World Of Ptavvs

Anderson, the Belt fleet just took off for Pluto from four million miles away. How long?'

'They started from rest?'

'Close enough.'-

'Lessee…five hours ten minutes, approx. No less, maybe more, depending on whether they're scared of the fire.'

'How long for us?'

'Fifty-nine hours now.'

'Thanks, Anderson.' Luke turned off the radio. Strange, how Smoky had sat there without saying a word. In fact, he hadn't said much of anything lately.

With a chill, Luke realized that Smoky's thoughts must run very like his own. With the ET a dead issue, the question was: Who got the helmet? Belt or Earth? And Smoky wasn't about to trust Earth with it.

Larry Greenberg opened his eyes and saw darkness. It was cold. 'The lights don't work,' said a voice in his mind.

'Did we crash?'

'We did indeed. I can't imagine why we're still alive.

GET UP.'

Larry Greenberg got up and marched down the aisle between the passengers' seats. His muscles, bruised and aching, seemed to be acting by themselves. He went to the pilot seat, removed the pilot and sat down. His hands strapped him, then folded themselves into his lap. There he sat. Kzanol stood beside him, barely in the range of his peripheral vision.

'Comfortable?'

'Not quite,' Larry confessed. 'Could you leave one arm free for smoking?'

'Certainly.' Larry found his left arm would obey him. He still couldn't move his eyes, though he could blink. He pulled a cigarette and lit it, moving by touch.

He thought, 'It's a good thing I'm one of those people who can shave without a mirror.'

Kzanol asked, 'What does that have to do with anything?'

'It means I don't get uncoordinated without my eyes.'

Kzanol stood watching him, a blurred mass at the edge of sight. Larry knew what he wanted. He wouldn't do it; he wouldn't ask.

What did Kzanol look like? he wondered.

He looked like a thrint, of course. Larry could remember being Kzanol/Greenberg, and all he had seen was a smallish, handsome, somewhat undergroomed thrint. But when he'd walked past Kzanol on his way to the pilot room, his fleeting glimpse had found something terrifying, something one-eyed and scaly and iridescent green, with gray giant earthworms writhing at the corners of a mouth like a slash in a child's rubber ball, with sharply pointed metallic teeth, with oversized arms and huge three-fingered hands like mechanical grabs.

The Thrintun voice was chilly, by its own standards. 'Are you wondering about my oath?'

'Oaths. Yes, now that you mention it.'

'You can no longer claim to be a thrint in a human body. You are not the being I gave my oath to.'

'Oaths.'

'I still want you to help me manage Earth.'

Larry had no trouble understanding even the inflections in overspeak, and Kzanol, of course, could now read his mind.

'But you'll manage me,' said Larry.

'Yes, of course.'

Larry raised his cigarette and tapped it with a forefinger. The ash fell slower than mist past his gaze and disappeared from sight. 'There's something I should tell you,' he said.

'Condense it. My time is short; I have to find something.'

'I don't think you should own the Earth any more. I'll stop you if I can.'

Kzanol's eating tendrils were doing something strange. Larry couldn't see what it was. 'You think like a slave. Not a ptavv, a slave. You have no conceivable reason to warn me.'

'That's my problem.'

'Quite. DON'T MOVE UNTIL I RETURN.' The command carried overtones of disgust. A dark blur that was Kzanol moved and vanished.

Alone in the pilot room, Larry listened to the clanking, squeaking, and mental cursing that meant Kzanol was searching for something. He heard when the thrint sharply ordered the pilot to return to life and show him AT ONCE where he'd hidden the contaminated portable radar… The command, a mere explosion of frustration, stopped suddenly. So did the sounds of search.

Presently Larry heard the airlock chugging to itself.

The clerk was a middleman. It was his job to set priorities on messages sent into and received from deep space. At three in the morning he answered the ring of the outside phone.

'Hello, Arms Maser Transceiving Station,' he said a little sleepily. It had been a dull night.

It was no longer dull. The small brunette who looked out of his screen was startlingly beautiful, especially to the man who saw her unexpectedly in the dead hours.

'Hello. I have a message for Lucas Garner. He's on the way to Neptune, I think.'

'Lucas Garner? What I mean, what's the message?'

'Tell him that my husband is back to normal, and he should take it into consideration. It's very important.'

'And who is your husband?'

'Larry Greenberg. That's G-r-e'

'Yes, I know. But he's beyond Neptune by now. Wouldn't Garner already know anything you know about Greenberg?'

'Not unless he's telepathic.'

It was a tricky decision for a clerk. Maser messages cost like uranium, less because of the power needed and the wear and tear on the delicate machines than because of the difficulty of finding the.target. But only Garner could decide whether an undependable «hunch» was important to him. The clerk risked his job and sent the message.

The fire had slowed now. Most of the unburned hydrogen had been blown before the fire, until it was congested into a cloud mass opposite on Pluto from the resting place of the Golden Circle. Around that cloud bank raged a hurricane of awesome proportions. Frozen rain poured out of the heavens in huge lens-shaped drops, hissing into the nitrogen snow. The layers above nitrogen were gone, vaporized, gas diluting the hydrogen which still poured in. On the borderline hydrogen burned fitfully with halogens, and even with nitrogen to form ammonia, but around most of the great circle the fires had gone out. Relatively small, isolated conflagrations ate their way toward the new center. The «hot» water ice continued to fall. When it had boiled the nitrogen away it would begin on the oxygen. And then there would be a fire.

At the center of the hurricane the ice stood like a tremendous Arizona butte. Even the halogens were still frozen across its flat top, thousands of square miles of fluorine ice with near-vacuum above. Coriolis effects held back the burning wind for a time.

On the other side of the world, Kzanol stepped out of the Golden Circle.

He turned once to look back. The honeymoon ship was flat on her belly. Her landing gear was retracted, and a wide, smooth crater was centered under the drive exhaust cone. Star-hot hydrogen had leaked from the fusion tube for some time after its fuel was cut off. The fuselage was twisted, though not broken. Her forward wings had been jarred open, and now hung broken from their sockets. One tip of the triangular major wing curled up where it had stabbed against rock-hard ice.

She was doomed, she was useless. Kzanol walked on. The Thrintun space suit was a marvelous assemblage of tools. No changes had been made in it for centuries before Kzanol's time, for the design had long been perfect, but for an unsuspected flaw in the emergency systems, and the naive Thrintun had never reached