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Larry Niven

A Hole In Space

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Parts of this book were previously published:

"There is a Tide," Galaxy Magazine. Copyright (r) 1968 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

I started writing ten years ago. I wrote for a solid year and collected nothing but rejection slips.

Most beginning writers can't afford to do that. They take an honest job and write in their spare time, and it takes them five years to make their mistakes, instead of one. Me, I lived off a trust fund.

The trust fund was there because my great-grandfather once made a lot of money in oil. He left behind him a large family of nice people, and we all owe him.

To EDWARD LAWRENCE DOHENY

RAMMER

Once there was a dead man.

He had been waiting for two hundred years inside a coffin, suitably labeled, whose outer shell held liquid nitrogen. There were frozen clumps of cancer all through his frozen body. He had had it bad.

He was waiting for medical science to find him a cure.

He waited in vain. Most varieties of cancer could be cured now, but no cure existed for the billions of cell walls ruptured by expanding crystals of ice. He had known the risk. He had gambled anyway. Why not? He'd been dying.

The vaults held over a million of these frozen bodies. Why not? They'd been dying.

Later there came a young criminal. His name is forgotten and his crime is secret, but it must have been a terrible one. The State wiped his personality for it.

Afterward he was a dead man: still warm, still breathing, even reasonably healthy-but empty.

The State had use for an empty man.

Corbell woke on a hard table, aching as if he had slept too long in one position. He stared incuriously at a white ceiling. Memories floated up to him of a double-wailed coffin, and sleep and pain.

The pain was gone.

He sat up at once.

And flapped his arms wildly for balance. Everything felt wrong. His arms would not swing right. His body was too light. His head bobbed strangely on a thin neck. He reached frantically for the nearest support, which turned out to be a blond young man in a white jumpsuit. Corbell missed his grip; his arms were shorter than he had expected. He toppled on his side, shook his head and sat up more carefully.

His arms. Scrawny, knobby-and not his.

The man in the jumpsuit said, "Are you all right?"

"Yeah," said Corbell. My God, what have they done to me? I thought I was ready for anything, but this- He fought rising panic. His throat was rusty, but that was all right. This was certainly somebody else's body, but it didn't seem to have cancer, either. "What's the date? How long has it been?"

A quick recovery. The checker gave him a plus. "Twenty-one ninety, your dating. You won't have to worry about our dating."

That sounded ominous. Cautiously Corbell postponed the obvious next question: What's happened to me? and asked instead, "Why not?"

"You won't be joining our society."

"No? What, then?"

"Several professions are open to you-a limited choice. If you don't qualify for any of them we'll try someone else."

Corbell sat on the edge of the hard operating table. His body seemed younger, more limber, definitely thinner, not very clean. He was acutely aware that his abdomen did not hurt no matter how he moved.

He asked, "And what happens to me?"

"I've never learned how to answer that question. Call it a problem in metaphysics," said the checker. "Let me detail what's happened to you so far and then you can decide for yourself."

There was an empty man. Still breathing and as healthy as most of society in the year 2190. But empty. The electrical patterns in the brain, the worn paths of nervous reflex, the memories, the person had all been wiped away as penalty for an unnamed crime.

And there was this frozen thing.

"Your newspapers called you people corpsicles," said the blond man. "I never understood what the tapes meant by that."

"It comes from popsicle. Frozen sherbet." Corbell had used the word himself before he became one of them. One of the corpsicles, the frozen dead.

Frozen within a corpsicle's frozen brain were electrical patterns that could be recorded. The process would warm the brain and destroy most of the patterns, but that hardly mattered, because other things must be done too.

Personality was not all in the brain. Memory RNA was concentrated in the brain, but it ran all through the nerves and the blood. In Corbell's case the clumps of cancer had to be cut away. Then the RNA could be leeched out of what was left. The operation would have left nothing like a human being, Corbell gathered. More like bloody mush.

"What's been done to you is not the kind of thing that can be done twice," the checker told him. "You get one chance and this is it. If you don't work out we'll terminate and try someone else. The vaults are full of corpsicles."

"You mean you'd wipe my personality," Corbell said unsteadily. "But I haven't committed a crime. Don't I have any rights?"

The checker looked stunned. Then he laughed. "I thought I'd explained. The man you think you are is dead. Corbell's will was probated long ago. His widow-"

"Damn it, I left money to myself!"

"No good." Though the man still smiled, his face was impersonal, remote, Unreachable. A vet smiles reassuringly at a cat due to be fixed. "A dead man can't own property. That was settled in the courts long ago. It wasn't fair to the heirs."

Corbell jerked an unexpectedly bony thumb at his bony chest. "But I'm alive now!"

"Not in law. You can earn your new life. The State will give you a new birth certificate and citizenship if you give the State good reason."

Corbell sat for a moment, absorbing that. Then he got off the table. "Let's get started then. What do you need to know about me?"

"Your name."

"Jerome Branch Corbell."

"Call me Pierce." The checker did not offer to shake hands. Neither did Corbell, perhaps because he sensed the man would not respond, perhaps because they were both noticeably overdue for a bath. "I'm your checker. Do you like people? I'm just asking. We'll test you in detail later."

"I get along with the people around me, but I like my privacy."

The checker frowned. "That narrows it more than you might think. The isolationism you called privacy was-well, a passing fad. We don't have the room for it... or the inclination, either. We can't send you to a colony world-"

"I might make a good colonist. I like travel."

"You'd make terrible breeding stock. Remember, the genes aren't yours. No. You get one choice, Corbell. Rammer."