Larry Niven - World of Ptavvs

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WORLD OF PTAVVS
by Larry Niven
(c) 1966 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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There was a moment so short that it had never been successfully measured, yet always far too
long. For that moment it seemed that every mind in the universe, every mind that had ever been or
that would ever be, was screaming its deepest emotions at him.
Then it was over. The stars had changed again.
Even for Kzanol, who was a good astrogator, there was no point in trying to guess where the ship
was now. At .93 lights, the speed at which the average mass of the universe becomes great enough
to permit entry into hyperspace, the stars become unrecognizable. Ahead they flared painful blue-
white. Behind they were dull red, like a scattered coal fire. To the sides they were compressed
and flattened into tiny lenses. So Knanol sucked a gnal until the ship's brain board made a
thudding sound, then went to look.
The brain screen said, "Reestimate of trip time to Thrintun: 1.72 days."
Not good, he decided. He should have come out much closer to Thrintun. But luck, more than
skill, decided when a hyperspace ship would make port. The Principle of Uncertainty is the law of
hyperspace. There was no need to be impatient. It would be several hours before the fusor
recharged the battery.
Kzanol swung his chair around so he could see the star map on the rear wall. The sapphire pin
seemed to twinkle and gleam across the length of the cabin. For a moment he basked in its
radiance, the radiance of unlimited wealth. Then he jumped up and began typing on the brain board.
Sure there was reason to be impatient! Even now somebody with a map just like his, and a pin
where Kzanol had inserted his sapphire marker, might be racing to put in a claim. The control of
an entire slave world, for all of Kzanol's lifetime, was his rightful property; but only if he
reached Thrintun first.
He typed: "How long to recharge the battery?"
The brain board thudded almost at once. But Kzanol was never to know the answer.
Suddenly a blinding light shone through the back window. Kzanol's chair flattened into a couch,
a loud musical note rang, and there was pressure. Terrible pressure. The ship wasn't ever supposed
to use that high an acceleration. It lasted for about five seconds. Then--
There was a sound like two lead doors being slapped together, with the ship between them. The
pressure eased. Kzanol got to his feet and peered out the rear window at the incandescent cloud
that had been his fusor. A machine has no mind to read; you never know when it's going to betray
you--
The brain board thudded.
He read, "Time to recharge battery:" followed by the spiral hieroglyph, the sign of infinity.
With his face pressed against the molded diamond pane, Kzanol watched the burning power plant
fade among the stars. The brain must have dropped it the moment it became dangerous. That was why
it had been trailed half a mile behind the ship: because fusors sometimes exploded. Just before he
lost sight of it altogether, the light flared again into something brighter than a sun.
Thud, said the brain. Kzanol read, "Reestimate of trip time to Thrintun:" followed by a spiral.
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The shock wave from the far explosion reached the ship. It sounded like a distant door slamming.
There was no hurry now. For a long time Kzanol stood before his wall map, gazing at the sapphire
pin.
The tiny star in the tiny jewel winked back at him, speaking of two billion slaves and a fully
industrialized world waiting to serve him; speaking of more wealth and power than even his
grandfather, the great Racarliw, had known; speaking of hundreds of mates and tens of thousands of
personal retainers to serve his every whim during his long, lazy life. He was chain-sucking, and
the eating tendrils at the corners of his mouth writhed without his knowledge, like embattled
earthworms. Useless regrets filled his mind.
His grandfather should have sold the plantation when Plorn's tnuctip slaves produced
antigravity. Plorn could and should have been assassinated in time. Kzanol should have stayed on
Thrintun, even if he had to slave it for a living. He should have bought a spare fusor instead of
that extra suit and the deluxe crash couch and the scent score on the air plant and, with his last
commercial, the sapphire pin.
There had been a day when he'd sat clutching a blue-green plastic cord which would make him a
spacecraft owner or a jobless pauper. Bowed white skeletal shapes had raced round and round him:
mutated racing viprin, the fastest animal anywhere in the galaxy. But, by the Power! Kzanol's was
faster than all the rest. If only he'd thrown away that thread...
For a time he relived his life on the vast stage tree plantation where he had become an adult.
Kzathit Stage Logs, with its virtual monopoly on solid fuel takeoff logs, now gone forever. If
only he were there now...
But Kzathit Stage Logs had been a spaceport landing field for almost ten years.
He went to the locker and put on his suit. There were two suits there, including the spare he'd
bought in case
one ceased to function. Stupid. If the suit failed he'd be dead anyway.
He ran a massive, stubby finger around the panic button on his chest. He'd have to use it soon;
but not yet. There were things to do first. He wanted the best possible chance of survival.
At the brain board he typed: "Compute a course for any civilized planet, minimum trip time. Give
trip time."
The brain purred happily to itself. Sometimes Kzanol thought it was happy only when it was
working hard. He often tried to guess at the emotionless thoughts of the machine. It bothered him
that he couldn't read its mind. Sometimes he even worried about his inability to give it orders
except through the brain board. Perhaps it was too alien, he thought; thrintun had never made
contact with other than protoplasmic life. While he waited for his answer he experimentally tried
to reach the rescue switch on his back.
He hadn't a chance; but that was the least of his worries. When he pushed the panic button the
suit stasis field would go on, and time would cease to flow inside his suit. Only the rescue
switch would protrude from the field. It had been placed so that Kzanol's rescuer, not Kzanol,
could reach it.
Thud! The screen said, "No solution."
Nonsense! The battery had a tremendous potential, even after a hyperspace jump it must still
have enough energy to aim the ship at some civilized planet. Why would the brain...?
Then he understood. The ship had power, probably, to reach several worlds, but not to slow him
down to the speed of any known world. Well, that was all right. In his stasis field Kzanol
wouldn't care how hard he hit. He typed: "Do not consider decrease of velocity upon arrival. Plot
course for any civilized planet. Minimize trip time."
The answer took only a few seconds. "Trip time to Awtprun 72 Thrintun years 100.48 days."
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Awtprun. Well, it didn't matter where he landed; he could hop a ship for Thrintun as soon as
they turned oil his field generator. Would some other prospector find Racarliwun in seventy-two
years? Probably.
Spirit of the Power! Hurriedly he typed: "Cancel course to Awtprun." Then he sagged back in his
chair, appalled at his narrow escape.
If he had hit Awtprun at more than nine-tenths light, he could have killed upward of a million
people. That was assuming he hit an ocean! The shock wave would knock every flying thing out of
the air for a thousand miles around and scour the land clean, sink islands, tear down buildings
half around the world.
For a blunder like that, he'd draw death after a year of torture. Torture in the hands of a
telepathic, highly scientific society was a horrible thing. Biology students would watch,
scribbling furiously, while members of the Penalty Board carefully traced his nervous system with
stimulators.
Gradually his predicament became clear to him. He couldn't land on a civilizdd planet. All
right. But he couldn't land on a slave planet either; he'd be certain to knock down a few
overseers' palaces, as well as killing billions of commercials' worth of slaves.
Perhaps he could aim to go through a system, hoping that the enlarged mass of his ship would be
noticed? But he dared not do that. To stay in space was literally unthinkable. Why, he might go
right out of the galaxy! He saw himself lost forever between the island universes, the ship
disintegrating around him, the rescue button being worn down to a small shiny spot by interstellar
dust... No!
Gently he rubbed his closed eyes with an eating tendril. Could he land on a moon? If he hit a
moon hard enough, the flash might be seen. But the brain wasn't good enough to get him there, not
at such a distance. A moon's orbit is a twisty thing, and he'd have to hit the moon of a civilized
planet. Awtprun was the closest, and Awtprun was much too far.
And to top it off, he realized, he was sucking his lpt gnal. He sat there feeling sorry for
himself until it was gone, then began to pace the floor.
Of course!
He stood stock still in the middle of the cabin, thinking out his inspiration, looking for the
flaw. He couldn't find one. Hurriedly he tapped at the brain board: "Compute course for a food
planet minimizing trip time. Ship need not slow on arrival. Give details."
His eating tendrils hung limp, relaxed. It's going to be all right, he thought, and meant it.
***
For protoplasmic life forms, there are not many habitable planets in the galaxy. Nature makes an
unreasonable number of conditions. To insure the right composition of atmosphere, the planet must
be exactly the right distance from a G type sun, must be exactly the right size, and must have a
freakishly oversized moon in its sky. The purpose of the moon is to strip away most of the
planet's atmosphere, generally around 99 percent of it. Without its moon a habitable world becomes
shockingly uninhabitable; its air acquires crushing weight, and its temperature becomes that of a
"hot" oven.
Of the 219 habitable worlds found by Thrintun, 64 had life. Seventeen had intelligent life; 18
if you were broad minded. The 155 barren worlds would not be ready for Thrintun occupancy until
after a long seeding process. Meanwhile, they had their uses.
They could be seeded with a tnuctipun-developed food yeast. After a few centuries the yeast
generally mutated, but until then the world was a food planet, with all its oceans full of the
cheapest food in the galaxy. Of course, only a slave would eat it; but there were plenty of
slaves.
All over the galaxy there were food planets to feed the slave planets. The caretaker's palace
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was always on the moon. Who would want to live on a world with barren land and scummy seas? Not to
mention the danger of bacteria contaminating the yeast. So from the moons a careful watch was kept
on the food planets.
After the yeast had mutated to the point where it was no longer edible, even to a slave, the
world was seeded with yeast-eating whitefood herds. Whitefoods ate anything, and were a good
source of meat. The watch was continued.
At his present speed Kzanol would hit such a planet hard enough to produce a blazing plume of
incandescent gas. The exploded rock would rise flaming into space, vivid and startling and
unmistakable even to a watcher on the moon. The orange glow of the crater would last for days.
Chances were that Kzanol would end underground, but not far underground. The incandescent air
and rock which move ahead of a meteorite usually blow the meteorite itself back into the air, to
rain down over a wide area. Kzanol, wrapped safely in his stasis field; would go right back out
his own hole, and would not dig himself very deep on the second fall. The caretaker could find him
instantly with any kind of rock-penetrating instrument. A stasis field is the only perfect
reflector.
The brain interrupted his planning. "Nearest available food planet is F124. Estimated trip time
202 years 91.4 days."
Kzanol typed: "Show me F124 and system."
The screen showed specks of light. One by one, the major planets and their moon systems were
enlarged. F124 was a steamy, quick-spinning ball: a typical food planet, even its moon's rotation
was almost nil. The moon seemed overlarge, but also overdistant. An outer planet made Kzanol gasp
in admiration. It was ringed! Gorgeously ringed. Kzanol waited until all the major worlds had been
shown. When the asteroids began to appear in order of size he typed: "Enough. Follow course to
F124."
He'd left his helmet off. Other than that he was fully dressed for the long sleep. He felt the
ship accelerating, a throb in the metal from the motors. The cabin's acceleration field canceled
the gees. He picked up his helmet and set it on his neck ring, changed his mind and took it off.
He went to the wall and tore off his star map, rolled it up and stuck it through the neck ring
into the bosom of his suit. He had the helmet ready to tog down when he started to wonder.
His rescuer could claim a large sum for the altruistic act of rescuing him. But suppose the
reward didn't satisfy him? If he were any kind of thrint he would take the map as soon as he saw
it. After all, there was no law against it. Kzanol had better memorize the map.
But there was a better answer.
Yes! Kzanol hurried to the locker and pulled out the second suit. He stuffed the map into one
arm. He was elated with his discovery. There was plenty of room left in the empty suit. Briskly he
moved about the cabin collecting his treasures. The amplifier helmet, universal symbol of power
and of royalty, which had once belonged to his grandfather. It was a light but bulky instrument
which could amplify the thrint's native Power to control twenty to thirty non-thrints into the
ability, to control an entire planet. His brother's farewell present, a disintegrator with a hand-
carved handle. He had a thought which made him put it aside. His statues of Ptul and Myxylomat.
May they never meet! But both females would be dead before he saw them again, unless some friend
put them in stasis against his return. His diamond-geared, hulifab-cased watch with the cryogenic
gears, which always ran slow no matter how many times it was fixed. He couldn't wear it to F124;
it was for formal events only. He wrapped each valuable in one of his extra robes before inserting
it into the suit.
There was room left over.
In a what-the-hell mood he called the little racarliw slave over from the storage locker and
made it get in. Then he screwed the helmet down and pushed the panic button.
The suit looked like a crazy mirror. All the wrinkies remained, but the suit was suddenly more
rigid than diamond or hulifab. He propped it in a corner, patted it fondly on the head, and left
it.
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"Cancel present course to F124," he typed. "Compute and follow fastest course to F124 using only
half of remaining
power, completing all necessary power maneuvers within the next day."
A day later, Kzanol was suffering mild gnal withdrawal symptoms. He was doing everything he
could think of to keep himself busy so that he wouldn't have to think about how much he wanted a
gnal.
He had, in fact, just finished an experiment. He had turned off the field in the second suit,
placed the disintegrator in its glove, and turned on the field again. The stasis field had
followed its metal surface. The digging instrument had gone into stasis along with the suit.
Then the drive went off. Feeling considerable relief, Kzanol went to the board and typed:
"Compute fastest course to eighth planet of F124 system. Wait one-half day, then follow course."
He put on his suit, picked up the disintegrator and some wire line, and went out the airlock. He
used the line to stop his drift until he was motionless with respect to the ship.
Any last thoughts?
He'd done the best he could for himself. He was falling toward F124. The ship would reach the
unwatched, uninhabitable eighth planet years before Kzanol hit the third. It should make a nice,
big crater, easy to find. Not that he'd need it.
There was a risk, he thought, that the rescue switch might be set off by reentry heat. If that
happened he would wake up underground, for it took time for the field to die. But he could dig his
way out with the disintegrator.
Kzanol poised a thick, clumsy finger over the panic button. Last thoughts?
Regrettably, there were none.
Kzanol pushed the panic button.
***
Larry Greenberg climbed out of the contact field and stood up. His footsteps echoed in the big
dolphin tank room. There were no disorientation effects this time, no trouble with his breathing
and no urge to wiggle nonexistent flippers and tail. Which was natural enough, since the "message"
had gone the other way.
The dolphin named Charley was lying on the bottom of the tank. He had sunk from under his own
specially designed contact helmet. Larry walked around to where Charley could see him through the
glass, but Charley's eyes weren't looking at anything. The dolphin was twitching, all over. Larry
watched with concern, aware that the two marine biologists had come up beside him and were looking
just as worried. Then Charley stopped twitching and surfaced.
"That wasss willd," said Charley in his best Donald Duck accent.
"Are you all right?" one of the seadocs asked anxiously. "We kept the field at lowest power."
"Sssure, Billl, I'mm ffine. But that was wild. I feel like I sshould have arms and legs and a
long nose overhanging my teeth insstead of a hole in my head." Whatever accent Charley had, there
was nothing wrong with his vocabulary. "And I havvv thiss terrible urge to make love to Larry's
wife."
"Me, too," said Doctor Bill Slater, but under his breath.
Larry laughed. "You lecherous fish! Don't you dare! I'll steal your cows!"
"We trade wives?" Charley buzzed like an MG taking off, then flipped wildly around the tank.
Dolphin laughter. He ended the performance by jetting straight out of the water and landing on his
belly. "Has my accent improved?"
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Larry decided there was no point in trying to brush off the water. It had soaked through to his
skin. "Come to think of it, yes, it has. It's much better."
Charley switched to dolphinese, or to pidgin dolphinese, which is dolphinese scaled down to the
human range of hearing. The rest of his conversation came in a chorus of squeaks, grunts, ear-
splitting whistles, and other extremely rude noises. "When's our next session, mind buddy?"
Larry was busy squeezing water out of his hair. "I don't know, exactly, Charley. Probably a few
weeks. I've been asked to take on another assignment. You'll have time to talk to your colleagues,
pass on whatever you've learned about us walkers from reading my mind."
"You sure you want me to do that? Seriously, Larrry, there's something I'd like to discuss with
you."
"Squeak on."
Charley deliberately speeded up his delivery. Nobody but Larry Greenberg could have followed the
rapid chorus of barnyard sounds. "What's chances of a dolphin getting aboard the Lazy Eight III?"
"Huh? To Jinx? Jinx's ocean is a foot deep in scum!"
"Oh, that's right. Well, some other world, then."
"Why would a dolphin be interested in space travel?"
"Why would a walker? No, that's not an honorable question. I think the truth is you've given me
the space bug, Larrry;"
A slow grin spread across Larry's urchin face. He found it curiously hard to answer. "It's a
damn contagious disease, and hard to get rid of."
"Yes."
"I'll think about it, Charley. Eventually you'll have to contact the UN about it, but give me
time first. We'd have to carry a lot of water, you know. Much heavier than air."
"So I've been told."
"Give me some time. I've got to go practically right now."
"But--"
"Sorry, Charley. Duty calls. Dr. Jansky made it sound like the opportunity of the decade. Now
roll over."
"Tyrant," hissed Charley, which isn't easy. But he rolled over on his back. The three men spent
a few minutes rubbing his belly. Then Larry had to leave. Momentarily he wondered if Charley would
have any trouble assimilating his memories. But there was no danger; at the low contact power
they'd been using, Charley could forget the whole experience if he had to. Including the conquest
of space.
Which would be a shame.
***
That night he and Judy had dinner with Dr. and Mrs. Dorcas Jansky. Dr. Dorcas Jansky was a huge
West Berliner with a blond beard and the kind of flamboyant, extrovert personality that had always
made Larry slightly uncomfortable. Had he but known it, Larry had a very similar psyche; but it
was housed in a much smaller body. It looked different that way. Mrs. Jansky was about Judy's size
and almost as pretty. She was the quiet type, at least when English was being spoken.
The conversation ranged explosively during dinner. As Larry said later, "It's fun to meet
someone who likes to argue about the same things you do." They compared Los Angeles' outward
growth to West Berlin's reaching skyscrapers.
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"The urge to reach the stars," said Jansky.
"You're surrounded by East Germany," Larry maintained.
"There's nowhere you can go but up."
They spent useless time deciding which of the eleven forms of communism most closely resembled
Marxism, and finally decided to wait and see which government withered away the fastest. They
talked smog-- where did it come from, now that there were neither industrial concerns nor
hydrocarbon-powered vehicles in the Major Los Angeles Basin? Mainly cooking, thought Judy.
Cigarettes, said Jansky, and Larry suggested that electrostatic air conditioning might concentrate
impurities in the outside air. They talked about dolphins. Janaky had the nerve to question
dolphin inteffigence, merely because they'd never built anything. Larry, touched to the quick,
stood up and gave the most stirring impromptu lecture of his life. It wasn't until the coffee hour
that business was mentioned.
"You were not the first man to read a dolphin's mind, Mr. Greenberg." Jansky now held a gigantic
cigar as if it were a professor's blackboard pointer. "Am I right in thinking that the dolphin
contacts were only training of a sort?"
Larry nodded vigorously. "Right. Judy and I were trying for a berth on the Lazy Eight III, bound
for Jinx. I knew from the standard tests that I had some telepathic aptitude, and when we got the
word about the bandersnatchi I knew we were in. Nobody's gotten anywhere trying to learn the
bandersnatchi language, and there aren't any contact men on Jinx. So I volunteered for the dolphin
work and Judy started studying linguistics, and then we put in for the trip as a husband-wife
team. I thought our sizes would be the clincher. The dolphin work was just practice for contacting
a bandersnatch." He sighed. "But this fool economic war with the Belt is fouling up the whole
space effort. The bastards."
Judy reached across and took his hand. "We'll get there yet," she promised.
"Sure we will," said Larry.
"You may not need to," said the doctor, emphasizing his words with jerky gestures of his cigar.
"If the mountain will not come to Mahomet--" He paused expectantly.
"You don't mean you've got a bandersnatch here?" Judy sounded startled, and well she might.
Bandersnatchi weighed thirty tons apiece.
"Am I a magician? No bandersnatchi, but something else. Did I mention that I am a physicist?"
"No." Larry wondered what a physicist would want with a contact man.
"Yes, a physicist. My colleagues and I have been working for some twelve years on a time-
retarding field. We knew it was possible, the mathematics are well known, but the engineering
techniques were very difficult. It took us years."
"But you got it."
"Yes. We developed a field that will make six hours of outer, normal time equivalent to one
second of time inside the field. The ratio of outer time to inner time moves in large, ahh,
quantum jumps. The twenty-one-thousand-to-one ratio is all we have been able to get, and we do not
know where the next quantum is."
Judy spoke unexpectedly.
"Then build two machines and put one inside the field of the other."
The physicist laughed uproariously. He seemed to shake the room. "Excuse me," he said when he
had finished, "but it is very funny that you should make that suggestion so quickly. Of course, it
was one of the first things we tried." Judy thought black thoughts, and Larry squeezed her hand
warningly. Jansky didn't notice. "The fact is that one time-retarding field cannot exist inside
another. I have worked out a mathematical proof of this."
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"Too bad," said Larry.
"Perhaps not. Mr. Greenberg, have you ever heard of the Sea Statue?"
Larry tried to remember, but it was Judy who answered. "I have! Lifetimes did a pictorial on it.
It's the one they found off the Brazilian continental shell."
"That's right," Larry remembered aloud. "The dolphins found it and sold it to the United Nations
for some undersea gadgetry. Some anthropologists thought they'd found Atlantis." He remembered
pictures of a misshapen figure four feet tall, with strangely carved arms and legs and a humped
back and a featureless globe of a head, surfaced like a highly polished mirror. "It looked like an
early rendition of a goblin."
"Yes, it certainly does. I have it here."
"Here?"
"Here. The United Nations Comparative Culture Exhibit loaned it to us after we explained what it
was for." He crushed his now tiny cigar butt to smithereens. "As you know, no sociologist has been
able to link the statue to any known culture. But I, the doctor of physics, I have solved the
mystery. I believe.
"Tomorrow I will show you why I believe the statue is an alien being in a time-retarder field.
You can guess what I want you to do. I want to put you and the statue in the time-retarder field,
to cancel out our, er, visitor's own field, and let you read its mind."
They walked down to the corner at ten the next morning, and Judy stayed while Larry pushed the
call button and waited for the cab. About two minutes passed before a yellow-and-black-checked
flyer dropped to the corner.
Larry was getting in when he felt Judy grasping his upper arm. "What's wrong?" he asked, turning
half around.
"I'm frightened," she said. She looked it. "Are you sure it's all right? You don't know anything
about him at all!"
"Who, Jansky? Look--"
"The statue."
"Oh." He considered. "Look, I'm just going to quickly make a couple of points. All right?" She
nodded. "One. The contact gadget isn't dangerous. I've been using it for years. All I get is
another person's memories, and a little insight into how he thinks. Even then they're damped a
little so I have to think hard to remember something that didn't happen to me personally.
"Two. My experience with dolphins has given me experience with unhuman minds. Right?"
"Right. And you always want to play practical jokes after a session with Charley. Remember when
you hypnotized Mrs. Grafton and made her--"
"Nuts. I've always liked practical jokes. Third point is that the time field doesn't matter at
all. It's just to kill the field around the statue. You can forget it.
"Four. Janaky won't take any chances with my life. You know that, you can see it. Okay?"
"All that scuba diving last summer--"
"That was your idea."
"Uh? I guess it was." She smiled and didn't mean it. "Okay. I thought you'd be practicing next
on bandersnatchi, but I guess this is the acid test. And I'm still worried. You know I'm
prescient."
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"Well-- oh, well. I'll call you as soon as I can." He got into the cab and dialed the address of
the UCLA physics school level.
***
"Mark will be back with the coffee in a minute," said Dorcas Jansky. "Let me show you how the
time-retarding field works." They were in a huge room whose roof contained two of those gigantic
electrodes which produce ear-splitting claps of artificial lightning to impress groups of wide-
eyed college students. But Jansky didn't seem concerned with the lightning maker. "We borrowed
this part of the building because it has a good power source," he said, "and it was big enough for
our purposes. Do you see that wire construction?"
"Sure." It was a cube of very fine wire mesh, with a flap in one side. The wire covered the top
and floor as well as the sides. Busy workmen were testing and arranging great and complex-looking
masses of machinery, which were not as yet connected to the wire cage.
"The field follows the surface of that wire. The wire side boundary between slow, inside time
and fast, outside time. We had some fun making it, let me tell you!" Janaky ran his fingers
through his beard, meditating on the hard work to which he had been put. "We think the field
around the alien must be several quantum numbers higher than ours. There is no telling how long he
has been in there except by the method we will use."
"Well, he might not know either."
"Yes, I suppose so. Larry, you will be in the field for six hours of outer time. That will be
one second of your time. I understand that the thought transfer is instantaneous?"
"Not instantaneous, but it does take less than a second. Set things up and turn on the contact
machine before you turn on the time field, and I'll get his thoughts as soon as he comes to life.
Until he does that I won't get anything." Just like the dolphins, Larry told himself. It's just
like contacting a Tursiops truncatus.
"Good. I wasn't sure. Ahh." Janaky went to tell Mark where to put the coffee. Larry welcomed the
interruption, for suddenly he was getting the willies. It wasn't nearly as bad as it had been the
night before his first session with a dolphin, but it was bad enough. He was remembering that his
wife was sometimes uncomfortably psychic. He drank his coffee gratefully.
"So," Jansky gasped, having drained his cup at a few gulps. "Larry, when did you first suspect
that you were telebaddic?"
"College," said Larry. "I was going to Washburn University it's in Kansas and one day a visiting
bigwig gave the whole school a test for psi powers. We spent the whole day at it. Telepathy,
esper, PK, prescience, even a weird test for teleportation which everybody flunked. Judy came up
high on prescience, but erratic, and I topped everyone on telepathy. That's how we met. When we
found out we both wanted to go starhopping..."
"Surely that wasn't why you two married?"
"Not entirely. And it sure as hell isn't why we haven't gotten divorced." Larry grinned a feral
grin, then seemed
to recollect himself. "Telepathy makes for good marriages, you know."
"I wouldn't know," Janaky smiled.
"I might have made a good psychologist," Larry said without regret. "But it's a little late to
start now. I hope
they send out the Lazy Eight III," he said between his teeth. "They can't desert the colonies
anyway. They can't do that."
Jansky refilled both cups. The workmen wheeled something through the huge doorway, something
covered by a sheet. Larry watched them as he sipped his coffee. He was feeling completely relaxed.
Jansky drained his second cup as fast as he had finished the first. He must either love it, Larry
decided, or hate it.
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file:///F|/rah/larry%20niven/World%20Of%20Ptavvs.txt
Unexpectedly Jansky asked, "Do you like dolphins?"
"Sure. Very much, in fact."
"Why?"
"They have so much fun," was Larry's inadequate sounding reply.
"You're glad you entered your profession?"
"Oh, very. It would have surprised my father, though. He thought I was going to be a pawnbroker.
You see, I was born with..." His voice trailed off. "Hey! Is that it?"
"Um?" Jansky looked where Larry was looking. "Yes, that is the Sea Statue. Shall we go and look
at it?"
The three men carrying the statue took no notice of them. They carried it into the cubical
structure of fine wire mesh and set it under one of the crystal-iron helmets of the contact
machine. They had to brace its feet with chocks of wood. The other helmet, Larry's end of the
contact link, was fixed at the head of an old psychoanalyst's couch. The workmen left the cage,
single file, and Larry stood in the open flap and peered at the statue.
The surface was an unbroken, perfect mirror. A crazy mirror. It made the statue difficult to
see, for all that reached the eye was a distorted view of other parts of the room.
The statue was less than four feet tall. It looked very much like a faceless hobgoblin. The
triangular hump on its back was more stylized than realistic, and the featureless globular head
was downright eerie. The legs were strange and bent, and the heels stuck out too far behind the
ankle. It could have been an attempt to model a gnome, except for the strange legs and feet and
the stranger surface and the short, thick arms with massive Mickey Mouse, hands.
"I notice he's armed," was Larry's first, slightly uneasy comment. "And he seems to be
crouching."
"Crouching? Take a closer look," Jansky invited genially. "And look at the feet."
A closer look was worse. The crouch was menacing, predatory, as if the supposed alien was about
to charge an enemy or a food animal. The gun, a ringed double-barreled shotgun with no handle, was
ready to deal death. But--
"I still don't see what you're driving at, but I can see his feet aren't straight. They don't
lie flat to the ground."
"Right!" Jansky waxed enthusiastic. His accent thickened noticeably. "That was the first thing I
thought of, when I saw a picture of the statue in the Griffith Park Observatory. I thought, the
thing wasn't made to stand up. Why? Then I saw. He is in free flight!"
"Yeah!" It was startling how obvious the thing became. The statue was in a weightless spaceman's
crouch, halfway toward fetal position. Of course he was!
"That was when the archaeologists were still wondering how the artist had gotten that mirror
finish. Some of them already thought the statue had been left by visitors from space. But I had
already completed my time field, you see, and I thought, suppose he was in space and something
went wrong. He might have put himself in slow time to wait for rescue. And rescue never came. So I
went to Brasilia Ciudad and persuaded the UNCCE to let me test my t'eory. I aimed a liddle laser
beam at one finger...
"And what happened? The laser couldn't even mark the surface. Then they were convinced. I took
it back here with me." He beamed happily.
The statue had seemed formidable, armed and crouched and ready to spring. Now it was merely
pitiful. Larry asked, "Can't you bring him out of it?"
Jansky shook his head violently. "No. You see that unshiny bump on his back?"
file:///F|/rah/larry%20niven/World%20Of%20Ptavvs.txt (10 of 97) [1/14/03 8:30:15 PM]
摘要：

file:///F|/rah/larry%20niven/World%20Of%20Ptavvs.txtWORLDOFPTAVVSbyLarryNiven(c)1966byLarryNivenv1.0(Jan-24-1999)Ifyoufindandcorrecterrorsinthetext,pleaseupdatetheversion umberby0.1andredistribute.Therewasamomentsoshortthatithadneverbeensuccessfullymeasured,yetalwaysfartoolong.Forthatmomentitseeme...

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