World Of Ptavvs

Why should it be in code?

Lit Sheeffer would have known.

Even now, sitting in his office deep in the rock of Ceres, with the bubble of Confinement winding its snail- slow orbit thirty miles overhead, Lit was preparing a note of apology to the United Nations. It was the hardest work he'd ever done! But there seemed no way out.

A week and a half ago there had been a maser message from Neptune. Garner's story was true: he had gone to Neptune in pursuit of a wildly dangerous ET. Lit had scowled and ordered an immediate end to the harassment of Earth shipping.

But the damage was done. For two weeks the Belt had persecuted Earth's meager shipping; had used codes in maser transmissions, even in solar weather forecasts, in violation of a century's tradition; had used their espionage network so heavily that its existence became insultingly obvious. Secretiveness and suspicion were the rule as never before.

Earth had retaliated in kind.

Now the Belt had stopped using codes, but Earth had not.

Did the coded messages contain vital information? Almost certainly not, Lit would have guessed. Certain messages decoded at random bore him out. But the Belt couldn't be sure, which, of course, was the whole point.

And Belt ships were searched at Earth's ports, with insulting thoroughness.

This mistrust had to be stopped now. Lit gritted his teeth and continued writing.

The message started to repeat, and Lloyd switched it off with a decisive click.

'She felt him die,' said Luke. 'She didn't know it, but she felt him die.'

His thoughts ran on without???… She'd felt him die. What was it that let some people know things they couldn't possibly know? There seemed to be more and more of them lately. Luke had never been remotely psychic, and he'd envied the lucky few who could find lost rings or lost criminals without the slightest effort, with no more explanation than, 'I thought you might have dropped it in the mayonnaise,' or, 'I had a hunch he was hiding in the subway, living off the tenth-mark peanut machines.' Parapsychologists with their special cards had proven that psy powers exist; and had gone no further than that, in close to two hundred years, except for psionics devices like the contact machine. 'Psionics,' to Luke, meant 'I don't know how the damn thing works.'

How did Judy know that the Golden Circle had crashed? You couldn't know the answer, so you hung a tag on it. Telepathy.

'And even then,' said Luke, not knowing that he spoke. 'she managed to fool herself. Marvelous!'

'Did she?'

Luke's head jerked up and around. Lloyd was scared and not trying to hide it. He said, 'The Golden Circle was a tough ship. Her drive was in her belly, remember? Her belly was built to stand fusion heat. And the explosion was below her.'

Luke felt his own nerves thrill in sympathetic fear.

'We'll find out right now,' he said, and touched the control panel. 'All ships, listen in. Anderson, what do you know about the Golden Circle?'

'Yeah, I heard it too. It could be; it just could be. The people who built the honeymooners knew damn well that one accident or one breakdown could ruin a billion-mark business. They built the ships to stand up to anything. The Golden Circle's life system is smaller in proportion than the life system of any ship here, just because they put so much extra weight in the walls and in the failsafe systems.'

In a dull voice, Smoky said, 'And we're out of it.'

'Hell we are. That message was in code. Lloyd, get the maser pointed at Pluto. We've got to warn the Belters. Smoky, is there a Mayday signal we can use?'

'No need. They'll hear you. It's too late anyway.'

'What do you mean?'

'They're going down.'

Kzanol walked slowly through a tunnel which gleamed dull white where the light fell. With practice he had learned to stay the right distance behind the disappearing far wall, following his disintegrator beam, so that he walked in a sloppy cylinder six feet in diameter. The wind-roared past him and ceased to be wind; it was flying dust and ice particles, flying in vacuum and low gravity, and it packed the tunnel solidly behind him.

The other suit was two hundred feet beyond the end of the sloping tube.

Kzanol looked up. He turned off the disintegrator and stood, stiffly furious, waiting. They had dared! They were just beyond control range, too far away and moving in fast, but they were decelerating as they closed in. He waited, ready to kill.

Mature consideration stopped him. He needed a ship in which to leave Pluto; his own was shot to heat death. Those above him were single seaters, useless to him, but he knew that other ships were coming. He must not frighten them away.

He would let these ships land.

Lew's singleship hung nose down over the surface of Pluto. He'd set the gyros that way. The ship would be nose down for a long time, perhaps until the gyros wore out. Yet he could see nothing. The planetary surface was hidden beneath a curtain of boiling storm clouds.

He knew that he had passed Cott's Crescent some minutes ago. He had heard the hum of an open intership circuit. Now, coming toward him over the curved horizon, was a storm within a storm: the titanic whirling hurricane he had passed over twice already. Pluto takes months to rotate. Only a monumental flow of air, air newly created, rushing around from the other side of the planet, could have carried enough lateral velocity to build such a sky whirlpool from mere Coriolis effects. Flames flickered in its roiling rim; but the center was a wide circle of calm, clear near-vacuum all the way down to the icy plateau.

Over the radio came the sound of Garner's voice.

'… Please answer at once so we'll know you're all right. There is a real chance that the ET survived the crash, in which case-'

'Now you're telling me, you know-it-all son of a bitch!' Lew couldn't talk. His tongue and his lips were as frozen as the rest of his voluntary muscles. He heard the message all the way through, and he heard it repeated, and repeated. Garner sounded more urgent than he had ten minutes ago.

The hurricane was almost below him now. He looked straight down into the eye.

From one of the murky fires in the rim of the eye, a tongue reached inward.

It was like the first explosion, the one he'd watched through the telescope. But this wasn't the telescope!

The whole plateau was lost in multicolored flame in the first twenty seconds. With the leisurely torpor of a sleepy ground sloth on a cold morning, the fire stood up and reached for him. It was fire and ice, chunks of ice big enough to see, ice burning as it rose in the clutch of the height and might, a blazing carnivore reaching to swallow him.

Viprin race. Bowed skeletal shapes like great albino whippets seemed to skim the dirt surface of the track, their jet nacelle nostrils flaring, their skins shining like oil, racing round and round the audience standing breathless in the center of the circle. The air was thick with Power: thousands of Thrintun desperately hurling orders at their favorites, knowing perfectly well that the mutant viprin didn't have the brains to hear. Kzanol on one of the too- expensive seats, clutching a lavender plastic cord, knowing that this race, this race meant the difference between life as a prospector and life as a superintendent of cleaning machinery. He would leave here with commercials to buy a ship, or with none.

Larry dropped it. It was too late in Kzanol's life. He wanted to remember much earlier. But his brain seemed filled with fog, and the Thrintun memories were fuzzy and hard to grasp. As Kzanol/Greenberg he had had no trouble with his memory, but as Larry he found it infuriatingly vague.

The earliest thing he could remember was that scene of the sunflowers.