Juggler of Worlds Read online

  “I’ve freed your special instruments,” Shaeffer said with aggravating calm. “Why don’t you see what you can find?”

  There were ships out there. Sigmund got a close-up of them: three space tugs of the Belter type. They were shaped like thick saucers, equipped with oversized drives and powerful electromagnetic generators. Asteroid haulers. With those heavy drives they could probably catch Hobo Kelly, assuming they had adequate cabin gravity.

  They weren’t even trying. They continued on their course, three points of a slow-moving triangle.

  Carlos asked, “Bey? What happened?”

  “How the futz would I know?” their pilot snapped. It seemed a fair answer. Several hyperdrive indicators had gone wild; the rest looked completely dead. “And the drive’s drawing no power at all. I’ve never heard of anything like this. Carlos, it’s still theoretically impossible.”

  Carlos said, “I’m . . . not so sure of that. I want to look at the drive.”

  Shaeffer didn’t look up from his console. “The access tubes don’t have cabin gravity.”

  On radar, the three innocent-looking tugs receded. Of course, until moments ago Hobo Kelly had also looked entirely innocent, not like the warship it was. Rather than scream, Sigmund said, “If there were an enemy, you frightened him away. Shaeffer, this mission and this ship have cost my department an enormous sum, and we have learned nothing at all.”

  “Not quite nothing,” Carlos said. “I still want to see the hyperdrive motor. Bey, would you run us down to one gee?”

  “Yeah. But . . . miracles make me nervous, Carlos.”

  Crawling one by one through the access tunnel, they encountered a miracle.

  Their hyperdrive motor had vanished from the ship.

  CARLOS BROKE THE stunned silence. “It takes an extremely high gravity gradient. The motor hit that, wrapped space around itself, and took off at some higher level of hyperdrive, one we can’t reach. By now it could be well on its way to the edge of the universe.”

  He seemed very confident for someone without an opinion a few minutes ago.

  With some trepidation, they powered up the hyperwave radio. It neither disappeared like the hyperdrive nor exploded. Sigmund relayed a coded query through Southworth Station to get registry data on the three tugs. From the ship to the relay, comm was instantaneous. The link between the station and the inner solar system was another story. There, light-speed crawl was the rule. They’d have a ten-hour round-trip delay for any answer.

  Carlos used the comm gear next. He wanted data about cosmology and cosmologists, astronomy and astronomers. There was also something in his request about a meteor strike in Siberia in 1908. What Sigmund found most significant was who Carlos asked. The call went to one of Gregory Pelton’s unlisted numbers.

  Shaeffer didn’t understand, either. “I haven’t the remotest idea what you’re after.”

  Smiling enigmatically, Carlos went to his cabin.

  Sigmund needed urgently to shake answers out of someone—and couldn’t. Not without hard proof of a crime. Wu was among Earth’s chosen. Shaeffer was under the protection of Gregory Pelton.

  Futz.

  THEY TOOK TURNS on watch before the answer to Sigmund’s message arrived via Southworth Station. The registration check on the tugs was worthless. All were supposedly owned by the Sixth Congregational Church of Rodney—libertarian Belter nonsense. The United Nations would never tolerate such evasions.

  Soon after, information began pouring in for Carlos. The physicist refused to share his thinking. The fool would rather be dead than proven wrong. As for the data stream itself, for all the sense it made to Sigmund it might as well have been in hieroglyphics.

  Sigmund concentrated on the bit he could understand: the list of Sol system’s leading experts in gravity theory. Name after name was paired with a Southworth Station hyperwave comm ID. That put all of them here in the Oort Cloud. Here where ships disappeared.

  Where in the Cloud hardly mattered. The fringes of the solar system were practically next door to any hyperdrive-equipped ship. “These people,” Sigmund said. “You wish to discuss your theory with one of them?”

  Carlos seemed surprised by the question. “That’s right, Sigmund.”

  “Carlos, has it occurred to you that one of these people may have built the ship-eating device?”

  “What? You’re right. It would take someone who knew something about gravity. But I’d say the Quicksilver Group”—and Carlos gestured at the long block of names that shared a comm ID—“was beyond suspicion. With upwards of ten thousand people at work, how could anyone hide anything?”

  One name on the list looked familiar. He knew a gravity theorist? Sigmund couldn’t imagine why. Whoever he was, the comm ID showed he wasn’t with Quicksilver. “What about this Julian Forward?”

  Carlos looked thoughtful. “Forward. Yeah. I’ve always wanted to meet him.”

  “You know of him? Who is he?” Shaeffer asked.

  “He used to be with the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx. I haven’t heard of him in years. He did some work on the gravity waves from the galactic core . . . work that turned out to be wrong. Sigmund, let’s give him a call.”

  Jinx. Sigmund suppressed a shiver. Now he placed the name. Forward was one of the experts who had vouched for the integrity of Shaeffer’s galactic-core-explosion data. Ander had spoken to him six years earlier. And now Forward turns up here?

  “And ask him what?” Shaeffer said pointedly.

  “Why . . . ?” Then Carlos remembered the situation. “Oh. You think he might—yeah.”

  “How well do you know this man?” Sigmund asked.

  “I know him by reputation. He’s quite famous. I don’t see how such a man could go in for mass murder.”

  Sigmund wondered: How can someone so brilliant be so innocent? “Earlier you said that we were looking for a man skilled in the study of gravitational phenomena.”

  “Granted.”

  That was rather grudging, Sigmund thought. “Perhaps we can do no more than talk to him. He could be on the other side of the sun and still head a pirate fleet.”

  Carlos shook his head. “No. That he could not.”

  “Think again,” Sigmund said. “We are outside the singularity of Sol. A pirate fleet would surely include hyperdrive ships.”

  “If Julian Forward is the ship eater, he’ll have to be nearby. The, uh, device won’t move in hyperspace.”

  Shaeffer had begun to look testy. He said, “Carlos, what we don’t know can kill us. Will you quit playing games?” But Carlos kept smiling, shaking his head. “All right, we can still check on Forward. Call him up and ask where he is! Is he likely to know you by reputation?”

  “Sure. I’m famous, too.”

  “Okay,” Shaeffer said. “If he’s close enough, we might even beg him for a ride home. The way things stand, we’ll be at the mercy of any hyperdrive ship for as long as we’re out here.”

  “I hope we are attacked,” Sigmund said. “We can outfight—”

  “But we can’t outrun,” Shaeffer interrupted. “They can dodge; we can’t.”

  “Peace, you two. First things first.” Carlos sat down at the hyperwave controls and keyed in a comm ID.

  One shipmate a foolish genius, the other a coward or a traitor. He couldn’t rely on either of them; he didn’t trust Forward. Sigmund backed into a corner that the comm gear did not see. “Can you contrive to keep my name out of this exchange? If necessary, you can be the ship’s owner.”

  Before Carlos could answer, the comm display lit. They saw ash-blond hair cut in a Belter crest over a lean white face and an insincere smile.

  “Forward Station. Good evening.”

  “Good evening. This is Carlos Wu of Earth calling. May I speak to Dr. Julian Forward, please?”

  “I’ll see if he’s available.” The video froze.

  Carlos shouted, “What kind of game are you playing now? How can I explain owning a warship?”

  Before anyone c
ould comment, the video unfroze. They saw someone massively muscled, undeniably a Jinxian.

  “Carlos Wu!” Forward said with unctuous enthusiasm. “Are you the same Carlos Wu who solved the Sealeyham Limits problem?”

  They babbled in tongues. “Well,” Forward finally said, “what can I do for you?”

  “Julian Forward, meet Beowulf Shaeffer. Bey was giving me a lift home when our hyperdrive motor disappeared.”

  Shaeffer jumped right in. “Disappeared, futzy right. The hyperdrive motor casing is empty. The motor supports are sheared off. We’re stuck out here with no hyperdrive and no idea how it happened.”

  “Almost true,” Carlos said cheerfully. “Dr. Forward, I do have some ideas as to what happened here. I’d like to discuss them with you.”

  “Where are you now?”

  Shaeffer sent Forward their position.

  Forward glanced at the coordinates. “You can get here a lot faster than you can get to Earth. Forward Station is ahead of you, within twenty a.u. of your position. You can wait here for the next ferry. Better than going on in a crippled ship.”

  An icy calm came over Sigmund. Forward was that near? The Jinxian must be involved.

  “Good!” Carlos said. “We’ll work out a course and let you know when to expect us.”

  “I welcome the chance to meet Carlos Wu.” Forward sent his coordinates and dropped the link.

  Carlos turned. “All right, Bey. Now you own an armed and disguised warship. You figure out where you got it.”

  Shaeffer had the sense to look worried. “We’ve got worse problems than that. Forward Station is exactly where the ship eater ought to be.”

  Carlos nodded. But he remained amused with something he still would not share.

  “So what’s our next move?” Shaeffer persisted. “We can’t run from hyperdrive ships. Not now. Is Forward likely to try to kill us?”

  “If we don’t reach Forward Station on schedule, he might send ships after us. We know too much. We’ve told him so,” Carlos said. “The hyperdrive motor disappeared completely. I know half a dozen people who could figure out how it happened, knowing just that.” He smiled suddenly. “That’s assuming Forward’s the ship eater. We don’t know that. I think we have a splendid chance to find out one way or the other.”

  “How? Just walk in?” Shaeffer asked.

  Ideas started to percolate in Sigmund’s mind. “Dr. Forward expects you and Carlos to enter his web unsuspecting, leaving an empty ship. I think we can prepare a few surprises for him. For example, he may not have guessed that this is a General Products hull. And I will be aboard to fight.”

  “So you’ll be in the indestructible hull,” Shaeffer said cynically, “and we’ll be helpless in the base. Very clever. I’d rather run for it myself. But then, you have your career to consider.”

  Something had reached through Hobo Kelly’s hull to remove its hyperdrive motor. A few years ago, tidal forces had reached through Skydiver—another GP #2 hull, as it happened, like this ship—and almost splatted Shaeffer across the inside of the bow. And between, Shaeffer had almost certainly experienced the complete destruction of a GP hull.

  Maybe I should be a little more sympathetic to Beowulf’s caution.

  “I will not deny it,” Sigmund said. “But there are ways in which I can prepare you.”

  33

  A lopsided stony mass flecked with ice hung in Hobo Kelly’s main view port. On magnification, signs of human presence dotted the rock’s mottled surface. Sigmund recognized air locks, flush-mounted windows, and antennae. The long, many-jointed metal arm with a bowl at its end? He hadn’t a clue.

  He returned his attention to the tiny open vehicle crossing the short distance to Forward Station. Two space-suited figures straddled a device that was little more than rocket motor and fuel tanks. Someone in a skintight suit and a bubble helmet waited for them. They moored the taxi to a spur of rock and went inside.

  “I’m Harry Moskowitz,” their greeter said. “They call me Angel. Dr. Forward is waiting in the laboratory.”

  Angel’s voice was as clear as if Sigmund were on the rock. Sigmund had equipped Bey and Wu with ARM gear.

  Sigmund had explained about their borrowed ARM earplugs, “Transmitter and hearing aid with sonic padding between. If you are blasted with sound, as by an explosion or a sonic stunner, the hearing aid will stop transmitting. If you go suddenly deaf, you will know you are under attack.” He had seen no need to volunteer that transmit also meant broadcast. They might fail to act naturally if they knew he was listening.

  The earplugs transmitted at very low power across a very broad spectrum—the devices wouldn’t reveal themselves by interfering with Forward’s equipment. Floating a few hundred meters away, Hobo Kelly’s long-range comm gear picked up the signals easily.

  Carlos and Bey followed Angel inside. As soon as they removed their space suits, Sigmund had video. One button on each of their jumpers contained a camera, another detail he had seen no reason to mention.

  Angel’s station tour was anticlimactic: long, boring tunnels such as have laced a thousand asteroid mines—which, supposedly, this rock had once been. Toolrooms. Storerooms. Fusion generators. A space-taxi hangar.

  Shaeffer was also getting bored. Admirably casual, he asked, “You use mining tugs?”

  “Sure,” Angel said. He seemed to think nothing of the question. “We can ship water and metals up from the inner system, but it’s cheaper to hunt them down ourselves. In an emergency the tugs could probably get us back to the inner system.” The Belter continued his tour before slipping in his own offhanded question. “Speaking of ships, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like yours. Were those bombs lined up along the ventral surface?”

  “Some of them,” Bey said.

  Carlos laughed. “Bey won’t tell me how he got it.”

  “Pick, pick, pick. All right, I stole it. I don’t think anyone is going to complain.” Bey spun a yarn as only he could, about being hired to pilot a cargo ship to Wunderland. Only it had turned out to be a warship hidden inside a fake shell. “By then I was already afraid that if I tried to back out, I’d be made to disappear.”

  Angel frowned. “Strange they left you with a working hyperdrive.”

  “Man, they didn’t. They’d ripped out the relays. I had to fix them myself. It’s lucky I looked, because they had the relays wired to a little bomb under the control chair.” Shaeffer paused, thoughtfully. The man was a born actor. “Maybe I fixed it wrong. You heard what happened? My hyperdrive motor just plain vanished. It must have set off some explosive bolts, because the belly of the ship blew off. It was a dummy. What’s left looks to be a pocket bomber.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Angel said.

  Bey shrugged. “I guess I’ll have to turn it in to the goldskin cops when we reach the inner system. Pity.”

  And then the tour took an interesting turn.

  The next tunnel ended in a great hemispherical chamber. A massive column stood at the center of the room, rising through a seal in the curved dome into the enigmatic multijointed arm whose purpose Bey, Carlos, and Sigmund had all tried—and failed—to guess.

  Julian Forward sat at the horseshoe-shaped control console near the pillar. “The Grabber,” he intoned with mock portentousness.

  “Pleased to meet you, Carlos Wu. Beowulf Shaeffer.” Forward bounded from his seat, beaming. “The Grabber is our main exhibit here. After the Grabber there’s nothing to see.”

  Bey asked, “What does it do?”

  Carlos laughed. “It’s beautiful! Why does it have to do anything?”

  Forward said, “I’ve been thinking of entering it in a junk-sculpture show. What it does is manipulate large, dense masses. The cradle at the end of the arm is a complex of electromagnets. I can actually vibrate masses in there to produce polarized gravity waves.”

  Carlos and Bey leaned back to admire the Grabber. It was huge. Sigmund took in views from their hidden cameras and the telescopic overhead
perspective of Hobo Kelly. Massive curved girders cut the dome into pie sections. Like the seal, the girders gleamed like mirrors.

  Carlos mumbled something about reinforcement by stasis fields. Then he spoke to Forward: “What do you vibrate in there? A megaton of lead?”

  “Lead sheathed in soft iron was the test mass. But that was years ago. I haven’t worked with the Grabber lately, but we had some satisfactory runs with a sphere of neutronium enclosed in a stasis field. Ten billion metric tons.”

  Sigmund twitched. Neutronium? It didn’t exist outside of neutron stars, did it? He was sure he remembered that from the BVS-1 affair.

  Maybe Carlos would have commented, but Bey spoke first. “What’s the point?”

  “Communication, for one thing,” Forward said. “There must be intelligent species all through the galaxy, most of them too far away for our ships. Gravity waves are probably the best way to reach them.”

  “Gravity waves travel at light speed, don’t they? Wouldn’t hyperwave be better?”

  “We can’t count on them having it. Who but the Outsiders would think to do their experimenting this far from a sun? If we want to reach beings who haven’t dealt with the Outsiders, we’ll have to use gravity waves once we know how.”

  The conversation lapsed further into technobabble. Sigmund hadn’t a clue what any of it meant. It didn’t seem threatening.

  And it didn’t explain why an expert on gravitational theory was here in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Every few sentences, the name of a mutual acquaintance bubbled out of the babble. Many were in the Quicksilver Group. Others were out-system, especially on Jinx, mostly seeking funding from the Institute of Knowledge.

  “Are you still with the institute, Doctor?” Carlos asked.

  Forward shook his head. “They stopped backing me. Not enough results. But I can continue to use this station, which is institute property. One day they’ll sell it and we’ll have to move.”

  This operation couldn’t be cheap. If the institute wasn’t supporting Forward, Sigmund wondered who was. Or was the Jinxian lying?