At the Core Read online

  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 a 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 almost 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 would 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 multicolored 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 Kzi
nti.” 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 foodstuffs 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 peoples 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 increase materially each other's temperature. Stars burn 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...."

  “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 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.