Larry Niven - Tales of Known Space

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Introduction:
My Universe and Welcome to It!
TWELVE YEARS AGO I started writing. Eleven years ago I started selling what I wrote. And eleven
years ago I started a future history-the history of Known Space.
The Known Space Series now spans a thousand years of future history, with data on conditions up
to a billion and a half years in the past. Most of the stories take place either in Human Space
(the human-colonized worlds and the space between, a bubble sixty light-years across by Louis Wu's
time) or in Known Space (the much larger bubble of space explored by Human-built ships but
controlled by other species); but arms of exploration reach 200 light-years up along galactic
north, and 33,000 light-years to the galactic core. The series now includes four novels (World of
Ptavvs, Protector, A Gift from Earth, Ringworld) plus the stories in the collection Neutron Star,
plus the book now in your hands, plus one other to be published in February of 1976 to be called
The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton.
Future histories tend to be chaotic. They grow from a common base, from individual stories with
common assumptions; but each story must--to be fair to readers stand by itself. The future
history chronicled in the Known Space Series is as chaotic as real history. Even the styles vary
in these stories, because my writing skills have evolved over eleven years of real time.
But this is the book with the crib sheets. The stories Published here are in chronological
order. I've scattered supplementary notes between them, to explain what is going on between and
around the individual novels and stories, in a region small on the galactic scale but huge in
human experience.
A few general notes are in order here:
1. The tales of Gil the ARM are missing. This book became so big that we had to cut these three
science- fiction/detective stories--60,000 words worth-to make room. Gil's career hits its high
point around 2121 AD, between World of Ptavvs and Protector. We'll be publishing these stories in
one volume sometime next year.
2. I dithered over including "The Coldest Place" and "Eye of an Octopus." They were my first and
sixth story sales, respectively; and they aren't that good. Furthermore, "The Coldest Place" was
obsolete before it ever reached print. But these two stories are part of the fabric of the
series, so I've included them.
3. You may feel that Mars itself is changing as you read through the book. Right you are.
"Eye of an Octopus" is set on pre-Mariner Mars. Mariner IV's photographs of the craters on Mars
sparked "How the Heroes Die." Sometime later, an article in Analog shaped the, new view of the
planet in "At the Bottom of a Hole." If the space probes keep redesigning our planets, what can we
do but write new stories?
4. I was sore tempted to rewrite some of the older, clumsier stories. But how would I have known
where to stop? You would then have been reading updated stories with the facts changed around.
I've assumed that that isn't what you're after. I hope I'm right.
5. The Tales of Known Space cluster around five eras.
First there is the near future, the exploration of interplanetary space during the next quarter-
century.
There is the era of Lucas Garner and Gil "the ARM' Hamilton: 2106-2125 AD. Interplanetary
civilization has loosened its ties with Earth, has taken on a character of its own. Other stellar
systems are being explored and settled. The organ bank problem is at its sociological worst on
Earth. The existence of nonhuman intelligence has become obtrusively plan; humanity must adjust.
There is an intermediate era centering around 2340 AD. In Sol System it is a period of peace
and prosperity. On colony worlds like Plateau times are turbulent. At the edge of Sol System, a
creature that used to be Jack Brennan fights a lone war. The era of peace begins with the subtle
interventions of the Brennan-monster (see Protector); it ends in contact with the Kzinti Empire.
The fourth period, following the Man-Kzin Wars, covers part of the twenty-sixth century AD. It
is a time of easy tourism and interspecies trade, in which the human species neither rules nor is
ruled. New planets have been settled, some of which were wrested from the Kzinti Empire during
the wars.
The fifth period resembles the fourth. Little has changed in two hundred years, at least on the
surface. The thruster drive has replaced the less efficient fusion drives; a new species has
joined the community of worlds. But there is one fundamental change. The Teela Brown gene--the
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"ultimate psychic power"--is spreading through humanity. The teelas have been bred for luck.
A fundamental change in human nature--and the teelas are that--makes life difficult for a writer.
The period following Ringworld might be pleasant to live in, but it is short of interesting
disasters. Only one story survives from this period; "Safe at Any Speed:" a kind of
advertisement. There will be no others.
There is something about future histories, and Known Space in particular, that gets to people.
They start worrying about the facts, the mathematics, the chronology. They work out elaborate
charts or they program their computers for close-approach orbits around point-masses. They send
me maps of Human, Kzinti, and Kdatlyno space, dynamic analyses of the Ringworld, ten-thousand-word
plot outlines for the novel that will wrap it all up into a bundle, and treatises on The Grog
Problem. To all of you who have thus entertained me and stroked my ego, thanks.
Thanks are due to Tim Kyger for his aid in compiling the Bibliography, and to Spike MacPhee and
Jerry Boyajian for their assistance with the Timeline. They belong to the above group and they
saved me a lot of research.
-Larry Niven
Los Angeles, California
January, 1975
The Coldest Place
IN THE COLDEST place in the solar system, I hesitated outside the ship for a moment. It was too
dark out there. I fought an urge to stay close by the ship, by the comfortable ungainly bulk of
warm metal which held the warm bright Earth inside it.
"See anything?" asked Eric.
"No, of course not. It's too hot here anyway, what with heat radiation from the ship. You
remember the way they scattered away from the probe."
"Yeah. Look, you want me to hold your hand or something? Go."
I sighed and started off, with the heavy collector bouncing gently on my shoulder. I bounced
too. The spikes on my boots kept me from sliding.
I walked up the side of the wide, shallow crater the ship had created by vaporizing the layered
air all the way down to the water ice level. Crags rose about me, masses of frozen gas with
smooth, rounded edges. They gleamed soft white where the light from my headlamp touched them.
Elsewhere all was as black as eternity. Brilliant stars shone above the soft crags; but the light
made no impression on the black land. The ship got smaller and darker and disappeared.
There was supposed to be life here. Nobody had even tried to guess what it might be like. Two
years ago the Messenger VI probe had moved into close orbit about the planet and then landed about
here, partly to find out if the cap of frozen gasses might be inflammable. In the field of view
of the camera during the landing, things like shadows had wriggled across the, snow and out of the
light thrown by the probe. The films had shown it beautifully. Naturally some wise ones had
suggested that they were only shadows.
I'd seen the films. I knew better. There was life.
Something alive, that hated light Something out there in the dark. Something huge... "Eric, you
there?"
"Where would I go?" he mocked me.
"Well," said I, "if I watched every word I spoke I'd never get anything said." All the same, I
had been tactless. Eric had had a bad accident once, very bad. He wouldn't be going anywhere
unless the ship went along.
"Touché," said Eric.
"Are you getting much heat leakage from your suit?"
"Very little." In fact, the frozen air didn't even melt under the pressure of my boots.
"They might be avoiding even that little. Or they might be afraid of your light." He knew I
hadn't seen anything; he was looking through a peeper in the top of my helmet.
"Okay, I'll climb that mountain and turn it off for awhile."
I swung my head so he could see the mound I meant, then started up it. It was good exercise, and
no strain in the low gravity. I could jump almost as high as on the Moon, without fear of a
rock's edge tearing my suit. It was all packed snow, with vacuum between the flakes.
My imagination started working again when I reached the top. There was black all around; the
world was black with cold. I turned off the light and the world disappeared.
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I pushed a trigger on the side of my helmet and my helmet put the stem of a pipe in my mouth.
The air renewer sucked air-and smoke down past my chin. They make wonderful suits nowadays. I sat
and smoked, waiting, shivering with the knowledge of the cold. Finally I realized I was sweating.
The suit was almost too well insulated.
Our ion drive section came over the horizon, a brilliant star moving very fast, and disappeared
as it hit the planet's shadow. Time was passing. The charge, in my pipe burned out and I dumped
it.
"Try the light," said Eric.
I got up and turned the headlamp on high. The light spread for a mile around; a white fairy
landscape sprang to life, a winter wonderland doubled in spades. I did a slow pirouette, looking,
looking... and saw it.
Even this close it looked like a shadow. It also looked like a very flat, monstrously large
amoeba, or like a pool of oil running across the ice. Uphill it ran, flowing slowly and painfully
up the side of a nitrogen mountain, trying desperately to escape the searing light of my lamp.
"The collector!" Eric demanded. I lifted the collector above my head and aimed it like a
telescope at the fleeing enigma, so that Eric could find it in the collectors peeper. The
collector spat fire at both ends and jumped up and away. Eric was controlling it now.
After a moment I asked, "Should I come back?"
"Certainly not. Stay there. I can't bring the collector back to the ship! You'll have to wait
and carry it back with you.
The pool-shadow slid over the edge of the hill. The flame of the collector's rocket went after
it, flying high, growing smaller. It dipped below the ridge. A moment later I heard Eric mutter,
"Got it." The bright flame reappeared, rising fast, then curved toward me.
When the thing was hovering near me on two lateral rockets I picked it up by the tail and carried
it home.
"No, no trouble," said Eric.
"I just used the scoop to nip a piece out of his flank, if, so I may speak. I got about ten cubic
centimeters of strange flesh."
"Good," said I. Carrying the collector carefully in one hand, I went up the landing leg to the
airlock. Eric let me in.
I peeled off my frosting suit in the blessed artificial light of ship's day.
"Okay," said Eric.
"Take it up to the lab. And don't touch it."
Eric can be a hell of an annoying character. I've got a brain," I snarled, "even if you can't
see it." So can I There was a ringing silence while we each tried to dream up an apology. Eric
got there first.
"Sorry," he said.
"Me too." I hauled the collector off to the lab on a cart.
He guided me when I got there.
"Put the whole package in that opening. Jaws first. No, don't close it yet. Turn the thing until
these lines match the lines on the collector. Okay. Push it in a little. Now close the door.
Okay, Howie, I'll take it from there..." There were chugging sounds from behind the little door.
"Have to wait till the lab's cool enough. Go get some coffee," said Eric.
"I'd better check your maintenance."
"Okay, good. Go oil my prosthetic aids."
"Prosthetic aids"--that was a hot one. I'd thought it up myself. I pushed the coffee button so
it would be ready when I was through, then opened the big door in the forward wall of the cabin.
Eric looked much like an electrical network, except for the gray mass at the top which was his
brain. In all directions from his spinal cord and brain, connected at the walls of the
intricately shaped glass-and-soft-plastic vessel which housed him, Eric's nerves reached out to
master the ship. The instruments which mastered Eric--but he was sensitive about having it put
that way--were banked along both sides of the closet. The blood pump pumped rhythmically, seventy
beats a minute.
"How do I look?" Eric asked.
"Beautiful. Are you looking for flattery?"
"Jackass! Am I still alive?"
"The instruments think so. But I'd better lower your fluid temperature a fraction." I did. Ever
since we'd landed I'd had a tendency to keep temperatures too high.
"Everything else looks okay. Except your food tank is getting low."
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"Well, it'll last the trip."
"Yeah.
'Scuse me. Eric, coffees ready." I went and got it. The only thing I really worry about is his
"liver." It's too complicated. It could break down too easily. If it stopped making blood sugar
Eric would be dead.
If Eric dies I die, because Eric is the ship. If I die Eric dies, insane, because he can't sleep
unless I set his prosthetic aids.
I was finishing my coffee when Eric yelled.
"Hey!"
"What's wrong?" I was ready to run in any direction.
"It's only helium!"
He was astonished and indignant. I relaxed.
"I get it now, Howie. Helium II. That's all our monsters are. Nuts."
Helium II, the superfluid that flows uphill.
"Nuts doubled. Hold everything, Eric. Don't throw away your samples. Check them for
contaminants."
"For what?"
"Contaminants. My body is hydrogen oxide with contaminants. If the contaminants in the helium
are complex enough it might be alive."
"There are plenty of other substances," said Eric, "but I can't analyze them well enough. We'll
have to rush this stuff back to Earth while our freezers can keep it cool."
I got up.
"Take, off right now?"
"Yes, I guess so. We could use another sample, but we're just as likely to wait here while this
one deteriorates."
"Okay, I'm strapping down now. Eric?"
"Yeah? Takeoff in fifteen minutes, we have to wait for the ion-drive section. You can get up."
"No, I'll wait. Eric, I hope it isn't alive. I'd rather it was just helium II acting like it's
supposed to act."
"Why? Don't you want to be famous, like me?"
"Oh, sure, but I hate to think of life out there. It's just too alien. Too cold. Even on Pluto
you could not make life out of helium II."
"It could be migrant, moving to stay on the night side of the pre-dawn crescent. Pluto's day is
long enough for that. You're right, though; it doesn't get colder than this even between the
stars. Luckily I don't have much imagination."
Twenty minutes later we took off. Beneath us all was darkness and only Eric, hooked into the
radar, could see the ice dome contracting until all of it was visible: the vast layered ice cap
that covers the coldest spot in the solar system, where midnight crosses the equator on the black
back of Mercury.
---------------------------------------------------
This, my first story, became obsolete before it was printed. Mercury does have an atmosphere,
and rotates once for every two of its years.
The sequel which follows fared somewhat better.
LN ---------------------------------------------------
BECALMED IN HELL
I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright and dry and cool, almost too
cool, like a modern office building in the dead of the summer. Beyond the two small windows it
was as black as it ever gets in the solar system, and hot enough to melt lead, at a pressure
equivalent to three hundred feet beneath the ocean.
"There goes a fish," I said, just to break the monotony.
"So how's it cooked?"
"Can't tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Fried? Imagine that, Eric! A fried
jellyfish." Eric sighed noisily.
"Do I have to?"
"You have to. Only way you'll see anything worthwhile in this--this--" Soup? Fog? Boiling maple
syrup?
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"Searing black calm."
"Right."
"Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just after the news of the Mariner II probe.
An eternal searing black calm, hot as a kiln, under an atmosphere thick enough to keep any light
or any breath of wind from ever reaching the surface."
I shivered.
"What's the outside temperature now?"
"You'd rather not know. You've always had too much imagination, Howie."
"I can take it, Doc."
"Six hundred and twelve degrees."
"I can't take it, Doc!"
This was Venus, Planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction writers of three decades ago.
Our ship hung below the Earth to-Venus hydrogen fuel tank, twenty miles up and all but motionless
in the syrupy air. The tank, nearly empty now, made an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft
as long as the internal pressure matched the external. That was Eric's job, to regulate the
tank's pressure by regulating the temperature of the hydrogen gas. We had collected air samples
after each ten mile drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter
intervals, and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had gotten from the surface merely
confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest world in the solar system.
"Temperature just went up to six-thirteen," said Eric.
"Look, are you through hitching?"
"For the moment."
"Good. Strap down. We're taking off."
"Oh frabjous day!" I started untangling the crash webbing over my couch.
"We've done everything we came to do. Haven't we?"
"Am I arguing? Look, I'm strapped down."
"Yeah."
I knew why he was reluctant to leave. I felt a touch of it myself. We'd spent four months
getting to Venus in order to spend a week circling her and less than two days in her upper
atmosphere, and it seemed a terrible waste of time.
But he was taking too long.
"What's the trouble, Eric?"
"You'd rather not know."
He meant it. His voice was a mechanical, inhuman monotone; he wasn't making the extra effort to
get human expression out of his "prosthetic" vocal apparatus. Only a severe shock would affect
him that way.
"I can take it," I said.
"Okay. I can't feel anything in the ramjet controls. Feels like I've just had a spinal
anesthetic."
The cold in the cabin drained into me, all of it.
"See if you can send motor impulses the other way. You could run the rams by guess-and-hope even
if you can't feel them."
"Okay." One split second later, "They don't. Nothing happens. Good thinking though."
I tried to think of something to say while I untied myself from the couch. What came out was,
"It's been a pleasure knowing you, Eric. I've liked being half of this team, and I still do."
"Get maudlin later. Right now, start checking my attachments. Carefully."
I swallowed my comments and went to open the access door in the cabin's forward wall. The floor
swayed ever so gently beneath my feet.
Beyond the four-foot-square access door was Eric. Eric's central nervous system, with the brain
perched at the top and the spinal cord coiled in a loose spiral to fit more compactly into the
transparent glass-and-sponge-plastic housing. Hundreds of wires from all over the ship led to the
glass walls, where they were joined to selected nerves which spread like an electrical network
from the central coil of nervous tissue and fatty protective membrane.
Space leaves no cripples; and don't call Eric a cripple, because he doesn't like it. In a way
he's the ideal spaceman. His life support system weighs only half of what mine does, and takes up
a twelfth as much room. But his other prosthetic aids take up most of the ship. The ramjets were
hooked into the last pair of nerve trunks, the nerves which once moved his legs, and dozens of
finer nerves in those trunks sensed and regulated fuel feed, ram temperature, differential
acceleration, intake aperture dilation, and spark pulse. These connections were intact. I checked
them four different ways without finding the slightest reason why they shouldn't be working.
"Test the others," said Eric.
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It took a good two hours to check every trunk nerve connection. They were all solid. The blood
pump was chugging along, and the fluid was rich enough, which killed the idea that the ram nerves
might have "gone to sleep" from lack of nutrients or oxygen. Since the lab is one of his
prosthetic aids, I let Eric analyze his own blood sugar, hoping that the "liver" had goofed and
was producing some other form of sugar. The conclusions were appalling. There was nothing wrong
with Eric--inside the cabin.
"Eric, you're healthier than I am."
"I could tell. You looked worried, son, and I don't blame you. Now you'll have to go outside."
"I know. Let's dig out the suit."
It was in the emergency tools locker, the Venus suit that was never supposed to be used. NASA
had designed it for use at Venusian ground level. Then they had refused to okay the ship below
twenty miles until they knew more about the planet. The suit was a segmented armor job. I had
watched it being tested in the heat-and-pressure box at Cal Tech, and I knew that the joints
stopped moving after five hours, and wouldn't start again until they had been cooled. Now I
opened the locker and pulled the suit out by the shoulders and held it in front of me. It seemed
to be staring back.
"You still can't feel anything in the ramjets?"
"Not a twinge."
I started to put on the suit, piece by piece like medieval armor. Then I thought of something
else.
"We're twenty miles up. Are you going to ask me to do a balancing act on the hull?"
"No! Wouldn't think of it. We'll just have to go down."
The lift from the blimp tank was supposed to be constant until takeoff. When the time came Eric
could get extra lift by heating the hydrogen to higher pressure, then cracking a valve to let the
excess out. Of course he'd have to be very careful that the pressure was higher in the tank, or
we'd get Venusian air coming in, and the ship would fall instead of rising. Naturally that would
be disastrous.
So Eric lowered the tank temperature and cracked the valve, and down we went.
"Of course there's a catch," said Eric.
"I know."
"The ship stood the pressure twenty miles up. At ground level it'll be six times that."
"I know."
We fell fast, with the cabin tilted forward by the drag on our tailfins. The temperature rose
gradually. The pressure went up fast. I sat at the window and saw nothing, nothing but black,
but I sat there anyway and waited for the window to crack.
NASA had refused to okay the ship below twenty miles : .
.
Eric said, "The blimp tank's okay, and so's the ship, I think. But will the cabin stand up to
it?"
"I wouldn't know."
"Ten miles."
Five hundred miles above us, unreachable, was the atomic ion engine that was to take us home. We
couldn't get to it on the chemical rocket alone. The rocket was for use after the air became too
thin for the ramjets.
"Four miles. Have to crack the valve again."
The ship dropped.
"I can see ground," said Eric.
I couldn't. Eric caught me straining my eyes and said,
"Forget it. I'm using deep infrared, and getting no detail."
"No vast, misty swamps with weird, terrifying monsters and man-eating plants?"
"All I see is hot, bare dirt."
But we were almost down, and there were no cracks in the cabin wall. My neck and shoulder
muscles loosened. I turned away from the window. Hours had passed while we dropped through the
poisoned, thickening air. I already had most of my suit on. Now I screwed on my helmet and three-
finger gantlets.
"Strap down," said Eric. I did.
We bumped gently. The ship tilted a little, swayed back, bumped again. And again, with my teeth
rattling and my armor-plated body rolling against the crash webbing.
"Damn," Eric muttered. I heard the hiss from above. Eric said, "I don't know how we'll get back
up."
Neither did I. The ship bumped hard and stayed down, and I got up and went to the airlock.
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"Good luck," said Eric.
"Don't stay out too long." I waved at his cabin camera. The outside temperature was seven hundred
and thirty.
The outer door opened. My suit refrigerating unit set up a complaining whine. With an empty
bucket in each hand, and with my headlamp blazing a way through the black murk, I stepped out onto
the right wing.
My suit creaked and settled under the pressure, and I stood on the wing and waited for it to
stop. It was almost like being under water. My headlamp beam went out thick enough to be solid,
penetrating no more than a hundred feet. The air couldn't have been that opaque, no matter how
dense. It must have been full of dust, or tiny droplets of some fluid.
The wing ran back like a knife-edged running board, widening toward the tail until it spread into
a tailfin.
"The two tailfins met back of the fuselage. At the tailfin tip was the ram, a big sculptured
cylinder with an atomic engine inside. It wouldn't be hot because it hadn't been used yet, but I
had my counter anyway.
I fastened a line to the wing and slid to the ground. As long as we were here... The ground
turned out to be a dry, reddish dirt, crumbly, and so porous that it was almost spongy. Lava
etched by chemicals? Almost anything would be corrosive at this pressure and temperature. I
scooped one pailful from the surface and another from underneath the first, then climbed up the
line and left the buckets on the wing. The wing was terribly slippery. I had to wear magnetic
sandals to stay on. I walked up and back along the two hundred foot length of the ship, making a
casual inspection. Neither wing nor fuselage showed damage. Why not? If a meteor or something
had cut Eric's contact with his sensors in the rams, there should have been evidence of a break in
the surface.
Then, almost suddenly, I realized that there was an alternative.
It was too vague a suspicion to put into words yet, and I still had to finish the inspection.
Telling Eric would be very difficult if I was right.
Four inspection panels were set into the wing, well protected from the reentry heat. One was
halfway back on the fuselage, below the lower edge of the blimp tank, which was molded to the
fuselage in such a way that from the front the ship looked like a dolphin. Two more were in the
trailing edge of the tailfin, and the fourth was in the ram itself. All opened, with powered
screwdriver on recessed screws, on junctions of the ship's electrical system.
There was nothing out of place under any of the panels. By making and breaking contacts and
getting Eric's reactions, I found that his sensation ended somewhere between the second and third
inspection panels. It was the same story on the left wing. No external damage, nothing wrong at
the junctions. I climbed back to ground and walked slowly beneath the length of each wing, my
headlamp tilted up. No damage underneath.
I collected my buckets and went back inside.
"A bone to pick?" Eric was puzzled.
"Isn't this a strange time to start an argument? Save it for space. We'll have four months with
nothing else to do."
"This can't wait. First of all, did you notice anything I didn't?
"He'd been watching everything I saw and did through the peeper in my helmet.
"No. I'd have yelled."
"Okay. Now get this.
"The break in your circuits isn't inside, because you get sensation up to the second wing
inspection panels. It isn't outside because there's no evidence of damage, not even corrosion
spots.
"That leaves only one place for the flaw."
"Go on."
"We also have the puzzle of why you're paralyzed in both rams. Why should they both go wrong at
the same time? There's only one place in the ship where the circuits join."
"What? Oh, yes, I see. They join through me."
"Now let's assume for the moment that you're the piece with the flaw in it. You're not a piece
of machinery, Eric. If something's wrong with you it isn't medical. That was the first thing we
covered. But it could be psychological."
"It's nice to know you think I'm human. So I've slipped a cam, have I?"
"Slightly. I think you've got a case of what used to be called trigger anesthesia. A soldier
who kills too often sometimes finds that his right index finger or even his whole hand has gone
numb, as if it were no longer a part of him. Your comment about not being a machine is important,
Eric. I think that's the whole problem. You've never really believed that any part of the ship
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is a part of you. That's intelligent, because it's true. Every time the ship is redesigned you
get a new set of parts, and it's right to avoid thinking of a change of model as a series of
amputations." I'd been rehearsing this speech, trying to put it so that Eric would have no choice
but to believe me. Now I know that it must have sounded phony.
"But now you've gone too far. Subconsciously you've stopped believing that the rams can feel like
a part of you, which they were designed to do. So you've persuaded yourself that you don't feel
anything."
With my prepared speech done, and nothing left to say, I stopped talking and waited for the
explosion.
"You make good sense," said Eric.
I was staggered.
"You agree?"
"I didn't say that. You spin an elegant theory, but I want time to think about it. What do we
do if it's true?"
"Why... I don't know. You'll just have to cure yourself."
"Okay. Now here's my idea. I propose that you thought up this theory to relieve yourself of a
responsibility for getting us home alive. It puts the whole problem in my lap, metaphorically
speaking."
"Oh, for-"
"Shut up. I haven't said you're wrong. That would be an ad hominem argument. We need time to
think about this."
It was lights-out, four hours later, before Eric would return to the subject.
"Howie, do me a favor. Assume for awhile that something mechanical is causing all our
trouble. I'll assume it's psychosomatic."
"Seems reasonable."
"It is reasonable. What can you do if I've gone psychosomatic? What can I do if it's mechanical?
I can't go around inspecting myself. We'd each better stick to what we know."
"It's a deal." I turned him off for the night and went to bed.
But not to sleep.
With the lights off it was just like outside. I turned them back on. It wouldn't wake Eric.
Eric never sleeps normally, since his blood doesn't accumulate fatigue poisons, and he'd go mad
from being awake all the time if he didn't have a Russian sleep inducer plate near his cortex.
The ship could implode without waking Eric when his sleep inducer's on. But I felt foolish being
afraid of the dark.
While the dark stayed outside it was all right.
But it wouldn't stay there. It had invaded my partner's mind. Because his chemical checks guard
him against chemical insanities like schizophrenia, we'd assumed he was permanently sane. But how
could any prosthetic device protect him from his own imagination, his own misplaced common sense?
I couldn't keep my bargain. I knew I was right. But what could I do about it?
Hindsight is wonderful. I could see exactly what our mistake had been, Eric's and mine and the
hundreds of men who had built his life support after the crash.
"There was nothing left of Eric then except the intact central nervous system, and no glands
except the pituitary.
"We'll regulate his blood composition," they said, "and he'll always be cool, calm, and
collected. No panic reactions from Eric!"
I know a girl whose father had an accident when he was forty-five or so. He was out with his
brother, the girl's uncle, on a fishing trip. They were blind drunk when they started home, and
the guy was riding on the hood while the brother drove. Then the brother made a sudden stop. Our
hero left two important glands on the hood ornament.
The only change in his sex life was that his wife stopped worrying about late pregnancy. His
habits were developed.
Eric doesn't need adrenal glands to be afraid of death. His emotional patterns were fixed long
before the day he tried to land a moonship without radar. He'd grab any excuse to believe that
I'd fixed whatever was wrong with the ram connections.
But he was counting on me to do it.
The atmosphere leaned on the windows. Not wanting to, I reached out to touch the quartz with my
fingertips. I couldn't feel the pressure. But it was there, inexorable as the tide smashing a
rock into sand grains. How long would the cabin hold it back?
If some broken part were holding us here, how could I have missed finding it? Perhaps it had left
no break in the surface of either wing. But how?
That was the angle.
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Two cigarettes later I got up to get the sample buckets. They were empty, the alien dirt safely
stored away. I filled them with water and put them in the cooler, set the cooler for 40 Absolute,
then turned off the lights and went to bed.
The morning was blacker than the inside of a smoker's lungs. What Venus really needs, I decided,
philosophizing on my back, is to lose ninety-nine percent of her air. That would give her a bit
more than half as much air as Earth, which would lower the greenhouse effect enough to make the
temperature livable. Drop Venus' gravity to near zero for a few weeks and the work would do
itself.
The whole damn universe is waiting for us to discover antigravity.
"Morning," said Eric.
"Thought of anything?"
"Yes." I rolled out of bed.
"Now don't bug me with questions. I'll explain everything as I go."
"No breakfast?"
"Not yet."
Piece by piece I put my suit on, just like one of King Arthur's gentlemen, and went for the
buckets only after the gantlets were on. The ice, in the cold section, was in the chilly
neighborhood of absolute zero.
"This is two buckets of ordinary ice," I said, holding them up.
"Now let me out."
"I should keep you here till you talk," Eric groused. But the doors opened and I went out onto
the wing. I started talking while I unscrewed the number two right panel.
"Eric, think a moment about the tests they run on a manned ship before they'll let a man walk
into the lifesystem. They test every part separately and in conjunction with other parts. Yet if
something isn't working, either it's damaged or it wasn't tested right. Right?"
"Reasonable." He wasn't giving away anything.
"Well, nothing caused any damage. Not only is there no break in the ship's skin, but no
coincidence could have made both rams go haywire at the same time. So something wasn't tested
right."
I had the panel off. In the buckets the ice boiled gently where it touched the surfaces of the
glass buckets. The blue ice cakes had cracked under their own internal pressure. I dumped one
bucket into the maze of wiring and contacts and relays, and the ice shattered, giving me room to
close the panel.
"So I thought of something last night, something that wasn't tested. Every part of the ship must
have been in the heat-and pressure box, exposed to artificial Venus conditions, but the ship as a
whole, a unit, couldn't have been. It's too big." I'd circled around to the left wing and was
opening the number three panel in the trailing edge. My remaining ice was half water and half
small chips; I sloshed these in and fastened the panel.
"What cut your circuits must have been the heat or the pressure or both. I can't help the
pressure, but I'm cooling these relays with ice. Let me know which ram gets its sensation back
first, and we'll know which inspection panel is the right one."
"Howie. Has it occurred to you what the cold water might do to those hot metals?"
"It could crack them. Then you'd lose all control over the ramjets, which is what's wrong right
now."
"Uh. Your point, partner. But I still can't feel anything."
I went back to the airlock with my empty buckets swinging, wondering if they'd get hot enough to
melt. They might have, but I wasn't out that long. I had my suit off and was refilling the
buckets when Eric said, "I can feel the right ram."
"How extensive? Full control?"
"No. I can't feel the temperature. Oh, here it comes. We're all set, Howie."
My sigh of relief was sincere.
I put the buckets in the freezer again. We'd certainly want to take off with the relays cold.
The water had been chilling for perhaps twenty minutes when Eric reported, "Sensation's going."
"What?"
"Sensation's going. No temperature, and I'm losing fuel feed control. It doesn't stay cold long
enough."
"Ouch! Now what?"
"I hate to tell you. I'd almost rather let you figure it out for yourself."
I had.
"We go as high as we can on the blimp tank, then I go out on the wing with a bucket of ice in each
hand"
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We had to raise the blimp tank temperature to almost eight hundred degrees to get pressure, but
from then on we went up in good shape. To sixteen miles. It took three hours.
"That's as high as we go," said Eric.
"You ready?"
I went to get the ice. Eric could see me, he didn't need an answer. He opened the airlock for
me.
Fear I might have felt, or panic, or determination or self- sacrifice but there was nothing. I
went out feeling like a used zombie.
My magnets were on full. It felt like I was walking through shallow tar. The air was thick,
though not as heavy as it had been down there. I followed my headlamp to the number two panel,
opened it, poured ice in, and threw the bucket high and far. The ice was in one cake. I couldn't
close the panel. I left it open and hurried around to the other wing. The second bucket was
filled with exploded chips; I sloshed them in and locked the number two left panel and came back
with both hands free. It still looked like limbo in all directions, except where the headlamp cut
a tunnel through the darkness, and my feet were getting hot. I closed the right panel on boiling
water and sidled back along the hull into the airlock.
"Come in and strap down," said Eric.
"Hurry!"
"Gotta get my suit off." My hands had started to shake from reaction. I couldn't work the
clamps.
"No you don't. If we start right now we may get home. Leave the suit on and come in."
I did. As I pulled my webbing shut, the rams roared. The ship shuddered a little, then pushed
forward as we dropped from under the blimp tank. Pressure mounted as the rams reached operating
speed. Eric was giving it all he had. It would have been uncomfortable even without the metal
suit around me. With the suit on it was torture. My couch was afire from the suit, but I
couldn't get breath to say so. We were going almost straight up.
We had gone twenty minutes when the ship jerked like a galvanized frog.
"Ram's out," Eric said calmly.
"I'll use the other." Another lurch as we dropped the dead one. The ship flew on like a wounded
penguin, but still accelerating. One minute... two... The other ram quit. It was as if we'd run
into molasses. Eric blew off the ram and the pressure eased. I could talk.
"Eric."
"What?"
"Got any marshmallows?"
"What? Oh, I see. Is your suit tight?"
"Sure."
"Live with it. We'll flush the smoke out later. I'm going to coast above some of this stuff,
but when I use the rocket it'll be savage. No mercy."
"Will we make it?"
"I think so. It'll be close."
The relief came first, icy cold. Then the anger.
"No more inexplicable numbnesses?" I asked.
"No. Why?"
"If any come up you'll be sure and tell me, won't you?"
"Are you getting at something?"
"Skip it." I wasn't angry any more.
"I'll be damned if I do. You know perfectly well it was mechanical trouble, you fool. You fixed
it yourself!"
"No. I convinced you I must have fixed it. You needed to believe the rams should be working
again. I gave you a miracle cure, Eric. I just hope I don't have to keep dreaming up new
placebos for you all the way home."
"You thought that, but you went out on the wing sixteen miles up?" Eric's machinery snorted.
"You've got guts where you need brains, Shorty."
I didn't answer.
"Five thousand says the trouble was mechanical. We let the mechanics decide after we land."
"You're on."
"Here comes the rocket. Two, one" It came, pushing me down into my metal suit. Sooty flames
licked past my ears, writing black on the green metal ceiling, but the rosy mist before my eyes
was not fire.
The man with the thick glasses spread a diagram of the Venus ship and jabbed a stubby finger at
file:///F|/rah/Larry%20Niven/Tales%20of%20Known%20Space.txt (10 of 106) [5/22/03 4:00:54 PM]
摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Larry%20Niven/Tales%20of%20Known%20Space.txtIntroduction:MyUniverseandWelcometoIt!TWELVEYEARSAGOIstartedwriting.ElevenyearsagoIstartedsellingwhatIwrote.AndelevenyearsagoIstartedafuturehistory-thehistoryofKnownSpace.TheKnownSpaceSeriesnowspansathousandyearsoffuturehistory,withdataonc...

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