Probably they were after him now.
They couldn’t catch him in any reasonable time. Their drives would be more powerful; gravity on G0 Target #1-3 was about one point zero nine. But they wouldn’t have ramjet fields. Before their bigger drives could make a difference they’d be out of fuel… provided he started in time.
He braked to meet the cargo section, used his softener and oozed through the opaque twing hull. He reached for a handhold without looking, knowing where it would be, his eyes searching for the native.
He missed the handhold. He floated across the empty space while his muscles turned to jelly and melted.
The native had broken through the net and was burrowing feebly among the roots. His belly had become a hard, distended bulge. There was no sentience in his eyes.
With a kind of bewildered fury, Phssthpok thought: How can I get anything done it they keep changing the rules?
Stop that. I’m thinking like a breeder. One step at a time…
Phssthpok reached for a handhold and pushed himself down to Brennan. Brennan was limp now, his eyes half closed with the whites showing under the lids, his hand still clutching half of a root. Phssthpok set him rotating to make an examination.
All right.
Phssthpok climbed through the hull into vacuum and made his way around to the small end of the egg. There he crawled back inside, emerging in a cubicle just big enough to hold him.
Now he must find a hiding place.
No question now of leaving this solar system. He would have to abandon the rest of his ship. Let them chase the monopoles in his empty drive section.
It would be like hiding all his children in the same cave, but there was no help for that. It could have been worse. Though the instruments in the cargo pod were designed only to drop that section from orbit around some planet, the motor itself — the gravity polarizer — would take him anywhere he wanted to go within G0 Target #1’s gravity well. Except that he would have to do everything right the first time. Except that he could only land once. As a ship’s drive, the gravity polarizer had many of the virtues and faults of a paraglider. He could aim it anywhere be wanted to go, even after he’d killed his velocity, provided that he wanted to go down. The polarizer would not lift him against gravity.
Compared to the fusion drive controls, the controls around him were fiercely complicated. Phssthpok began doing things to them. The line at the small end of the egg separated in a puff of flame. The twing around him became transparent… and slightly porous; in a century it would have lost a dangerous amount of air. Phssthpok’s manlike eyes took on a glassy look. The next moves would take intense concentration. He hadn’t dared tie the captive down; or otherwise restrict him. To avoid crushing him, he would have to keep the internal and external gravities exactly balanced. The hull, which carried the polarizing field, might melt at these accelerations.
The rest of his ship floated in Phssthpok’s rear screen. He twisted two knobs hard over, and it was gone.
Where to now?
He’d need weeks to hide. He couldn’t hope to hide on G0 Target #1-3, given their technology.
But space was too open to hide in.
He could only land once. Where he came down, he’d have to stay, unless he could rig some kind of launching or signaling device.
Phssthpok began to search the sky for planets. His eyes were good, and planets were big and dim, easy to spot. The ringed gas giant would have been a good one — easy to hide in the rings — except that it was behind him. A gas giant ahead of him, with moons — too far ahead. He’d have to coast for days to reach it. The natives must be after him now. Without a telescope he’d never see them until too late.
That one. He’d studied it when he had a telescope. Small, with low gravity and a trace of atmosphere. Asteroids all around it, and too much atmosphere for vacuum cementing. With luck, it should make for deep dust pools.
He should have studied it before. There might be mining industries, or even colonies. Too late now. He had no choice; he had had no real choice in quite some time. That planet was his target. When the time came to leave he would have to hope the native could signal his kind. He didn’t like it much.
The robot was a four-foot upright cylinder floating placidly in one corner of the Struldbrugs’ Club reading room. Its muted two tone brown blended with the walls, making it almost invisible. Externally the robot was motionless. In its flared base, fans whirred silently, holding it two inches off the floor, and inside the featureless dome that was its head, scanners revolved endlessly, watching every corner of the room.
Without taking his eyes off the reading screen, Lucas Garner reached for his glass. He found it with careful fingertips, picked it up and tried to drink. It was empty. He held it aloft, wiggled it and, still without looking up, said, “Irish coffee.”
The robot was at his elbow. It made no move to take the double-walled glass. Instead, it chimed softly. Garner looked up at last, scowling. A line of lighted print flowed across the robot’s chest.
“Terribly sorry, Mr. Garner. You have exceeded your maximum daily alcohol content.”
“Cancel, then,” said Luke. “Go on, beat it.”
The robot scooted for its corner. Luke sighed — it was partly his own fault — and went back to reading. The tape was a new medical tome on “The Aging Process in Man.”
Last year he had voted with the rest to let the Club autodoc monitor the Club serving robots. He couldn’t regret it. Not a single Struldbrug was less than one hundred and fifty-four years of age, by Club law, and the age requirement went up one year for every two that passed. They needed the best and most rigid of medical protection.
Luke was a prime example. He was approaching, with little enthusiasm, his one hundred and eighty-fifth birthday. He had used a travel chair constantly for twenty years. Luke was a paraplegic, not because of any accident to his spine, but because his spinal nerves were dying of old age. Central nervous tissue never replaces itself. The disproportion between his thin unused legs and his massive shoulders and arms and huge hands made him look a little ape-like. Luke was aware of this, and rather enjoyed it.
His attention was wholly on the tape he was speedreading when he was disturbed again. A barely audible murmur of voices filled the reading room with a formless, swelling whisper. Regretfully Luke turned to look.
Someone was walking in his direction, using a purposeful stride which could not have been matched by any Struldbrug. The man had the long, narrow frame of one who has spent some years on a stretch rack. His arms and the skin below his larynx were negro dark; but his hands and his heavily lined face were the black of a starless night, a true space black. His hair was a cockatoo’s crest, an inch-wide strip of snow-white rug from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck.
A Belter had invaded the Struldbrugs’ Club. No wonder they whispered!
He stopped before Luke’s chair. “Lucas Garner?” His voice and manner were grave and formal.
“Right,” said Luke.
The man lowered his voice. “I’m Nicholas Sohl, First Speaker for the Belt Political Section. Is there someplace we can talk?”
“Follow me,” said Luke. He touched controls in the arm of his chair, and the chair rose on an air cushion and moved across the room.
He settled them in an alcove off the main hall. He said, “You really caused an uproar in there.”
“Oh? Why?” The First Speaker sprawled limp and boneless in a masseur chair, letting the tiny motors knead him into new shapes. His voice was still quick and crisp with the well known Belt accent.