The Second IF Reader of Science Fiction Read online

  “There is a thing you should know,” the puppeteer said afterward. “The direction of thrust opposes the direction of hyperdrive.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  The puppeteer groped for words. “If you turned on the reaction motors and the hyperdrive together, the flames would precede your ship through hyperspace.”

  I got the picture then. Backward into the unknown. With the control room at the ship’s bottom, it made sense. To a puppeteer, it made sense.

  III

  And I was off.

  I went up under two standard gees because I like my comfort. For twelve hours I used only the reaction motors. It wouldn’t do to be too deep in a gravity well when I used a hyperdrive, especially an experimental one. Pilots who do that never leave hyperspace. The relaxroom kept me entertained until the bell rang. I slipped down to the control room, netted myself down against free fall, turned off the motors, rubbed my hands briskly together, and turned on the hyperdrive.

  It wasn’t quite like I’d expected.

  I couldn’t see out, of course. When the hyperdrive goes on it’s like your blind spot expanding to take in all the windows. It’s not just that you don’t see anything; you forget that there’s anything to see. If there’s a window between the kitchen control bank and your print of Dali’s “Spain,” your eye and mind will put the picture right next to the kitchen bank, obliterating the space between. It takes getting used to, in fact it has driven people insane, but that wasn’t what bothered me. I’ve spent thousands of man-hours in hyperspace. I kept my eye on the mass pointer.

  The mass pointer is a big transparent sphere with a number of blue lines radiating from the center. The direction of the line is the direction of a star; its length shows the star’s mass. We wouldn’t need pilots if the mass pointer could have been hooked into an autopilot, but it can’t. Dependable as it is, accurate as it is, the mass pointer is a psionic device. It needs a mind to work. I’d been using mass pointers for so long that those lines were like real stars.

  A star came toward me, and I dodged around it. I thought that another line that didn’t point quite straight ahead was long enough to show dangerous mass, so I dodged. That put a blue dwarf right in front of me. I shifted fast and looked for a throttle. I wanted to slow down.

  Repeat, I wanted to slow down.

  Of course there was no throttle. Part of the puppeteer research project would be designing a throttle. A long, fuzzy line reached for me: a protosun . . .

  Put it this way: imagine one of Earth’s freeways. You must have seen pictures of them from space, a tangle of twisting concrete ribbons, empty and abandoned but never tom down. Some lie broken; others are covered with houses. People use the later rubberized ones for horseback riding. Imagine the way one of these must have looked about six o’clock on a week night in, say, nineteen seventy. Ground-cars from end to end.

  Now, let’s take all these cars and remove the brakes. Further, let’s put governors on the accelerators, so that the maximum speeds are between sixty and seventy miles per hour, not all the same. Let something be wrong with all the governors at once, so that the maximum speed also becomes the minimum. You’ll begin to see signs of panic . . .

  Ready? Okay. Get a radar installed in your car, paint your windshield and windows jet black, and get out on that freeway.

  It was like that

  It didn’t seem so bad at first. The stars kept coming at me, and I kept dodging, and after awhile it settled down to a kind of routine. From experience I could tell at a glance whether a star was heavy enough and close enough to wreck me. But in Nakamura Lines I’d only had to take that glance every six hours or so. Here I didn’t dare look away. As I grew tired the near-misses came closer and closer. After three hours of it I had to drop out.

  The stars had a subtly unfamiliar look. With a sudden jar I realized that I was entirely out of known space. Sirius, Antares—I’d never recognize them from here; I wasn’t even sure they were visible. I shook it off and called home.

  “Long Shot calling General Products, Long Shot calling.”

  “Beowulf Shaeffer?”

  “Have I ever told you what a lovely, sexy voice you have?”

  “No. Is everything going well?”

  “I’m afraid not. In fact, I’m not going to make it.”

  A pause. “Why not?”

  “I can’t keep dodging these stars forever. One of them’s going to get me if I keep on much longer. The ship’s just too goddam fast”

  “Yes. We must design a slower ship.”

  “I hate to give up that good pay, but my eyes feel like peeled onions. I ache all over. I’m turning back.”

  “Shall I play your contract for you?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Your only legal reason for returning is a mechanical failure. Otherwise you forfeit twice your pay. Jinx has recently adopted the debtor’s prison.”

  I said, “Mechanical failure?” There was a tool box somewhere in the ship, with a hammer in it . . .

  “I did not mention it before, since it did not seem polite, but two of the cameras are in the lifesystem. We had thought to use films of you for purposes of publicity, but—”

  “I see. Tell me one thing, just one thing. When the regional president of We Made It sent you my name, did he mention that I’d discovered your planet has no moon?”

  “Yes, he did mention that matter. You accepted one million stars for your silence. He naturally has a recording of the bargain.”

  “I see.” So that’s why they’d picked Beowulf Shaeffer, well known author. “The trip’ll take longer than I thought.”

  “You must pay a penalty for every extra day over four months. Two thousand stars per day late.”

  “Your voice has acquired an unpleasant grating sound. Good-by.”

  I went on in. Every hour I shifted to normal space for a ten-minute coffee break. I dropped out for meals, and I dropped out for sleep. Twelve hours per ship’s day I spent traveling, and twelve trying to recover. It was a losing battle.

  By the end of day two I knew I wasn’t going to make the four month limit. I might do it in six months, forfeiting one hundred and twenty thousand stars, leaving me almost where I started. Serves me right for trusting a puppeteer!

  Stars were all around me, shining through the floor and between the banked instruments. I sucked coffee, trying not to think. The Milky Way shone ghostly pale between my feet. The stars were thick now; they’d get thicker as I approached the Core, until finally one got me.

  An idea! And about time, too.

  The golden voice answered immediately. “Beowulf Shaeffer?”

  “There’s nobody else here, honey. Look, I’ve thought of something. Would you send—”

  “Is one of your instruments malfunctioning, Beowulf Shaeffer?”

  “No, they all work fine, as far as they go. Look—”

  “Then what could you possibly have to say that would require my attention?”

  “Honey, now is the time to decide. Do you want revenge, or do you want your ship back?”

  A small silence. Then, “You may speak.”

  “I can reach the Core much faster if I first get into one of the spaces between the arms. Do we know enough about the galaxy to know where our arm ends?”

  “I will send to the Institute of Knowledge to find out.”

  “Good.”

  Four hours later I was dragged from a deathlike sleep by the ringing of the hyperphone. It was not the president, but some flunky. I remembered calling the puppeteer Honey last night, tricked by my own exhaustion and that seductive voice, and wondered if I’d hurt his puppeteer feelings. “He” might be male; a puppeteer’s sex is one of his little secrets. The flunky gave me a bearing and distance for the nearest gap between stars.

  It took me another day to get there. When the stars began to thin out I could hardly believe it. I turned off the hyperdrive, and it was true. The stars were tens and hundreds of light-years apart. I could see part of the
Core peeking in a bright rim above the dim flat cloud of mixed dust and stars.

  IV

  From then on it was better. I was safe if I glanced at the mass pointer every ten minutes or so. I could forget the rest breaks, eat meals and do isometrics while watching the pointers. For eight hours a day I slept, but during the other sixteen I moved. The gap swept toward the Core in a narrowing curve, and I followed it As a voyage of exploration the trip would have been a fiasco. I saw nothing; I stayed well away from anything worth seeing. Stars and dust, anomalous wispy clusters shining in the dark of the gap, invisible indications that might have been stars—my cameras picked them up from a nice, safe distance, showing tiny blobs of light. In three weeks I moved seventeen thousand light-years toward the Core.

  The end of those three weeks was the end of the gap. Before me was an uninteresting wash of stars backed by a wall of opaque dust clouds. I still had thirteen thousand light-years to go before I reached the center of the galaxy.

  I took some pictures and moved in.

  Ten minute breaks, mealtimes that grew longer and longer for the rest they gave, sleep periods that left my eyes red and burning. The stars were thick, and the dust was thicker, so that the mass pointer showed a blur of blue broken by sharp blue lines. The lines began to get less sharp. I took breaks every half hour . . .

  Three days of that.

  It was getting near lunchtime on the fourth day. I sat watching the mass pointer, noting the fluctuations in the blue blur which showed the changing density of the dust around me. Suddenly it faded out completely. Great! Wouldn’t it be nice if the mass pointer went out on me? But the sharp starlines were still there, ten or twenty of them pointing in all directions. I went back to steering. The clock chimed to indicate a rest period. I sighed happily and dropped into normal space.

  The clock showed I had half an hour to wait for lunch. I thought about eating anyway, decided against it. The routine was all that kept me going. I wondered what the sky looked like, reflexively looked up so I wouldn’t have to look down at the transparent floor. That big an expanse of hyperspace is hard even on trained eyes. I remembered I wasn’t in hyperspace and looked down.

  For a time I just stared. Then, without taking my eyes off the floor, I reached for the hyperphone.

  “Beowulf Shaeffer?”

  “No, this is Albert Einstein. I stowed away when the Long Shot took off, and I’ve decided to turn myself in for the reward”

  “Giving misinformation is an implicit violation of contract. Why have you called?”

  “I can see the Core.”

  “That is not a reason to call. It was implicit in your contract that you could see the Core.”

  “Dammit, don’t you care? Don’t you want to know what it looks like?”

  “If you wish to describe it now, as a precaution against accident, I will switch you to a dictaphone. However, if your mission is not totally successful, we cannot use your recording.”

  I was thinking up a really searing answer when I heard the click. Great, my boss had hooked me into a dictaphone. I said one short sentence and hung up.

  The Core.

  Gone were the obscuring masses of dust and gas. A billion years ago they must have been swept up for fuel by the hungry, crowded stars. The Core lay before me like a great jeweled sphere. I’d expected it to be a gradual thing, a thick mass of stars thinning out into the arms. There was nothing gradual about it. A clear ball of multi-colored light five or six thousand light-years across nestled in the heart of the galaxy, sharply bounded by the last of the dust clouds. I was ten thousand four hundred light-years from the center.

  The red stars were the biggest and brightest. I could actually pick some of them out as individuals. The rest was a finger painting in fluorescent green and blue. But those red stars they would have sent Aldebaran back to kindergarten.

  It was all so bright. I needed the telescope to see black between the stars . . .

  I’ll show you how bright it was.

  Is it night where you are? Step outside and look at the stars. What color are they? Antares may show red, if you’re near enough; in the System, so will Mars. Sirius may show bluish. But all the rest are white pinpoints. Why? Because it’s dark. Your day vision is in color, but at night you see black-and-white, like a dog.

  The Core suns were bright enough for color vision.

  I’d pick a planet here! Not in the Core itself, but right out here, with the Core on one side and on the other, the dimly starred dust clouds forming their strange convoluted curtain. Man, what a view! Imagine that flaming jeweled sphere rising in the east, hundreds of times as big as Binary shows on Jinx, but without the constant feeling Binary gives you, the fear that the orange world will fall on you; for the vast, twinkling Core is only starlight, lovely and harmless. I’d pick my world now and stake a claim. When the puppeteers got their drive fixed up, I’d have the finest piece of real estate in the known universe! If I could only find a habitable planet.

  If only I could find it twice.

  Hell, I’d be lucky to find my way home from here. I shifted into hyperspace and went back to work.

  V

  An hour and fifty minutes, one lunch break and two rest breaks, and fifty light-years later, I noticed something peculiar in the Core.

  It was even clearer then, if not much bigger; I’d passed through the almost transparent wisps of the last dust cloud. Not too near the center of the sphere was a patch of white, bright enough to make the green and blue and red look dull around it. I looked for it again at the next break, and it was a little brighter. It was brighter again at the next break . . .

  “Beowulf Shaeffer?”

  “Yah. I—“

  “Why did you use the dictaphone to call me a cowardly, two-headed, monster?”

  “You were off the line. I had to use the dictaphone.”

  “That is sensible. Yes. We puppeteers have never understood your attitude toward a natural caution.” My boss was peeved, though you couldn’t tell from his voice.

  “I’ll go into that if you like, but it’s not why I called.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “I’m all for caution. Discretion is the better part of valor, and like that. You can even be good businessmen, because it’s easier to survive with lots of money. But you’re so damn concerned with various kinds of survival that you aren’t even interested in something that isn’t a threat. Nobody but a puppeteer would have turned down my offer to describe the Core.”

  “You forget the kzinti.”

  “Oh, the kzinti.” Who expects rational behavior from kzinti? You whip them when they attack, you reluctantly decide not to exterminate them, you wait till they build up their strength, and when they attack you whip ’em again. Meanwhile you sell them food-stuffs and buy their metals and employ them where you need good games theorists. It’s not as if they were a real threat. They’ll always attack before they’re ready.

  “The kzinti are carnivores. Where we are interested in survival, carnivores are interested in meat alone. They conquer because subject people can supply them with food. They cannot do menial work. Animal husbandry is alien to them. They must have slaves or be barbarians roaming the forests for meat. Why should they be interested in what you call abstract knowledge? Why should any thinking being, if the knowledge has no chance of showing a profit? In practice, your description of the Core would attract only an omnivore.”

  “You’d make a good case, if it were not for the fact that most sentient races are omnivores.”

  “We have thought long and hard on that.”

  Ye cats. I was going to have to think long and hard on that.

  “Why did you call, Beowulf Shaeffer?”

  Oh, yeah. “Look, I know you don’t want to know what the Core looks like, but I see something that might represent personal danger. You have access to information I don’t. May I proceed?”

  “You may.”

  Hah! I was learning to think like a puppeteer. Was that good
? I told my boss about the blazing, strangely shaped white patch in the Core. “When I turned the telescope on it, it nearly blinded me. Grade two sunglasses don’t give any details at all. It’s just a shapeless white patch, but so bright that the stars in front look like black dots with colored rims. I’d like to know what’s causing it.”

  “It sounds very unusual.” Pause. “Is the white color uniform? Is the brightness uniform?”

  “Just a sec.” I used the scope again. “The color is, but the brightness isn’t. I see dimmer areas inside the patch. I think the center is fading out”

  “Use the telescope to find a nova star. There ought to be several in such a large mass of stars.”

  I tried it. Presently I found something: a blazing disk of a peculiar blue-white color with a dimmer, somewhat smaller red disk half in front of it. That had to be a nova. In the core of Andromeda galaxy, and in what I’d seen of our own Core, the red stars were the biggest and brightest.

  “I’ve found one,”

  “Comment”

  A moment more and I saw what he meant. “It’s the same color as the Patch. Something like the same brightness, too. But what could make a patch of supernovas go off all at once?”

  “You have studied the Core. The stars of the Core are an average of half a light-year apart. They are even closer near the center, and no dust clouds dim their brightness. When stars are that close they shed enough light on each other to materially increase each other’s temperature. Stars bum faster and age faster in the Core.”

  “I see that.”

  “Since the Core stars age faster, a much greater portion are near the supernova stage than in the arms. Also, all are hotter considering their respective ages. If a star were a few millennia from the supernova stage, and a supernova exploded half a light-year away, estimate the probabilities.”

  “They might both blow. Then the two could set off a third, and the three might take a couple more . . .”