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 can, 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 was no point in going farther.
“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 he 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 ensure 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 we’re 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 someday, 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 are 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, I don’t see anything that 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 that 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.
THE SOFT WEAPON
LOGICALLY JASON PAPANDREOU should have taken the Court Jester straight home to Jinx. But…
He’d seen a queer star once.
He’d been single then, a gunner volunteer on one of Earth’s warships during the last stages of the last Kzinti war. The war had been highly unequal in Earth’s favor. Kzinti fight gallantly, ferociously, and with no concept of mercy; and they always take on several times as much as they can handle.
Earth’s ships had pushed the Kzinti back out of human space, then pushed a little farther, annexing two Kzinti worlds for punitive damages. The fleets had turned for home. But Jason’s captain had altered course to give his crew what might be their last chance to see Beta Lyrae.
Now, decades later, Jason, his wife, and their single alien passenger were rattling around in a ship built for ten times their number. Anne-Marie’s curiosity was driving her up the walls with the frustration of not being able to open the stasis box in the forward locker. Nessus, the mad puppeteer, had taken to spending all his time in his room, hovering motionless and morose between the sleeping plates. Jinx was still weeks away.
Clearly a diversion was in order.
Beta Lyrae. A six-degree shift in course would do it.
Anne-Marie glared at the locker containing the stasis box. “Isn’t there any way to open it?”
Jason didn’t answer. His whole attention was on the mass indicator, the transparent ball in which a green radial line was growing toward the surface—growing and splitting in two.
“Jay?”
“We can’t open it, Anne. We don’t have the equipment to break a stasis field. It’s illegal anyway.”
Almost time. The radial double-line must not grow too long. When a working hyperdrive gets too deep into a gravity well, it disappears.
“Think they’ll tell us what’s inside?”
“Sure, unless it’s a new weapon.”
“With our luck it will be. Jay, nobody’s ever found a stasis box that shape before. It’s bound to be something new. The Institute is likely to sit on it for years and years.
“Whup! Jay, what are you doing?”
“Dropping out of hyperspace.”
“You might warn a lady.” She wrapped both arms around her midsection, apparently making sure everything was still there.
“Lady, why don’t you have a look out that side window?”
“What for?”
Jason merely looked smug. His wife, knowing she would get no other answer, got up and undogged the cover. It was not unusual for a pilot to drop out in the depths of interstellar space. Weeks of looking at the blind-spot appearance of hyperspace could wear on the best of nerves.
She stood at the window, a tall, slender brunette in a glowing-green falling jumper. A Wunderlander she had been, of the willowy low-gravity type rather than the fat, balloonlike low-gravity type, until Jason Papandreou had dropped out of the sky to add her to his collection of girls in every port. It hadn’t worked out that way. In the first year of marriage she had learned space and the Court Jester inside out, until she was doubly indispensable. Jay, Anne, Jester, all one independent organism.
And she thought she’d seen everything. But she hadn’t seen this! Grinning, Jason waited for her reaction.
“Jay, it’s gorgeous! What is it?”
Jason moved up to circle her waist with one arm. She’d put on weight in the last year, muscle weight, from moving in heavier gravities. He looked out around her shoulder … and thought of smoke.
There was smoke across the sky, a trail of red smoke wound in a tight spiral coil. At the center of the coil was the source of the fire: a double star. One member was violet-white, a flame to brand holes in a human retina, its force held in check by the polarized window. The companion was small and yellow. They seemed to burn inches apart, so close that their masses had pulled them both into flattened eggs, so close that a red belt of lesser flame looped around them to link their bulging equators together. The belt was hydrogen, still mating in fusion fire, pulled loose from the stellar surfaces by two gravitational wells in conflict.
The gravity war did more than that. It sent a loose end of the red belt flailing away, away and out in a burning Maypole spiral that expanded and dimmed as it rose toward interstellar space, until it turned from flame-red to smoke-red, bracketing the sky and painting a spiral path of stars deep red across half the universe.
“They call it Beta Lyrae,” said Jason. “I was here once before, back when I was free and happy. Mph. Hasn’t changed much.”
“Well, no.”
“Now don’t you take all this for granted. How long do you think those twins can keep throwing hydrogen away? I give it a million years, and then, pft! No more Beta Lyrae.”
“Pity. We’d better hurry and wake Nessus before it disappears.”
The being they called Nessus would not have opened his door for them.
Puppeteers were gregarious even among alien species. They’d had to be. For at least tens of thousands of years the puppeteers had ruled a trade empire that included all the races within the sixty-light-year sphere men called “known space” and additional unknown regions whose extent could not be guessed. As innate cowards the puppeteers had to get along with everyone. And Nessus, too, was usually gregarious. But Nessus was mad.
Nessus was cursed with courage.
In a puppeteer, courage is a symptom of insanity. As usual there were other symptoms, other peripheral indications of the central disorder. Nessus was now in the depressive stage of a manic-depressive cycle.
Luckily the depression had not hit him until his business with the Outsiders was over. In the manic stage he had been fun. He had spent every night in a different stateroom. He had charcoal-drawn cartoons which now hung in the astrogation room, cartoons that Jason could hardly believe were drawn by a puppeteer. Humor is generally linked to an interrupted defense mechanism. Puppeteers weren’t supposed to have a sense of humor. But now Nessus spent all his time in one room. He wanted to see nobody.
There was one thing he might open his door for.
Jason moved to the control board and pushed the panic button. The alarm was a repeated recording of a woman’s scream. It should have brought the puppeteer galloping in as if the angel of death were at his heel. But he trotted through the door seconds later than he should have. His flat, brainless heads surveyed the control room for signs of damage.
The first man to see a puppeteer had done so during a Campish revival of Time for Beany reruns. He had come running back to the scout ship, breathless and terrified, screaming, “Take off! The pl
anet’s full of monsters!”
“Whatta they look like?”
“Like a three-legged centaur with two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on its hands, and no head.”
“Take a pill, Pierson. You’re drunk.”
Nessus was an atypical puppeteer. His mane was straggly and unkempt. It should have been twisted, brushed, and tied in a manner to show his status in puppeteer society. But it showed no status at all. Perhaps this was appropriate. There was no puppeteer society. The puppeteers had apparently left the galaxy en masse some twelve years earlier, leaving behind only their insane and their genetically deficient.
“What is wrong?” asked Nessus.
“There’s nothing wrong,” said Jason.
Anne-Marie said, “Have a look out the window. This window.”
Their employer obediently moved to the window. He happened to stop just next to one of the cartoons he’d drawn while in the manic phase, and Jason, looking from the puppeteer to the cartoon, found it more difficult than ever to associate the two.
The cartoon showed two human gods. Only the lighting and the proportions showed that they were gods. Otherwise they were as individually human as a very good human artist could have drawn them. One, a child just about to become a teen-ager, was holding the galaxy in his hands. He wore a very strange grin as he looked down at the glowing multicolored spiral. The other figure, a disgruntled patriarch with flowing white hair and beard, was saying, “All right, now that you’ve had your little joke…”
Nessus claimed it was an attempt to imitate human humor. Maybe. Would an insane puppeteer develop a sense of humor?
Nessus (his real name sounded like a car crash set to music) was insane. There were circumstances under which he would actually risk his life. But the sudden puppeteer exodus had left a myriad broken promises made to a dozen sentient races. The puppeteers had left Nessus and his fellow exiles with money to straighten things out. So Nessus had rented the Court Jester, rented all twelve staterooms, and gone out to the farthest edge of known space to deal with a ship of the Outsiders.