Protector

They had been falling for six days. Now they were 7x109 miles from Sol — as far as Persephone. Now the mass indicator showed a tiny, distinct image. It was smaller than any moon a gas giant ought to have. But matter was so thin out here — almost as thin as interstellar space — that by long odds they should have been falling toward nothing at all.

They thought it was Bre

And the telescope showed nothing.

He wasn’t sure what had wakened him. He listened to the silence, he looked about him in the half-light…

Alice was sagging forward against the restraining straps around her hammock, hanging toward the ship’s nose. As was he.

He had learned his lesson well. He had his pressure suit in hand before he released the straps. He clutched them as an anchor and do

The mass detector was going crazy. Beyond the porthole was a wilderness of fixed stars.

“I can’t do a course estimate out here,” said Alice. “There aren’t any reference points. It was bad enough back there, two days out from Sol.”

“Okay.”

She slammed a fist into the porthole glass. “It’s not okay. I can’t find out where we are. What does he want with us?”

“Easy, easy. We came to him.”

“I can do a Doppler shift on the sun. At least it’ll give us our radial velocity. I can’t do that with Persephone, it’s too goddamn dim—” She turned away suddenly, her face convulsed.

“Take it easy, Captain.”

She was crying. When he put his arms around her she beat gently on his shoulders with her fists. “I don’t like this. I hate depending on someone—” She sobbed rackingly.

She had more responsibility than he. More stress.

And — he knew it was true — she couldn’t make herself depend on anyone. Within his big family Roy had always had someone to run to in an emergency. He’d felt sorry for anyone who didn’t have such a failsafe in his life.

Love was an interdependence kind of thing, he thought. What he and Alice had wouldn’t ever quite be love. Too bad.

Which was a silly thing to be thinking while they waited the whim of Bre

She felt him stiffen and turned too. A moment she looked, then moved to the telescope controls.

It looked like a distant asteroid.

It was not where the mass indicator had been pointing, but behind that point. When Alice threw the image on the screen, Roy couldn’t believe his eyes. It was like a sunlit landscape in fairyland, all grass and trees and growing things, and a few small buildings in soft organic shapes; but it was as if a piece of such a landscape had been picked up and molded by the hands of a playful topologist.

It was small, much too small to hold the film of atmosphere he could see around it or the blue pond gleaming across one side. A modeling-clay donut with depressions and bulges on its surface, and a small grass-green sphere floating in the hole, and a single tree growing out of the sphere. He could see the sphere quite clearly. It must have been huge.

And the near side of the structure was all bathed in sunlight. Where was the sunlight coming from?

“We’re coming up on it.” Alice was tense, but there were no tears in her voice. She’d recovered fast.

“What do we do now? Land ourselves, or wait for him to land us?”

“I’d better warm up the drive,” she said. “His gravity generator might kick up storms in that artificial atmosphere.”

He didn’t ask, How do you know? She was guessing, of course. He said, “Weapons?”

Her hands paused on the keys. “He wouldn’t — I don’t know.”

He pondered the question. Thus he lost his chance.

When he woke he thought he was on Earth. Bright sunlight, blue sky, the tickling of grass against his back and legs, the touch and sound and smell of a cool and pollinated breeze… had he been abandoned in another national park, then? He rolled on his side and saw Bre

Bre

Where the vest didn’t cover him, Bre

He said, “Hello, Roy.”

Roy sat up convulsively. There was Alice, on her back, eyes closed. She still wore her pressure suit, but the hood was open. There was the ship, resting belly-down on… on…

Vertigo.

“She’ll be all right,” Bre

Roy looked again. Uphill across a rounded green slope, to where an impossible mass floated ready to fall on them. A grass-covered spheroid with a single gigantic tree growing out of one side. The ship rested beside its trunk. It should have fallen too.

Alice Jordan sat up. Roy wondered if she’d panic, but she studied the Bre

“Pretty close,” Bre

“And now we’re caught,” she said bitterly.

“No. You’re guests.”

Her expression didn’t change.

“You think I’m playing euphemisms. I’m not. When I leave here I’m going to give you this place. My work here is almost finished. I’ll have to instruct you in how not to kill yourselves by pushing the wrong buttons, and I’ll give you a deed to Kobold. We’ll have time for that.”

Give? Roy thought of being marooned out here, unreachably far from home. A pleasant enough prison. Did Bre

“Alice Jordan,” she said. She was taking it well, but she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. They fluttered.

“Call me Jack, or Bre

Roy said one word. “Why?”

Bre

“Using generated gravity as an art form,” said Alice.

“That too. Mainly I’ve been watching for high-energy lithium radicals in Saggitarius.” He looked at them through the mask of his face. “I’m not being cryptic. I’m trying to explain so you won’t be so nervous. I’ve had a purpose out here. Over the past few weeks I’ve found what I was looking for. Now I’ll be leaving. I never dreamed they’d take so long.”

“Who?”

“The Pak. Let’s see, you must have studied the Phssthpok incident in detail, or you wouldn’t have gotten this far. Did you think to ask yourselves what the childless protectors of Pak would do after Phssthpok was gone?”

Clearly they hadn’t.

“I did. Phssthpok established a space industry on Pak. He found out how to grow tree-of-life in the worlds of the galactic arms. He built a ship, and it worked for as far as any Pak could detect it. Now what?