Mann nodded gloomily to himself. Definitely, that was it.
“I should have tried this before. Since you’re nowhere in sight, you’ve either left the vicinity altogether or you’re hiding in the thick bushes around those towers.”
Should he try to keep dodging from spire to spire? Or could he outfly them?
At least one was bound to be faster. The armor increased his weight.
“I hope you took the opportunity to examine this tower. It’s fascinating. Very smooth, stony surface, except at the top. A perfect cone, also except at the top. You listening? The tip of this thing swells from an eight-foot neck into an egg-shaped knob fifteen feet across. The knob isn’t polished as smooth as the rest of it. Vaguely reminiscent of an asparagus spear, wouldn’t you say?”
Richard Schultz-Mann cocked his head, tasting an idea.
He unscrewed his helmet, ripped out and pocketed the radio. In frantic haste he began ripping out double handfuls of the yellow moss/wool, stuffed them into a wad in the helmet, and turned his lighter on it. At first the vegetation merely smoldered, while Mann muttered through clenched teeth. Then it caught with a weak blue smokeless flame. Mann placed his helmet in a mossy nest, setting it so it would not tip over and spill its burning contents.
“I’d have said a phallic symbol, myself. What do you think, Rich Mann? If these are phallic symbols, they’re pretty well distorted. Humanoid but not human, you might say.”
The pirates had joined their ship. They hovered around its floating silver bulk, ready to drop on him when the Puppet Master’s infrared detectors found him.
Mann streaked away to the west on full acceleration, staying as low as he dared. The spire would shield him for a minute or so, and then…
“This vegetation isn’t stage trees, Rich Mann. It looks like some sort of grass from here. Must need something in the rock they made these erections out of. Mph. No hot spots. You’re not down there after all. Well, we try the next one.”
Behind him, in the moments when he dared look back, Mann saw the Puppet Master move to cover the second spire, the one he’d left a moment ago, the one with a gray streak in the moss at its base. Four humanoid dots clustered loosely above the ship.
“Peekaboo,” came the Jinxian’s voice. “And good-bye, killer.”
The Puppet Master’s fusion drive went on. Fusion flame lashed out in a blue-white spear, played down the side of the pillar and into the moss/wool below. Mann faced forward and concentrated on flying. He felt neither elation nor pity, but only disgust. The Jinxian was a fool after all. He’d seen no life on Mira Ceti-T but for the stage trees, He had Mann’s word that there was none. Couldn’t he reach the obvious conclusion? Perhaps the moss/wool had fooled him. It certainly did look like yellow moss, clustering around the spires as if it needed some chemical element in the stone.
A glance back told him that the pirate ship was still spraying white flame over the spire and the foliage below. He’d have been a cinder by now. The Jinxian must want him extremely dead. Well—
The spire went all at once. It sat on the lavender plain in a hemisphere of multicolored fire, engulfing the other spires and the Jinxian ship; and then it began to expand and rise. Mann adjusted his attitude to vertical to get away from the ground. A moment later the shock wave slammed into him and blew him tumbling over the desert.
Two white ropes of smoke rose straight up through the dimming explosion cloud. The other spires were taking off while still green! Fire must have reached the foliage at their bases.
Mann watched them go with his head thrown back and his body curiously loose in the vacuum armor. His expression was strangely contented. At these times he could forget himself and his ambitions in the contemplation of immortality.
Two, knots formed simultaneously in the rising smoke trails. Second stage on. They rose very fast now.
“Rich Mann.”
Mann flicked his transmitter on. “You’d live through anything.”
“Not I. I can’t feel anything below my shoulders. Listen, Rich Mann, I’ll trade secrets with you. What happened?”
“The big towers are stage trees.”
“Uh?” Half question, half an expression of agony.
“A stage tree has two life cycles. One is the bush, the other is the big multistage form.” Mann talked fast, fearful of losing his audience. “The forms alternate. A stage tree seed lands on a planet and grows into a bush. Later there are lots of bushes. When a seed hits a particularly fertile spot, it grows into a multistage form. You still there?”
“Yuh.”
“In the big form the living part is the tap root and the photosynthetic organs around the base. That way the rocket section doesn’t have to carry so much weight. It grows straight up out of the living part, but it’s as dead as the center of an oak except for the seed at the top. When it’s ripe, the rocket takes off. Usually it’ll reach terminal velocity for the system it’s in. Kidd, I can’t see your ship; I’ll have to wait till the smoke—”
“Just keep talking.”
“I’d like to help.”
“Too late. Keep talking.”
“I’ve tracked the stage trees across twenty light-years of space. God knows where they started. They’re all through the systems around here. The seed pods spend hundreds of thousands of years in space; and when they enter a system, they explode. If there’s a habitable world, one seed is bound to hit it. If there isn’t, there’s lots more pods where that one came from. It’s immortality, Captain Kidd. This one plant has traveled farther than mankind, and it’s much older. A billion and a—”
“Mann.”
“Yah.”
“Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nil. I don’t know its name on the star charts. Shall I repeat that?”
Mann forgot the stage trees. “Better repeat it.”
“Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nothing. Hunt in that area till you find it. It’s a red giant, undersized. Planet is small, dense, no moon.”
“Got it.”
“You’re stupid if you use it. You’ll have the same luck I did. That’s why I told you.”
“I’ll use blackmail.”
“They’ll kill you. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said. Why’d you kill me, Rich Mann?”
“I didn’t like your remarks about my beard. Never insult a Wunderlander’s asymmetric beard, Captain Kidd.”
“I won’t do it again.”
“I’d like to help.” Mann peered into the billowing smoke. Now it was a black pillar tinged at the edges by the twin sunlight. “Still can’t see your ship.”
“You will in a moment.”
The pirate moaned … and Mann saw the ship. He managed to turn his head in time to save his eyes.
AT THE CORE
I
I COULDN’T DECIDE whether to call it a painting, a relief mural, a sculpture, or a hash, but it was the prize exhibit in the art section of the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx. The Kdatlyno must have strange eyes, I thought. My own were watering. The longer I looked at “FTLSPACE,” the more blurred it got.
I’d tentatively decided that it was supposed to look blurred when a set of toothy jaws clamped gently on my arm. I jumped a foot in the air. A soft, thrilling contralto voice said, “Beowulf Shaeffer, you are a spendthrift.”
That voice would have made a singer’s fortune. And I thought I recognized it—but it couldn’t be; that one was on We Made It, light-years distant. I turned.
The puppeteer had released my arm. It went on: “And what do you think of Hrodenu?”
“He’s ruining my eyes.”
“Naturally. The Kdatlyno are blind to all but radar. ‘FTLSPACE’ is not meant to be seen but to be touched. Run your tongue over it.”
“My tongue? No, thanks.” I tried running my hand over it. If you want to know what it felt like, hop a ship for Jinx; the thing’s still there. I flatly refuse to describe the sensation.
The puppeteer cocked its head dubiously. ?
??I’m sure your tongue is more sensitive. No guards are nearby.”
“Forget it. You know, you sound just like the regional president of General Products on We Made It.”
“It was he who sent me your dossier, Beowulf Shaeffer. No doubt we had the same English teacher. I am the regional president on Jinx, as you no doubt recognized from my mane.”
Well, not quite. The auburn mop over the brain case between the two necks is supposed to show caste once you learn to discount variations of mere style. To do that, you have to be a puppeteer. Instead of admitting my ignorance, I asked, “Did that dossier say I was a spendthrift?”
“You have spent more than a million stars in the past four years.”
“And loved it.”
“Yes. You will shortly be in debt again. Have you thought of doing more writing? I admired your article on the neutron star BVS-1. ‘The pointy bottom of a gravity well…’ ‘Blue starlight fell on me like intangible sleet…’ Lovely.”
“Thanks. It paid well, too. But I’m mainly a spaceship pilot.”
“It is fortunate, our meeting here. I had thought of having you found. Do you wish a job?”
That was a loaded question. The last and only time I took a job from a puppeteer, the puppeteer blackmailed me into it, knowing it would probably kill me. It almost did. I didn’t hold that against the regional president of We Made It, but to let them have another crack at me—? “I’ll give you a conditional ‘Maybe.’ Do you have the idea I’m a professional suicide pilot?”
“Not at all. If I show details, do you agree that the information shall be confidential?”
“I do,” I said formally, knowing it would commit me. A verbal contract is as binding as the tape it’s recorded on.
“Good. Come.” He pranced toward a transfer booth.
The transfer booth let us out somewhere in Jinx’s vacuum regions. It was night. High in the sky, Sirius B was a painfully bright pinpoint casting vivid blue moonlight on a ragged lunar landscape. I looked up and didn’t see Binary, Jinx’s bloated orange companion planet, so we must have been in the Farside End.
But there was something hanging over us.
A No. 4 General Products hull is a transparent sphere a thousand-odd feet in diameter. No bigger ship has been built anywhere in the known galaxy. It takes a government to buy one, and they are used for colonization projects only. But this one could never have been so used; it was all machinery. Our transfer booth stood between two of the landing legs, so that the swelling flank of the ship looked down on us as an owl looks down at a mouse. An access tube ran through vacuum from the booth to the airlock.
I said, “Does General Products build complete spacecraft nowadays?”
“We are thinking of branching out. But there are problems.”
From the viewpoint of the puppeteer-owned company, it must have seemed high time. General Products makes the hulls for ninety-five percent of all ships in space, mainly because nobody else knows how to build an indestructible hull. But they’d made a bad start with this ship. The only room I could see for crew, cargo, or passengers was a few cubic yards of empty space right at the bottom, just above the airlock and just big enough for a pilot.
“You’d have a hard time selling that,” I said.
“True. Do you notice anything else?”
“Well…” The hardware that filled the transparent hull was very tightly packed. The effect was as if a race of ten-mile-tall giants had striven to achieve miniaturization. I saw no sign of access tubes; hence, there could be no in-space repairs. Four reaction motors poked their appropriately huge nostrils through the hull, angled outward from the bottom. No small attitude jets; hence, oversized gyros inside. Otherwise…“Most of it looks like hyperdrive motors. But that’s silly. Unless you’ve thought of a good reason for moving moons around.”
“At one time you were a commercial pilot for Nakamura Lines. How long was the run from Jinx to We Made It?”
“Twelve days if nothing broke down.” Just long enough to get to know the prettiest passenger aboard, while the autopilot did everything for me but wear my uniform.
“Sirius to Procyon is a distance of four light-years. Our ship would make the trip in five minutes.”
“You’ve lost your mind.”
“No.”
But that was almost a light-year per minute! I couldn’t visualize it. Then suddenly I did visualize it, and my mouth fell open, for what I saw was the galaxy opening before me. We know so little beyond our own small neighborhood of the galaxy. But with a ship like that—!
“That’s goddamn fast.”
“As you say. But the equipment is bulky, as you note. It cost seven billion stars to build that ship, discounting centuries of research, but it will only move one man. As is, the ship is a failure. Shall we go inside?”
II
The lifesystem was two circular rooms, one above the other, with a small airlock to one side. The lower room was the control room, with banks of switches and dials and blinking lights dominated by a huge spherical mass pointer. The upper room was bare walls, transparent, through which I could see air- and food-producing equipment.
“This will be the relaxroom,” said the puppeteer. “We decided to let the pilot decorate it himself.”
“Why me?”
“Let me further explain the problem.” The puppeteer began to pace the floor. I hunkered down against the wall and watched. Watching a puppeteer move is a pleasure. Even in Jinx’s gravity the deerlike body seemed weightless, the tiny hooves tapping the floor at random. “The human sphere of colonization is some thirty light-years across, is it not?”
“Maximum. It’s not exactly a sphere—”
“The puppeteer region is much smaller The Kdatlyno sphere is half the size of yours, and the Kzinti is fractionally larger. These are the important space-traveling species. We must discount the Outsiders since they do not use ships. Some spheres coincide, naturally. Travel from one sphere to another is nearly nil except for ourselves, since our sphere of influence extends to all who buy our hulls. But add all these regions, and you have a region sixty light-years across. This ship could cross it in seventy-five minutes. Allow six hours for takeoff and six for landing, assuming no traffic snarls near the world of destination, and we have a ship which can go anywhere in thirteen hours but nowhere in less than twelve, carrying one pilot and no cargo, costing seven billion stars.”
“How about exploration?”
“We puppeteers have no taste for abstract knowledge. And how should we explore?” Meaning that whatever race flew the ship would gain the advantages thereby. A puppeteer wouldn’t risk his necks by flying it himself. “What we need is a great deal of money and a gathering of intelligences, to design something which may go slower but must be less bulky. General Products does not wish to spend so much on something that may fail. We will require the best minds of each sentient species and the richest investors. Beowulf Shaeffer, we need to attract attention.”
“A publicity stunt?”
“Yes. We wish to send a pilot to the center of the galaxy and back.”
“Ye…gods! Will it go that fast?”
“It would require some twenty-five days to reach the center and an equal time to return. You can see the reasoning behind—”
“It’s perfect. You don’t need to spell it out. Why me?”
“We wish you to make the trip and then write of it. I have a list of pilots who write. Those I have approached have been reluctant. They say that writing on the ground is safer than testing unknown ships. I follow their reasoning.”
“Me, too.”
“Will you go?”
“What am I offered?”
“One hundred thousand stars for the trip. Fifty thousand to write the story, in addition to what you sell it for.”
“Sold.”
From then on my only worry was that my new boss would find out that someone had ghost-written that neutron star article.
Oh, I wondered at first why General
Products was willing to trust me. The first time I worked for them, I tried to steal their ship for reasons which seemed good at the time. But the ship I now called Long Shot really wasn’t worth stealing. Any potential buyer would know it was hot; and what good would it be to him? Long Shot could have explored a globular cluster; but her only other use was publicity.
Sending her to the Core was a masterpiece of promotion.
Look: It was twelve days from We Made It to Jinx by conventional craft, and twelve hours by Long Shot. What’s the difference? You spent twelve years saving for the trip. But the Core! Ignoring refueling and reprovisioning problems, my old ship could have reached the galaxy’s core in three hundred years. No known species had ever seen the Core! It hid behind layer on layer of tenuous gas and dust clouds. You can find libraries of literature on those central stars, but they all consist of generalities and educated guesses based on observation of other galaxies, like Andromeda.
Three centuries dropped to less than a month! There’s something anyone can grasp. And with pictures!
The lifesystem was finished in a couple of weeks. I had them leave the control-room walls transparent and paint the relaxroom solid blue, no windows. When they finished, I had entertainment tapes and everything it takes to keep a man sane for seven weeks in a room the size of a large closet.
On the last day the puppeteer and I spoke the final version of my contract. I had four months to reach the galaxy’s center and return. The outside cameras would run constantly; I was not to interfere with them. If the ship suffered a mechanical failure, I could return before reaching the center; otherwise, no. There were penalties. I took a copy of the tape to leave with a lawyer.
“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. Ass backward into the unknown. With the control room at the ship’s bottom, it made sense. To a puppeteer, it made sense.