Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven Page A

They synthesized and integrated, deduced and projected. They drank in the stars and planets. They delighted in the fire of the sun. They tasted the faint glints of distant asteroids and the even more remote rocks and ice in the far-off cometary belt.
    They gulped it all down and thirsted for more. Thirsted for one
particular
taste.
    Someone had left a radio beacon and a message of hope on the back of a nearby moon. Someone had marked the position of the beacon with crossed lines lased deep, and long, across the rocky surface. Simple micrometeoroid frequency measurements and abrasion-rate calculations proved the incisions were recent.
    Too recent to have been cut by whatever was headed this way.
    Ol’t’ro kept scanning the skies for whoever had left the beacon and the offer of help. They had to hope those Others who offered help would return in time.

12
    Â 
    After two days coasting and observing—during which the Gw’oth archives, despite Kirsten’s best efforts, kept their secrets—Sigmund had to concede they had learned what they could from afar. That, and he was tired of rehashing what little they knew about the Gw’oth. He assembled everyone in the relax room to discuss “next steps.”
    Kirsten was eager to meet
her
Gw’oth. She got right to the point. “Thrusters or gravity drag?”
    The answer was not obvious, at least to Sigmund. Which technology should they risk revealing to the Gw’oth? He tossed back the question. “Which do you recommend, and why?”
    â€œThrusters. Even if we get all the way down to the ice surface on gravity drag—which would be fancy piloting, even for me—we’ll need thrusters to leave. If you hope to keep secrets, Sigmund, why show gravity drag at all?”
    Sensible—given her unstated assumption. “Eric. What do you think?”
    â€œPilot’s decision,” Eric said.
    â€œBaedeker?” Sigmund asked.
    Baedeker tugged at a lock of his earnestly coiffed mane. “These Gw’oth learn so quickly. I opt for the less advanced technology, of course. But Citizens have used both technologies for so long I can’t tell you which was trickiest to develop.”
    And
Don Quixote
didn’t have a Puppeteer historical database. No New Terran ship or institution did.
    The Earth Sigmund remembered, however imperfectly, knew thrusters and gravity drag. Both were fairly recent technologies. Thrusters were very new; he had flown on ships that used fusion drives instead. Fusion drives being potential weapons of mass destruction, ships reliant on them used air compressed nearly into degenerate matter for takeoffs and landings.
    Sigmund did not understand thrusters well enough to make even aneducated guess whether Earth’s and Hearth’s relied on the same physical principles. The history of technology was hardly his field. There might have been an earlier generation of thrusters he knew nothing about. “Jeeves. Have you been listening?”
    â€œYes, Sigmund.”
    â€œWhen
Long Pass
left Earth”—at least four and a half centuries earlier—“was either technology known?”
    â€œOnly gravity drag.”
    â€œGravity drag only
drags
,” Kirsten said impatiently. “It won’t get us launched, so we’ll reveal our thrusters anyway when we leave. We might as well slow down with thrusters.”
    There was that unstated assumption again. She presumed
Don Quixote
must land.
    Neither Eric nor Kirsten would want to hear it, but setting down on the Gw’oth world was far from certain. The call for help that had brought them here could be part of a trap. If anything smelled wrong, Sigmund meant to go far, far away—fast.
    Humans in the Fleet had had no tech to call their own, only such crumbs as the Puppeteers had let drop from their table. Then came
Explorer
’s mission, discovery of the Gw’oth, and the loss of innocence. Learning to respect