Hugo awards the short st.., p.102
Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 1), page 102
There are no books which tell a man how to bring back the power he has lost.
He tries everything he can think of, while he is waiting. Walking the hot pavements of a summer noon, crossing against the lights because traffic is slow, watching kids in swimsuits play around a gurgling hydrant, filthy water sluicing the gutter about their feet, as mothers and older sisters in halters, wrinkled shirts, bermudas, and sunburnt skins watch them, occasionally, while talking to one another in entranceways to buildings or the shade of a storefront awning. Milt moves across town, heading nowhere in particular, growing claustrophobic if he stops for long, his eyebrows full of perspiration, sunglasses streaked with it, shirt sticking to his sides and coming loose, sticking and coming loose as he walks.
Amid the afternoon, there comes a time when he has to rest the two fresh-baked bricks at the ends of his legs. He finds a tree-lawn bench flanked by high maples, eases himself down into it and sits there thinking of nothing in particular for perhaps twenty-five minutes.
Hello.
Something within him laughs or weeps.
Yes, hello, I am here! Don't go away! Stay! Please!
You are—like me…
Yes, I am. You can see it in me because you are what you are. But you must read here and send here, too. I'm frozen. I—Hello? Where are you?
Once more, he is alone.
He tries to broadcast. He fills his mind with the thoughts and tries to push them outside his skull.
Please come back! I need you. You can help me. I am desperate. I hurt. Where are you?
Again, nothing.
He wants to scream. He wants to search every room in every building on the block.
Instead, he sits there.
At 9:30 that evening they meet again, inside his mind.
Hello?
Stay! Stay, for God's sake! Don't go away this time! Please don't! Listen, I need you! You can help me.
How? What is the matter?
I'm like you. Or was, once. I could reach out with my mind and be other places, other things, other people. I can't do it now, though. I have a blockage. The power will not come. I know it is there. I can feel it. But I can't use… Hello?
Yes, I am still here. I can feel myself going away, though. I will be back. I…
Milt waits until midnight. She does not come back. It is a feminine mind which has touched his own. Vague, weak, but definitely feminine, and wearing the power. She does not come back that night, though. He paces up and down the block, wondering which window, which door…
He eats at an all-night cafe, returns to his bench, waits, paces again, goes back to the cafe for cigarettes, begins chain-smoking, goes back to the bench.
Dawn occurs, day arrives, night is gone. He is alone, as birds explore the silence, traffic begins to swell, dogs wander the lawns.
Then, weakly, the contact:
I am here. I can stay longer this time, I think. How can I help you? Tell me.
All right. Do this thing: Think of the feeling, the feeling of the out-go, out-reach, out-know that you have now. Fill your mind with that feeling and send it to me as hard as you can.
It comes upon him then as once it was: the knowledge of the power. It is earth and water, fire and air to him. He stands upon it, he swims in it, he warms himself by it, he moves through it.
It is returning! Don't stop now!
I'm sorry. I must. I'm getting dizzy…
Where are you?
Hospital…
He looks up the street to the hospital on the corner, at the far end, to his left.
What ward? He frames the thought but knows she is already gone, even as he does it.
Doped-up or feverish, he decides, and probably out for a while now.
He takes a taxi back to where he had parked, drives home, showers and shaves, makes breakfast, cannot eat.
He drinks orange juice and coffee and stretches out on the bed.
Five hours later he awakens, looks at his watch, curses.
All the way back into town, he tries to recall the power. It is there like a tree, rooted in his being, branching behind his eyes, all bud, blossom, sap, and color, but no leaves, no fruit. He can feel it swaying within him, pulsing, breathing; from the tips of his toes to the roots of his hair he feels it. But it does not bend to his will, it does not branch within his consciousness, furl there it leaves, spread the aromas of life.
He parks in the hospital lot, enters the lobby, avoids the front desk, finds a chair beside a table filled with magazines.
Two hours later he meets her.
He is hiding behind a copy of Holiday and looking for her.
I am here.
Again, then! Quickly! The power! Help me to rouse it!
She does this thing.
Within his mind, she conjures the power. There is a movement, a pause, a movement, a pause. Reflectively, as though suddenly remembering an intricate dance step, it stirs within him, the power.
As in a surfacing bathyscaphe, there is a rush of distortions, then a clear, moist view without.
She is a child who has helped him.
A mind-twisted, fevered child, dying…
He reads it all when he turns the power upon her.
Her name is Dorothy and she is delirious. The power came upon her at the height of her illness, perhaps because of it.
Has she helped a man come alive again, or dreamed that she helped him? she wonders.
She is thirteen years old and her parents sit beside her bed. In the mind of her mother a word rolls over and over, senselessly, blocking all other thoughts, though it cannot keep away the feelings:
Methotrexate, methotrexate, methotrexate, meth…
In Dorothy's thirteen-year-old breastbone there are needles of pain. The fevers swirl within her, and she is all but gone to him.
She is dying of leukemia. The final stages are already arrived. He can taste the blood in her mouth.
Helpless within his power, he projects:
You have given me the end of your life and your final strength. I did not know this. I would not have asked it of you if I had.
Thank you, she says, for the pictures inside you.
Pictures?
Places, things I saw…
There is not much inside me worth showing. You could have been elsewhere, seeing better.
I am going again…
Wait!
He calls upon the power that lives within him now, fused with his will and his sense, his thoughts, memories, feelings. In one great blaze of life, he shows her Milt Rand.
Here is everything I have, all I have ever been that might please. Here is swarming through a foggy night, blinking on and off. Here is lying beneath a bush as the rains of summer fall about you, drip from the leaves upon your fox-soft fur. Here is the moon-dance of the deer, the dream drift of the trout beneath the dark swell, blood cold as the waters about you.
Here is Tatya dancing and Walker preaching; here is my cousin Gary, as he whittles, contriving a ball within a box, all out of one piece of wood. This is my New York and my Paris. This, my favorite meal, drink, cigar, restaurant, park, road to drive on late at night; this is where I dug tunnels, built a lean-to, went swimming; this, my first kiss; these are the tears of loss; this is exile and alone, and recovery, awe, joy; these, my grandmother's daffodils; this her coffin, daffodils about it; these are the colors of the music I love, and this is my dog who lived long and was good. See all the things that heat the spirit, cool within the mind, are encased in memory and one's self. I give them to you, who have no time to know them.
He sees himself standing on the far hills of her mind. She laughs aloud then, and in her room somewhere high away a hand is laid upon her and her wrist is taken between fingers and thumb as she rushes toward him suddenly grown large. His great black wings sweep forward to fold her wordless spasm of life, then are empty.
Milt Rand stiffens within his power, puts aside a copy of Holiday and stands, to leave the hospital, full and empty, empty, full, like himself, now, behind.
Such is the power of the power.
NEUTRON STAR
Larry Niven
The Skydiver dropped out of hyperspace an even million miles above the neutron star. I needed a minute to place myself against the stellar background, and another to find the distortion Sonya Laskin had mentioned before she died. It was to my left, an area the apparent size of the Earth’s moon. I swung the ship around to face it.
Curdled stars, muddled stars, stars that had been stirred with a spoon.
The neutron star was in the center, of course, though I couldn’t see it and hadn’t expected to. It was only eleven miles across, and cool. A billion years had passed since BVS-l burned by fusion fire. Millions of years, at least, since the cataclysmic two weeks during which BVS-l was an X-ray star, burning at a temperature of five billion degrees Kelvin. Now it showed only by its mass.
The ship began to turn by itself. I felt the pressure of the fusion drive. Without help from me my faithful metal watchdog was putting me in a hyperbolic orbit that would take me within one mile of the neutron star’s surface. Twenty-four hours to fall, twenty-four hours to rise. . . and during that time something would try to kill me. As something had killed the Laskins.
The same type of autopilot, with the same program, had chosen the Laskins’ orbit. It had not caused their ship to collide with the star. I could trust the autopilot. I could even change its program.
I really ought to.
How did I get myself into this hole?
The drive went off after ten minutes of maneuvering. My orbit was established, in more ways than one. I knew what would happen if I tried to back out now.
All I’d done was walk into a drugstore to get a new battery for my lighter!
Right in the middle of the store, surrounded by three floors of sales counters, was the new 2603 Sinclair intrasystem yacht. I’d come for a battery, but I stayed to admire. It was a beautiful job, small and sleek and streamlined and blatantly different from anything that’d ever been built. I wouldn’t have flown it for anything but I had to admit it was pretty. I ducked my head through the door to look at the control panel. You never saw so many dials. When I pulled my head out, all the customers were looking in the same direction. The place had gone startlingly quiet.
I can’t blame them for staring. A number of aliens were in the store, mainly shopping for souvenirs, but they were staring too. A puppeteer is unique. Imagine a headless, three-legged centaur wearing two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on its arms, and you’ll have something like the right picture. But the arms are weaving necks, and the puppets are real heads, flat and brainless, with wide flexible lips. The brain is under a bony hump set between the bases of the necks. This puppeteer wore only its own coat of brown hair, with a mane that extended all the way up its spine to form a thick mat over the brain. I’m told that the way they wear the mane indicates their status in society, but to me it could have been anything from a dock worker to a jeweler to the president of General Products.
I watched with the rest as it came across the floor, not because I’d never seen a puppeteer but because there is something beautiful about the dainty way they move on those slender legs and tiny hooves. I watched it come straight toward me, closer and closer. It stopped a foot away, looked me over, and said, “You are Beowuif Shaeffer, former chief pilot for Nakamura Lines.”
Its voice was a beautiful contralto with not a trace of accent. A puppeteer’s mouths are not only the most flexible speech organs around, but also the most sensitive hands. The tongues are forked and pointed; the wide, thick lips have little fingerlike knobs along the rims. Imagine a watchmaker with a sense of taste in his fingertips
I cleared my throat. “That’s right.”
It considered me from two directions. “You would be interested in a high-paying job?”
“I’d be fascinated by a high-paying job.”
“I am our equivalent of the regional president of General Products. Please come with me, and we will discuss this elsewhere.”
I followed it into a displacement booth. Eyes followed me all the way. It was embarrassing, being accosted in a public drugstore by a two-headed monster. Maybe the puppeteer knew it. Maybe it was testing me to see how badly I needed money.
My need was great. Eight months had passed since Nakamura Lines folded. For some time before that I had been living very high on the hog, knowing that my back pay would cover my debts. I never saw that back pay. It was quite a crash, Nakamura Lines. Respectable middle-aged businessmen took to leaving their hotel windows without their lift belts. Me, I kept spending. If I’d started living frugally, my creditors would have done some checking... and I’d have ended in debtor’s prison.
The puppeteer dialed thirteen fast digits with its tongue. A moment later we were elsewhere, Air puffed out when I opened the booth door, and I swallowed to pop my ears.
“We are on the roof of the General Products building.” The rich contralto voice thrilled along my nerves, and I had to remind myself that it was an alien speaking, not a lovely woman. “You must examine this spacecraft while we discuss your assignment.”
I stepped outside a little cautiously, but it wasn’t the windy season. The roof was at ground level. That’s the way we build on We Made It. Maybe it has something to do with the fifteen-hundred-mile-an-hour winds we get in summer and winter, when the planet’s axis of rotation runs through its primary, Procyon. The winds are our planet’s only tourist attraction, and it would be a shame to slow them down by planting skyscrapers in their path. The bare, square concrete roof was surrounded by endless square miles of desert, not like the deserts of other inhabited worlds, but an utterly lifeless expanse of fine sand just crying to be planted with ornamental cactus. We’ve tried that. The wind blows the plants away.
The ship lay on the sand beyond the roof. It was a No. 2 General Products hull: a cylinder three hundred feet long and twenty feet through, pointed at both ends and with a, slight wasp-waist constriction near the tail. For some reason it was lying on its side, with the landing shocks still folded in at the tail.
Ever notice how all ships have begun to look the same? A good ninety-five percent of today’s spacecraft are built around one of the four General Products hulls. It’s easier and safer to build that way, but somehow all ships end as they began: mass-produced look-alikes.
The hulls are delivered fully transparent, and you use paint where you feel like it. Most of this particular hull had been left transparent. Only the nose had been painted, around the lifesystem. There was no major reaction drive. A series of retractable attitude jets had been mounted in the sides, and the hull was pierced with smaller holes, square and round, for observational instruments. I could see them gleaming through the hull.
The puppeteer was moving toward the nose, but something made me turn toward the stern for a closer look at the landing shocks. They were bent. Behind the curved transparent hull panels some tremendous pressure had forced the metal to flow like warm wax, back and into the pointed stern.
“What did this?” I asked.
“We do not know. We wish strenuously to find out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you heard of the neutron star BVS-l?”
I had to think a moment. “First neutron star ever found, and so far the only. Someone located it two years ago, by stellar displacement.”
“BVS-l was found by the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx. We learned through a go-between that the Institute wished to explore the star. They needed a ship to do it.
They had not yet sufficient money. We offered to supply them with a ship’s hull, with the usual guarantees, if they would turn over to us all data they acquired through using our ship.”
“Sounds fair enough.” I didn’t ask why they hadn’t done their own exploring. Like most sentient vegetarians, puppeteers find discretion to be the only part of valor.
“Two humans named Peter Laskin and Sonya Laskin wished to use the ship. They intended to come within one mile of the surface in a hyperbolic orbit. At some point during their trip an unknown force apparently reached through the hull to do this to the landing shocks. The unknown force also seems to have killed the pilots.”
“But that’s impossible. Isn’t it?”
“You see the point. Come with me.” The puppeteer trotted toward the bow.
I saw the point, all right. Nothing, but nothing, can get through a General Products hull. No kind of electromagnetic energy except visible light. No kind of matter, from the smallest subatomic particle to the fastest meteor. That’s what the company’s advertisements claim, and the guarantee backs them up. I’ve never doubted it, and I’ve never heard of a General Products hull being damaged by a weapon or by anything else.
On the other hand, a General Products hull is as ugly as it is functional. The puppeteer-owned company could be badly hurt if it got around that something could get through a company hull. But I didn’t see where I came in.
We rode an escalladder into the nose.
The lifesystem was in two compartments. Here the Laskins had used heat-reflective paint. In the conical control cabin the hull had been divided into windows. The relaxation room behind it was a windowless reflective silver. From the back wall of the relaxation room an access tube ran aft, opening on various instruments and the hyperdrive motors.
There were two acceleration couches in the control cabin. Both had been torn loose from their mountings and wadded into the nose like so much tissue paper, crushing the instrument paneL The backs of the crumpled couches were splashed with rust brown. Flecks of the same color were all over everything, the walls, the windows, the viewscreens. It was as if something had hit the couches from behind: something like a dozen paint-filled toy balloons striking with tremendous force.
"That’s blood,” I said.
“That is correct. Human circulatory fluid.”
Twenty-four hours to fall.
I spent most of the first twelve hours in the relaxation room, trying to read. Nothing significant was happening, except that a few times I saw the phenomenon Sonya Laskin had mentioned in her last report. When a star went directly behind the invisible BVS-l, a halo formed. BVS-1 was heavy enough to bend light around it, displacing most stars to the sides; but when a star went directly behind the neutron star, its light was displaced to all sides at once. Result: a tiny circle which flashed once and was gone almost before the eye could catch it.
