Protector

A Belter had invaded the Struldbrugs’ Club. No wonder they whispered!

He stopped before Luke’s chair. “Lucas Garner?” His voice and ma

“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.

Luke couldn’t decide whether be was joking. “Why? For one thing, you’re nowhere near admission age.”

“The guard didn’t say anything. He just sort of stared.”

“I can imagine.”

“Do you know what brought me to Earth?”

“I heard. There’s an alien in the system.”

“It was supposed to be secret.”

“I used to be an ARM, a member of the United Nations Police. They didn’t retire me until two years ago. I’ve still got contacts.”

“That’s what Lit Shaeffer told me.” Nick opened his eyes. “Excuse me if I’m being rude. I can stand your silly gravity lying in a ship’s couch, but I don’t like walking through it.”

“Relax then.”

“Thanks. Garner, nobody at the UN seems to realize how urgent this is. There’s an alien in the system. He’s performed a hostile act, kidnapped a Belter. He’s abandoned his interstellar drive, and we can both guess what that means.”

“He’s pla

“Simple enough. You know the Outsider ship came in three easy-to-assemble parts?”

“I found out that much.”

“The trailing section must have been a re-entry capsule. We might have guessed there’d be one. Two and a half hours after Bre

“Teleport?”

“No, thank Finagle. We’ve got one film panel that shows a blurred streak. The acceleration was huge.”

“I see. Why come to us?”

“Huh? Garner, this is humanity’s business!”

“I don’t like that game, Nick. The Outsider was humanity’s business the second you spotted him. You didn’t come to us until he pulled his disappearing act. Why not? Because you thought the aliens would think better of humanity if they met Belters first?”

“No comment.”

“Why tell us now? If the Belt scopes can’t find him, nobody can.”

Nick turned off his massage chair and sat up to study the old man. Garner’s face was the face of Time, a loose mask covering ancient evil. Only the eyes and teeth seemed young; and the teeth were new, white and sharp and incongruous.

But he talked like a Belter, in straight lines. He didn’t waste words and he didn’t play games.

“Lit said you were bright. That’s the trouble, Garner. We’ve found him.”

“I still don’t see the problem.”

“He went through a smuggler trap near the end of his flight. We were looking for a bird who has the habit of coasting through populated regions with his drive off. A heat sensor found the Outsider, and a camera caught a section of his course and stayed on him long enough to give us velocity, position, acceleration. Acceleration was huge, tens of gees. It’s near certain he was on his way to Mars.”

“Mars?”

“Mars, or a Mars orbit, or the moons. If it was an orbit we’d have found him by now. Ditto for the moons; they both have observation stations. Except that they belong to the UN—”

Luke began to laugh. Nick closed his eyes with a pained expression.

Mars was the junkheap of the system. In truth there were few useful planets in the solar system; Earth and Mercury and Jupiter’s atmosphere just filled the list. It was the asteroids that were important. But Mars had proved the bitterest disappointment. A nearly airless desert, covered with craters and with seas of ultrafine dust, the atmosphere almost too thin to be considered poisonous. Somewhere in Lacis Solis was an abandoned base, the remains of Man’s third and last attempt on the rusty planet. Nobody wanted Mars.

When the Free Belt Charter was signed, after the Belt had proven by embargo and propaganda that Earth needed the Belt more than the Belt needed Earth, the UN had been allowed to keep Earth, the Moon, Titan, rights in Saturn’s rings, mining and exploratory rights on Mercury, Mars and its moons.

Mars was just a token. Mars hadn’t counted until now.

“You see the problem,” said Nick. He’d turned the massage unit on again. Little muscles all over his body were giving up under Earth’s unaccustomed strain, stridently proclaiming their existence for the first time in Nick’s life. The massage helped.

Luke nodded. “Considering the way the Belt is constantly telling us to stay off their property, you can’t blame the UN for trying to get a little of its own back. We must have a couple of hundred complaints on file.”

“You exaggerate. Since the Free Belt Charter was signed we’ve registered some sixty violations, most of which were allowed and paid for by the UN.”

“What is it you want the UN to do that they aren’t doing?”

“We want access to Earth’s records on the study of Mars. Hell, Garner, the Phobos cameras might already show where the Outsider came down! We want permission to search Mars from close orbit. We want permission to land.”

“What have you got so far?”

Nick snorted. “There’s only two things they can agree on. We can search all we want to — from space. For letting us examine their silly records they want to charge us a flat million marks!”

“Pay it.”

“It’s robbery.”

“A Belter says that? Why don’t you have records on Mars?”

“We were never interested. What for?”

“What about abstract knowledge?”

“Another word for useless.”

“Then what makes you want useless knowledge enough to pay a million marks for it?”

Slowly Nick matched his grin. “It’s still robbery. How in Finagle’s name did Earth know they’d need to know about Mars?”

“That’s the secret of abstract knowledge. You get in the habit of finding out everything you can about everything. Most of it gets used sooner or later. We’ve spent billions exploring Mars.”

“I’ll authorize payment of a million marks to the UN Universal Library. Now how do we land?” Nick turned off the chair.

“I… have an idea on that.”

A ridiculous idea. Luke would not have considered it for a moment… except for his surroundings. The Struldbrugs’ Club was luxurious and quiet, soundproofed everywhere, rich with draperies. His own jarring laughter had been swallowed the instant it left his lips. People seldom laughed or shouted here. The Club was a place to rest after a lifetime of… not resting?

“Can you fly a two-man ship, Starfire make?”

“Sure. There’s no difference in the control panels. Belt ships use drives bought from Rolls-Royce, England.”

“You’re hired as my pilot at a dollar a year. I can get a ship ready in six hours.”

“You’ve flipped.”

“Not I. Look, Nick. Every so-called diplomat in the UN knows how important it is to find the Outsider. But they can’t get moving. It’s not because they’re getting their own back with the Belt. That’s only part of it. It’s inertia. The UN is a world government. It’s unwieldy by its very nature, having to rule the lives of eighteen billion people. Worse than that, the UN is made up of individual nations. The nations aren’t very powerful nowadays. Someday not too soon, even their names will be forgotten; and I’m not sure that’s a good idea… but today national prestige can get in the way. You’d be weeks getting them to agree on anything.