Crashlander Read online

  All I’d done was walk into a drugstore to get a new battery for my lighter!

  Right in the middle of the store, surrounded by three floors of sales counters, was the new 2603 Sinclair intrasystem yacht. I’d come for a battery, but I stayed to admire. It was a beautiful job, small and sleek and streamlined and blatantly different from anything that’d ever been built. I wouldn’t have flown it for anything, but I had to admit it was pretty. I ducked my head through the door to look at the control panel. You never saw so many dials. When I pulled my head out, all the customers were looking in the same direction. The place had gone startlingly quiet.

  I can’t blame them for staring. A number of aliens were in the store, mainly shopping for souvenirs, but they were staring, too. A puppeteer is unique. Imagine a headless, three-legged centaur wearing two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on its arms and you’ll have something like the right picture. But the arms are weaving necks, and the puppets are real heads, flat and brainless, with wide flexible lips. The brain is under a bony hump set between the bases of the necks. This puppeteer wore only its own coat of brown hair, with a mane that extended all the way up its spine to form a thick mat over the brain. I’m told that the way they wear the mane indicates their status in society, but to me it could have been anything from a dockworker to a jeweler to the president of General Products.

  I watched with the rest as it came across the floor, not because I’d never seen a puppeteer but because there is something beautiful about the dainty way they move on those slender legs and tiny hooves. I watched it come straight toward me, closer and closer. It stopped a foot away, looked me over, and said, “You are Beowulf Shaeffer, former chief pilot for Nakamura Lines.”

  Its voice was a beautiful contralto with not a trace of accent. A puppeteer’s months are not only the most flexible speech organs around but also the most sensitive hands. The tongues are forked and pointed; the wide, thick lips have little fingerlike knobs along the rims. Imagine a watchmaker with a sense of taste in his fingertips…

  I cleared my throat. “That’s right.”

  It considered me from two directions. “You would be interested in a high-paying job?”

  “I’d be fascinated by a high-paying job.”

  “I am our equivalent of the regional president of General Products. Please come with me, and we will discuss this elsewhere.”

  I followed it into a displacement booth. Eyes followed me all the way. It was embarrassing being accosted in a public drugstore by a two-headed monster. Maybe the puppeteer knew it. Maybe it was testing me to see how badly I needed money.

  My need was great. Eight months had passed since Nakamura Lines had folded. For some time before that I had been living very high on the hog, knowing that my back pay would cover my debts. I never saw that back pay. It was quite a crash, Nakamura Lines. Respectable middle-aged businessmen took to leaving their hotel windows without their lift belts. Me, I kept spending. If I’d started living frugally, my creditors would have done some checking…and I’d have ended in debtor’s prison.

  The puppeteer dialed thirteen fast digits with its tongue. A moment later we were elsewhere. Air puffed out when I opened the booth door, and I swallowed to pop my ears.

  “We are on the roof of the General Products building.” The rich contralto voice thrilled along my nerves, and I had to remind myself that it was an alien speaking, not a lovely woman. “You must examine this spacecraft while we discuss your assignment.”

  I stepped outside a little cautiously, but it wasn’t the windy season. The roof was at ground level. That’s the way we build on We Made It. Maybe it has something to do with the fifteen-hundred-mile-an-hour winds we get in summer and winter, when the planet’s axis of rotation runs through its primary, Procyon. The winds are our planet’s only tourist attraction, and it would be a shame to slow them down by planting skyscrapers in their path. The bare, square concrete roof was surrounded by endless square miles of desert, not like the deserts of other inhabited worlds but an utterly lifeless expanse of fine sand just crying to be planted with ornamental cactus. We’ve tried that. The wind blows the plants away.

  The ship lay on the sand beyond the roof. It was a No. 2 General Products hull: a cylinder three hundred feet long and twenty feet through, pointed at both ends and with a slight wasp-waist constriction near the tail. For some reason it was lying on its side, with the landing shocks still folded in at the tail.

  Ever notice how all ships have begun to look the same? A good ninety-five percent of today’s spacecraft are built around one of the four General Products hulls. It’s easier and safer to build that way, but somehow all ships end as they began: mass-produced look-alikes.

  The hulls are delivered fully transparent, and you use paint where you feel like it. Most of this particular hull had been left transparent. Only the nose had been painted, around the lifesystem. There was no major reaction drive. A series of retractable attitude jets had been mounted in the sides, and the hull was pierced with smaller holes, square and round, for observational instruments. I could see them gleaming through the hull.

  The puppeteer was moving toward the nose, but something made me turn toward the stern for a closer look at the landing shocks. They were bent. Behind the curved transparent hull panels some tremendous pressure had forced the metal to flow like warm wax, back and into the pointed stern.

  “What did this?” I asked.

  “We do not know. We wish strenuously to find out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you heard of the neutron star BVS-1?”

  I had to think a moment. “First neutron star ever found, and so far the only. Someone located it two years ago by stellar displacement.”

  “BVS-1 was found by the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx. We learned through a go-between that the Institute wished to explore the star. They needed a ship to do it. They had not yet sufficient money. We offered to supply them with a ship’s hull, with the usual guarantees, if they would turn over to us all data they acquired through using our ship.”

  “Sounds fair enough.” I didn’t ask why they hadn’t done their own exploring. Like most sentient vegetarians, puppeteers find discretion to be the only part of valor.

  “Two humans named Peter Laskin and Sonya Laskin wished to use the ship. They intended to come within one mile of the surface in a hyperbolic orbit. At some point during their trip an unknown force apparently reached through the hull to do this to the landing shocks. The unknown force also seems to have killed the pilots.”

  “But that’s impossible. Isn’t it?”

  “You see the point. Come with me.” The puppeteer trotted toward the bow.

  I saw the point, all right. Nothing, but nothing, can get through a General Products hull. No kind of electromagnetic energy except visible light. No kind of matter, from the smallest subatomic particle to the fastest meteor. That’s what the company’s advertisements claim, and the guarantee backs them up. I’ve never doubted it, and I’ve never heard of a General Products hull being damaged by a weapon or by anything else.

  On the other hand, a General Products hull is as ugly as it is functional. The puppeteer-owned company could be badly hurt if it got around that something could get through a company hull. But I didn’t see where I came in.

  We rode an escalladder into the nose.

  The lifesystem was in two compartments. Here the Laskins had used heat-reflective paint. In the conical control cabin the hull had been divided into windows. The relaxation room behind it was a windowless reflective silver. From the back wall of the relaxation room an access tube ran aft, opening on various instruments and the hyperdrive motors.

  There were two acceleration couches in the control cabin. Both had been torn loose from their mountings and wadded into the nose like so much tissue paper, crushing the instrument panel. The backs of the crumpled couches were splashed with rust brown. Flecks of the same color were all over everything: the walls, the windows, the viewscreens.
It was as if something had hit the couches from behind: something like a dozen paint-filled toy balloons striking with tremendous force.

  “That’s blood,” I said.

  “That is correct. Human circulatory fluid.”

  Twenty-four hours to fall.

  I spent most of the first twelve hours in the relaxation room, trying to read. Nothing significant was happening, except that a few times I saw the phenomenon Sonya Laskin had mentioned in her last report. When a star went directly behind the invisible BVS-1, a halo formed. BVS-1 was heavy enough to bend light around it, displacing most stars to the sides, but when a star went directly behind the neutron star, its light was displaced to all sides at once. Result: a tiny circle which flashed once and was gone almost before the eye could catch it.

  I’d known next to nothing about neutron stars the day the puppeteer picked me up. Now I was an expert. And I still had no idea what was waiting for me when I got down there.

  All the matter you’re ever likely to meet will be normal matter, composed of a nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons in quantum energy states. In the heart of any star there is a second kind of matter, for there the tremendous pressure is enough to smash the electron shells. The result is degenerate matter nuclei forced together by pressure and gravity but held apart by the mutual repulsion of the more or less continuous electron “gas” around them. The right circumstances may create a third type of matter.

  Given: a burned-out white dwarf with a mass greater than 1.44 times the mass of the sun—Chandrasekhar’s Limit, named for an Indian-American astronomer of the 1900s. In such a mass the electron pressure alone would not be able to hold the electrons back from the nuclei. Electrons would be forced against protons—to make neutrons. In one blazing explosion most of the star would change from a compressed mass of degenerate matter to a closely packed lump of neutrons: neutronium, theoretically the densest matter possible in this universe. Most of the remaining normal and degenerate matter would be blown away by the liberated heat.

  For two weeks the star would give off X rays as its core temperature dropped from five billion degrees Kelvin to five hundred million. After that it would be a light-emitting body perhaps ten to twelve miles across: the next best thing to invisible. It was not strange that BVS-1 was the first neutron star ever found.

  Neither is it strange that the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx would have spent a good deal of time and trouble looking. Until BVS-1 was found, neutronium and neutron stars were only theories. The examination of an actual neutron star could be of tremendous importance. Neutron stars might give us the key to true gravity control.

  Mass of BVS-1: 1.3 times the mass of Sol, approx.

  Diameter of BVS-1 (estimated): eleven miles of neutronium, covered by half a mile of degenerate matter, covered by maybe twelve feet of ordinary matter.

  Nothing else was known of the tiny hidden star until the Laskins went in to look. Now the Institute knew one thing more: the star’s spin.

  “A mass that large can distort space by its rotation,” said the puppeteer. “The Laskins’ projected hyperbola was twisted across itself in such a way that we can deduce the star’s period of rotation to be two minutes twenty-seven seconds.”

  The bar was somewhere in the General Products building. I don’t know just where, and with the transfer booth’s it doesn’t matter. I kept staring at the puppeteer bartender. Naturally only a puppeteer would be served by a puppeteer bartender, since any biped life-form would resent knowing that his drink had been made with somebody’s mouth. I had already decided to get dinner somewhere else.

  “I see your problem,” I said. “Your sales will suffer if it gets out that something can reach through one of your hulls and smash a crew to bloody smears. But where do I come in?”

  “We want to repeat the experiment of Sonya Laskin and Peter Laskin. We must find—”

  “With me?”

  “Yes. We must find out what it is that our hulls cannot stop. Naturally you may—”

  “But I won’t.”

  “We are prepared to offer one million stars.”

  I was tempted, but only for a moment. “Forget it.”

  “Naturally you will be allowed to build your own ship, starting with a No. 2 General Products hull.”

  “Thanks, but I’d like to go on living.”

  “You would dislike being confined. I find that We Made It has reestablished the debtor’s prison. If General Products made public your accounts—”

  “Now, just a—”

  “You owe money on the close order of five hundred thousand stars. We will pay your creditors before you leave. If you return—” I had to admire the creature’s honesty in not saying “When.” “—we will pay you the residue. You may be asked to speak to news commentators concerning the voyage, in which case there will be more stars.”

  “You say I can build my own ship?”

  “Naturally. This is not a voyage of exploration. We want you to return safely.”

  “It’s a deal,” I said.

  After all, the puppeteer had tried to blackmail me. What happened next would be its own fault.

  They built my ship in two weeks flat. They started with a No. 2 General Products hull, just like the one around the Institute of Knowledge ship, and the lifesystem was practically a duplicate of the Laskins’, but there the resemblance ended. There were no instruments to observe neutron stars. Instead, there was a fusion motor big enough for a Jinx warliner. In my ship, which I now called Skydiver, the drive would produce thirty gees at the safety limit. There was a laser cannon big enough to punch a hole through We Made It’s moon. The puppeteer wanted me to feel safe, and now I did, for I could fight and I could run. Especially I could run.

  I heard the Laskins’ last broadcast through half a dozen times. Their unnamed ship had dropped out of hyperspace a million miles above BVS-1. Gravity warp would have prevented their getting closer in hyperspace. While her husband was crawling through the access tube for an instrument check, Sonya Laskin had called the Institute of Knowledge. “…We can’t see it yet, not by naked eye. But we can see where it is. Every time some star or other goes behind it, there’s a little ring of light. Just a minute. Peter’s ready to use the telescope…”

  Then the star’s mass had cut the hyperspatial link. It was expected, and nobody had worried—then. Later, the same effect must have stopped them from escaping from whatever attacked them into hyperspace.

  When would-be rescuers found the ship, only the radar and the cameras were still running. They didn’t tell us much. There had been no camera in the cabin. But the forward camera gave us, for one instant, a speed-blurred view of the neutron star. It was a featureless disk the orange color of perfect barbecue coals, if you know someone who can afford to burn wood. This object had been a neutron star a long time.

  “There’ll be no need to paint the ship,” I told the president.

  “You should not make such a trip with the walls transparent. You would go insane.”

  “I’m no flatlander. The mind-wrenching sight of naked space fills me with mild but waning interest. I want to know nothing’s sneaking up behind me.”

  The day before I left, I sat alone in the General Products bar, letting the puppeteer bartender make me drinks with his mouth. He did it well. Puppeteers were scattered around the bar in twos and threes, with a couple of men for variety, but the drinking hour had not yet arrived. The place felt empty.

  I was pleased with myself. My debts were all paid, not that that would matter where I was going. I would leave with not a minicredit to my name, with nothing but the ship…

  All told, I was well out of a sticky situation. I hoped I’d like being a rich exile.

  I jumped when the newcomer sat down across from me. He was a foreigner, a middle-aged man wearing an expensive night-black business suit and a snow-white asymmetrical beard. I let my face freeze and started to get up.

  “Sit down, Mr. Shaeffer.”

  “Why?
”

  He told me by showing me a blue disk. An Earth government ident. I looked it over to show I was alert, not because I’d know an ersatz from the real thing.

  “My name is Sigmund Ausfaller,” said the government man. “I wish to say a few words concerning your assignment on behalf of General Products.”

  I nodded, not saying anything.

  “A record of your verbal contract was sent to us as a matter of course. I noticed some peculiar things about it. Mr. Shaeffer, will you really take such a risk for only five hundred thousand stars?”

  “I’m getting twice that.”

  “But you only keep half of it. The rest goes to pay debts. Then there are taxes…But never mind. What occurred to me was that a spaceship is a spaceship, and yours is very well armed and has powerful legs. An admirable fighting ship, if you were moved to sell it.”

  “But it isn’t mine.”

  “There are those who would not ask. On Canyon, for example, or the Isolationist party of Wunderland.”

  I said nothing.

  “Or you might be planning a career of piracy. A risky business, piracy, and I don’t take the notion seriously.”

  I hadn’t even thought about piracy. But I’d have to give up on Wunderland.

  “What I would like to say is this, Mr. Shaeffer. A single entrepreneur, if he were sufficiently dishonest, could do terrible damage to the reputation of all human beings everywhere. Most species find it necessary to police the ethics of their own members, and we are no exception. It occurred to me that you might not take your ship to the neutron star at all, that you would take it elsewhere and sell it. The puppeteers do not make invulnerable war vessels. They are pacifists. Your Skydiver is unique.

  “Hence, I have asked General Products to allow me to install a remote-control bomb in the Skydiver. Since it is inside the hull, the hull cannot protect you. I had it installed this afternoon.

  “Now, notice! If you have not reported within a week, I will set off the bomb. There are several worlds within a week’s hyperspace flight of here, but all recognize the dominion of Earth. If you flee, you must leave your ship within a week, so I hardly think you will land on a nonhabitable world. Clear?”