Niven, Larry - Protector

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PROTECTOR
by Larry Niven
(c) 1973 by Larry Niven
v1.0 (Jan-24-1999)
If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number by 0.1 and
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PHSSTHPOK
Genesis, Chapter 3, King James version:
22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and
now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever:
23 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence
he was taken.
24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cher-u-bims, and a
flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
***
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 Phsstbpok. The protector's knotted fingers moved,
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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
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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.
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"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 collectoes 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.
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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.
***
Phsstbpok'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 10^4 magnification the screen showed three tiny violet points.
Looking around the edge of the scope screen Phsstbpok could see only the bright yellow star he'd
called GO 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 hed 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 hed classified as Pak-habitable. No lifeform native to space
could have taken its gravity or its atmosphere.
That planet, GO 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 GO 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?
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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. GO Target #1 was
not the only likely target. Probability was only twenty-eigbt 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."
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"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
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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.
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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
bad 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 potect. 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.
file:///F|/rah/larry%20niven/Protector.txt (9 of 122) [1/14/03 8:27:16 PM]
file:///F|/rah/larry%20niven/Protector.txt
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.
Phsstbpok 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 GO 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.
file:///F|/rah/larry%20niven/Protector.txt (10 of 122) [1/14/03 8:27:16 PM]
摘要：

file:///F|/rah/larry%20niven/Protector.txtPROTECTORbyLarryNiven(c)1973byLarryNivenv1.0(Jan-24-1999)Ifyoufindandcorrecterrorsinthetext,pleaseupdatetheversion umberby0.1andredistribute.PHSSTHPOKGenesis,Chapter3,KingJamesversion:22AndtheLordGodsaid,Behold,themanisbecomeasoneofus,tok owgoodandevil:and...

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