Man-Kzin Wars XII, Larry Niven [readnow .TXT] 📗

Ginger and Perpetua both stared at him, but the Customs inspector just snorted and waved them back into motion.

They went through another pressure door, but before either of them could say anything to Smith, somebody said, "Hey, Waldo, what's the password?"

Smith, in the lead, stopped, and slowly turned to the group of five men to the left of the doorway. "There's a new one," he said, in a low voice. "It's, 'I'm not an unarmed child anymore.' "

He had been a mild, affable companion for the past three days. Now Ginger smelled murder.

Since humans who fight for trivial reasons are typically of inferior intelligence, it was a common error to suppose that kzinti were rather dim. In fact, they averaged somewhat brighter than humans, due to intense competition for mates; but for the same reason, they just didn't care.

But Ginger had a responsibility to see to. "Excuse me, sir," he said to Smith, "but you did say back at the embassy you wouldn't kill anyone else until you found me another job."

Smith turned sharply, staring. "What?"

Ginger moved, quickly and smoothly, out of Smith's reach. "I realize these aren't kzinti, Mr. Smith, but you did say anyone, sir."

The five men had already dwindled to two, the others having worked out the implications at once. Smith blinked a few times, looked back at the remaining two, looked at Ginger again, and nodded. "Fair enough." He turned to face the pair again, and said in a declamatory tone, " 'Would you buy it for a quarter?' "

Both of the men had the smoothness of motion that indicated a human past 100, but Smith must have been nearly that old himself; and while he was no Hero, compared to a low-gee build he looked like a Jinxian. One was whispering frantically in the other's ear; Ginger was able to catch the phrase "ARM Commando," this being one of the first terms he'd learned in Flatlander. The one being spoken to was shorter and solider, but not in Smith's shape.

That human looked at Ginger, then at his own companion; then he said, "Uh, pass, friend."

As they went by, Ginger thought to hear a suit's recycler start up. He didn't look—he was pretty certain whose it was, anyway.

They were in a broad inner space, like a courtyard, only with no gun turrets. Smith led them through it, past unlabeled pressure doors, to a door just like the others, and started it opening. Perpetua, who was just getting the idea that she'd come very close to being held by the UN as principal witness, started up an innocuous subject: "How did this settlement get started?"

"After the Blowout one of the old lifers talked people into gathering everything up and bringing it here. More air and water. They stayed up here because it wasn't stable down lower. Still isn't. Once a habitat was set up, they formed a government and petitioned the UN for membership before the ARM thought of jamming them. The ARMs try to keep people from hearing more than absolutely necessary about this place, but it's really popular with smugglers since the ARM moved in on Luna," he said.

"What was this lifer's name?" Ginger said, impressed—he was picturing what the weather must have been like for the migration.

"He didn't know. He dated to brainwipe days," said Smith. They entered the door, and he closed it; abruptly the floor began to descend. "There are stories that he was actually Raymond Sinclair, but I checked ARM records, and Sinclair was murdered years before the Founder arrived. He seems to have been something of an invisible man—the Founder, that is. Have you ever heard of the Tehuantepec Canal?" They hadn't. "Okay. On Earth there's an ocean bordered by two continents, and one of the two is kept from freezing solid by an ocean current from the other. Now, the sun has been abnormally cool for thousands of years, and keeps getting worse by stages. The warm current started to give up most of its heat in hurricanes as a result. Sharper gradient, see? What the Founder appears to have done, to get arrested and brainwiped, was make secret arrangements with local officials and investors to blast open a sea-level trench at a place called Tehuantepec, where two oceans weren't separated very far. The ocean to the east was the one with the current, and the one to the west was cooler, with a higher sea level. Water washed out the trench, and mixed with the warm water, so it got stirred up and wouldn't stay put long enough to let hurricanes form. They need still, saturated air. The ocean current wound up transporting more heat than it had in a thousand years, so everybody was saved. But the man responsible had already been brainwiped, so the ARM made his records vanish and claimed it was their own project. The Founder turned out to be one of those people who does really well in low gravity, so he was still here a couple of centuries later for the Blowout." The elevator stopped. Another door was now visible.

Perpetua began, "That is the filthiest—"

"Who goes there?" said a speaker over the door.

"A true believer," said Smith.

"What do you want?" said the speaker.

"To do one thing."

The door began opening. "Surely they didn't call him Founder all the time," Ginger said, and stopped to gape.

The cavern before them had to be artificial, its lining fused dust; but it looked like an enormous natural cave, bigger than the dome they'd landed by. There were gardens, with trees, and light sources in the roof that made it about twice as bright as on the surface. In the center of the cavity floor, hundreds of meters away, was what looked like a big rock formation with its own cave opening; a waterfall trickled down one side over a couple of pretty good bonsai. There was a sign above the cave opening:

odd john's toxic dump

"No," said Smith. "They called him John Smith."

"Your ancestor?"