The World of Ptavvs (8 page)

The buildings were getting lower, and there were even gaps between them. Had poor transportation made these slaves crowd together in clumps? Someday he must spend the time to find out more about them. After all, they were his now.

But what a story this would make someday! How his grandchildren would listen and admire! When the time came he must buy balladeerg; pruntaquilun balladeers, for only these had the proper gift of language.

The spaceport was drawing near.

***

There was no apparent need to be subtle. Once Kzanol/Greenberg had Masney fully under, he simply ordered Masney to take him to the spaceport. It took about fifteen minutes to reach the gate.

At first he couldn't guess why Masney was landing. Shouldn't he simply fly over the fence? Masney wasn't giving away information. His mind would have been nearly normal by now, and it was normal for a hypnotized person. Masney "knew" that he wasn't really hypnotized; he was only going along with it for a joke. Any time now he would snap out of it and surprise Greenberg. Meanwhile he was calm and happy and free from the necessity for making decisions. He had been told to go to the spaceport. Here he was at the spaceport. His passenger let him lead.

Not until they were down did Kzancl/Greenberg realize that Masney was waiting to be passed through by the guards. He asked, "Will the guards let us through?"

"No," said Masney.

Coosth, another setback. "Would they have let me through with--" he thought, "Garner?"

"Yes. Garner's an Arm."

"Well, turn around and go back for Garner."

The car whirred. "Wait a minute," said Kzanol/Greenberg. "Sleep." Where were the guards?

Across a tremendous flat expanse of concrete, painted with large red targets in a hexagonal array, he could see the spaceships. There were twenty or thirty ramjet rocket orbital craft, some fitted out to lift other spaceczaft to orbit. A linear accelerator ran down the entire south side of the field: a quarter mile of wide, closely set metal hoops. Fusion-drive military rockets lay on their sides in docks, ready to be loaded onto the flat triangular ramjet-rockets. They all looked like motor scooters beside two truly gigantic craft.

One thing like a monstrous tin of tuna, a circular flying wing resting on its blunt trailing edge, was the reentry, cargo, and lifesupport system of the Lazy Eight III. Anyone would have recognized her, even without the blue human's sign of infinity on her flank. She was 320 feet in diameter, 360 in height. The other, far to the right, was a passenger ship as big as the ancient *Queen Mary*, one of the twin luxury transports which served the Titan Hotel. And even at this distance it was apparent that everybody, everybody was clustered around her entrance port.

Listening as hard as he could, Kzanol/Greenberg still couldn't find out what they were doing there; but he recognized the flavor of those far-too-calm thoughts. Those were tame slaves, slaves under orders.

The other thrint was here. But why wasn't he taking his own ship? Or had he landed here? Or-- was the spawn of a ptavv making a leisurely inspection of his new property?

He told Masney, "The guard has told us to go ahead. Take the car over to that honeymoon special."

The car skimmed across the concrete.

***

Garner shook his head, let it fall back into place. His mind was as the mind of a sleeping child. Across that mind flitted thoughts as ephemeral as dreams. They could not stay. Gamer had been ordered not to think. I must look terribly senile, he thought once. The idea slipped away. and returned. Senile. I'm old but not senile. No? There is drool on my chin.

He shook his head, hard. He slapped his face with one hand. Garner was beginning to think again, but not fast enough to suit him. He fumbled at the controls of his chair, and it lurched over to the coffee faucet. When he poured a cup his hand shook so that hot coffee spilled on his hand and wrist. Enraged, he hurled the cup at the wall.

His mind went back to white dullness.

A few minutes later Judy Greenberg wobbled through the door. She looked dazed, but her mind was functioning again. She saw Garner slumped in his travel chair wearing the face of a decrepit moron, and she poured cold water over his head until he came to life.

"Where is he?" Garner demanded.

"I don't know," Judy told him. "I saw him walk out, but it didn't seem to matter to me. Chief Masney was with him. What happened to us?"

"Something I should have expected." Garner was no longer a decrepit old man, but an angry Jehovah. "It means things have gone from worse to terrible. That alien statue-- I knew there was something wrong with it the moment I saw it, but I couldn't see what it was. Oh, nuts.

"It had both arms out, like it was turning chicken halfway through a swan dive. I saw a little projection on his chest, too. Look. The alien put himself into a freeze field to avoid some disaster. After that the button that turned on the field was in the field, and so was the alien's finger pushing it in. So the button wouldn't need a catch to hold it in. It wouldn't have one.

"But the alien had both arms out when I saw it. When Jansky put his own field around the statue, the alien dropped Greenberg's 'digging instrument' and the button too. The button must have popped out. Why he didn't come to life right then I don't know, unless the freeze field has inertia like hysteresis in an electric current. But he's alive now, and that was him we heard."

"Well, it's quite a monster," said Judy. "Is that what Larry thinks he is?"

"Right." Garner's chair rose and made a wind in the room The chair slid out the door, picking up speed. Judy stared after it.

"Then if he sees that he isn't who he thinks he is." she began hopefully. Then she gave it up.

One of the policemen got to his feet, moving like a sleepwalker.

***

Kzanol took the guards with him on his tour of the spaceport. He also took all the repairmen, dispatchers, spacemen, and even passengers he happened to meet while moving around. The man who owned the Cadillac seemed to regard even a trip to Mars as a hazardous journey! If that was the state of Earth's space technology, Kzanol wanted a bundleful of expert opinions.

A couple of dispatchers were sent back to the office to try to find F124 on the star maps. The rest of the group came with Kzanol, growing as it moved. Just two men had the sense to hide when they saw the mob coming. By the time he reached the passenger liner Kzanol was towing everyone at the spaceport but Masney, Kzanol/Greenberg, and those two cautious men.

He had already chosen the Lazy Eight III, the only interstellar ship on the field. While he was getting the

rescue switch on his back repaired, slaves could finish building and orbiting the ship's drive and fuel tanks. It would be at least a year before he was ready to leave Earth.

Then he would take a large crew and pass the journey in stasis, with his slaves to wake him whenever a new child became old enough to take orders. Their descendants would wake him at journey's end.

Kzanol had stood beneath the blunt ring which ship's trailing edge and looked up into the gaping mouth of a solid fuel landing motor. He had probed an engineer's mind to find how the spin of a ship could substitute for artificial gravity. He had walked on the after wall of the central corridor and peered through doors above his head and beneath his feet, into the Garden whose rows of hydroponic tanks served in place of his own tnuctip-bred air plant, and into the huge control room with three walls covered in nightmare profusion with dials and screens and switchboards. His own ship had needed only a screen and a brain board. Everywhere he saw ingenuity replacing true knowledge, complex makeshifts replacing the compact, simple machines Kzanol had known. Dared he trust his life to this jury-rigged monster?

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

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

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

He was impressed despite himself.

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

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

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

The truth hit him all at once.

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

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

Lucas Garner gasped and stopped his chair with a jerk. Alone among the pedestrians around him, who were behaving as if

they had very bad headaches, Garner listened. There must be information buried in all that emoton! But Garner learned nothing. He felt the sense loss becoming his own, sapping his will to live until he felt he was drowning in a black tide.

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

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

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

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

Jato units. Kzanol was going after the second suit.

***

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

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

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

Confinement Asteroid is unique.

Early explorers had run across a roughly cylindrical block of solid nickel-iron two miles long by a mile thick, orbiting not far from Ceres. They had marked its path and dubbed it 5-2376.

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