The Second IF Reader of Science Fiction Read online

  “Yes. Since a supernova lasts on the order of one human standard year, the chain reaction would soon die out. Your patch of light must have occurred in this way.”

  “That’s a relief. Knowing what did it, I mean. I’ll take pictures going in.”

  “As you say.” Click.

  The Patch kept expanding as I went in, still with no more shape than a veil nebula, getting brighter and bigger. It hardly seemed fair, what I was doing. The light which the patch novas had taken fifty years to put out, I covered in an hour, moving down the beam at a speed which made the universe itself seem unreal. At the fourth rest period I dropped out of hyperspace, looked down through the floor while the cameras took their pictures, glanced away from the Patch for a moment, and found myself blinded by tangerine afterimages. I had to put on a pair of grade one sunglasses, out of the packet of twenty which every pilot carries for working near suns during takeoff and landing.

  It made me shiver, to think that the Patch was still nearly ten thousand light-years away. Already the radiation must have killed all life in the Core, if there ever had been life there.

  My instruments on the hull showed radiation like a solar flare.

  At the next stop I needed grade two sunglasses. Somewhat later, grade three. Then four. The Patch became a great bright amoeba reaching twisting tentacles of fusion fire deep into the vitals of the Core. In hyperspace the sky was jammed bumper to bumper, so to speak; but I never thought of stopping. As the Core came closer the Patch grew like something alive, something needing ever more food. I think I knew, even then.

  Night came. The control room was a blaze of light I slept in the relaxroom, to the tune of the laboring temperature control. Morning, and I was off again. The radiation meter snarled its death song, louder during each rest break. If I’d been planning to go outside I would have dropped that plan. Radiation couldn’t get through a General Products hull. Nothing else does, either, except visible light I spent a bad half hour trying to remember whether one of the puppeteers’ customers saw X rays. I was afraid to call up and ask.

  The mass pointer began to show a faint blue blur. Gases thrown outward from the Patch. I had to keep changing sunglasses . . .

  Sometime during the morning of the next day, I stopped.

  There really was no point in going further.

  “Beowulf Shaeffer, have you become attached to the sound of my voice? I have other work than supervising your progress.”

  “I would like to deliver a lecture on abstract knowledge!”

  “Surely it can wait until your return.”

  “The galaxy is exploding.”

  There was a strange noise. Then: “Repeat, please.”

  “Have I got your attention?”

  “Yes”

  “Good. I think I know the reason so many sentient races are omnivores. Interest in abstract knowledge is a symptom of pure curiosity. Curiosity must be a survival trait.”

  “Must we discuss this? Very well. You may well be right. Others have made the same suggestion, including puppeteers. But how has our species survived at all?”

  “You must have some substitute for curiosity. Increased intelligence, maybe. You’ve been around long enough to develop it. Our hands can’t compare with your mouths for tool building. If a watchmaker had taste and smell in his hands, he still wouldn’t have the strength of your jaws or the delicacy of those knobs around your lips. When I want to know how old a sentient race is, I watch what it uses for hands and feet”

  “Yes. Human feet are still adapting to their task of keeping you erect. You propose then, that our intelligence has grown sufficiently to insure our survival without depending on your hit-or-miss method of learning everything you can for the sheer pleasure of learning.”

  “Not quite. Our method is better. If you hadn’t sent me to the Core for publicity you’d never have known about this.”

  “You say the galaxy is exploding.”

  “Rather, it finished exploding some nine thousand years ago. I’m wearing grade twenty sunglasses, and it’s still too bright. A third of the Core is gone already. The Patch is spreading at nearly the speed of light. I don’t see that anything can stop it until it hits the gas clouds beyond the Core.”

  There was no comment. I went on. “A lot of the inside of the Patch has gone out, but all of the surface is new novas. And remember, the light I’m seeing is nine thousand years old. Now, I’m going to read you a few instruments. Radiation, two hundred and ten. Cabin temperature normal, but you can hear the whine of the temperature control. The mass indicator shows nothing but a blur ahead I’m turning back.”

  “Radiation two hundred and ten? How far are you from the edge of the Core?”

  “About four thousand light-years, I think. I can see plumes of incandescent gas starting to form in the near side of the Patch, moving toward galactic north and south. It reminds me of something. Aren’t there pictures of exploding galaxies in the Institute?”

  “Many. Yes, it has happened before. Beowulf Shaeffer, this is bad news. When the radiation from the Core reaches our worlds, it will sterilize them. We puppeteers will soon need considerable amounts of money. Shall I release you from your contract, paying you nothing?”

  I laughed. I was too surprised even to get mad. “No.”

  “Surely you do not intend to enter the Core?”

  “No. Look, why do you—”

  “Then by the conditions of our contract, you forfeit”

  “Wrong again. I’ll take pictures of these instruments. When a court sees the readings on the radiation meter and the blue blur in the mass indicator, they’ll know something’s wrong with them.”

  “Nonsense. Under evidence drugs you will explain the readings.”

  “Sure. And the court will know you tried to get me to go right to the center of that holocaust. You know what they’ll say to that?”

  “But how can a court of law find against a recorded contract?”

  “The point is they’ll want to. Maybe they’ll decide that were both lying, and the instruments really did go haywire. Maybe they’ll find a way to say the contract was illegal. But they’ll find against you. Want to make a side bet?”

  “No. You have won. Come back.”

  VI

  The Core was a lovely multicolored jewel when It disappeared below the lens of the galaxy. I’d have liked to visit it some day; but there aren’t any time machines.

  I’d penetrated nearly to the Core in something like a month. I took my time coming home, going straight up along galactic north and flying above the lens where there were no stars to bother me, and still made it in two. All the way I wondered why the puppeteer had tried to cheat me at the last. Long Shot’s publicity would have been better than ever; yet the regional president had been willing to throw it away just to leave me broke. I couldn’t ask why, because nobody was answering my hyperphone. Nothing I knew about puppeteers could tell me. I felt persecuted.

  My come-hither brought me down at the base in the Farside End. Nobody was there. I took the transfer booth back to Sirius Mater, Jinx’s biggest city, figuring to contact General Products, turn over the ship and pick up my pay.

  More surprises awaited me.

  1) General Products had paid one hundred and fifty thousand stars into my account in the Bank of Jinx. A personal note stated that whether I wrote my article was solely up to me.

  2) General Products has disappeared. They axe selling no more spacecraft hulls. Companies with contracts have had their penalty clauses paid off. It all happened two months ago, simultaneously on all known worlds.

  3) The bar I’m in is on the roof of the tallest building in Sirius Mater, more than a mile above the streets. Even from here I can hear the stock market crashing. It started with the collapse of spacecraft companies with no hulls to build ships. Hundreds of others have followed. It takes a long time for an interstellar market to come apart at the seams, but, as with the Core novas, nothing can stop the chain reaction.

  4)
The secret of the indestructible General Products hull is being advertised for sale. General Products’ human representatives will collect bids for one year, no bid to be less than one trillion stars. Get in on the ground floor, folks.

  5) Nobody knows anything. That’s what’s causing most of the panic. It’s been a month since a puppeteer was seen on any known world. Why did they drop so suddenly out of interstellar affairs?

  I know.

  In twenty thousand years a flood of radiation will wash over this region of space. Thirty thousand light-years may seem a long, safe distance, but it isn’t, not with this big an explosion. I’ve asked. The Core explosion will make this galaxy uninhabitable to any known form of life.

  Twenty thousand years is a long time. It’s four times as long as human written history. We’ll all be less than dust before things get dangerous, and I for one am not going to worry about it

  But the puppeteers are different. They’re scared. They’re getting out right now. Paying off their penalty clauses and buying motors and other equipment to put in their indestructible hulls will take so much money that even confiscating my puny salary would have been a step to the good. Interstellar business can go to hell; from now on the puppeteers will have no time for anything but running.

  Where will they go? Well, the galaxy is surrounded by a halo of small globular clusters. The ones near the rim might be safe. Or the puppeteers may even go as far as Andromeda. They have the Long Shot for exploring, if they come back for it, and they can build more. Outside the galaxy is space empty enough even for a puppeteer pilot, if he thinks his species is threatened.

  It’s a pity. This galaxy will be dull without puppeteers. Those two-headed monsters were not only the most dependable faction in interstellar business; they were like water in a wasteland of more-or-less humanoids. It’s too bad they aren’t brave, like us.

  But is it?

  I never heard of a puppeteer refusing to face a problem. He may merely be deciding how fast to run, but he’ll never pretend the problem isn’t there. Sometime within the next twenty millennia, we humans will have to move a population which already numbers forty-three billion. How? To where? When should we start thinking about this? When the glow of the Core begins to shine through the dust clouds?

  Maybe men are the cowards—at the core.

  UNDER TWO MOONS

  by Frederik Pohl

  I

  The bolt of flame from the gun hissed by, twenty millimeters from his nose.

  There was silence, and then the door opened behind him. Light footsteps approached, muffled by the fine, deadly dust on the floor. Gull craned to see the person approaching, but he was tied too tightly for that.

  “You are most foolhardy, Meesta Gull,” said the girl’s soft voice. “I beg you, do not drop the fuse again or I must resort to more ’arsh methods.” And from the comer of his eye Johan Gull saw her slim figure swiftly stoop to recover the half-meter length of rubbery plastic fuse-cord.

  As she attempted to jam it into his mouth again he jerked his head aside and managed to ask, “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why?” There was the soft hint of a laugh in her voice. “Ah, why indeed!” She caught his head in the crook of an arm and, surprisingly strong, held it still. He felt the stiff strand thrust between his teeth, tasted again the acrid chemical flavor. When she had done the same thing before he had been able to spit the fuse out before she could ignite it She did not chance his dropping it again; her flame-gun hissed, and the end of the fuse began to sizzle with a tiny green spark.

  “I think,” she whispered, “that it is because I love you, Meesta Gull.” And he felt something like a quick touch of lips, a scent of perfume that carried even above the pyro-technic reek of the sputtering fuse; and then the door closed softly and he was alone in the room that was about to become an enormous bomb.

  The green halo hissed the length of the dangling fuse toward his lips. Johan Gull, estimating seconds by the beat of his pulse where his wrists were tied to the wall, timed its course at perhaps two millimeters a second. Say four minutes before it reached his lips.

  He sighed. It was a nuisance to think of his career ending like this—a daring foray into enemy territory to break up a smuggling operation of the Black Hats . . . complete success, the ring destroyed, the dozen men in charge of it dead . . . and then to allow himself to be tricked by the one person who survived, a slip of a girl. If he had only not answered her cry for help!

  But he had. And he had found himself trussed up in a karate grip, then tied to the wall. And now—he had four minutes of life, or actually a bit less, unless he thought of something rather quickly.

  He could, of course, drop the fuse at any time before the spark touched his flesh and his instinctive reaction made him drop it But the girl had said, and he had no reason to think that she lied, that the powdery dust she had spread about the floor was gunpowder. In the unconfined space of the room it would perhaps not explode; it might only flare up like the igniting of a gas jet; but it would kill Johan Gull nonetheless. Could he scrape a spot clean with his feet and drop the burning fuse there?

  Experimentally he shifted position and tried. It was slow work. The floor was rough-cast cement and the tiny particles of explosive powder adhered like lint on wool. By arduous scraping with the side of his shoe Gull managed to get a six-inch square mostly free of the stuff. But it was not good enough, he saw. A pale powdery haze dung to the crevices. It was not much, but it was too much; it would take very little to flash and carry the spark of the fuse to the main mass; and two minutes were irretrievably gone.

  Could he sneeze it out? It was at least worth a try, he thought; but annoyingly his nose would not itch, there was no trace of nasal drip, all he managed to do was snort at the tiny green light and make it flare brighter for a moment. He redoubled his efforts to slip his wrists out of their bonds. The thing could be done, he discovered with tempered pleasure. The girl had tied him well; but she was only a girl and not strong enough, or cruel enough, to cut deeply into his wrists. The cord stretched slowly and minutely; he would be able to work himself free.

  But not in four minutes. Still more certainly not in the minute or less that was all he had left. Already he could feel the heat of the glowing end of the fuse on his chin. He was forced to lean forward for fear of igniting his goatee, but soon it would be too close for that to help.

  There really was only one thing to do, thought Johan Gull regretfully.

  He nibbled the short remaining length of fuse up to his lips and, wincing from the pain but denying it control of his actions, chewed out the spark.

  A quarter of an hour later he was free of his bonds and through the door.

  The girl was long gone, of course. Spirited little devil. Gull wished her well; he bore her no animus for taking one round of The Game, wished only that he had been able to see her more clearly, for her voice was sweet. Perhaps they would meet again.

  Rubbing his wrists, Gull looked about the dingy shed in which he had been held captive. He knew this part of Marsport less well than almost any of the rest of the red planet, but recognized this rundown corridor as a slum. An uncollected trash basket kicked over on its side spewed refuse across the steel decking. On the black wall that had housed him some despairing wretch had scrawled, We Are Property! The air pressure was low, but it reeked of dirt, drugs and vice.

  Gull shrugged, lighted a cigarette, turned his back on the room that had so nearly been his death trap and strode toward the sign marked Subway. He would be late, and .5 was a stickler for promptness. But he paused to glance back again, and thought of the girl who had trapped him. He had liked her voice. She had had a charming fragrance. It had been cool of her to have ignited the fuse while she was still in the room; he might have dropped it and then and there blown both of them halfway to Deimos. And she had said that she loved him.

  II

  The entrance to Security lay through a barber shop. Gull hung his coat on a rack and sat back in the ch
air, musing about the adventure he had just had and wondering about the next to come. In the corridor outside a chanting mob of UFOlogists demanded equal rights for spacemen; Gull had nearly been caught in the marching front of their demonstration as he entered the shop.

  He submitted to being lathered, shaved, talced and brushed, but the jacket he was helped into was not his own. His hand in the pocket closed over the familiar shape of the pencil-key. He let himself out the back way of the barber shop and opened the private door to .5’s office.

  “Sorry I’m late, sir,” he apologized to the ancient, leathery figure with the hooded eyes behind the desk.

  The Old Man’s secretary, McIntyre, looked up from his eternal notebook. From the hooks and slants in that little leather-bound pad messages flew to every comer of the Solar System, alerting a battalion of Marines on Callisto, driving a Black Hat front into bankruptcy in Stuttgart, thrusting pawns against a raid on Darkside Mercury, throwing an agent to his death here on Mars. To McIntyre it was all the same. Ha was a dark young man who had never been known to show emotion. He said calmly, “.5 is a stickler for promptness, Gull”

  Gull said, “I ran into difficulties. Something didn’t want me to get here today, I’m afraid.”

  Was it his imagination, or did .5’s imperturbable face show the vestige of a frown? McIntyre put down his pencil and regarded Gull thoughtfully. “I think,” he said, “that you’d better tell .5 just what you mean by that.”

  “Oh, just that I had difficulties, sir.” Quickly Gull sketched the events of the day. “Afraid I allowed myself to be decoyed. Shouldn’t have, of course. But next thing you know there was a flame-pencil in my ribs, I was tied up and a lighted fuse between my teeth. Quite unpleasant, as the floor was covered with gunpowder. I would have been here sooner, but I didn’t quite trust myself to spit the fuse clear of the gunpowder.”

  Eyebrows raised, McIntyre glanced at .5, as if to find a sign on that stoic countenance. Then he rose deliberately, walked to a file, pulled out a sheaf of papers in a folder marked, Gull, Johan, Personnel Records of. He glanced through them thoughtfully.