Protector

He took a shower. It was fun. The shower delivered great slow volumes of hot water that tended to stay on his body as if jellied. There were side jets, and a needle spray. A far cry from the old days, he supposed, when the deep cavity that now housed Anderson City had been carved by the extensive, expensive mining of hydratebearing rock. But fusion was cheap, and water once made could be distilled over and over, indefinitely.

When he left the shower he found that there had been a delivery. The information terminal beside his desk had delivered several books’ worth of information, printing it into a book the size of the San Diego telephone book, with pages that could be wiped after the departure of a guest. Alice Jordan must have sent this. He leafed through it until he found Nicholas Sohl’s memoirs, and started there. The section on the Pak ship was near the end.

There was a chill on him when he finished. Nicholas Sohl, once First Speaker for the Belt… not a fool. The thing to remember, Sohl had written, is that he’s brighter than we are. Maybe he’s thought of something I haven’t.

But how bright would a man have to be to make up for the lack of a foodsource?

He read on…

Alice Jordan arrived ten minutes early. At the door she glanced past him at the, information terminal. “You got it. Good. How far did you get?”

“Nick Sohl’s memoirs. A textbook on the physiology of the Pak. I skimmed Graves’s book on evolution. He claims a dozen plants that could have been imported from the Pak world.”

“You’re a flatlander. What do you think?”

“I’m not a biologist. And I skipped the proceedings of Olympus Base. I don’t really care why a gravity polarizer doesn’t work yet.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. She was wearing loose slacks and a blouse: not dressed for di

She said, “I think it’s Bre

“So do I.”

“But he’s got to be dead. He didn’t have a food source.”

“He had his own singleship on a tow line. Even two hundred years ago, a singleship kitchen would feed him for a long time, wouldn’t it? It was the roots he was missing. Maybe he had a few he took from the cargo pod, and there were more aboard the Pak ship. But when he ate those he’d be finished.”

“But you still think he’s alive. So do I. Let’s hear your reasons.”

Truesdale took a minute to get his thoughts organized. “The Flying Dutchman. Vandervecken. A man immortalized by a curse. It fits too well.”

She nodded. “What else?”

“Oh, the kidnappings… and the fact that he puts us back. Even with the chance that he’ll get caught, he puts us back. He’s too considerate for an alien and he’s too powerful for a human. What’s left?”

“Bre

“Then there’s the duplicate Stonehenge.” He had to tell her about that. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since you mentioned Bre

“Games. Right again. This superintelligence must have been like a new toy to him.”

“He may have pulled some other practical jokes.”

“Yes,” she said with too much emphasis.

“What? Another practical joke?”

Alice laughed. “Ever hear of the Mahmed Asteroid? It was in those excerpts I sent you.”

“I guess I didn’t get to it.”

“An asteroid a couple of miles in diameter, mainly ice. The Belt telescopes spotted it fairly early, in… 2183, I think. It was still outside Jupiter’s orbit. Mahmed was the first man to land on it. He was also the man who plotted its orbit and found out that it was going to hit Mars.”

“Did it?”

“Yah. It probably could have been stopped, even with the technology of the day, but I suppose nobody was really interested. It was going to hit well away from Olympus Base. They did carve off a hefty chunk of ice and move it into a new orbit. Nearly pure water, valuable stuff.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with—”

“It killed the martians. Every martian on the planet, as far as we can tell. The water vapor content of the atmosphere went way up.”

“Oh,” said Truesdale. “Genocide. Some practical joke.”

“I told you, Vandervecken may be too big for us.”

“Yah.” From a recorded voice on a self-destructing spool Vandervecken had grown in all dimensions. Now he was two hundred and twenty years long, and the realm of his activities blanketed the solar system. In physical strength he had grown too. The Bre

“Let’s get di

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Alice said gently. “But let’s get di

The top of the Palace Hotel was a four-sided dome that showed two views of reality. For the east and West quadrants looked out on Vesta, but the north and south quadrants were holograph projections of some mountainous part of Earth. “It’s a looped tape, several days long,” Alice told him. “Taken from a car cruising at ground level. This looks like morning in Switzerland.”

“It does,” he agreed. The vodka martini was hitting him hard. He’d skipped lunch, and now his belly was a yawning vacuum. “Tell me about Belter foods.”

“Well, the Palace is mainly french flatlander cooking.”

“I’d like to try Belter cooking. Tomorrow?”

“Honestly, Roy, I got spoiled on Earth. I’ll take you to a Belter place tomorrow, but I don’t think youll find any new taste thrills. Food’s too expensive here to do much experimental cooking.

“Too bad.” He glanced at the menu on a waiter’s chest, and recoiled. “Ye gods. The prices!”

“This is as expensive as it gets. At the other end is dole yeast, which is free—”

“Free?”

“—and barely worth it. If you’re down and out it’ll keep you fed, and it practically grows itself. Normal Belter cooking is almost vegetarian except for chicken and eggs. We grow chickens in most of the larger domes. Beef and pork we have to grow in the bubble-formed worlds, and seafood — well, we have to ship it up. Some comes freeze-dried; that’s cheaper.”

They punched their orders into a waiter’s keyboard. On Earth a restaurant this expensive would at least have featured human waiters… but Roy somehow couldn’t imagine a Belter playing the role of waiter.

The steaks Diane were too small, the vegetables varied and plentiful. Alice tore in with a gusto he admired. “I missed this,” she said. “On Earth I had to take up backpacking to work off all I was eating.”

Roy put his fork down. “I can’t figure out what he ate.”

“Drop it for awhile.”

“All right. Tell me about yourself.”

She told him about a childhood in Confinement asteroid, and the thick basement windows from which she could see the stars: stars that hadn’t meant anything to her until her first trip outside. The years of training in flying spacecraft — not mandatory, but your friends would think you were fu

They were down to coffee (freeze-dried) and brandy (a Belt product, and excellent). He told her about the cousins and the part-cousins and the generations of uncles and part-uncles and great-uncles and -aunts to match, all spread across the world, so that there were relatives anywhere he chose to go. He told her about Greatly ’Stelle.