Larry Niven - A Hole in Space

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Parts of this book were previously published:

reserved.

"There is a Tide," Galaxy Magazine. Copyright (r) 1968 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

reserved.

"$16,940.00," Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Copyright (c) H.S.D. Publications Inc., 1974. All

rights reserved.

reserved.

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SBN 345-24011-1-125

First Printing: June, 1974

Second Printing: November, 1974

Cover painting by Dean Ellis

Printed in the United States of America

BALLANTINE BOOKS

A Division of Random House, Inc.

201 East 50th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

I started writing ten years ago. I wrote for a solid year and collected nothing but rejection

slips.

Most beginning writers can't afford to do that. They take an honest job and write in their spare

time, and it takes them five years to make their mistakes, instead of one. Me, I lived off a trust fund.

The trust fund was there because my great-grandfather once made a lot of money in oil. He

left behind him a large family of nice people, and we all owe him.

To EDWARD LAWRENCE DOHENY

Contents

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Rammer

The Alibi Machine

The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club

A Kind of Murder

All the Bridges Rusting

There Is a Tide

Bigger Than Worlds

$16,94O.OO

The Hole Man

The Fourth Profession

RAMMER

I

Once there was a dead man.

He had been waiting for two hundred years inside a coffin, suitably labeled, whose outer shell

held liquid nitrogen. There were frozen clumps of cancer all through his frozen body. He had had it bad.

He was waiting for medical science to find him a cure.

He waited in vain. Most varieties of cancer could be cured now, but no cure existed for the

billions of cell walls ruptured by expanding crystals of ice. He had known the risk. He had gambled

anyway. Why not? He'd beendying .

The vaults held over a million of these frozen bodies. Why not? They'd beendying .

Later there came a young criminal. His name is forgotten and his crime is secret, but it must

have been a terrible one. The State wiped his personality for it.

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Afterward he was a dead man: still warm, still breathing, even reasonably healthy-but empty.

The State had use for an empty man.

Corbell woke on a hard table, aching as if he had slept too long in one position. He stared

incuriously at a white ceiling. Memories floated up to him of a double-wailed coffin, and sleep and pain.

The pain was gone.

He sat up at once.

And flapped his arms wildly for balance. Everything felt wrong. His arms would not swing

right. His body was too light. His head bobbed strangely on a thin neck. He reached frantically for the

nearest support, which turned out to be a blond young man in a white jumpsuit. Corbell missed his grip;

his arms were shorter than he had expected. He toppled on his side, shook his head and sat up more

carefully.

His arms. Scrawny, knobby-and not his.

The man in the jumpsuit said, "Are you all right?"

"Yeah," said Corbell.My God, what have they done to me? I thought I was ready for

anything, but this - He fought rising panic. His throat was rusty, but that was all right. This was certainly

somebody else's body, but it didn't seem to have cancer, either. "What's the date? How long has it

been?"

A quick recovery. The checker gave him a plus. "Twenty-one ninety, your dating. You won't

have to worry about our dating."

That sounded ominous. Cautiously Corbell postponed the obvious next question:What's

happened to me ? and asked instead, "Why not?"

"You won't be joining our society."

"No? What, then?"

"Several professions are open to you-a limited choice. If you don't qualify for any of them we'll

try someone else."

Corbell sat on the edge of the hard operating table. His body seemed younger, more limber,

definitely thinner, not very clean. He was acutely aware that his abdomen did not hurt no matter how he

moved.

He asked, "And what happens to me?"

"I've never learned how to answer that question. Call it a problem in metaphysics," said the

checker. "Let me detail what's happened to you so far and then you can decide for yourself."

There was an empty man. Still breathing and as healthy as most of society in the year 2190.

But empty. The electrical patterns in the brain, the worn paths of nervous reflex, the memories, theperson

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had all been wiped away as penalty for an unnamed crime.

And there was this frozen thing.

"Your newspapers called you peoplecorpsicles ," said the blond man. "I never understood

what the tapes meant by that."

"It comes from popsicle. Frozen sherbet." Corbell had used the word himself before he

became one of them. One of the corpsicles, the frozen dead.

Frozen within a corpsicle's frozen brain were electrical patterns that could be recorded. The

process would warm the brain and destroy most of the patterns, but that hardly mattered, because other

things must be done too.

Personality was not all in the brain. Memory RNA was concentrated in the brain, but it ran all

through the nerves and the blood. In Corbell's case the clumps of cancer had to be cut away. Then the

RNA could be leeched out of what was left. The operation would have left nothing like a human being,

Corbell gathered. More like bloody mush.

"What's been done to you is not the kind of thing that can be done twice," the checker told

him. "You get one chance and this is it. If you don't work out we'll terminate and try someone else. The

vaults are full of corpsicles."

"You mean you'd wipe my personality," Corbell said unsteadily. "But I haven't committed a

crime. Don't I have any rights?"

The checker looked stunned. Then he laughed. "I thought I'd explained. The man you think

you are is dead. Corbell's will was probated long ago. His widow-"

"Damn it, I left money to myself!"

"No good." Though the man still smiled, his face was impersonal, remote, Unreachable. A vet

smiles reassuringly at a cat due to be fixed. "A dead man can't own property. That was settled in the

courts long ago. It wasn't fair to the heirs."

Corbell jerked an unexpectedly bony thumb at his bony chest. "But I'm alive now!"

"Not in law. You can earn your new life. The State will give you a new birth certificate and

citizenship if you give the State good reason."

Corbell sat for a moment, absorbing that. Then he got off the table. "Let's get started then.

What do you need to know about me?"

"Your name."

"Jerome Branch Corbell."

"Call me Pierce." The checker did not offer to shake hands. Neither did Corbell, perhaps

because he sensed the man would not respond, perhaps because they were both noticeably overdue for

a bath. "I'm your checker. Do you like people? I'm just asking. We'll test you in detail later."

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"I get along with the people around me, but I like my privacy."

The checker frowned. "That narrows it more than you might think. The isolationism you called

privacy was-well, a passing fad. We don't have the room for it . . . or the inclination, either. We can't

send you to a colony world-"

"I might make a good colonist. I like travel."

"You'd make terrible breeding stock. Remember, the genes aren't yours. No. You get one

choice, Corbell. Rammer."

"Rammer?"

"I'm afraid so."

"That's the first strange word you've used since I woke up. In fact-hasn't the language changed

at all? You don't even have an accent."

"Part of my profession. I learned your speech through RNA training, many years ago. You'll

learn your trade the same way if you get that far. You'll be amazed how fast you learn with RNA shots to

help you along. But you'd better be right about liking your privacy, Corbell, and about liking to travel,

too. Can you take orders?"

"I was in the army."

"What does that mean?"

"Means yes."

"Good. Do you like strange places and faraway people, or vice versa?"

"Both." Corbell smiled hopefully. "I've raised buildings all over the world. Can the world use

another architect?"

"No. Do you feel that the State owes you something?"

There could be but one answer to that. "No."

"But you had yourself frozen. You must have felt that the future owed you something."

"Not at all. It was a good risk. I was dying."

"Ah." The checker looked him over thoughtfully. "If you had something to believe in, perhaps

dying wouldn't mean so much."

Corbell said nothing.

They gave him a short word-association test in English. That test made Corbell suspect that a

good many corpsicles must date from near his own death in 1970. They took a blood sample, then

exercised him to exhaustion and took another blood sample. They tested his pain threshold by direct

nerve stimulation-excruciatingly unpleasant-then took another blood sample. They gave him a Chinese

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puzzle and told him to take it apart.

Pierce then informed him that the testing was over. "After all, we already know the state of

your health."

"Then why the blood samples?"

The checker looked at him for a moment. "You tell me."

Something about that look gave Corbell the creepy feeling that he was on trial for his life. The

feeling might have been caused only by the checker's rather narrow features, his icy blue gaze and

abstracted smile. Still . . . Pierce had stayed with him all through the testing, watching him as if Corbell's

behavior was a reflection on Pierce's judgment. Corbell thought carefully before he spoke.

"You have to know how far I'll go before I quit. You can analyze the blood samples for

adrenalin and fatigue poisons to find out just how much I was hurting, just how tired I really was."

"That's right," said the checker.

Corbell had survived again.

He would have given up much earlier on the pain test. But at some point Pierce had mentioned

that Corbell was the fourth corpsicle personality to be tested in that empty body.

He remembered going to sleep that last time, two hundred and twenty years ago.

His family and friends had been all around him, acting like mourners. He had chosen the coffin,

paid for vault space, and made out his Last Will and Testament, but he had not thought of it asdying . He

had been given a shot. The eternal pain had drifted away in a soft haze. He had gone to sleep.

He had drifted off wondering about the future, wondering what he would wake to. A vault into

the unknown. World government? Interplanetary spacecraft? Clean fusion power? Strange clothing,

body paints, nudism? New principles of architecture, floating houses, arcologies?

Or crowding, poverty, all the fuels used up, power provided by cheap labor? He'd thought of

those, but they didn't worry him. The world could not afford to wake him if it was that poor. The world

he dreamed of in those last moments was a rich world, able to support such luxuries as Jaybee Corbell.

It looked like he wasn't going to see too damn much of it.

Someone led him away after the testing. The guard, walked with a meaty hand wrapped

around Corbell's thin upper arm. Leg irons would have been no more effective had Corbell thought of

escaping. The guard took him up a narrow staircase to the roof.

The noon sun blazed in a blue sky that shaded to yellow, then brown at the horizon. Green

plants grew in close-packed rows on parts of the roof. Elsewhere many sheets of something glassy were

exposed to the sunlight.

Corbell caught one glimpse of the world from a bridge between two roofs. It was a cityscape

of close-packed buildings, all of the same cold cubistic design.

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And Corbell was impossibly high on a narrow strip of concrete with no guardrails at all. He

froze. He stopped breathing.

The guard did not speak. He tugged at Corbell's arm, not hard, and watched to see what he

would do. Corbell pulled himself together and went on.

The room was all bunks: two walls of bunks with a gap between. The light was cool and

artificial, but outside it was nearly noon. Could they be expecting him to sleep? But jet lag had never

bothered Corbell. . .

The room wasbig , a thousand bunks big. Most of the bunks were full. A few occupants

watched incuriously as the guard showed Corbell which bunk was his. It was the bottommost in a stack

of six. Corbell had to drop to his knees and roll to get into it. The bedclothes were strange: silky and very

smooth, even slippery-the only touch of luxury about the place. But there was no top sheet, nothing to

cover him. He lay on his side, looking out at the dormitory from near floor level.

Now, finally, he could let himself think:

I'm alive.

Earlier it might have been a fatal distraction. He'd been holding it back:

I made it!

I'm alive!

And young! That wasn't even in the contract.

But, he thought reluctantly, because it would not stay buried,who is it that's alive? Some

kind of composite? A criminal rehabilitated with the aid of some spare chemicals and an electric

brainwashing device. . . ? No. Jaybee Corbell is alive and well, if a trifle confused .

Once he had had that rare ability: He could go to sleep anywhere, anytime. But sleep was very

far from him now. He watched and tried to learn.

Three things were shocking about that place.

One was the smell. Apparently perfumes and deodorants had been another passing fad. Pierce

had been overdue for a bath. So was the new, improved Corbell. Here the smell was rich.

The second was the loving bunks, four of them in a vertical stack, twice as wide as the singles

and with thicker mattresses. The doubles were for loving, not sleeping. What shocked Corbell was that

they were right out in the open, not hidden by so much as a gauze curtain.

The same was true of the toilets.

How can they live like this?

Corbell rubbed his nose and jumped-and cursed at himself for jumping. His own nose had

been big and fleshy and somewhat shapeless. But the nose he now rubbed automatically when trying to

think was small and narrow with a straight, sharp edge. He might very well get used to the smell and

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everything else before he got used to his own nose.

Eventually he slept.

Some time after dusk a man came for him. A broad, brawny type wearing a gray jumper and a

broad expressionless face, the guard was not one to waste words. He found Corbell's bunk, pulled

Corbell out by one arm and led him stumbling away. Corbell was facing Pierce before he was fully

awake.

In annoyance he asked, "Doesn't anyone else speak English?"

"No," said the checker.

Pierce and the guard guided Corbell to a comfortable armchair facing a wide curved screen.

They put padded earphones on him. They set a plastic bottle of clear fluid on a shelf over his head.

Corbell noticed a clear plastic tube tipped with a hypodermic needle.

"Breakfast?"

Pierce missed the sarcasm. "You'll have one meal each day-after learning period and

exercise." He inserted the needle into a vein in Corbell's arm. He covered the wound with a blob of what

might have been Silly Putty.

Corbell watched it all without emotion. If he had ever been afraid of needles the months of

pain and cancer had worked it out of him. A needle was surcease, freedom from pain for a while.

"Learn now," said Pierce. "This knob controls speed. The volume is set for your hearing. You

may replay any section once. Don't worry about your arm; you can't pull the tube loose."

"There's something I wanted to ask you, only I couldn't remember the word. What's a

rammer?"

"Starship pilot."

Corbell studied the checker's face, without profit. "You're kidding."

"No. Learn now." The checker turned on Corbell's screen and went away.

II

A rammer was the pilot of a starship.

The starships were Bussard ramjets. They caught interstellar hydrogen in immaterial nets of

electromagnetic force, compressed and guided it into a ring of pinched force fields, and there burned it in

fusion fire. Potentially there was no limit at all on the speed of a Bussard ramjet. The ships were

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enormously powerful, enormously complex, enormously expensive.

Corbell thought it incredible that the State would trust so much value, such devastating power

and mass to one man. To a man two centuries dead! Why, Corbell was an architect, not an astronaut! It

was news to him that the concept of the Bussard ramjet predated his own death. He had watched the

Apollo XI and XIII flights on television, and that had been the extent of his interest in space flight, until

now.

Now his life depended on his "rammer" career. He never doubted it. That was what kept

Corbell in front of the screen with the earphones on his head for fourteen hours that first day. He was

afraid he might be tested.

He didn't understand all he was supposed to learn. But he was not tested, either.

The second day he began to get interested. By the third day he was fascinated. Things he had

never understood-relativity and magnetic theory and abstract mathematics-he now grasped intuitively. It

was marvelous!

And he ceased to wonder why the State had chosen Jerome Corbell. It was always done this

way. It made sense, all kinds of sense.

The payload of a starship was small and its operating lifetime was more than a man's lifetime.

A reasonably safe life-support system for one man occupied an unreasonably high proportion of the

payload. The rest must go for biological package probes. A crew of more than one was out of the

question.

A good, capable, loyal citizen was not likely to be enough of a loner. In any case, why send a

citizen? The times would change drastically before a seeder ramship could return. The State itself might

change beyond recognition. A returning rammer must adjust to a whole new culture. There was no way

to tell in advance what it might be like.

Why not pick a man who had already chosen to adjust to a new culture? A man whose own

culture was already two centuries dead when the trip started?

And a man who already owed the State his life.

The RNA was most effective. Corbell stopped wondering about Pierce's dispassionately

possessive attitude. He began to think of himself as property being programmed for a purpose.

And he learned. He skimmed microtaped texts as if they were already familiar. The process

was heady. He became convinced that he could rebuild a seeder ramship with his bare hands, given the

parts. He had loved figures all his life, but abstract math had been beyond him until now. Field theory,

monopole field equations, circuitry design. When to suspect the presence of a gravitational point source

how to locate it, use it, avoid it.

The teaching chair was his life. The rest of his time-exercise, dinner, sleep-seemed vague,

uninteresting.

He exercised with about twenty others in a room too small for the purpose. Like Corbell, the

others were lean and stringy, in sharp contrast to the brawny wedge-shaped men who were their guards.

They followed the lead of a guard, running in place because there was no room for real running, forming

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Larry Niven - A Hole in Space

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