Ларри Нивен: World Of Ptavvs

Any last thoughts?

He'd done the best he could for himself. He was falling toward F124. The ship would reach the unwatched, uninhabitable eighth planet years before Kzanol hit the third. It should make a nice, big crater, easy to find. Not that he'd need it.

There was a risk, he thought, that the rescue switch might be set off by reentry heat. If that happened he would wake up underground, for it took time for the field to die. But he could dig his way out with the disintegrator.

Kzanol poised a thick, clumsy finger over the panic button. Last thoughts?

Regrettably, there were none.

Kzanol pushed the panic button.

Larry Greenberg climbed out of the contact field and stood up. His footsteps echoed in the big dolphin tank room. There were no disorientation effects this time, no trouble with his breathing and no urge to wiggle nonexistent flippers and tail. Which was natural enough, since the «message» had gone the other way.

The dolphin named Charley was lying on the bottom of the tank. He had sunk from under his own specially designed contact helmet. Larry walked around to where Charley could see him through the glass, but Charley's eyes weren't looking at anything. The dolphin was twitching, all over. Larry watched with concern, aware that the two marine biologists had come up beside him and were looking just as worried. Then Charley stopped twitching and surfaced.

"That wasss willd," said Charley in his best Donald Duck accent.

"Are you all right?" one of the seadocs asked anxiously. "We kept the field at lowest power."

"Sssure, Billl, I'mm ffine. But that was wild. I feel like I sshould have arms and legs and a long nose overhanging my teeth insstead of a hole in my head." Whatever accent Charley had, there was nothing wrong with his vocabulary. "And I havvv thiss terrible urge to make love to Larry's wife."

"Me, too," said Doctor Bill Slater, but under his breath.

Larry laughed. "You lecherous fish! Don't you dare! I'll steal your cows!"

"We trade wives?" Charley buzzed like an MG taking off, then flipped wildly around the tank. Dolphin laughter. He ended the performance by jetting straight out of the water and landing on his belly. "Has my accent improved?"

Larry decided there was no point in trying to brush off the water. It had soaked through to his skin. "Come to think of it, yes, it has. It's much better."

Charley switched to dolphinese, or to pidgin dolphinese, which is dolphinese scaled down to the human range of hearing. The rest of his conversation came in a chorus of squeaks, grunts, ear-splitting whistles, and other extremely rude noises. "When's our next session, mind buddy?"

Larry was busy squeezing water out of his hair. "I don't know, exactly, Charley. Probably a few weeks. I've been asked to take on another assignment. You'll have time to talk to your colleagues, pass on whatever you've learned about us walkers from reading my mind."

"You sure you want me to do that? Seriously, Larrry, there's something I'd like to discuss with you."

"Squeak on."

Charley deliberately speeded up his delivery. Nobody but Larry Greenberg could have followed the rapid chorus of barnyard sounds. "What's chances of a dolphin getting aboard the Lazy Eight III?"

"Huh? To Jinx? Jinx's ocean is a foot deep in scum!"

"Oh, that's right. Well, some other world, then."

"Why would a dolphin be interested in space travel?"

"Why would a walker? No, that's not an honorable question. I think the truth is you've given me the space bug, Larrry;"

A slow grin spread across Larry's urchin face. He found it curiously hard to answer. "It's a damn contagious disease, and hard to get rid of."

"Yes."

"I'll think about it, Charley. Eventually you'll have to contact the UN about it, but give me time first. We'd have to carry a lot of water, you know. Much heavier than air."

"So I've been told."

"Give me some time. I've got to go practically right now."

"But-"

"Sorry, Charley. Duty calls. Dr. Jansky made it sound like the opportunity of the decade. Now roll over."

"Tyrant," hissed Charley, which isn't easy. But he rolled over on his back. The three men spent a few minutes rubbing his belly. Then Larry had to leave. Momentarily he wondered if Charley would have any trouble assimilating his memories. But there was no danger; at the low contact power they'd been using, Charley could forget the whole experience if he had to. Including the conquest of space.

Which would be a shame.

That night he and Judy had dinner with Dr. and Mrs. Dorcas Jansky. Dr. Dorcas Jansky was a huge West Berliner with a blond beard and the kind of flamboyant, extrovert personality that had always made Larry slightly uncomfortable. Had he but known it, Larry had a very similar psyche; but it was housed in a much smaller body. It looked different that way. Mrs. Jansky was about Judy's size and almost as pretty. She was the quiet type, at least when English was being spoken.

The conversation ranged explosively during dinner. As Larry said later, "It's fun to meet someone who likes to argue about the same things you do." They compared Los Angeles' outward growth to West Berlin's reaching skyscrapers.

"The urge to reach the stars," said Jansky.

"You're surrounded by East Germany," Larry maintained.

"There's nowhere you can go but up."

They spent useless time deciding which of the eleven forms of communism most closely resembled Marxism, and finally decided to wait and see which government withered away the fastest. They talked smog- where did it come from, now that there were neither industrial concerns nor hydrocarbon-powered vehicles in the Major Los Angeles Basin? Mainly cooking, thought Judy. Cigarettes, said Jansky, and Larry suggested that electrostatic air conditioning might concentrate impurities in the outside air. They talked about dolphins. Jansky had the nerve to question dolphin intelligence, merely because they'd never built anything. Larry, touched to the quick, stood up and gave the most stirring impromptu lecture of his life. It wasn't until the coffee hour that business was mentioned.

"You were not the first man to read a dolphin's mind, Mr. Greenberg." Jansky now held a gigantic cigar as if it were a professor's blackboard pointer. "Am I right in thinking that the dolphin contacts were only training of a sort?"

Larry nodded vigorously. "Right. Judy and I were trying for a berth on the Lazy Eight III, bound for Jinx. I knew from the standard tests that I had some telepathic aptitude, and when we got the word about the bandersnatchi I knew we were in. Nobody's gotten anywhere trying to learn the bandersnatchi language, and there aren't any contact men on Jinx. So I volunteered for the dolphin work and Judy started studying linguistics, and then we put in for the trip as a husband-wife team. I thought our sizes would be the clincher. The dolphin work was just practice for contacting a bandersnatch." He sighed. "But this fool economic war with the Belt is fouling up the whole space effort. The bastards."

Judy reached across and took his hand. "We'll get there yet," she promised.

"Sure we will," said Larry.

"You may not need to," said the doctor, emphasizing his words with jerky gestures of his cigar. "If the mountain will not come to Mahomet-" He paused expectantly.

"You don't mean you've got a bandersnatch here?" Judy sounded startled, and well she might. Bandersnatchi weighed thirty tons apiece.

"Am I a magician? No bandersnatchi, but something else. Did I mention that I am a physicist?"

"No." Larry wondered what a physicist would want with a contact man.

"Yes, a physicist. My colleagues and I have been working for some twelve years on a time-retarding field. We knew it was possible, the mathematics are well known, but the engineering techniques were very difficult. It took us years."