Man-Kzin Wars XII Larry Niven (list of ebook readers .TXT) 📖

you think of a fifth method, you're qualified for Technology Restriction. Usually." He half-smiled. "I wrote down a fifth: 'Force him to concentrate on the thing until his head explodes.' They put me in Propaganda."

Amused, Ginger said, "So what's the fifth?"

"Oh, they never tell anyone outside TR Division that." He put on an expression of grim, heroic concern: " 'There's an awful lot of soap out there.' " He laughed at their incredulity, and nodded vigorously.

"I'm surprised you still have fire," Ginger said.

"They're more or less resigned to fire," Smith said thoughtfully. "But I'm fairly sure they'd like to crack down on bronze."

XII

As they made the approach to Mars, Smith told Perpetua, "We want that white spot on the equator."

"Right," she said nervously—she hadn't made many landings. Then she said, "Are those clouds?"

"Yeah. Set down outside the northern edge, there's water under the clouds."

"A lake?"

"Actually the locals call it 'the Sea of Issus.' Literary reference. The ARMs call it 'O'Donnell's Surprise.' Bartholomew O'Donnell got his degree in exotic physics right at the start of the First War and came up with a proposal for more effective bombs. In those days they were desperate for something they could make quickly, so they gave him research facilities and plenty of room."

"What happened?" Perpetua said.

"All his notes and designs were in his lab, so nobody really knows, but the general consensus is that he succeeded. He had this wild notion that he could cause natural thorium to spontaneously fission—"

"Uh-oh," said Ginger.

"Well said. Fission into iron and nickel and a whole lot of beta rays. The prospectus called for never having more than a nanogram of thorium in his field generator at a time. My guess is the generator produced a somewhat larger field than he expected."

They were descending toward the settlement by then. It was on higher ground than the cloud layer, which looked thinner up close. That seemed to be about ten times the diameter of the lake, which radar said was about four kilometers across. "Some blast," said Ginger admiringly.

"There was an automated monitor on Phobos—that's the nearer moon, it was passing almost overhead—that was able to relay a picture of a big circle around the base turning X-ray blue before it melted."

"The orbital monitor melted?" said Perpetua.

"Phobos melted. A lot of it, anyway. The monitor evaporated along with that side of Phobos's surface. Recoil kicked Phobos into a less eccentric orbit, as a matter of fact."

Ginger said, "At a planet's surface, thorium can be easier to find than lead. You're lucky he didn't sterilize the system."

"I know. The affected area was a bit over half a kilometer across—pretty sharply defined, in the pictures. The blast was later calculated at something like thirty thousand megatons. Popped every dome on the planet. Land by that big one, it's the Customs shack."

Perpetua was settling Jubilee when Smith abruptly said, "Damn, come back up and move us to the other side of the dome."

She took them up smoothly and shifted position, then said, "People?"

"No, some kind of plants. This whole region is in a depression, not just the lake and clouds. Pictures taken right after it happened show this hemisphere looking like somebody put a bullet through a sheet of glass. This area was scooped out, and even up here it has ten times the atmospheric pressure you'd find at the antipodes. Still not much, but they've been trying to breed grass that'll survive it. Either they've succeeded, or they dumped in another ice asteroid when I wasn't paying attention. Here's good."

They suited up and went outside. There were smaller domes clustered about the Customs station, and various people had already come out of these, holding guns in a conspicuous fashion, not quite pointed at them. They paid a lot of attention to Ginger.

Smith held up an ARM ident and triggered its flasher, then said over the common channel, "If it's your intention to start fighting the next war now, by all means let me know so I can start conscripting troops." People began to disperse.

"What do you expect people to do when they see a kzinti ship landing?" somebody said defensively.

"Around here? Raise meat prices."

There was some grumbling, and another voice said in amused tones, "There's still time, Kate."

"Aw, shut up," said somebody else.

Smith signaled for the private channel and said, "Don't say anything you don't want heard. Sooner or later someone will break the encryption."

"ARMs?" Perpetua said.

"Hobbyists. These people are all obsessives. This place is still a dumping ground for lunatics—it's just that now they're self-diagnosed."

"You grew up here," Ginger guessed suddenly.

"Yes, didn't I say? I didn't. Yeah. I started working out very young." The gravity was about two-thirds that of Wunderland; he must have started wearing a weight suit well before puberty.

As they went through the airlock—the biggest they'd ever seen—Perpetua said, "You wanted to join the ARMs that young?"

"I wanted to leave that young. The ARMs had the best deal."

"Were there any survivors of the blast?" Ginger said.

"Everybody except the ARMs survived," Smith said. "The exiles lived on the other side of the planet, but they heard about the project and started wearing pressure suits all the time, and keeping their kids near them with bubbles handy. The ARMs made fun of them, until Blowout Day. Then they stopped." The inner door opened, and he and Perpetua took off their helmets, while Ginger folded his back.

"Any fissionables or bioactives?" said a bored-looking man with beige skin and a green-and-yellow suit. The suits outside had just been green.

"Okay. How much?" Smith said.

The man frowned, then saw the ARM ident and grunted. "Get your own," he said, and waved them by. As they passed, he said, "Hey, why is he wearing a military suit?"

"What do you mean?" Smith said.

"No tail."

Ginger had never thought about it before, but it made sense; the convenience of being able to stretch his tail for balance would make the suit more vulnerable. This was simply the only design anyone on Wunderland had ever seen.

"So nobody will suspect