Larry Niven

A Gift From Earth

CHAPTER 1

THE RAMROBOT

A RAMROBOT had been the first to see Mount Lookitthat. Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds. The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light. Long ago the UN had sent ramrobots to nearby stars to search out habitable planets. It was a peculiarity of the first ramrobots that they were not choosy. The Procyon ramrobot, for instance, had landed on We Made It in spring. Had the landing occurred in summer or winter, when the planet's axis points through its sun, the ramrobot would have sensed the fifteen-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. The Sirius ramrobot had searched out the two narrow habitable bands on Jinx, but had not been programmed to report the planet's other peculiarities. And the Tau Ceti ramrobot, Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #4, had landed on Mount Lookitthat. Only the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat was habitable. The rest of the planet was an eternal searing black calm, useless for any purpose. The Plateau was smaller than any region a colony project would settle by choice. But Inter stellar Ramscoop Robot #4 had found an habitable point, and that was all it knew.

The colony slowboats, which followed the ramrobots. had not been built to make round trips. Their passengers had to stay, always. And so Mount Lookitthat was set tled, more than three hundred years ago.

A flock of police cars fanned out behind the fleeing man. He could hear them buzzing like summer bumble-bees. Now, too late, they were using all their power. In the air this pushed them to one hundred miles per hour: fast enough for transportation in as small a region as Mount Lookitthat, but, just this once, not fast enough to win a race. The running man was only yards from the edge.

Spurts of dust erupted ahead of the fugitive. At last the Implementation police had decided to risk damaging the body. The man bit the dust like a puppet thrown in anger, turned over hugging one knee. Then he was scrambling for the cliff's sharp edge on the other knee and two hands. He jerked once more, but kept moving... At the very edge he looked up to see a circling car coming right at him from the blue void beyond.

With the tip of his tongue held firmly between his teeth, Jesus Pietro Castro aimed his car at the enraged, agonized, bearded face. An inch too low and he'd hit the cliff; an inch too high and he'd miss the man, miss his chance to knock him back onto the Plateau. He pushed two fan throttles forward ...

Too late. The man was gone.

Later, they stood at the edge and looked down.

Often Jesus Pietro had watched groups of children standing fearful and excited at the void edge, looking down toward the hidden roots of Mount Lookitthat, daring each other to go closer-and closer. As a child he had done the same. The wonder of that view had never left him.

Forty miles below, beneath a swirling sea of white mist, was the true surface of Mount Lookitthat the planet. The great plateau on Mount Lookitthat the mountain had a surface less than half the size of California. All the rest of the world's surface was a black oven, hot enough to melt lead, at the bottom of an atmosphere sixty times as thick as Earth's.

Matthew Keller had committed, deliberately, one of the worst of possible crimes. He had crawled off the edge of the Plateau, taking with him his eyes, his liver and kidneys, his miles of blood tubing, and all twelve of his glands--taking everything that could have gone into the Hospital's organ banks to save the lives of those whose bodies were failing. Even his worth as fertilizer, not inconsiderable on a three-hundred-year-old colony world, was now nil. Only the water in him would someday return to the upper world to fall as rain on the lakes and rivers and as snow on the great northern glacier. Already, perhaps, he was dry and flaming, in the awful heat forty miles below.

Or had he stopped falling, even yet?

Jesus Pietro, Head of Implementation, stepped back with an effort. The formless mist sometimes brought strange hallucinations and stranger thoughts--like that odd member of the Rorschach inkblot set, the one sheet of cardboard which is blank. Jesus Pietro had caught himself thinking that when his time came, if it ever came, this was the way he would like to go. And that was treason.

The major met his eye with a curious reluctance.

"Major," said Jesus Pietro, "why did that man escape you?"

The major spread his hands. "He lost himself in the trees for several minutes. When he broke for the edge, it took my men a few minutes to spot him."

"How did he reach the trees? No, don't tell me how he broke loose. Tell me why your cars didn't catch him before he reached the grove."

The major hesitated a split second too long. Jesus Pietro said, "You were playing with him. He couldn't reach his friends and he couldn't remain hidden anywhere, so you decided to have a little harmless fun."

The major dropped his eyes.

"You will take his place," said Jesus Pietro.

The playground was grass and trees, swings and teetertotters, and a slow, skeletal merry-go-round. The school surrounded it on three sides, a one-story building of architectural coral, painted white. The fourth side, protected by a high fence of tame vine growing on wooden stakes, was the edge of Gamma Plateau, a steep cliff overlooking Lake Davidson on Delta Plateau.

Matthew Leiah Keller sat beneath a watershed tree and brooded. Other children played all around him, but they ignored Matt. So did two teachers on monitor duty. People usually ignored Matt when he wanted to be alone.

Uncle Matt was gone. Gone to a fate so horrible that the adults wouldn't even talk about it.

Implementation police had come to the house at sunset yesterday. They had left with Matt's big comfortable uncle. Knowing that they were taking him to the Hospital, Matt had tried to stop those towering, uniformed men; but they'd been gentle and superior and firm, and an eight-year-old boy had not slowed them down at all. A honey-bee buzzing around four tanks.

One day soon his uncle's trial and conviction would be announced on the colonist teedee programs, along with the charges and the record of his execution. But that didn't matter. That was just cleaning up. Uncle Matt would not be back.

A sting in his eyes warned Matt that he was going to cry.

Harold Lillard stopped his aimless running around when he realized that he was alone. He didn't like to be alone. Harold was ten, big for his age, and he needed others around him. Preferably smaller others, children who could be dominated. Looking rather helplessly around him, he spotted a small form under a tree near the playground's edge. Small enough. Far enough from the playground monitors.

He started over.

The boy under the tree looked up.

Harold lost interest. He wandered away with a vacant expression, moving more or less toward the teeter-totters.

Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #143 left Juno at the end of a linear accelerator. Coasting toward interstellar space, she looked like a huge metal insect, makeshift and hastily built. Yet, except for the contents of her cargo pod, she was identical to the last forty of her predecessors. Her nose was the ramscoop generator, a massive, heavily armored cylinder with a large orifice in the center. Along the sides were two big fusion motors, aimed ten degrees outward, mounted on oddly jointed metal structures like the folded legs of a praying mantis. The hull was small, containing only a computer and an insystem fuel tank.