Larry Niven - Fallen Angels

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Larry Niven - Fallen Angels
CHAPTER ONE
"Aspiring to Be Gods . . ."
High over the northern hemisphere the scoopship's hull
began to sing. The cabin was a sounding box for
vibrations far below the threshold of hearing. Alex
MacLeod could feel his bones singing in sympathy.
Piranha was kissing high atmosphere.
Planet Earth was shrouded in pearl white. There was
no break anywhere. There were mountain ranges of
fluff, looming cliffs, vast plains that stretched to a far
distant convex horizon, a cloud cover that looked firm
enough to walk on. An illusion; a geography of vapors
as insubstantial as the dreams of youth. If he were to
set foot upon them . . . The clouds did not float in free
fall, as was proper, but in an acceleration frame that
could hurl the scoopship headlong into an enormous
ball of rock and iron and smash it like any dream.
Falling, they called it.
Alex felt the melancholy stealing over him again.
Nostalgia? For that germ-infested ball of mud? Not
possible. He could barely remember Earth. Snapshots
from childhood; a chaotic montage of memories. He
had fallen down the cellar steps once in a childhood
home he scarcely recalled. Tumbling, arms flailing,
head thumping hard against the concrete floor. He
hadn't been hurt; not really. He'd been too small to
mass up enough kinetic energy. But he recalled the
terror vividly. Now he was a lot bigger, and he would
fall a lot farther.
His parents had once taken him atop the Sears Tower
and another time to the edge of the Mesa Verde cliffs;
and each time he had thought what an awful long way
down it was. Then, they had taken him so far up that
down ceased to mean anything at all.
Alex stared out of Piranha's windscreen at the cloud
deck, trying to conjure that feeling of height; trying to
feel that the clouds were down and he was up. But it
had all been too many years ago, in another world. All
he could see was distance. Living in the habitats did
that to you. It stole height from your senses and left you
only with distance.
He glanced covertly at Gordon Tanner in the copilot's
seat. If you were born in the habitats, you never knew
height at all. There were no memories to steal. Was
Gordon luckier than he, or not?
The ship sang. He was beginning to hear it now.
And Alex MacLeod was back behind a stick, where
God had meant him to be, flying a spaceship again.
Melancholy was plain ingratitude! He had plotted and
schemed his way into this assignment. He had
pestered Mary and pestered Mary until she had
relented and bumped his name to the top of the list just
to be rid of him. He had won.
Of course, there was a cost. Victories are always
bittersweet. Sweet because . . . He touched the stick
and felt nothing. They were still in vacuum . . . thicker
vacuum, that was heating up. If there wasn't enough air
to give bite to the control surfaces, a pilot must call it
vacuum.
How could you explain the sweetness to someone who
had never conned a ship? You couldn't. He relaxed in
the acceleration chair, feeling the tingling in his hands
and feet. The itching anticipation. Oh, to be useful
again, even if for a moment.
But bitter because . . . That part he did not want to think
about. Just enjoy the moment; become one with it. If
this was to be his last trip, he would enjoy it while he
could. If everything went A-OK, he'd be back upstairs in
a few hours, playing the hero for the minute or so that
people would care. A real hero, not a retired hero. Then
back in the day-care center wiping snotty noses. It
would be years before another dip trip was needed.
He'd never be on the list again.
Which meant that Alex MacLeod, pilot and engineer,
wasn't needed any longer. So what do you do with a
pilot when pilots aren't needed? What do the habitats
do with a man who can't work outside, because one
more episode of explosive decompression will bring on
a fatal stroke?
Day care. Snotty noses. Work at learning to be a
teacher, a job he didn't much like.
Look on the bright side, Alex, my boy. Maybe you won't
make it back at all.
Sure, he could always go out the way Mish Lykonov
had in Moon Rat, auguring in to Mare Tranquilitatis.
They'd have a ceremony-—and they'd miss the ship
more than him. Even Mary. Maybe especially Mary,
since she'd got him the mission.
He straightened in his seat and touched the controls
again. Maybe just a touch of resistance . . .
"Chto delayet? Alex!"
Something had prodded Gordon awake. Alex glanced
to the right. "What is it?"
"I'm getting a reading on the air temperature gauge!"
"Right. There's enough air outside now to have a
temperature."
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Gordon nodded, still unbelieving.
Gordon had read the book. Come to that, Gordon read
a lot of books, but books don't mean much. No one
ever learned anything out of a book, anyway. This was
why they always teamed a newbie with an old pro.
Hands-on learning. The problem with on-the-job
training for this job was that there was not a hell of a lot
of room for trial and error. Alex moved the stick gently,
and felt the ship respond. Not vacuum anymore! He
banked and brought them up level, feeling the air
rushing past just outside the skin. His eyes danced
across the gauges. Here. There. Not reading them.
Just a glance to see if something was wrong, or if
something had changed since the last glance. Dynamic
air temperature. Stagnation air temperature. The Mach
number needle sprang to life, leaped from zero to
absurdity, then hunted across the dial. A grin stretched
itself across his face. No blues now. He hadn't forgotten
at all; not a damned thing.
"What is funny?" Gordon demanded.
"Old war-horse heard the trumpet again. Now it's your
turn. Take the stick." Fun was fun, but it was time for
the kid to wrap his hands around the real thing. There
was only so much you could do in a simulator. "There.
Feel it?"
"Uh . . ." Gordon pulled back slightly on the copilot's
stick. He looked uncertain.
He hadn't felt anything. "Take over," Alex growled.
"You're flying the ship now. Can't you tell?"
"Well . . ." Another tentative move at the controls.
Piranha wobbled. "Hey! Yeah!"
"Good. Look, it's hard to describe, but the ship will tell
you how she's doing if you really listen. I don't mean
you should forget the gauges. Keep scanning them;
they're your eyes and ears. But you've got to listen with
your hands and feet and ass, too. Make the ship an
extension of your entire body. Do you feel it? That
rush? That's air moving past us at five miles per
second. Newton's not flying us anymore. You are."
Gordon flashed a nervous grin, like he'd just discovered
sex.
"What's our flight path?" Alex asked.
"Uh . . ." A quick glance at the map rollout. "Greenland
upcoming."
"Good. Hate to be over Norway."
"Why?"
Why. Didn't the kid listen to the downside news
broadcasts? Gordon, this is your planet! Don't you
care? No, he probably didn't. It was his grandparents
planet.
"There's war in Norway. If we flew over, somebody
would cruise a missile at us sure as moonquakes, and
we'd never even know which side did it."
The new tiling was wonderful. In the old days, the ship's
skin would be glowing; but now . . . Four thousand
degrees and no visible sign at all. Still, they'd be
glowing like a madman's dream on an IR screen, new
tiles or no, and that was all the Downers would need to
vector in on.
"Which side?" Gordon mused. "What are the sides?"
Alex laughed. "That's one of the reasons we can't be
sure. When it started, it was what was left of NATO
defending the Baltics." Non-nuclear, but it just went on
and on and on. Alex didn't really care who won any
more than Gordon did. "After a while, the
Scandinavians and the Russians took a nervous look
over their shoulders at the glaciers, and East versus
West became North versus South."
"Silly bastards. Nye kulturni."
"Da." It didn't surprise him anymore. All the younger
Floaters spoke Russian as automatically as English.
Russlish? Ever since Peace and Freedom had pooled
their resources, everyone was supposed to learn each
other's language; but Alex hadn't gotten past "Ya tebye
lyublyu." Hello was "zdravstvuitye." Alex thought there
was something masochistic about speaking a language
that strung so many consonants together. "Be fair,
Gordon. If you had ice growing a mile thick in your
backyard, wouldn't you want to move south?"
Gordon mulled it. "Why south?"
He couldn't help the grin. "Never mind. Let me take her
again. Hang on, while I kill some velocity. Watch what I
do and follow me." He stroked the stick gently.
Here we go, baby. You'll love this. Drop the scoop face-
on to the wind. Open wide. That's right. Spread your
tail, just for a moment ... Alex realized that his lips were
moving and clamped them shut. The younger ones
didn't understand when he talked to the ship. Gordon
was having enough trouble feeling the ship. "Okay," he
said finally, "that's done. Take over, again."
Gordon did, more smoothly than before. Alex watched
him from the corner of his eye while pretending to study
the instruments. Piranha was a sweet little ship. Alex
had flown her once, years before, and considered her
the best of the three remaining scoopers. Maybe that
was just Final Trip nostalgia. Maybe he would have felt
the same about whichever ship he flew on his last dip;
but he would shed a special tear for Piranha when they
retired her. The scoopers were twenty-two years old
already and, while there was not much wear and tear
parked in a vacuum, screaming through the Earth's
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atmosphere like a white hot banshee did tend to age
the gals a bit. Jaws was already retired. Here was
Gordon at nineteen, just getting started; and the ships
at twenty-two were ready to pack it in. Life was funny.
Alex ran a hand lightly across the instrument panel.
Scoopships were pretty in an ugly sort of way: lifting
bodies with gaping scoops that made them look like
early jet airplanes. They could not land-—no landing
gear-—but they didn't dip into the atmosphere deeply
enough for that to matter. But they were the hottest
ships around.
Piranha skimmed above the glare-white earth as hot as
any meteor, but never too hot at any point. Humming,
vibrating, functional.
Gordon was functional too. Alert, but not tense; holding
her nose just right while flame-hot air piled through the
scoop and bled into the holding tank. The velocity
dropped below optimum on the dial and Gordon bled
some of the air into the scramjet and added hydrogen
until the velocity rose again. He did it casually, as if he
did this sort of thing every day. Alex nodded to himself.
The kid had it. He just needed it coaxed out of him.
"Alex?" Gordon said suddenly. "Why not Greenland?"
"Hmm?"
"Why isn't anyone in Greenland shooting missiles?"
Alex grinned. That was good. Gordon was flying a
scoopship on a dip trip, sucking air at five miles per,
and trying to make casual conversation. That's right,
Gordo. You can't do this sort of thing all tensed up;
you've got to be relaxed.
"Nobody there but Eskimos," he explained. "An Ice Age
doesn't bother them any. Hell, they probably think
they've all died and gone to Inuit Heaven."
"Eskimos I do not know. Gogol once wrote good story
that speaks of Laplanders but I did not understand-—"
The sky had turned from black to navy blue. Wouldn't
want to get any lower. Gordon glanced out the
windscreen and said, "Shouldn't we be seeing land by
now?"
Alex shook his head, realized Gordon wasn't looking at
him and answered. "No, the cloud-deck off the pole . .
." He stopped. The white below them wasn't the cloud
shroud any more. They must have gone past the
southern edge or hit a hole in it. White on white. Cloud
or ice. If you didn't actually look you, might not notice.
"Damn, damn. The ice is still growing."
Gordon didn't say anything. Alex watched him a
moment longer then turned his attention to the gauges.
Gordon was nineteen. There had always been an Ice
Age, so it did not surprise him that the glaciers had
crept farther south. Alex thought he remembered a
different world-—green, not white-—before his parents
brought him upstairs. He wasn't sure how much of it
was genuine childhood memories and how much was
movies or photographs in books. The habitats had a
fair number of books on tape, brought up when they still
got along with the Downers.
The green hills of earth, he thought. Now the glaciers-
—not rivers of ice, but vast oceans of ice-—were
spreading south at tens of miles a year. Hundreds of
miles in some places. In the dictionary, "glacial" meant
slow; but Ice Ages came on fast. Ten thousand years
ago the glaciers had covered England and most of
Europe in less than a century. They'd known that since
the sixties . . . though no one had ever seen fit to revise
his schoolbooks. But what did that matter? To a school
kid a century was forever anyway.
As for Gordon . . . He glanced again at his copilot. Well,
what the world is like in our lifetimes is what it should
be like forever. As it was in the beginning, is now, and
ever shall be. It was funny to think of groundside
environmentalists desperately struggling against
Nature, trying to preserve forever the temporary
conditions and mayfly species of a brief interglacial.
Alex looked again through the cockpit windscreen and
sighed.
"We could have stopped it," he said abruptly.
"Eh?" Gordon gave him a puzzled glance.
"The Ice Age. Big orbiting solar mirrors. More
microwave power stations. Sunlight is free. We could
have beamed down enough power to stop the ice. Look
what one little SUNSAT has done for Winnipeg."
Gordon studied the frozen planet outside. He shook his
head. "Ya nye ponimál," he admitted. "I faked the
examiners, but I never did get it. The what-did-they-
call-it, polar ice cap? It stayed put for thousands of
years. Then, of a sudden it reaches out like vast white
amoeba."
All of a sudden, Alex's earphones warbled. He touched
a hand to his ear. "Piranha here."
"Alex!" It was Mary Hopkins's voice. She was sitting
mission control for this dip. Alex wondered if he should
be flattered . . . And if Lonny was there with her. "We've
got a bogey rising," said Mary. "Looks like he's
vectoring in on you."
So, they don't shoot missiles out of Greenland? Find
another line of work, Alex—boy; you'll never make it as
a soothsayer. "Roger, Big Momma." He spun to
Gordon. "Taking over," he barked. "Close the scoop.
Seal her up. Countermeasures!"
"Da!" He said something else, too rapid to follow.
"English, damn your eyes!"
"Oh. Yeah. Roger. Scoops closed."
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Piranha felt better. Under control. "Close your
faceplate." Alex pulled his own shut and sealed it.
"Alex, I have something." Gordon's voice sounded tinny
over the radio, or maybe a wee bit stressed. "Aft and to
the left and below," he said.
Seven o'clock low.
"Constant bearing and closing."
"Drop flares." That wouldn't do any good. Piranha was
the hottest thing in the sky right now. But like the lady
said, while spooning chicken soup to the dead man, it
couldn't hurt. "How are they seeing us?"
"K-band."
"Jam it."
"Am."
He sure enough was. Alex grunted. At least Gordo had
read that book. Alex squinted at his radar. There was
the bogey, sure enough. Small. Constant bearing and
closing. "Hang on." He peeled off to starboard and
watched the heat gauge rise. Piranha didn't have wings
for a near miss to tear off. Just small, fat fins and a big,
broad, flat belly to be melted, evaporated or pierced.
Alex bit his lip. Don't think about that. Concentrate on
what you can do.
The sharp turn pushed him against the corner of his
seat. Alex relaxed to the extra weight and prayed that
his Earth-born bones would remember how to take it.
Decades of falling had turned him soft. The
acceleration felt like a ton of sand covering him. He felt
the blood start in his sinuses. But he could take it. He
could take it because he had to.
Gordon sat gripping the arms of the copilot's seat. His
cheeks sagged. His head bowed. Gordon had been
born in free fall and thrust was new to him. He looked
frightened. It must feel like he'd taken sick.
The turn seemed to go on forever. Alex watched the
bogey on the scope. Each sweep of the arm brought
the blip closer to the center. Closer. He pulled harder
against the stick. The next blip was left of center. Then
it arced away. Alex knew that was an illusion. The
missile had gone straight; Piranha had banked.
"You lost it!" Gordon shouted. He turned and looked at
Alex with a grin that nearly split his face in two.
Alex smiled back. "Scared?"
"Hell, no."
"Yeah. Me, too. Anyone flying at Mach 26 while a
heatseeking cruise missile tries to fly up his ass is
entitled to be scared." He toggled the radio. It was
Management Decision time. "Big Momma, we have lost
the bogey. Do you have instructions?"
There was a pause; short, but significant. "We need
that nitrogen," said Mary's voice.
Alex waited for her to finish, then realized that she had.
We need that nitrogen. That was all she was going to
say, leaving the ball in his octant.
Of course we need the nitrogen, he thought. Recycling
wasn't perfect. Gas molecules outgassed right through
the walls of the stations. Every now and then someone
had to take the bucket to the well and get some more.
The question was when. When someone with an itchy
finger was sitting in a missile farm somewhere below?
He could pack it home and be the goat; his last trip a
failure. Delta vee thrown away for no gain. Or he could
fly heroically into the jaws of death and suck air. Either
way, it was going to be his decision.
He sensed Lonny Hopkins's spidery hand behind
things. If Mary was performing plausible deniability on
his bones, it must be because her husband was floating
right behind her at the comm console, one hand gentle
on her shoulder, while she downlinked to the stud who
had . . .
Jesus, but some people had long memories.
Well, Mary was a free citizen, wasn't she? If the wife of
the station commander wants a little extracurricular, it's
her choice. She had never pushed him away; not until
that last night together. We're hanging on up here by
our fingernails, she had said then. We've got to all pull
together; stand behind the station commander.
Right.
Nobody could stand behind Lonny Hopkins because he
never turned his back on anyone. With good reason.
Maybe he's right. He is good at the goddam job, and
maybe our position is so precarious that there's no
room for democratic debate. That doesn't mean I have
to like it.
And it's decision time.
"Understood, Big Momma. We'll get your air." Take
that, Commander Lonny Hopkins. He clicked off and
turned to Gordon. "Open the scoops, but bleed half of it
to the scramjets."
"Alex . . ." Gordon frowned and bit his lip.
"They say they need the air."
"Yeah-da." Gordon's fingers flipped toggled switches
back up.
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Alex felt the drag as the big scoop doors opened again.
The doors had just completed their cycle when Gordon
bean shouting. "Ekho! Ekho priblizháyetsya!"
"English!"
Something exploded aft of the cabin and Alex felt his
suit pop out. His ears tried to pop, and Alex MacLeod
whined deep in his throat.
He'd forgotten, but his nerves remembered. It wasn't
falling he feared, it was air tearing through his throat,
daggers in his ears, pressure trying to rip his chest
apart. Five times his suit had leaked air while they
worked to save Freedom Station. He wore the scars in
ruptured veins and arteries, everywhere on his body, as
if Lonny Hopkins had given him to a mad tattoo artist.
There were more scars in his lungs and in his sinus
cavities. A sixth exposure to vacuum would have his
brains spewing through his nose. Alex couldn't come
out to play; they had to keep him in the day-care
center.
His fists clenched on the controls in a rigor mortis grip.
He heard his own whine of terror, and Gordon's shout,
and felt Piranha falling off hard to port. And his suit was
holding, holding.
He fought the stick hard when he tried to steady her.
Had he recovered too late? "Hold fast, baby," he said
through clenched teeth. "Hold fast." Hold Fast was the
ancient motto of the MacLeod. Alex wished fleetingly
that he had the Fairy Flag that Clan MacLeod unfurled
only in the gravest peril. Piranha vibrated and
shuddered. Something snapped with the sound of
piano wire. "Come on, baby. Steady down."
Incredibly, she did. "Good girl," he muttered, then
tongued the uplink on his suit radio. "Big Momma, Big
Momma. We've been hit." There was nothing for it now
but use up all the air they'd scooped, and anything else,
to light off the jets. Get back in orbit; out of the Well.
When you're in orbit you're halfway to anywhere! Get in
orbit and pickup would be easy. He toggled the
switches.
The rocket wouldn't light. The rocket wouldn't light. Air
speed was dropping steadily. The rocket wouldn't light.
He suppressed the knot of panic that twisted itself in his
gut. Time enough afterward, if there was an afterward.
The scramjet alone was not enough to reach orbit
again. It wouldn't be long before Piranha would be
moving too slowly to keep the jet lit. She would become
a glider.
And not a terribly good glider.
Alex swallowed. It looked awfully cold down below. And
the rocket wouldn't light.
"Mayday," he said. "Mayday. Piranha has a problem." A
part of his mind was detached, admiring the cool way
he reacted after that one moment of terror.
"This is Big Momma. What is your status?"
Well, I'm just fine, Mary; and how are you? "We're
going in, Mary. Tell my family. It's all in my file directory.
Access code word is dunvegan." He glanced over at
Gordon, but the teenager just shook his head. His face
was white through the plexiglass face shield. "And the
Tanner family, too." Gordon didn't have any children
yet. He was the child. Damned near unwanted child at
that: a stilyagi, a JayDee on parole. Some parole!
"Watch where we land and get the message out.
Tightbeam."
The phones hissed for long seconds. "Sure, Alex. We
have friends on Earth. Maybe not many, but . . . We'll
tell them. They'll take care of you. Can you-—can you
get her down?"
"I may not be good for anything else, but, by God, you
paint stripes on a brick and I can fly her."
"Then that's two things you do well."
He felt warmth spreading outward from his belly. Was
Lonny still there? Would he understand that message?
Alex almost hoped he could. Mary said something else
but he was too busy with the ship to hear her. Airspeed
had dropped to near Mach 2, and he tilted her nose
down to keep the scramjet lit and tried to turn south.
Ice. Ice all around and the cloud deck closing in again.
Piranha was shaped like the bastard daughter of an
airplane and a cement mixer. The slower she flew, the
more she acted like a cement mixer.
Not on the ice, baby. Not on the ice. Hang in there . . .
"Do you really fly that well?" Gordon asked tightly.
"I landed on Earth once before, Gordon. Who else do
you know who can say that?" Tom Corbett, Space
Cadet. That's me. Disguised as a washed-up day-care
gopher, he is in reality Alex MacLeod, Hot Pilot. Lord,
just let me get us down in one piece.
Fifteen miles up and the air was thick. Mach 3.5. The
clouds below were puffy with turbulence. Piranha was
diving into a storm. He wondered whether North Dakota
was flat or mountainous.
Naybe an ice landing would be all right. Ice was
smooth, wasn't it? Or was that only true in free fall?
Piranha was hot from friction. She'd melt her own
runway across the glacier.
Sure, but step outside afterward. Your eyeballs will
freeze so cold they'll shatter when you blink . . .
The clouds closed in and he was flying by radar.
Dropping. Dropping. Lose velocity in the turns. Mach
2.5 and falling.
Gordon couldn't lift his head against the acceleration.
"At least we'll have life support," he said suddenly. "Life
Page 7 of 166
support for four billion people, my teacher told me. And
it doesn't get really cold, right? Cold enough to freeze
water, but not carbon dioxide."
Alex grunted. Cold enough to freeze water. Gordo,
what is the human body made of? Another turn.
"Right," he said. Gordon wasn't a distraction. He was
just a voice. The last thing Alex wanted during his last
moments was dead silence. There would be enough of
that afterward.
Think positive, Alex boy. You'll live through the landing,
so you can freeze to death on the ice.
Piranha shuddered as she dropped below Mach 1. The
missile must have left some holes, creating turbulence
in the airstream. Then the scramjet quit and she was
diving at the ground. Ice crystals impacting on the skin
created a rustling sound. When radar read a thousand
feet up, Alex lifted the nose and waited.
Piranha didn't have wheels.
Friends on Earth, Mary had said. He wondered who
she had meant. Earth's four billion hated the Peace and
Freedom space stations with a passion. A dozen
nations had declared war when the nitrogen dipping
started; but they had no space capabilities, so it never
meant anything but noise. Now Piranha was diving into
their hands.
Two hundred feet up and slowing. He dropped the
nose, trading altitude for speed, and pretended that the
scoopship had wheels. Wind battered the ship. She
yawed and Alex fought with the stick. Once the ship
dipped suddenly and Alex fought a moment of pure
panic. Don't lose it now! Don't lose it now! The ground
looked smooth on the radar. Gordon's hands were on
the dash, his elbows locked. It won't be too cold,
Gordo. Not cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide.
It was the second best landing he had ever made.
Second by a long, long margin. Piranha hit the ice and
skipped like a schoolgirl hit and skipped again. There
was probably a third or fourth skip, too; but Alex never
knew.
* * *
Soren Haroldsson had watched the flame from his
steading. He was wrapped in his fur parka, heavy
boots, mittens like bowling balls, but still he shivered.
His breath was frosty steam in the evening air. He
always took a turn around the house before they
battened down for the night checking the gate, the wolf-
traps, making sure none of the animals had been
accidentally left outside.
It came just at dusk, a fiery stream low across the sky
still large and burning as it touched the ice and sent up
clouds of steam. Not a shooting star. Not a sky stone
like he'd heard of. It had come in too shallow, too
controlled. A ship of some sort.
Ah, surely it was Angels.
He shook his swaddled fist at the sky. "Be damned, you
air thieves! We've got you now. Heh!" His breath froze
on his graying blond mustache and beard. Tomorrow
he would saddle up Ozzie and ride into Casselton to
notify the authorities. They were probably hunting the
Angels already; but only a fool went riding at night, and
Ozzie, at least, was no fool.
Inside, bundled in the warmth of family and livestock,
he told Lisbet what he had seen and guessed.
Haughty, technomaniac Angels down on the Great Ice.
Poetic justice, he said. Poetic, she replied and, smiling,
quoted from memory:
"In pride, in reas'ning pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere and rush into the skies!
Aspiring to be Gods if Angels fell,
Aspiring to be Angels men rebel."
CHAPTER TWO
"One Moment in Childhood. . . "
The phone warbled and Sherrine Hartley pulled a pillow
over her head, even though she knew it would do no
good. She'd been allocated a phone precisely because
they might want to call her in the middle of the night.
Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor cold of night shall
keep the programmers from being rousted out of bed to
untangle every little glitch in operations. Didn't anyone
know how to run programs anymore?
The phone warbled.
It was warm in bed, buried beneath the down
comforter. The thermostat was turned down to 55, as
the law required, and the last thing she wanted was to
get out into the chilly air. Her arm snaked out from
beneath the comforter, groped for the phone set and
pulled it under the covers with her. The plastic was
cold, but she was bundled in flannel and felt it only in
her hands.
"Dr. Hartley here." She winced. It was like holding an
ice cube to her ear.
"Sherrine?"
Page 8 of 166
Not the University, after all. That really ticked her off.
The 'danes who signed her paycheck bought the right
to wake her up, sometimes and for some things; but ex-
boyfriends did not. "Bob," she said, "do you know what
time it is?"
"Certainly. Two-forty-three. Plus or minus three sigma."
She sighed. Never ask a physicist a question like that.
"What do you want, Bob? And why can't it wait until
morning?"
"I need you, Sherrine. Now."
"What? Look, Bob, that's all over." And why couldn't
some men ever believe that?
"I'll be there in five minutes."
"Bob!" But she was talking into a dead phone.
She thought about staying put under the comforter. It
wouldn't help. Bob Needleton was persistent. He was
quite capable of standing on her doorstep all night,
banging on the door until she opened. Sometimes that
sort of persistence was invaluable. In the lab, for
instance. Other times it was just a pain in the ass.
Damn him. She was wearing heavy flannel socks, and
she kept a pair of wooly slippers under the sheets with
her. She played contortionist for a while finding them
and putting them on. Then she slipped out of bed,
leaving the covers carefully in place so the bed would
stay warm. A heavy housecoat hung over the back of
the chair next to the bed. She snuggled into it and
shivered her way to the bathroom.
When she flipped the switch on the bulb glowed at
about quarter-strength. Sometimes a brownout could
be convenient. Real light would have blinded her just
then. She brushed her teeth to get the nighttime fuzzies
out. The water in the basin wasn't quite frozen, but it
shocked her teeth when she rinsed. She spat out into
the commode, because there was no sense in wasting
the rest of the water in the sink.
"Conservation will see us through," the posters said.
And when there's nothing left to conserve? She ran a
comb through her hair. It needed brushing, but she was
too cold.
"So what does Bob Needleton see in you," she asked
her reflection, "that he's coming out in the dead of
night?" The beanpole in the mirror did not answer. Big
nose. Big mouth. Not quite pretty. She could explain
why Jake left; but not why Bob wouldn't.
She opened the door on the first knock and stood out of
the way. The wind was whipping the ground snow in
swirling circles. Some of it blew in the door as Bob
entered. She slammed the door behind him. The snow
on the floor decided to wait a while before melting.
"Okay. You're here," she snapped. "There's no fire and
no place to sit. The bed's the only warm place and you
know it. I didn't know you were this hard up. And, by the
way, I don't have any company, thanks for asking." If
Bob couldn't figure out from that speech that she was
pissed, he'd never win the prize as Mr. Perception.
"I am that hard up," he said, moving closer. "Let's get it
on."
"Say what?" Bob had never been one for subtle
technique, but this was pushing it. She tried to step
back but his hands gripped her arms. They were cold
as ice, even through the housecoat. "Bob!" He pulled
her to him and buried his face in her hair.
"It's not what you think," he whispered. "We don't have
time for this, worse luck."
"Bob!"
"No, just bear with me. Let's go to your bedroom. I don't
want you to freeze."
He led her to the back of the house and she slid under
the covers without inviting him in. He lay on top, still
wearing his thick leather coat. Whatever he had in
mind, she realized, it wasn't sex. Not with her
housecoat, the comforter and his greatcoat playing
chaperone.
He kissed her hard and was whispering hoarsely in her
ear before she had a chance to react. "Angels down. A
scoopship. It crashed."
"Angels?" Was he crazy?
He kissed her neck. "Not so loud. I don't think the
'danes are listening, but why take chances? Angels.
Spacemen. Peace and Freedom."
She'd been away too long. She'd never heard
spacemen called Angels. And-— "Crashed?" She kept
it to a whisper. "Where?"
"Just over the border in North Dakota. Near Mapleton."
"Great Ghu, Bob. That's on the Ice!"
He whispered, "Yeah. But they're not too far in."
"How do you know about it?"
He snuggled closer and kissed her on the neck again.
Maybe sex made a great cover for his visit, but she
didn't think he had to lay it on so thick. "We know."
"We?"
"The Worldcon's in Minneapolis-St. Paul this year-—"
Page 9 of 166
The World Science Fiction Convention. "I got, the
invitation, but I didn't dare go. If anyone saw me-—"
"-—And it was just getting started when the call came
down from Freedom. Sherrine, they couldn't have
picked a better time or place to crash their scoopship.
That's why I came to you. Your grandparents live near
the crash site."
She wondered if there was a good time for crashing
scoopships. "So?"
"We're going to rescue them."
"We? Who's we?"
"The Con Committee, some of the fans-—"
"But why tell me, Bob? I'm fafiated. It's been years
since I've dared associate with fen."
Too many years, she thought. She had discovered
science fiction in childhood, at her neighborhood
branch library. She still remembered that first book:
Star Man's Son, by Andre Norton. Fors had been
persecuted because he was different; but he nurtured a
secret, a mutant power. Just the sort of hero to appeal
to an ugly-duckling little girl who would not act like other
little girls.
SF had opened a whole new world to her. A galaxy, a
universe of new worlds. While the other little girls had
played with Barbie dolls, Sherrine played with Lummox
and Poddy and Arkady and Susan Calvin. While they
went to the malls, she went to Trantor and the Witch
World. While they wondered what Look was In, she
wondered about resource depletion and nuclear war
and genetic engineering. Escape literature, they called
it. She missed it terribly.
"There is always one moment in childhood," Graham
Greene had written in The Power and the Glory, "when
the door opens and lets the future in." For some
people, that door never closed. She thought that Peter
Pan had had the right idea all along.
"Why tell you? Sherrine, we want you with us. Your
grandparents live near the crash site. They've got all
sorts of gear we can borrow for the rescue."
"Me?" A tiny trickle of electric current ran up her spine.
But . . . Nah. "Bob, I don't dare. If my bosses thought I
was associating with fen, I'd lose my job."
He grinned. "Yeah. Me, too." And she saw that he had
never considered that she might not go.
'Tis a Proud and Lonely Thing to Be a Fan, they used
to say, laughing. It had become a very lonely thing. The
Establishment had always been hard on science fiction.
The government-funded Arts Councils would pass out
tax money to write obscure poetry for "little" magazines,
but not to write speculative fiction. "Sci-fi isn't
literature." That wasn't censorship.
Perversely, people went on buying science fiction
without grants. Writers even got rich without
government funding. They couldn't kill us that way!
Then the Luddites and the Greens had come to power.
She had watched science fiction books slowly
disappear from the library shelves, beginning with the
children's departments. (That wasn't censorship either.
Libraries couldn't buy every book, now could they? So
they bought "realistic" children's books funded by the
National Endowment for the Arts, books about death
and divorce, and really important things like being
overweight or fitting in with the right school crowd.)
Then came paper shortages, and paper allocations.
The science fiction sections in the chain stores grew
smaller. ("You can't expect us to stock books that aren't
selling." And they can't sell if you don't stock them.)
Fantasy wasn't hurt so bad. Fantasy was about wizards
and elves, and being kind to the Earth, and harmony
with nature, all things the Greens loved. But science
fiction was about science.
Science fiction wasn't exactly outlawed. There was still
Freedom of Speech; still a Bill of Rights, even if it
wasn't taught much in the schools-—even if most kids
graduated unable to read well enough to understand it.
But a person could get into a lot of unofficial trouble for
reading SF or for associating with known fen. She
could lose her job, say. Not through government
persecution-—of course not-—but because of
"reduction in work force" or "poor job performance" or
"uncooperative attitude" or "politically incorrect" or a
hundred other phrases. And if the neighbors shunned
her, and tradesmen wouldn't deal with her, and stores
wouldn't give her credit, who could blame them?
Science fiction involved science; and science was a
conspiracy to pollute the environment, "to bring back
technology."
Damn right! she thought savagely. We do conspire to
bring back technology. Some of us are crazy enough to
think that there are alternatives to freezing in the dark.
And some of us are even crazy enough to try to rescue
marooned spacemen before they freeze, or disappear
into protective custody.
Which could be dangerous. The government might
declare you mentally ill, and help you.
She shuddered at that thought. She pushed and rolled
Bob aside. She sat up and pulled the comforter up tight
around herself. "Do you know what it was that attracted
me to science fiction?"
He raised himself on one elbow, blinked at her change
of subject, and looked quickly around the room, as if
suspecting bugs. "No, what?"
Page 10 of 166
"Not Fandom. I was reading the true quill long before I
knew about Fandom and cons and such. No, it was the
feeling of hope."
"Hope?"
"Even in the most depressing dystopia, there's still the
notion that the future is something we build. It doesn't
just happen. You can't predict the future, but you can
invent it. Build it. That is a hopeful idea, even when the
building collapses."
Bob was silent for a moment. Then he nodded. "Yeah.
Nobody's building the future anymore, 'We live in an
Age of Limited Choices.' " He quoted the government
line without cracking a smile. "Hell, you don't take
choices off a list. You make choices and add them to
the list. Speaking of which have you made your
choice?"
That electric tickle . . . "Are they even alive?"
"So far. I understand it was some kind of miracle that
they landed at all. They're unconscious but not hurt
bad. They're hooked up to some sort of magical
medical widget and the Angels overhead are
monitoring. But if we don't get them out soon, they'll
freeze to death."
She bit her lip. "And you think we can reach them in
time?"
Bob shrugged.
"You want me to risk my life on the Ice, defy the
government and probably lose my job in a crazy,
amateur effort to rescue two spacemen who might
easily be dead by the time we reach them."
He scratched his beard. "Is that quixotic, or what?"
"Quixotic. Give me four minutes."
She found five more fen waiting outside by Bob's van.
Three she knew from an earlier life. She smiled and
waved and they nodded warily.
That griped her, but she could see their point of view.
She had been out of Fandom for a long time and they
weren't quite sure about her.
Bob's van had less than half a tank of alcohol, so they
topped it with the fuel from her car. She rolled her eyes
up watching them. Typical fanac, she thought. Six
people trying to work a syphon at the same time.
Finally Thor took over the whole thing and Sherrine
retired gratefully to the van with the rest and shivered
while she waited.
Thor was outside, but he wasn't shivering. Sherrine
watched him through the window. He was built like the
god whose name he used, and nothing about him had
changed since she had known him except for the
beard.
Even with the last drop of alkey sucked from the car's
tank, the van had less than a full tank. Thor climbed
into the van and slid the door closed. He still had the
syphon. Sherrine poked her nose out of her coat.
"Keeping the syphon?"
His grin was lopsided and too wide. Siphoning alcohol .
. . He held the rubber hose up like an Appalachian
snake handler. "We can't make it to Mapleton and back
on one tank. Might not be too smart to gas up at a
public station. 'Specially after we collect Rafe and
Cabe."
"Who?"
"The Angels."
"Oh. You know their names?"
"Those are code names." That was Mike Glider,
grinning on her right. "Gotta have code names on a
clandestine operation."
"Sure you do; there are standards to keep up."
She shook her head. Mike knew everything there was
to know and had opinions on the rest. He'd been a
county agricultural agent since quitting the IRS; but that
was just cover for his true identity as Oral Historian of
Fandom. He was "tall and round and three hundred
pound," in his own words. If they froze on the Ice, he'd
freeze last.
Bob started the van and Sherrine felt that electric thrill
surging deep and strong. Real spacemen. Oh, God, to
talk to them! Space stations. Moon base. Angels down;
fans to the rescue!
She looked around at her companions. "Thor, you look
like a Mormon patriarch."
"The beard's for warmth. I shave the mustache off so
snot won't freeze in it. Ever wonder why Eskimos don't
grow more hair? Evolution in action."
"Hunh. No." Fans were a wellspring of minutiae, a
peculiar mix of the trivial and the practical. Try asking
about Inuit tonsorial practices in a group of mundanes!
She tried to banish snot-encrusted mustaches from her
thoughts.
"Welcome back, Sherrine." Bruce Hyde was riding
shotgun. He twisted around in his seat to look at her.
"We heard you'd gafiated."
摘要：

Page2of166LarryNiven-FallenAngelsCHAPTERONE"AspiringtoBeGods..."Highoverthenorthernhemispherethescoopship'shullbegantosing.Thecabinwasasoundingboxforvibrationsfarbelowthethresholdofhearing.AlexMacLeodcouldfeelhisbonessinginginsympathy.Piranhawaskissinghighatmosphere.PlanetEarthwasshroudedinpearlwhit...

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