The World of Ptavvs by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online Page A

solar system. There was its queer orbit, and some mathematical discrepancy in its size. Perhaps it was captured by Sol before he awakened.
    But in three hundred years? Highly unlikely.
    Kzanol raised his face, and his face showed terror. He knew perfectly well that three hundred years was his lower limit; the brain board had given him a three-hundred-year journey using half the ship's power. He might have been buried much longer than that.
    Suppose he accepted Pluto. What about the slave race, happily living where there should have been only yeast, covering the oceans a foot deep, or at most whitefoods, big as brontosaurs and twice as pretty, wandering along the shorelines feeding on mutated scum?
    He couldn't explain it, so he dropped it.
    But the asteroid belt was certainly thinner than it had been. True, it would have thinned out anyway in time, what with photon pressure and solar wind pushing dust and the smaller particles outward into deep space, and collisions with the bigger planets removing a few rocks, and even some of the most eccentric asteroids being slowed and killed by friction with the solar atmosphere which must extend well past Earth. But that was not a matter for a few hundred years. Or even thousands. Or hundreds of--
    And he knew.
    Not hundreds of years, or hundreds of thousands. He had been at the bottom of the sea while the solar system captured a new planet, and lost a good third of its asteroid belt, while oceans of food yeast mutated and went bad, and mutated again, and again. At the bottom of the sea he had waited while yeast became grass and fish and now walked on two legs like a thrint.
    A billion years wouldn't be long enough. Two billion might do it.
    He was hugging his knees with both arms, almost as if he were trying to bury his head between them. A thrint couldn't have done that. It was not the pure passage of time that frightened him so. It was the loss of everything he knew and loved, even his own race. Not only Thrintun the world, but also Thrint the species, must be lost in the past. If there had been thrintun in the galaxy they would have colonized Earth long ages ago.
    He was the last thrint.
    Slowly he raised his head, to stare, expressionless, at the wide city beneath him.
    He could damn well behave like a thrint.
    The car had stopped. He must be over the center of Topeka. But which way was the spaceport? And how would he get in? Greenberg, worse luck, had had no experience in stealing spacecraft. Well, first find out where it was, and then.
    The ship was vibrating. He could feel it with those ridiculously delicate fingertips. There was sound too, too high to hear, but he could feel it jangling in his nerves. What was going on?
    He went to sleep. The car hung for a moment longer, then started down.
    ***
    "They always stack me in the rear of the plane," Garner grumbled.
    Lloyd Masney was unsympathetic. "You're lucky they don't make you ride in the baggage compartment-- seeing as you refuse to leave that hot rod there alone."
    "Well, why not? I'm a cripple!"
    "Uh huh. Aren't the Ch'ien treatments working?"
    "Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. My spinal cord is carrying some messages again. But walking ten paces around a room twice a day just about kills me. It'll be another year before I can walk downtown and back. Meanwhile my chair rides with me, not in the luggage compartment. I'm used to it."
    "You'll never miss that year," Masney told him. "How old are you now, Luke?"
    "Hundred and seventy next April. But the years aren't getting any shorter, Lloyd, contrary to public opinion. Why do they have to stack me in the rear? I get nervous when I see the wings turn red hot." He shifted uncomfortably.
    Judy Greenberg came back from the rest room and sat down next to Lloyd. Luke was across the aisle, in the space made by removing two chairs before takeoff. Judy seemed to have recovered nicely; she looked and moved as if she had just left a beauty parlor. From a distance her face was calm.