. We’ll have to wait and see.”

Brennan shifted.

He hadn’t moved in hours. He lay on his back in the root bin, his eyes closed, his body folded into near-foetal position around his swollen belly, his fists clenched. But now he moved one arm, and Phssthpok came suddenly alert.

Brennan reached for a root, put it in his mouth, bit and swallowed. Bit and swallowed. Bit and swallowed, under Phssthpok’s watchful eye. His own eyes stayed closed.

Brennan’s hand released the last inch or so of root, and he turned over and stopped moving.

Phssthpok relaxed. Presently he dreamed.

Days ago he had stopped eating. He told himself it was too early, but his belly didn’t believe it. He would live just long enough. Meanwhile, he dreamed.

…He sat on the floor of the Library with a piece of root in his jaws and an ancient book balanced on one cantaloupe knee and a map spread before him on the floor. It was a map of the galaxy, but it was graded for time. The Core stars showed in positions three million years old, but the outer arms were half a million years younger. The Library staff had spent most of a year preparing it for him.

Assume they went a distance X, he told himself. Their average velocity must have been .06748 lightspeed, considering dust friction and the galaxy’s gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Their laser returned at lightspeed; figure for space curvature. Give them a century to build the laser; they’d use all the time they had for that. Then X = 33,210 light years.

Phssthpok set his compass and drew an arc, using the Pak sun as a center. Margin of error: .001, thirty light years. They’re on that arc!

Now assume they went straight outward from the galactic hub. It was a good assumption: there were stars in that direction, and the Pak sun was well off-center from the hub. Phssthpok drew a radial line. Greater margin of error here. Original error, course alterations… And the straight line would have curved by now, while the galaxy turned like curdled milk. They would have stayed flat in the galactic plane. And they’re near this point. I’ve found them…

Phssthpok’s minions pouring like army ants through the Library. Every protector in reach had joined his quest. It’s in the Astronautics section, Phwee. Find it! We need those ramscoop diagrams. Ttuss, I need to know what happens when a protector gets old, and when it happens, and any contributing factors. There’s probably a copy of that report in the Medical section. It may have been added to. Hratchp, we have to learn what could stop a tree-of-life from growing right in the galactic arm. You need agronomists, medical researchers, chemists, astrophysicists. Use the Valley of Pitchok for your experiments, and remember the environment was habitable. Try experimenting with the soil, reduced starlight, reduced radiation. You of the Physics and Engineering sections: I need a fusion drive for insystem maneuvers. I need launching vehicles for everything we build. Design them! Every childless protector on the planet was looking for a purpose in living, a Cause. And Phssthpok gave it to them…

… The ship, finally completed, standing in three parts on the sand not far from the Library. Phssthpok’s army assembling. We need monopoles, we need tree-of-life roots and seeds, we need enormous quantities of hydrogen fuel. The scoop won’t work below a certain speed. Meteor Bay has everything we need. We can take them! For the first time in twenty thousand years, the childless protectors of Pak assembled for war…

… His own Virus QQ used on breeders, with mopup squads to hunt the survivors. Newly childless protectors switching sides, joining his army. Hratchp reporting in with the strange, complex secret of the tree-of-life root…

Something thumped three times on the hull.

For an instant he thought it was a memory. He was that far gone. Then he was on his feet, staring up at a point high on the curved wall of the hold. His mind racing.

He had known that there was some kind of non-organic photosynthetic process going on on the surface of the dust. Now his mind extrapolated: currents in the dust, photosynthesis going on on the top, currents bringing food down to larger forms of life. He should have guessed before, and checked. He was far gone, was Phssthpok. Age and dwindling motivation were switching him off too early.

Three measured thumps came from almost beneath his feet.

He crossed the hold in one leap, landed softly, silently. Picked up the flat-nosed softener key. Waited.

Hypothesis: something intelligent was sounding the cargo hold for echoes. Size: unknown. Intelligence: unknown. Sophistication: probably low due to their environment. They would be blind down here, if they had eyes at all. A feel for sound could compensate. The echoes from this thumping could tell them a good deal about what was inside. And then?

They would try to break in. Intelligent beings were curious.

Twing was tough, but not invulnerable.

Phssthpok leapt straight upward, through the hatch and into the control cubby. He hated to leave the captive, but there was no choice. He closed the door to the cargo hold, tested it to be sure it was locked. He climbed rapidly into his pressure suit.

Three measured thumps from somewhere below him. Pause.

Something thumped next to his right arm. Phssthpok applied the softener key to the twing. Thump — and a foot of crude glass rod slammed through the twing. Phssthpok yanked hard on it, reached through the wall and had something softer. He pulled.

He had something roughly Pak-shaped, both smaller and denser than a Pak. It was clutching a reversed spear. Phssthpok hit it savagely where its head joined its shoulders. Something broke, and it went limp. Phssthpok probed its body for soft spots. There was a spot in the middle of its body where bone did not protect. Phssthpok pushed hard into it and clutched with his fingers until he felt something give. Presumably it was dead.

It began to smoke.

Phssthpok watched.

Something in the pod’s atmosphere was causing it to give off fumes. That seemed promising. The spear did not speak for a high civilization. Probably they would have nothing that could penetrate twing. He did not like to risk it — but the alternative was to leak his own breathing-air into the surrounding dust, to poison it.

He opened his helmet for a moment and sniffed. Closed it fast. But he’d smelled chemicals he was familiar with…

He got a squeeze of water, trickled it on the alien’s leg. The result was a fireball. Phssthpok leapt away. From across the room he watched the alien burn.

That seemed straightforward enough.

He went to work rigging a hose from the pod’s water supply to the hull. His last moves he made in haste: using the softener key, running the hose through the hull, removing the key to harden the twing, then running water. There was frantic thumping from all over the hull. It stopped rather suddenly.

He ran most of his reserve of water out into the dust.

He waited several hours, until the whine of the air system dropped to normal. Then he doffed his pressure suit and rejoined Brennan. The captive had noticed nothing.

The water should hold off the natives for awhile. But Phssthpok’s reserves were dwindling almost ludicrously. His ship was abandoned, his remaining drive system was useless, his environment bordered by a spherical shell of dust. Now his water reserve was gone. His life story was almost visibly coming to a close.

Presently he dreamed.

The Blue Ox had circled the sun and was now on the other side of the system, headed for interstellar space. Between Ox and U Thant there was a communications gap of thirty minutes. Sohl and Garner waited, knowing that any information would be half-an-hour late.

Mars was three-quarters fall and impressively large in their rear view camera.

They had asked all the questions, made guesses at the answers, mapped out their search pattern of the Lacis Solis region. Luke was bored. He missed the conveniences built into his travel chair. He thought Nick was bored too, but he was wrong. In space Nick was silent by habit.

The screen flashed on: a woman’s face. The radio cleared its throat and spoke.

“U Thant, this is Tina Jordan aboard Blue Ox.” Luke sensed the woman’s barely repressed panic. Tina caught on her own voice, then blurted, “We’re in trouble. We were testing that alien root in the lab and Einar took a bite out of it! The damn thing was like asbestos from vacuum exposure, but he chewed a piece off and swallowed if before we could stop him. I can’t understand why he did it. It smelled awful!

“Einar’s sick, very sick. He tried to kill me when I took the root away from him. Now he’s gone into coma. We’ve hooked him into the ship’s ’doc. The ’doc says Insufficient Data.” They heard a ragged intake of breath. Luke thought he could see bruises beginning to form on the woman’s throat. “We’d like permission to get him to a human doctor.”

Nick cursed and keyed Transmit. “Nick Sohl speaking. Pick a route and get on it. Then finish analyzing that root. Did the smell remind you of anything? Sohl over.” He turned it off. “What the blazes got into him?”

Luke shrugged. “He was hungry?”

“Einar Nilsson, for Finagle’s sake! He was my boss for a year before he quit politics. Why would he try a suicidal trick like that? He’s not stupid.” Nick drummed on the arm of his chair, then began looking for Ceres with the com laser.

In the half hour that passed before the Blue Ox called again, he got dossiers on all three of her crew. “Tina Jordan’s a flatlander. That explains why they waited for orders,” he said.

“Does that need an explanation?”

“Most Belters would have turned around the moment Einar came down sick. The Outsider ship’s empty, and there’s no problem tracking it. No real point in staying. But Jordan’s still a flatlander, still used to being told when to breathe, and La Pan probably didn’t trust his own judgment enough to overide her.”

“Age,” said Luke. “Nilsson was the oldest.”

“What would that have to do with it?”

“I don’t know. He was also the biggest. Maybe he was after a new taste thrill… no, dammit, I don’t believe it either—”

“Blue Ox calling U Thant. We’re on our way home. Course plotted for Vesta. The root analyzes almost normal. High in carbohydrates, including right-hand sugars. The proteins look ordinary. No vitamins at all. We found two compounds Nate says are brand new. One resembles a hormone, testosterone, but it definitely isn’t testosterone.

“The root doesn’t smell like anything I can name, except possibly sour milk or sour cream. The air in the Outsider ship was thin, with an adequate partial pressure of oxygen, no poisonous compounds, at least two percent helium. We spectroanalyzed the porthole material, and—” She listed a spectrum of elements, high in silicone. “The ’doc still reports Einar’s illness as Insufficient Data, but now there’s an emergency light. Whatever it is, it’s not good. Any further questions?”

“Not at the moment,” said Nick. “Don’t call back, because we’re going to be too busy landing.” He signed off. He sat drumming on the console with long, tapering fingers. “Helium. That ought to tell us something.”

“A small world with no moon,” Luke speculated. “Big moons tend to skim away a planet’s atmosphere. The Earth would look like Venus without her oversized moon. The helium would be the first to go, wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe. It would also be the first to leave a small planet. Think about the Outsider’s strength. It was no small planet he came from.”

Nick and Luke were men who would stop to think before speaking. Conversation aboard U Thant would lapse for minutes, then take up just where it had left off.

“What then?”

“From somewhere in a gas cloud, with lots of helium. The galactic core is in the direction he came from. Plenty of gas clouds and dust clouds in that direction.”

“But thaes an unholy distance away. Will you stop that drumming?”

“It helps me think. Like your smoking.”

“Drum then.”

“Theres no limit to how far he could have come. The faster a Bussard ramjet ship moves, the more fuel it would pick up.”

“There has to be a limit at which the exhaust velocity equals the velocity at which the gas hits the ramscoop field.”

“Possible. But it must be way the Finagle up there. That air tank was huge. The Outsider is a long way from home.”

The autodoc was built into the back wall, set over one of the three disaster couches. Einar was in that couch. His arm was in the ’doc almost to the shoulder.

Tina watched his face. He had been getting progressively worse. It did not look like sickness; it looked like age. Einar had aged decades in the past hour. He urgently needed a human doctor… but a higher thrust than the Ox’s would have killed him, and the Ox was all they had.

Could they have stopped him? If she’d yelled at once — but then Einn had his hands on her throat, and it was too late. Where had Einar got such strength? He would have killed her.

His chest stopped moving.

Tina looked up at the dial faces on the ’doc. Usually a panel covered those dials; a spaceship has enough gadgets to watch without added distractions. Tina had been looking at those dials every five minutes, for hours. This time they all showed red.

“He’s dead,” she said. She heard the surprise in her voice, and wondered at it. The cabin walls began to blur and recede.

Nate squirmed out of the control couch and bent over Einar. “And you just noticed! He must have been dead for an hour!”

“No, I swear…” Tina gulped against the rising anaesthesia in her veins. Her body was water. She was going to faint.

“Look at his face and tell me that!”

Tina climbed onto watery legs. She looked down at the ravaged face. Einar, dead, looked hundreds of years old. In sorrow and guilt and repugnance, she reached to touch the dead cheek.

“He’s still warm.”

“Warm?” Nate touched the corpse. “He’s on fire. Fever. Must have been alive seconds ago. Sorry, Tina, I jumped at conclusions. Hey! Are you all right?”

“How dangerous are these approaches?”

“Get that brave little quiver out of your voice,” said Nick. It was pure slander; Luke was nothing but interested. “I’ve made a couple of hundred of these in my life. For sheer thrills I’ve never found anything to beat letting you fly me to Death Valley Port.”

“You said you were in a hurry.”

“So I did. Luke, I’d like to request an admiring silence for the next few minutes.”

“Aha! Ah HA!”

The red planet reached for them, unfolding like a wargod’s fist. Nick’s bantering mood drained away. His face took on a set, stony look. He had not been quite candid with Luke. He had made several hundred powered approaches in his life; true. But those had been asteroid approaches, with gravity negligible or nearly so.

Diemos went by in the direction technically known as “ship’s upward.” Nick inched a lever toward him. Mars was flattening out and simultaneously sliding away as they moved north.

“The base should be there,” said Luke. “At the north edge of that arc. Ah, that must be it, that little crater.”

“Use the scope.”

“Mmmmm… dammit. Ah. There it is. Deflated, of course. See it, Nick?”

“Yah.”

It looked like the abandoned shred of a sky-blue toy balloon.

Dust rose in churning clouds to meet their drive flame. Nick swore viciously and increased thrust. By now Luke had caught on to Nick’s vagaries in blasphemy. When he swore by Finagle it was for humor or emphasis. When he blasphemed in Christian fashion, he meant it.

U Thant slowed and hovered. She was above the dust, then in the dust, and gradually the ochre clouds thinned and backed away. A ring shaped sandstorm receded toward three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon. The bedrock lay exposed for the first time in millennia. It was lumpy and brown and worn. In the light of the drive the rounded rock blazed white, with sharp black shadows. Where the drive flame touched it melted.

Nick said, “I’ll have to land in the crater. That dust will flow back in as soon as I turn off the motor.” He angled the ship left and killed the drive. The bottom dropped out. They fell.

They fell all the way on attitude jets, and touched with hardly a bounce.

“Beautiful,” said Luke.

“I do that all the time. I’m going to search the base. You monitor me on helmet camera.”

The ring wall rose above him in worn, rounded, volcanic-looking stone. Dust dripped back from the rim, ran like molasses down the shallow slope to collect in a pool around the ship’s shock legs. The crater was half a mile across. In the approximate center was the dome, surrounded by a lapping sea of dust.

Nick looked about him, frowning. There seemed no way to reach the dome without crossing the dust, which might not be as shallow as it looked. The crater was ancient; it looked just younger than the planet itself. But it was criss-crossed with younger cracks. Some of the edges were almost sharp; the air and dust were too thin to erode things quickly. There would be bad footing.

He started around the base of the ring wall, walking with care. Dust concealed some of the cracks.

A small, intense sun hung above the crater rim, in a deep purple sky.

On the far side of the dome a narrow path of laser-fused dust led from the dome to the ring wall. It must have been made with the base’s communications laser. The boats were there, moored along the path. Nick did not pause to study them.

There must have been dozens of slits in the dome material. Nick found twelve dried bodies within. Martians had murdered the base personnel over a century ago. They had killed Müller the same way, after Müller had reinflated the dome.

Nick searched each of the small buildings in turn. At some places he had to crawl beneath the transparent folds of the dome. There was no Outsider to meet him. There was no sign of tampering since Müller’s forced visit.

“Dead end,” he reported. “Next step?”

“You’ll have to carry me piggyback until we can find a sand boat.”

Dust had settled over the boats, leaving only flat, wide shapes the color of everything else. For twelve years they had waited for another wave of explorers — explorers who had lost interest and gone home.

It was like seeing ghosts. An Egyptian pharaoh might find such ghosts waiting for him in the afterworld: rank on rank of dumb, faithful retainers, gone before him, and waiting, waiting.

“From here they look good,” said Luke. He settled himself more comfortably on Nick’s shoulders. “We’re in luck, Sinbad.”

“Don’t count your money yet.” Nick started across the dust pond toward the dome. Luke was light on his shoulders, and his own body was light here; but together they were top-heavy. “If I start falling I’ll try to fall sideways. That dust won’t hurt either of us.”

“Don’t fall.”

“The UN fleet will probably be coming here too. To get the boats.”

“They’re days behind us. Come on.”

“The path’s slippery. Dust all over it.”

The boats, three of them, were lined along the west side. Each had four seats and a pair of fans at the stern, below the dust line, caged for protection against submerged rocks. The boats were so flat that any ocean ripple would have sunk them; but in the heavy dust they rode high.

Nick settled his burden not too gently into one of the seats. “See if she’ll start, Luke. I’m going to the dome for fuel.”

“It’ll be hydrazine, with compressed martian air as oxidizer.”

“I’ll just look for something labeled Fuel.”

Luke was able to start the compressor, but the motor wouldn’t fire. Probably drained the tanks, he decided, and turned everything off. He found a bubble dome collapsed in the back. After making sure it was meant to be worked manually, he wrestled it into place and sealed it down, holding himself in place with a seat belt to get leverage. His long arms and wide hands had never lost an arm wrestling match. The edges of the bubble would probably leak, he decided, but not seriously. He found the inspection hatch that hid an air converter for changing the nitric oxides outside into breathable nitrogen and oxygen.

Nick returned with a green tank balanced on one shoulder. He fueled the boat through an injector nozzle. Luke tried the starter again. It worked. The boat tried to take off without Nick. Luke found the neutral setting, then reverse. Nick waited while he backed up.

“How do I get through the bubble?”

“I guess you don’t.” Luke collapsed the bubble, unsealed one side for Nick, then sealed it after him. The bubble began to fill, slowly. “Best keep our suits on,” said Luke. “It may be an hour before we can breathe in here.”

“You can collapse it then. We’ve got to got provisions from the ship.”

It was two hours before they raised the bubble and started for the opening in the ring wall.

The dark sandstone cliffs that framed the opening were sharp and clear, clearly dynamite-blasted, as artificial as the glassy path between dome and ring wall. Nick was settled comfortably in one of the passenger chairs, his feet propped on another, his eyes on the screen of the dismounted deep-radar.

“Seems deep enough now,” he said.

“Then I’ll open her up,” said Luke. The fans spun; the stern dipped far down, then righted. They skunmed across the dust at ten knots, leaving two straight, shallow, regular swells as a wake.

The deep-radar screen registered a density pattern in three dimensions. It showed a smooth bottom, regular swells and dips from which millions of years had eliminated all sharp lines and points. There was little volcanic activity on Mars.

Thle desert was as flat as a mirror. Rounded dun rocks poked through its surface, incongruous, Daliesque. Craters sat on the dust like badly made clay ash trays. Some were a few inches across. Some were so large that they had to be seen from orbit. The horizon was straight and close and razor sharp, glowing yellow below and artery red above. Nick turned his head to watch the crater recede.

His eyes widened, then squinted. Something?

“Damn’t. Hold itl” he shouted. “Turn around! Turn hard left!”

“Back toward the crater?”

“Yes!”

Luke cut the power in one motor. The boat turned its prow to the left but continued to skid sideways across the dust. Then the right fan bit in, and the boat curved around.

“I see it,” said Luke.

It was little more than a dot at that distance, but it showed clearly against the calm monochrome sea around it. And it moved. It jerked, it paused to rest, it jerked again, rolling sideways. It was several hundred yards from the crater wall.

As they approached, it grew clearer. It was cylindrical, the shape of a short caterpillar, and translucent; and soft, for they saw it bend as it moved. It was trying to reach the opening in the ring wall.

Luke throttled down. The dustboat slowed and settled deeper. As they pulled alongside Luke saw that Nick had armed himself with a signal gun.

“It’s him,” said Nick. He sounded awed. He leaned over the side, gun at the ready.

The caterpillar was a transparent, inflated sack. Inside was something that rolled over and over, slowly, painfully, trying to get closer to the side of the boat. It was as clearly alien as anything created in the days of flat television.

It was humanoid, as much so as a stick-figure drawing is humanoid. It was all knobs. Elbows, knees, shoulders, cheekbones, they stuck out like marbles or grapefruit or bowling balls. The bald head swelled and rose behind like hydrocephalus.

It stopped trying to roll when it bumped against the boat.

“It looks helpless enough,” Nick said dubiously.

“Well, here goes our air again.” Luke deflated the bubble. The two men reached over the side, picked up the pressurized sack and dropped it in the bottom of the boat. The alien’s expression did not change, and probably could not. That face looked hard. But it did a strange thing. With thumb and forefinger of a hand like a score of black walnuts strung together, it made a circle.

Nick said, “It must have learned that from Brennan.”

“Look at the bones, Nick. The bones correspond to a human skeleton.”

“Its arms are too long for human. And its back slopes more.”

“Yah. Well, we can’t take him back to the ship, and we can’t talk to him the way he is now. Well have to wait out here while the bubble inflates.”

“We seem to spend most of our time waiting,” said Luke.

Nick nodded. His fingers drummed against the back of a chair. For twenty minutes the boat’s small converter had been straining to fill the bubble, using and changing the thin, poisonous mixture outside.

But the alien hadn’t moved at all. Luke had been watching. The alien lay in its inflated bag in the bottom of the boat, and it waited. Its human eyes watched them from inside pits of tough, leathery wrinkles. Just so, with just such patience, might a dead man wait for Judgment Day.

“At least we have it at a disadvantage,” said Nick. “It won’t be kidnapping us.”

“I think he must be insane.”

“Insane? Its motives may be a little strange—”

“Look at the evidence. He came plowing into the System in a ship just adequate to get him here. His air tank was on its last gasp. There was no evidence of failsafe devices anywhere aboard. He made no attempt to contact anyone, as far as we can tell. He killed or kidnapped Brennan. He then proceeded to abandon his interstellar drive and ran for Mars, presumably to hide. Now he’s abandoned his reentry vehicle, and whatever’s left of Brennan too; he’s rolled across a martian desert in a sandwich bag to reach the first place any exploring ship would land! He’s a nut. He’s escaped from some interstellar mental institution.”

“You keep saying him. It’s an it. Think of it as an it and you’ll be ready for it to act peculiar.”

“That’s a cop-out. The universe is rational. In order to survive, this thing has to be rational too, he, she, or it.”

“Another couple of minutes and we can—”

The alien moved. Its hand slashed down the length of the sack. Instantly Nick raised the signal gun. Instantly… but the alien reached through a long gap in the sack and took the gun out of Nick’s hand before Nick could react. There was no sign of haste. It placed the gun in the back of the boat and sat up.

It spoke. Its speech was full of clickings and rustlings and poppings. The flat, hard beak must have been a handicap. But it could be understood.

It said, “Take me to your leader.”

Nick recovered first. He straightened his shoulders, cleared his throat and said, “That will involve a trip of several days. Meanwhile, we welcome you to human space.”

“I’m afraid not,” said the monster. “I hate to ruin your day. My name’s Jack Brennan, and I’m a Belter. Aren’t you Nick Sohl?”

The awful silence erupted in the sound of Luke’s laughter. “You think of it as an alien and you’ll be ready for s-strange — h-hahaha…”

Nick felt panic close around his throat. “You. You’re Brennan?”

“Yah. And you’re Nick Sohl. I saw you once in Confinement. But I don’t recognize your friend.”

“Lucas Garner.” Luke had himself under control. “Your photographs don’t do you justice, Brennan.”

“I did something stupid,” said the Brennan-monster. Its voice was no more human, its appearance no less intimidating. “I went to meet the Outsider. You were trying to do the same, weren’t you?”

“Yes.” There was a sardonic amusement in Luke’s eyes and Luke’s voice. Whether or not he believed the Brennan-monster, he was enjoying the situation. “Was there really an Outsider, Brennan?”

“Unless you want to quibble about definitions.”

Sohl broke in. “For God’s sake, Brennan! What happened to you?”

“That’s a long story. Are we pressed for time? Of course not, you’d have started the motor. All right, I’d like to tell this my own way, so please maintain a respectful silence, remembering that if I hadn’t gotten in the way you’d look just like this, and serve you right, too.” He looked hard at the two men. “I’m wrong. You wouldn’t. You’re both past the age.

“Well, bear with me. There exists a race of bipeds that live near the edge of the globe of close-packed suns at the core of the galaxy…

“The most important thing about them is that they live in three stages of maturity. There is childhood, which is self-explanatory. There is the breeder stage, a biped just short of intelligence, whose purpose is to create more children. And there is the protector.

“At around age forty-two, our time, the breeder stage gets the urge to eat the root of a certain bush. Up to then he stayed away from it, because its smell was repugnant to him. Suddenly it smells delicious. The bush grows all over the planet; there’s no real chance that the root won’t be available to any breeder who lives long enough to want it.

“The root initiates certain changes, both physiological and emotional. Before I go into detail, I’ll let you in on the big secret. The race I speak of calls itself—” The Brennan-monster clicked its horny beak sharply together. Pak. “But we call it Homo habilis.”

“What?” Nick seemed forced into the position of straight man, and he didn’t like it. But Luke sat hugging his useless legs to his chest, grinning with huge enjoyment.

“There was an expedition that landed on Earth some two and a half million years ago. The bush they brought wouldn’t grow right, so there haven’t been any protector stage Pak on Earth. I’ll get to that.

“When a breeder eats the root, these changes take place. His or her gonads and obvious sexual characteristics disappear. His skull softens and his brain begins to grow, until it is comfortably larger and more complex than yours, gentlemen. The skull then hardens and develops a bony crest. The teeth fall out, whatever teeth are left; the gums and lips grow together and form a hard, almost flat beak. My face is too flat; it works better with Homo habilis. All hair disappears. Some joints swell enormously, to supply much greater leverage to the muscle. The moment arm increases, you follow? The skin hardens and wrinkles to form a kind of armor. Fingernails become claws, retractile, so that a protector’s fingertips are actually more sensitive than before, and better toolmakers. A simple two-chamber heart forms where the two veins from the legs, whatever the hell they’re called, join to approach the heart. Notice that my skin is thicker there? Well, there are less dramatic changes, but they all contribute to make the protector a powerful, intelligent fighting machine. Garner, you no longer seem amused.”

“It all sounds awfully familiar.”

“I wondered if you’d spot that. The emotional changes are drastic. A protector who has bred true feels no urge except the urge to protect those of his blood line. He recognizes them by smell. His increased intelligence does him no good here, because his hormones rule his motives. Nick, has it occurred to you that all of these changes are a kind of exaggeration of what happens to men and women as they get older? Garner saw it right away.”

“Yes, but—”

“The extra heart,” Luke broke in. “What about that?”

“Like the expanded brain, it doesn’t form without tree-of-life. After fifty, without modern medical care, a normal human heart becomes inadequate. Eventually it stops.”

“Ah.”

“Do you two find this convincing?”

Luke was reserving judgment. “Why do you ask?”

“I’m really more interested in convincing Nick. My Belt citizenship depends on my convincing you I’m Brennan. Not to mention my bank account and my ship and cargo. Nick, I’ve got an abandoned fuel tank from the Mariner XX attached to my ship, which I last left falling across the solar system at high speed.”

“It’s still doing that,” said Nick. “Likewise the Outsider ship. We ought to be doing something about recovering it.”

“Finagle’s eyes, yes! It’s not that good a design, I could improve it blindfold, but you could buy Ceres with the monopoles!”

“First things first,” Garner said mildly.

“That ship is receding, Garner. Oh, I see what you mean; you’re afraid to put an alien monster near a working spacecraft.” The Brennan-monster glanced back at the flare gun, flickeringly, then apparently abandoned the idea of hijacking the dustboat. “We’ll stay out here until you’re convinced. Is that a deal? Could you get a better deal anywhere?”

“Not from a Belter. Brennan, there is considerable evidence that man is related to the other primates of Earth.”

“I don’t doubt it. I’ve got some theories.”

“Say on.”

“About that lost colony. A big ship arrived here, and four landing craft went down with some thirty protectors and a lot of breeders. A year later the protectors knew they’d picked the wrong planet. The bush they needed grew wrong. They sent a message for help, by laser, and then they died. Starvation is a normal death for a protector, but it’s usually voluntary. These starved against their will.” There was no emotion in the Brennan-monster’s voice or mask-like face.

“They died. The breeders were breeding without check. There was endless room, and the protectors must have wiped out any dangerous life forms. What happened next has to be speculation. The protectors were dead, but the breeders were used to their helping out, and they stayed around the ships.”

“And?”

“And the piles got hot without the protectors to keep them balanced. They had to be fission piles, given the state of the art. Maybe they exploded. Maybe not. The radiation caused mutations resulting in everything from lemurs to apes and chimpanzees to ancient and modern man.

“That’s one theory,” said the Brennan-monster. “Another is that the protectors deliberately started breeding mutations, so that breeders would have a chance to survive in some form until help came. The results would be the same.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Nick.

“You will. You should now. There’s enough evidence, particularly in religions and folk tales. What percentage of humanity genuinely expects to live forever? Why do so many religions include a race of immortal beings who are constantly battling one another? What’s the justification for ancestor worship? You know what happens to a man without modern geriatrics: as he ages his brain cells start to die. Yet people tend to respect him, to listen to him. Where do guardian angels come from?”

“Race memory?”

“Probably. It’s hard to believe a tradition could survive that long.”

“South Africa,” said Luke. “They must have landed in South Africa, somewhere near Olduvai Gorge National Park. All the primates are there.”

“Not quite. Maybe one ship landed in Australia, for the metals. You know, the protectors may have just scattered radioactive dust around and left it at that. The breeders would breed like rabbits without natural enemies, and the radiation would help them change. With all the protectors dead, they’d have to develop new shticks. Some got strength, some got agility, some got intelligence. Most got dead, of course. Mutations do.”

“I seem to remember,” said Luke, “that the aging process in man can be compared to the program running out in a space probe. Once the probe has done its work it doesn’t matter what happens to it. Similarly, once we pass the age at which we can have children—”

“—Evolution is through with you. You’re moving on inertia only, following your course with no corrective mechanisms.” The Brennan-monster nodded. “Of course the root supplies the program for the third stage. Good comparison.”

Nick said, “Any idea what went wrong with the root?”

“Oh, that’s no mystery. Though it had the protectors of Pak going crazy for awhile. No wonder a small colony couldn’t solve it. There’s a virus that lives in the root. It carries the genes for the change from breeder to protector. It can’t live outside the root, so a protector has to eat more root every so often. If there’s no thalium in the soil, the root still grows, but it won’t support the virus.”

“That sounds pretty complicated.”

“Ever work with a hydroponics garden? The relationships in a stable ecology can be complicated. There was no problem on the Pak world. Thalium is a rare earth, but it must be common enough among all those Population H stars. And the root grows everywhere.”

Nick said, “Where does the Outsider come in?”

A hiss and snap of beak: Phssth-pok. “Phssthpok found old records, including the call for help. He was the first protector in two and a half million years to realize that there was a way to find Sol, or at least to narrow the search. And he had no children, so he had to find a Cause quick, before the urge to eat left him. That’s what happens to a protector when his blood line is dead. More lack of programming. Incidentally, you might note the heavy protection against mutation in the Pak species. A mutation doesn’t smell right. That could be important in the galactic core, where radiation is heavy.”

“So he came barreling out here with a hold full of seeds?”

“And bags of thalium oxide. The oxide was easiest to carry. I wondered about the construction of his ship, but you can see why he trailed his cargo section behind his lifesystem. Radiation doesn’t bother him, in small amounts. He can’t have children.”

“Where is he now?”

“I had to kill him.”

“What?” Garner was shocked. “Did he attack you?”

“No.”

“Then — I don’t understand.”

The Brennan-monster seemed to hesitate. It said, “Garner, Sohl, listen to me. Twelve miles from here, some fifty feet under the sand, is part of an alien spacecraft filled with roots and seeds and bags of thalium oxide. The roots I can grow from those seeds can make a man nearly immortal. Now what? What are we going to do with them?”

The two men looked at each other. Luke seemed about to speak, closed his mouth.

“That’s a tough one, right? But you can guess what Phssthpok expected, can’t you?”

Phssthpok dreamed.

He knew to within a day just how long it would take for Brennan to wake up. He could have been wrong, of course. But if he were, then Brennan’s kind would have mutated too far from the Pak form.

Knowing how long he had, Phssthpok could time his dreaming. The martians were no threat now, though something would have to be done about them eventually. Dreaming was a fine art to a protector. He had about ten days. For a week he dreamed the past, up until the day he left the Pak planet. Sensory stimulation had been skimpy during the voyage. He moved on into the future.

Phssthpok dreamed…

It would begin when his captive woke. From the looks of him, the captive’s brain would be larger than Phssthpok’s; there was that frontal bulge, ruining the slope of the face. He would learn fast. Phssthpok would teach him how to be a protector, and what to do with the roots and seeds of tree-of-life.

Did the breeder have children? If so, he would take the secret for his own, using tree-of-life to make protectors of his own descendants. That was all right. If he had sense enough to spread his family around, avoiding inbreeding, his blood line should reach out to include most of this system’s Pak race.

Probably he would kill Phssthpok to keep the secret. That was all right too.

There was a nightmare tinge to Phssthpok’s dreaming. For the captive didn’t look right. His fingernails were developing wrong. His head was certainly not the right shape. That frontal bulge… and his beak was as flat as his face had been. His back wasn’t arched, his legs were wrong, his arms were too short. His kind had had too much time to mutate.

But he’d reacted correctly to the roots.

The future was uncertain… except for Phssthpok. Let the captive learn what he needed to know, if he could; let him carry on the work, if he could. There would come a day when Earth was a second Pak world. Phssthpok had done his best. He would teach, and die.

Brennan stirred. He unfolded his curled body, stretched wide and opened his eyes. He stared unwinking at Phssthpok, stared as if he were reading the protector’s mind. All new protectors did that: orienting themselves through memories they were only now beginning to understand.

“I wonder if I can make you understand how fast it all was,” said the Brennan-monster. He gazed at the two old men, one twice the age of the other but both past the transition age, and wondered that they should be his judges.

“In two days we learned each other’s language. His is much faster than mine and fits my mouth better, so we used it. He told me his life story. We discussed the martians, working out the most efficient way to exterminate them—”

“What?”

“To exterminate them, Garner. Hell, they’ve killed thirteen men already! We talked practically nonstop, with Phssthpok doing most of the talking, and all the time we were hard at work: calisthenics to build me up, fins for Phssthpok’s suit so he could swim the dust, widgets to get every atom of air and water out of the life support system and take it to the base. I’ve never seen the base; we had to extrapolate the design so we’d know how to re-inflate it and protect it.

“The third day he told me how to get a tree-of-life crop growing. He had the box open and was telling me how to unfreeze the seeds safely. He was giving me orders just as if I were a voice-box computer. I was about to ask, ‘Don’t I get any choices at all?’ And I didn’t.”

“I don’t follow,” said Garner.

“I didn’t get any choices. I was too intelligent. It’s been that way ever since I woke up. I get answers before I can finish formulating the question. If I always see the best answer, then where’s my choice? Where’s my free will? You can’t believe how fast this all was. I saw the whole chain of logic in one flash. I slammed Phssthpok’s head hard against the edge of the freezer. It stunned him long enough so that I could break his throat against the edge. Then I jumped back in case he attacked. I figured I could hold him off until he strangled. But he didn’t attack. He hadn’t figured it out, not yet.”

“It sounds like murder, Brennan. He didn’t want to kill you?”

“Not yet. I was his shining hope. He couldn’t even defend himself for fear of bruising me. He was older than me, and he knew how to fight. He could have killed me if he’d wanted to, but he couldn’t want to. It took him thirty-two thousand years of real time to bring us those roots. I was supposed to finish the job.

“I think he died believing he’d succeeded. He half-expected me to kill him.”

“Brennan. Why?”

The Brennan-monster shrugged cantaloupe shoulders. “He was wrong. I killed him because he would have tried to wipe out humanity when he learned the truth.” He reached into the slit balloon that had brought him across twelve miles of fluid dust. He pulled out a jury-rigged something that hummed softly — his air renewal setup, made from parts of Phssthpok’s control board — and dropped it in the boat. Next he pulled out half of a yellow root like a raw sweet potato. He held it under Garner’s nose. “Smell.”

Luke sniffed. “Pleasant enough. Like a liqueur.”

“Sohl?”

“Nice. How’s it taste?”

“If you knew it would turn you into something like me, would you take a bite of it? Garner?”

“This instant. I’d like to live forever, and I’m afraid of going senile.”

“Sohl?”

“No! I’m not ready to give up sex yet.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventy-four. Birthday two months from now.”

“You’re already too old. You were too old at fifty; It would have killed you. Would you have volunteered at forty-five?”

Sohl laughed. “Not likely.”

“Well, that’s half the answer. From Phssthpok’s point of view we’re a failure. The other half is that no sane man would turn the root loose on Earth or Belt or anywhere else.”

“I should hope not. But let’s hear your reasons.”

“War. The Pak world has never been free from war at any time in its history. Naturally not, with every protector acting to expand and protect his blood line at the expense of all the others. Knowledge keeps getting lost. The race can’t cooperate for a minute beyond the point where one protector sees an advantage in betraying the others. They can’t make any kind of progress because of that continual state of war.

“And I’m to turn that loose on Earth? Can you imagine a thousand protectors deciding their grandchildren need more room? Your eighteen billion flatlanders live too close to the edge already; you can’t afford the resources.

“Besides which, we don’t really need tree-of-life. Garner, when were you born? Nineteen forty or thereabouts?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“Geriatrics is getting so good so fast that my kids could live a thousand years. We’ll get longevity without tree-of-life, without sacrificing anything at all.

“Now look at it from Phssthpok’s viewpoint,” the Brennan-monster continued. “We’re a mutation. We’ve settled the solar system and started some interstellar colonies. We will and must refuse the root, and even when it’s forced on us, the resulting mutated protectors are atypical. Phssthpok thought in terms of the long view. We’re not Pak, we’re no use to the Pak, and it’s conceivable that someday we’ll reach the core suns. The Pak will attack us the moment they see us, and we’ll fight back.” He shrugged. “And we’ll win. The Pak don’t unite effectively. We do. We’ll have a better technology than theirs.”

“We will?”

“I told you, they can’t keep their technology. Whatever can’t be used immediately, gets lost until someone files it in the Library. Military knowledge never gets filed; the families keep it a deep, dark secret. And the only ones to use the Library are childless protectors. There aren’t many of them, and they aren’t highly motivated.”

“Couldn’t you have tried to talk to him?”

“Garner, I’m not getting through to you. He’d have killed me the moment he figured it out! He was trained to fight protectors. I wouldn’t have had a chance. Then he’d have tried to wipe out the human species. We’d have been much worse to him than hostile aliens. We’re a corruption of the Pak form itself.”

“But he couldn’t do it. He was all alone.”

“I’ve thought of half a dozen things he could have tried. None of them sure things, but I couldn’t risk it.”

“Name one.”

“Plant tree-of-life all through Congo National Park. Organize the monkey and chimpanzee protectors.”

“He was marooned here.”

“He could have commandeered your ship. He’d have had your silly flare gun as fast as I did. Gentlemen, may I point out that it’s near sunset? I don’t think we want to navigate the ring wall in darkness.”

Luke started the motor.

“This is Martin Shaeffer at Ceres calling Nick Sohl aboard U Thant. Nick, I don’t know how your hunting goes, but Phobos reports that you’ve landed safely at Olympus Base, and they’re tracking your dustboat wake. Presumably you’ll find this on tape when you get back.

“We’ve sent the Blue Ox to meet you, on the theory that you may need the computer package as a translating device. Eisaku Ikeda commanding. The Ox should reach Olympus Base a day behind the UN fleet.

“Einar Nilsson is dead. We’ll have an autopsy report shortly.

“We’ve sent fuel ships and construction facilities to rendezvous with the Outsider ship. There are two singleships falling alongside already, and the Outsider ship has a tested tow line of its own. We may be able to rig the singleships for towing. Still, it’s all going to be very sticky and time consuming. We may not get it home to the Belt for a couple of years.

“Nick, when the Ox gets there, be careful of Tina Jordan. Don’t shake her up. She’s had a bad shock. I think she blames herself for what happened to Einar.

“Repeating…”

Luke docked the dustboat in near-darkness. He said, “You’ll have to wait in the boat, Brennan. Nick can’t carry us both.”

“I’ll roll,” said the Brennan-monster.

Nick’s walk down the path and around the rim of the dust pool was made in unseemly haste. “Take it easy,” Luke complained. “You can’t trot in this light. You’ll fall and crack both our helmets.”

“He’s going to beat us to the ship,” Nick said edgily.

Brennan was taking the short cut, rolling directly across the dust.

“Slow down. You can’t beat him, and he can’t get up the ladder.”

“Maybe he’s thought of a way. If he does… oh, hell.” Nick slowed down. Brennan had rolled uphill to the foot of U Thant’s ladder. He waited for them there like a translucent sausage.

“Nick? Do you trust him?”

It was seconds before he answered. “I think his story’s straight. He’s a Belter. Or an ex-Belter.”

“He swore by damn instead of by Finagle.”

“So do I. And he recognized me. No, I’ll tell you what really convinced me. He didn’t ask about his wife, because she can take care of herself. He asked about his cargo. He’s a Belter.”

“We accept his story, then. Anthropology and all. Wow.”

“His story, yes. Luke, I’ll take you up, then come back for Brennan. But I won’t come down until you’re talking to Ceres. I want all of this on record before I let him in the ship. I’m still wondering about his motives.”

“Ah.”

“He said it himself. Motives change for a protector.” Garner was already signing off when Brennan climbed out of his zippered balloon. Brennan made no mention of the delay. He said, “If you’re worried about accommodations, I can get along without an acceleration couch. In fact, I can ride outside in a cargo net if you’ll give me a radio link. If my patchwork air plant breaks down I’d want to get inside fast.”

“That won’t be necessary. It’ll be cramped, but not that cramped,” said Nick. He squeezed past Brennan, wincing inside himself from the dry leathery touch, and into the control chair. “We seem to have a message.”

They listened in silence to the recorded voice of Lit Shaeffer.

“Too bad about Nilsson,” Brennan said afterward. “There wasn’t much chance they’d let him eat enough of the root, even if he wasn’t past the age.”

Nobody answered.

“Shaeffer’s right, you know. Doing it that way, it’ll take you a couple of years to drag Phssthpok’s ship home.”

“Have you got a better idea?”

“Of course I’ve got a better idea, Nick, you idiot. I can fly that ship home myself.”

“You?” Nick stared. “When did the Outsider ever let you operate the controls?”

“He never did. But I saw them, and they didn’t look cryptic. Just complicated. I’m sure I can figure out how to fly it. All you’ve got to do is fuel the ship and fly me to it.”

“Uh huh. What do we do about the cargo pod? Leave it where it is?”

“No. Theres a gravity polarizer in that pod.”

“Oh?”

“Not to mention the supply of roots, which I need, even if you don’t. The seeds count too. Gentlemen, when you have finally grasped the extent of my magnificent intelligence, youll see what those seeds represent. They’re a failsafe for the human race. If we ever really need a leader, we can make one. Just pick a forty-two-year-old childless volunteer and turn him or her loose in the tree-of-life patch.”

“I’m not sure how well I like that,” said Garner.

“Well, the gravity polarizer’s important enough. You and the UN fleet can retrieve it while Nick and I go after Phssthpok’s ship—”

Nick said, “Just a—”

“—You won’t have to worry about the martians for awhile. I dumped Phssthpok’s share of the water into the dust, just before I left. Don’t let anyone into the pod without a pressure suit. Need I elaborate?”

“No,” said Garner. He felt like an amateur on skis. Somewhere he had lost control, and now events were moving too fast.

Nick spoke with a certain amount of anger. “Hold it. What makes you think we’d trust you to fly the Outsider ship?”

“Take your time. Think it through,” said Brennan. “You’ll have my supply of root for hostage. And where would I go with a Bussard ramjet? Where would I sell it? Where would I hide, with my face?”

Nick’s face wore a trapped look. Where was his own free will?

“It’s probably the most valuable artifact in human space,” said Brennan. “It’s falling outward at several hundred miles per second. Each minute you take to make up your mind now is going to cost us a couple of hours hauling it back from interstellar space. You’ll pay for that in extra fuel and provisions and man-hours and delays. But take your time. Think it through.”

The Brennan-monster had the ability to relax. Sometime in the future there would be periods of furious activity…

They left Lucas Garner on Phobos, refueled there, and took off. Garner did not see Nick again for seven months. He did not see Brennan ever again.

For the rest of his life he remembered that cramped conversation. Brennan — on his back with his knees up, in a position of acute discomfort — was a blurred half-alien voice behind his control couch. Brennan had trouble with his V’s and W’s, but he could be understood. His voice was full of clickings.

An indefinite tension went out of Nick once they were in free fall. Mars converged slowly on itself, a bright varied landscape reddening as it lost detail.

“Children. You’ve got children,” Luke remembered suddenly.

“I’m aware of that. But fear not. I don’t intend to hover over them. They’ll have a better chance for happiness without that.”

“The hormone changes didn’t work?”

“I’m as neuter as a bumblebee. They must have worked to some extent. I think most of a Protector’s urge to die after his blood line is dead must be cultural. Training. I don’t have that training, that conviction that a breeder can’t be happy or safe without his ancestors constantly telling him what to do. Nick, can you give it out that the Outsider killed me?”

“What? What for?”

“Best for the children. I couldn’t keep seeing them without affecting their lives. Best for Charlotte too. I don’t intend to rejoin society as such. There’s nothing there for me.”

“The Belt doesn’t look down on cripples, Brennan.”

“No,” Brennan said with finality. “Give me an asteroid I can bubble-form and I’ll raise tree-of-life. Set me up a monthly liaison with Ceres so I can keep abreast of current developments. I’ll be able to pay for all this with new inventions. I think I can design a manned ramrobot. Better than Phssthpok’s.”

Garner said, “You called it tree-of-life?”

“It’s a good name. You remember that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. According to Genesis, the reason they were kicked out was that they might also have eaten from the Tree of Life, to live forever. ‘And be as one of us’ — it would have made them equivalent to angels. Now It looks like both trees were the same.”

Luke found a cigarette. “I don’t know that I like the idea of you producing tree-of-life crops.”

“I don’t much like the idea of a State secret,” said Nick. “The Belt has never had State secrets.”

“I hope I can convince you. I can’t protect my children, but I can try to protect the human race. If I was needed, I’d be there. If more were needed, there would be the root.”

“The cure would be worse than the disease, most likely.” Luke used his lighter. “Wha—” A knotted hand had reached around the crash couch and taken the cigarette from his mouth and stubbed it out against the hull.

It had been a shock. He remembered it with a shiver as he traversed the double airlocks at the axis of Farmer’s Asteroid.

Long ago, Farmer’s Asteroid had been an approximate cylinder of nickel-iron orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Then Belt industry had bubble-formed it: set it rotating, heated the metal nearly to melting and inflated it, via exploding bags of water, into a cylindrical bubble five miles in radius. Its rotation produced half a gravity. Much of the Belt’s food supply was grown here.

Luke had been in Farmer’s Asteroid once before. He enjoyed the landscaped interior, the wedding-ring lake, the checkered farmlands that rolled out and away and up and over, to where tiny tractors plowed furrows ten miles overhead.

The airlock let him out at the axis. It was cold here behind the sunshield, where the rays of the axial fusion tube never fell. Icebergs condensed out of the air here; and eventually broke loose and slid downslope, and melted into rivers that flowed in carved beds to the wedding-ring lake that girdled Farmer’s Asteroid. Nick Sohl met him here, and helped him tow himself downslope to where a travel chair waited.

“I can guess why you’re here,” Nick told him.

“Officially, I’m here at the request of the Joint Interstellar Colony Authority. They got your request to send a warning message to Wunderland. They weren’t at all clear on what the situation was, and I couldn’t give them much help.”

“You had my report,” Nick said a bit stiffly.

“It wasn’t much of a report, Nick.”

After a bit Nick nodded. “My fault. I just didn’t want to talk about it — and don’t now, for the matter of that — and it was too bloody late. We didn’t just give up, you know. We’ve been tracking him.”

“What happened, Nick?”

“They’d done considerable work when I got there with Brennan. The idea was to rig two singleships together with their drive tubes aimed about ten degrees apart, then moor the framework to the cable from the Pak ship. There was eight miles of it behind the lifesystem section. We could have hauled them home at low thrust. But Brennan said that the Pak drive section would produce ten times the thrust.

“So we boarded the Pak lifesystem sphere and Brennan played around with the controls. I spent a couple of days in there watching him. It turns out you can make the whole hull transparent, or just part of it, the way it was when we found it. We widened the hole Tina Jordan left and fitted an airlock into it.

“Two days of fiddling, and then Brennan said he had it figured out and all we had to do was refuel the drive section. He said that if we tried to tow it backward we’d set off all kinds of failsafe systems. Garner, how the hell was I to know—”

“You couldn’t. It still doesn’t make sense.”

Nick ran a hand backward through his white wool crest. “They’d already rigged up a mating plug to match the fuel plug on the Pak ship. Brennan insisted on doing all the work himself, and even he had to use a radiation suit and shield. We moored his own singleship to the tow line, just in case something failed on the way home. That was my idea, Garner.”

“Uh huh.”

“He took off headed back toward Sol. We tried to fly formation with him, but he was putting the ship through maneuvers, testing the control sytems. We kept our distance. Then — he just turned around and headed out into interstellar space.”

“You tried to catch him?”

Nick yelped, “What tried? We flew alongside him! I didn’t want to make any threatening moves, but he wouldn’t communicate, and we were going to run out of fuel. I ordered Dubchek and Gorton to use their drives as weapons if he didn’t sheer off.”

“What happened?”

“I think he must have turned on his Bussard ramjet field. The electromagnetic effects burned out enough of our equipment to leave us dead in space. Were lucky the drives didn’t blow up. A fuel ship finally got to us, and we managed to make some repairs. By that time Brennan was up to ramscoop speed.”

“All right.”

“How the bell was I to know? We’ve got his food supplyl That bin of roots was almost empty. Was it just a fancy way to commit suicide? Was he afraid of what we’d do with a manned Bussard ramjet ship?”

“I hadn’t thought of that. You know, that could be it. Nick, do you remember him mashing out my cigarette?”

Nick chortled. “Sure. He apologized all over the place, but he wouldn’t let you smoke. I thought you were going to hit him.”

“He’s a protector. Whatever he does, it’s for our own good.” Luke scowled, remembering someone… no, that was all he remembered about her. A high school teacher? “He didn’t want us to have the Pak ship, or something we could learn from it, or from him.”

“Then why did he spend two months out there beyond Pluto? You don’t stop halfway with a Bussard ramjet! It costs reserve fuel! And theres nothing at all out there—”

“The cometary belt, they call it. Most comets spend most of their time out there beyond Pluto. It’s thin, but there’s matter out there. There’s a tenth planet too.”

“He never went near Persephone.”

“But he may have gone near any number of comets.”

“… Right. Okay, he spent two months out there, at rest as far as our monopole detectors could determine. Last month he started moving again. We followed him that long before we were sure. He’s accelerating toward Alpha Centauri. Wunderland.”

“How long before he gets there?”

“Oh, twenty years anyway. It’s a low thrust drive. But we can warn them, and set things up so that our successors warn them again in fifteen years. Just in case.”

“Okay, we can do that. What else? You knew that we dug up the cargo pod.”

“That’s all we know. The UN can keep secrets too.”

“We destroyed the roots and seeds. Nobody really liked the idea, but we did it.”

It was a long time before Nick answered, “Good.”

“Good or bad, we did it. We haven’t had any luck at all understanding the gravity polarizer. If that’s what it was. Brennan could have been lying.”

“It was a gravity polarizer.”

“Just how do you know that?”

“We analyzed the record of the Outsider’s course to Mars. His acceleration varies according to local gravitational gradients: not just by thrust but by direction too.”

“All right, that’ll help. What else can we do?”

“About Brennan, nothing. Eventually he’ll starve. Meanwhile we’ll always know exactly where he is.”

“Or where his monopole source is.”

Nick spoke with dwindling patience. “He doesn’t have a ship without his monopole package. He doesn’t have a food supply, period. He’s dead, Garner.”

“I keep remembering that he’s smarter than we are. If he can find a way to hibernate, it would get him to Wunderland. A thriving colony… and so what? What does he want with Wunderland?”

“Something we haven’t thought of.”

“I’ll never know what it is. I’ll be dead before Brennan reaches Wunderland.” Luke sighed. “Poor Outsider. All this way to bring us the roots that would let us lead a normal life.”

“His intentions were good. Life is hard on us heroes,” Nick said seriously.