Tales Of Known Space Part 30

Louis followed him down. There was a bad moment while he waited for some unimaginable weapon to fire from the grounded s.h.i.+p, to tear him flaming from the sky while his attention was distracted by landing Procedures. But he landed without a jar, several hundred yards from the alien cone.

"An explosion will destroy both our s.h.i.+ps if I am harmed," he told the alien via signal beam.

"Our species seem to think alike. I will now descend."

Louis watched him appear near the nose of the s.h.i.+p, in a wide circular airlock. He watched the alien drift gently to the sand. Then he clamped his helmet down and entered the airlock.

Had he made the right decision?

Gambling was safer than war. More fun, too. Best of all, it gave him better odds.

"But I'd hate to go home without that box," he thought. In nearly two hundred years of life, he had never done anything as important as finding a stasis box. He had made no discoveries, won no elective offices, overthrown no governments. This was his big chance.

"Even odds," he said, and turned on the intercom as he descended.

His muscles and semicircular ca.n.a.ls registered about a gee. A hundred feet away waves slid hissing up onto pure white sand. The waves were green and huge, perfect for riding; the beach a definite beer party beach.

Later, perhaps he would ride those waves to sh.o.r.e on his belly, if the air checked out and the water was free of predators. He hadn't had time to give the planet a thorough checkup.

Sand tugged at his boots as he went to meet the alien.

The alien was five feet tall. He had looked much taller descending from his s.h.i.+p, but that was because he was mostly leg. More than three feet of skinny leg, a torso like a beer barrel, and no neck. Impossible that his neckless neck should be so supple. But the chrome yellow skin fell in thick rolls around the bottom of his head, hiding anatomical details.

His suit was transparent, a roughly alien-shaped balloon, constricted at the shoulder, above and below the complicated elbow joint, at the wrist, at hip and knee. Air jets showed at wrist and ankle. Tools hung in loops at the chest. A back pack hung from the neck, under the suit. Louis noted all these tools with trepidation; any one of them could be a weapon.

"I expected that you would be taller," said the alien.

"A laser screen doesn't tell much, does it? I think my translator may have mixed up right and left, too. Do you have the coin?"

"The screee?" The alien produced it.

"Shall there be no preliminary talk? My name is screee."

"My machine can't translate that. Or p.r.o.nouce it. My name is Louis. Has your species met others besides mine?"

"Yes, two. But I am not an expert in that field of knowledge."

"Nor am I. Let's leave the politenesses to the experts. We're here to gamble."

"Choose your symbol," said the alien, and handed him the coin.

Louis looked it over. It was a lens of platinum or something similar, sharp-edged, with the three-clawed hand of his new gambling partner stamped on one side and a planet, with heavy ice caps outlined, decorating the other. Maybe they weren't ice caps, but continents.

He held the coin as if trying to choose. Stalling. Those gas jets seemed to be att.i.tude jets, but maybe not. Suppose he won? Would he win only the chance to be murdered?

But they'd both die if his heart stopped. No alien could have guessed what kind of weapon would render him helpless without killing him.

"I choose the planet. You flip first."

The alien tossed the coin in the direction of Louis's s.h.i.+p. Louis' eyes followed it down, and he took two steps to retrieve it. The alien stood beside him when he rose.

"Hand," he said.

"My turn." He was one down. He tossed the coin. As it spun gleaming, he saw for the first time that the alien s.h.i.+p was gone.

"What gives?" he demanded.

"There's no need for us to die," said the alien. It held something that had hung in a loop from its chest.

"This is a weapon, but both will die if I use it. Please do not try to reach your s.h.i.+p."

Louis touched the b.u.t.ton that would blow his power plant.

"My s.h.i.+p lifted when you turned your head to follow the screee. By now my s.h.i.+p is beyond range of any possible explosion you can bring to bear. There is no need for us to die, provided you do not try to reach your s.h.i.+p."

"Wrong. I can leave your s.h.i.+p without a pilot." He left his hand where it was. Rather than be cheated by an alien in a gambling game-- "The pilot is still on board, with the astrogator and the screee. I am only the communications officer. Why did you a.s.sume I was alone?"

Louis sighed and let his arm fall.

"Because I'm stupid," he said bitterly.

"Because you used the singular p.r.o.noun, or my computer did. Because I thought you were a gambler."

"I gambled that you would not see my s.h.i.+p take off, that you would be distracted by the coin, that you could see only from the front of your head. The risks seemed better than one-half."

Louis nodded. It all seemed clear.

"There was also the chance that you had lured me down to destroy me." The computer was still translating into the first person singular.

"I have lost at, least one exploring s.h.i.+p that flew in this direction."

"Not guilty. So have we." A thought struck him and he said, "Prove that you hold a weapon."

The alien obliged. No beam showed, but sand exploded to Louis's left, with a vicious crack! and a flash the color of lightning. The alien held something that made holes.

So much for that. Louis bent and picked up the coin. "As long as we're here, shall we finish the game?"

"To what purpose?"

"To see who would have won. Doesn't your species gamble for pleasure?"

"To what purpose? We gamble for survival."

"Then Finagle take your whole breed!" he snarled and flung himself to the sand. His chance for glory was gone, tricked away from him. There is a tide that governs men's affairs... and there went the ebb, carrying statues to Louis Wu, history books naming Louis Wu, jetsam on the tide.

"Your att.i.tude is puzzling. One gambles only when gambling is necessary."

"Nuts."

"My translator will not translate that comment."

"Do you know what that artifact is?"

"I know of the species who built that artifact. They traveled far."

"We've never found a stasis box that big. It must be a vault of some kind."

"It is thought that that species used a single weapon to end their war and all its partic.i.p.ants."

The two looked at each other. Possibly each was thinking the same thing. What a disaster, if any but my own species should take this ultimate weapon!

But that was anthropomorphic thinking. Louis knew that a Kzin would have been saying: Now I can conquer the universe, as is my right.

"Finagle take my luck!" said Louis Wu between his teeth.

"Why did you have to show at the same time I did?"

"That was not entirely chance. My instruments found your craft as you backed into the system. To reach the vicinity of the artifact in time, it was necessary to use thrust that damaged my s.h.i.+p and killed one of my crew. I earned possession of the artifact."

"By cheating, d.a.m.n you!" Louis stood up...

And something meshed between his brain and his semicircular ca.n.a.ls.

One gravity.

The density of a planet's atmosphere depended on its gravity, and on its moon. A big moon would skim away most of the atmosphere, over the billions of years of a world's evolution. A moonless world the size and ma.s.s of Earth should have unbreathable air, impossibly dense, worse than Venus.

But this planet had no moon. Except-- The alien said something, a startled e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n that the computer refused to translate.

"Secree! Where did the water go?"

Louis looked. What he saw puzzled him only a moment. The ocean had receded, slipped imperceptibly away, until what showed now was half a mile of level, slickly s.h.i.+nning sea bottom.

"Where did the water go? I do not understand."

"I do."

"Where did it go? Without a moon, there can be no tides. Tides are not this quick in any case. Explain, please."

"It'd be easier if we use the telescope in my s.h.i.+p."

"In your s.h.i.+p there may be weapons."

"Now pay attention," said Louis.

"Your s.h.i.+p is very close to total destruction. Nothing can save your crew but the comm laser in my s.h.i.+p."

The alien dithered, then capitulated.

"If you have weapons, you would have used them earlier. You cannot stop my s.h.i.+p now.

Let us enter your s.h.i.+p. Remember that I hold my weapon."

The alien sood beside him in the small cabin, his mouth working disturbingly around the serrated edges of his teeth as Louis activated the scope and screen. Shortly a starfield appeared. So did a conical s.p.a.cecraft, painted green with darker green markings. Along the bottom of the screen was the blur of thick atmosphere.

"You see? The artifact must be nearly to the horizon. It moves fast."

"That fact is obvious even to low intelligence."

"Yah. Is it obvious to you that this world must have a ma.s.sive satellite?"

"But it does not, unless the satellite is invisible."

"Not invisible. Just too small to notice. But then, it must be very dense."

The alien didn't answer.

"Why did we a.s.sume the sphere was a Slaver stasis box? Its shape was wrong; its size was wrong. But it was s.h.i.+ny, like the surface of a stasis field, and spherical, like an artifact. Planets are spheres too, but gravity wouldn't ordinarily pull something ten feet wide into a sphere. Either it would have to be very fluid, or it would have to be very dense. Do you understand me?"

"No."

"I don't know how your equipment works. My deepradar uses a hyperwave pulse to find stasis boxes. When something stops a byperwave pulse, it's either a stasis box, or it's something denser than degenerate matter, the matter inside a normal star. And this object is dense enough to cause tides."

A tiny silver bead had drifted into view ahead of the cone. Telescopic foreshortening seemed to bring it right alongside the s.h.i.+p. Louis reached to scratch at his beard and was stopped by his faceplate.

"I believe I understand you. But how could it happen?"

"That's guesswork. Well?"

"Call my s.h.i.+p. They would be killed. We must save them!"

"I had to be sure you wouldn't stop me." Louis Wu went to work. Presently a light glowed; the computer had found the alien s.h.i.+p with its comm laser.

He spoke without preliminaries.

"You must leave the spherical object immediately. It is not an artifact. It is ten feet of nearly solid neutronium, probably torn loose from a neutron star."

There was no answer, of course. The alien stood behind him but did not speak.

Probably his own s.h.i.+p's computer could not have handled the double translation. But the alien was making one two-armed gesture, over and over.

The green cone swung sharply around, broadside to the telescope.

"Good, they're firing lateral," said Louis to himself. "Maybe they can do a hyperbolic past it." He raised his voice.

"Use all the power available. You must pull away."

The two objects seemed to be pulling apart. Louis suspected that that was illusion, for the two objects were almost in line-of-sight.