Crashlander Read online

  “Did you try closing your eyes?”

  “It was worse. Futz, I made it this far on hypnosis. Bey, it’s so empty.”

  “Hang on. We’re almost there.”

  The blond Belter was outside one of the air locks in a skintight suit and a bubble helmet. He used a flashlight to flag us down. We moored our taxi to a spur of rock—the gravity was almost nil—and went inside.

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

  The interior of the asteroid was a network of straight cylindrical corridors, laser-drilled, pressurized, and lined with cool blue light strips. We weighed a few pounds near the surface, less in the deep interior. Angel moved in a fashion new to me: a flat jump from the floor that took him far down the corridor to brush the ceiling, push back to the floor, and jump again. Three jumps and he’d wait, not hiding his amusement at our attempts to catch up.

  “Doctor Forward asked me to give you a tour,” he told us.

  I said, “You seem to have a lot more corridor than you need. Why didn’t you cluster all the rooms together?”

  “This rock was a mine once upon a time. The miners drilled these passages. They left big hollows wherever they found air-bearing rock or ice pockets. All we had to do was wall them off.”

  That explained why there was so much corridor between the doors and why the chambers we saw were so big. Some rooms were storage areas, Angel said; not worth opening. Others were tool rooms, life-support systems, a garden, a fair-sized computer, a sizable fusion plant. A mess room built to hold thirty actually held about ten, all men, who looked at us curiously before they went back to eating. A hangar, bigger than need be and open to the sky, housed taxis and powered suits with specialized tools and three identical circular cradles, all empty.

  I gambled. Carefully casual, I asked, “You use mining tugs?”

  Angel didn’t hesitate. “Sure. 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.”

  We moved back into the tunnels. Angel said, “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,” I 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.”

  Angel, frankly curious before, was frankly fascinated as I told the story of how I had been hired to fly a cargo ship in the Wunderland system. “I didn’t much like the looks of the guy who hired me, but what do I know about Wunderlanders? Besides, I needed the money.” I told of my surprise at the proportions of the ship: the solid wall behind the cabin, the passenger section that was only holographs in blind portholes. By then I was already afraid that if I tried to back out, I’d be made to disappear.

  But when I learned my destination, I got really worried. “It was in the Serpent Stream—you know, the crescent of asteroids in Wunderland system? It’s common knowledge that the Free Wunderland Conspiracy is all through those rocks. When they gave me my course, I just took off and aimed for Sirius.”

  “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.” I stopped, then, “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.”

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

  Carlos was smiling and shaking his head. He covered by saying, “It only goes to prove that you can run away from your problems.”

  The next tunnel ended in a great hemispherical chamber lidded by a bulging transparent dome. A man-thick pillar rose through the rock floor to a seal in the center of the dome. Above the seal, gleaming against night and stars, a multi-jointed metal arm reached out blindly into space. The arm ended in what might have been a tremendous iron puppy dish.

  Forward was in a horseshoe-shaped control console near the pillar. I hardly noticed him. I’d seen this arm-and-bucket thing before, coming in from space, but I hadn’t grasped its size.

  Forward caught me gaping. “The Grabber,” he said.

  He approached us in a bouncing walk, comical but effective. “Pleased to meet you, Carlos Wu. Beowulf Shaeffer.” His handshake was not crippling, because he was being careful. He had a wide, engaging smile. “The Grabber is our main exhibit here. After the Grabber there’s nothing to see.”

  I asked, “What does it do?”

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

  Forward acknowledged the compliment. “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.”

  Six massive arcs of girder divided the dome into pie sections. Now I noticed that they and the seal at their center gleamed like mirrors. They were reinforced by stasis fields. More bracing for the Grabber? I tried to imagine forces that would require such strength.

  “What do you vibrate in there? A megaton of lead?”

  “Lead sheathed in soft iron was our test mass. But that was three 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.”

  I said, “What’s the point?”

  From Carlos I got a dirty look. Forward seemed to think it was a wholly reasonable question. “Communication, for one thing. 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 lightspeed, don’t they? Wouldn’t hyperwave be better?”

  “We can’t count on their 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.”

  Angel offered us chairs and refreshments. By the time we were settled, I was already out of it; Forward and Carlos were talking plasma physics, metaphysics, and what are our old friends doing? I gathered that they had large numbers of mutual acquaintances. And Carlos was probing for the whereabouts of cosmologists specializing in gravity physics.

  A few were in the Quicksilver Group. Others were among the colony worlds, especially on Jinx, trying to get the Institute of Knowledge to finance various projects, such as more expeditions to the collapsar in Cygnus.

  “Are you still with the Institute, Doctor?”

  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.”

  “I was wondering why they sent you here in the first place,” said Carlos. “Sirius has an adequate cometary belt.”

  “But Sol is the only system with any kind of civilization this far from its sun. And I can count on better men to work with. Sol system has always had its fair share of cosmologists.”

  “I thought you might have come to solve an old mystery. The Tunguska meteorite. You’ve heard of it, of course.”

  Forward laughed. “Of course. Who hasn’t? I don’t think we’ll ever know just what it was that hit Siberia that night. It may have been a chunk of antimatter. I’m told that there is antimatter in known space.”

  “If it was, we’ll never prove it,” Carlos admitted.

  “Shall we discuss y
our problem?” Forward seemed to remember my existence. “Shaeffer, what does a professional pilot think when his hyperdrive motor disappears?”

  “He gets very upset.”

  “Any theories?”

  I decided not to mention pirates. I wanted to see if Forward would mention them first. “Nobody seems to like my theory,” I said, and I sketched out the argument for monsters in hyperspace.

  Forward heard me out politely. Then, “I’ll give you this; it’d be hard to disprove. Do you buy it?”

  “I’m afraid to. I almost got myself killed once, looking for space monsters when I should have been looking for natural causes.”

  “Why would the hyperspace monsters eat only your motor?”

  “Um…futz. I pass.”

  “What do you think, Carlos? Natural phenomena or space monsters?”

  “Pirates,” said Carlos.

  “How are they going about it?”

  “Well, this business of a hyperdrive motor disappearing and leaving the ship behind—that’s brand new. I’d think it would take a sharp gravity gradient with a tidal effect as strong as that of a neutron star or a black hole.”

  “You won’t find anything like that anywhere in human space.”

  “I know.” Carlos looked frustrated. That had to be faked. Earlier he’d behaved as if he already had an answer.

  Forward said, “I don’t think a black hole would have that anyway. If it did, you’d never know it, because the ship would disappear down the black hole.”

  “What about a powerful gravity generator?”

  “Hmmm.” Forward thought about it, then shook his massive head. “You’re talking about a surface gravity in the millions. Any gravity generator I’ve ever heard of would collapse itself at that level. Let’s see, with a frame supported by stasis fields…no. The frame would hold, and the rest of the machinery would flow like water.”

  “You don’t leave much of my theory.”

  “Sorry.”

  Carlos ended a short pause by asking, “How do you think the universe started?”

  Forward looked puzzled at the change of subject.

  And I began to get uneasy.

  Given all that I don’t know about cosmology, I do know attitudes and tones of voice. Carlos was giving out broad hints, trying to lead Forward to his own conclusion. Black holes, pirates, the Tunguska meteorite, the origin of the universe—he was offering them as clues. And Forward was not responding correctly.

  He was saying, “Ask a priest. Me, I lean toward the big bang. The steady state always seemed so futile.”

  “I like the big bang, too,” said Carlos.

  There was something else to worry about. Those mining tugs: they almost had to belong to Forward Station. How would Ausfaller react when three familiar spacecraft came cruising into his space?

  How did I want him to react? Forward Station would make a dandy pirate base. Permeated by laser-drilled corridors distributed almost at random…could there be two networks of corridors, connected only at the surface? How would we know?

  Suddenly I didn’t want to know. I wanted to go home. If only Carlos would stay off the touchy subjects—

  But he was speculating about the ship eater again. “That ten billion metric tons of neutronium, now, that you were using for a test mass. That wouldn’t be big enough or dense enough to give us enough of a gravity gradient.”

  “It might, right near the surface.” Forward grinned and held his hands close together. “It was about that big.”

  “And that’s as dense as matter gets in this universe. Too bad.”

  “True, but…have you ever heard of quantum black holes?”

  “Yah.”

  Forward stood up briskly. “Wrong answer.”

  I rolled out of my web chair, trying to brace myself for a jump, while my fingers fumbled for the third button on my jumper. It was no good. I hadn’t practiced in this gravity.

  Forward was in midleap. He slapped Carlos alongside the head as he went past. He caught me at the peak of his jump and took me with him via an iron grip on my wrist.

  I had no leverage, but I kicked at him. He didn’t even try to stop me. It was like fighting a mountain. He gathered my wrists in one hand and towed me away.

  Forward was busy. He sat within the horseshoe of his control console, talking. The backs of three disembodied heads showed above the console’s edge.

  Evidently there was a laser phone in the console. I could hear parts of what Forward was saying. He was ordering the pilots of the dime mining tugs to destroy Hobo Kelly. He didn’t seem to know about Ausfaller yet.

  Forward was busy, but Angel was studying us thoughtfully, or unhappily, or both. Well he might. We could disappear, but what messages might we have sent earlier?

  I couldn’t do anything constructive with Angel watching me. And I couldn’t count on Carlos.

  I couldn’t see Carlos. Forward and Angel had tied us to opposite sides of the central pillar, beneath the Grabber. Carlos hadn’t made a sound since then. He might be dying from that tremendous slap across the head.

  I tested the line around my wrists. Metal mesh of some kind, cool to the touch…and it was tight.

  Forward turned a switch. The heads vanished. It was a moment before he spoke.

  “You’ve put me in a very bad position.”

  And Carlos answered. “I think you put yourself there.”

  “That may be. You should not have let me guess what you knew.”

  Carlos said, “Sorry, Bey.”

  He sounded healthy. Good. “That’s all right,” I said. “But what’s all the excitement about? What has Forward got?”

  “I think he’s got the Tunguska meteorite.”

  “No. That I do not.” Forward stood and faced us. “I will admit that I came here to search for the Tunguska meteorite. I spent several years trying to trace its trajectory after it left Earth. Perhaps it was a quantum black hole. Perhaps not. The Institute cut off my funds without warning just as I had found a real quantum black hole, the first in history.”

  I said, “That doesn’t tell me a lot.”

  “Patience, Mr. Shaeffer. You know that a black hole may form from the collapse of a massive star? Good. And you know that it takes a body of at least five solar masses. It may mass as much as a galaxy—or as much as the universe. There is some evidence that the universe is an in-falling black hole. But at less than five solar masses the collapse would stop at the neutron star stage.”

  “I follow you.”

  “In all the history of the universe there has been one moment at which smaller black holes might have formed. That moment was the explosion of the monoblock, the cosmic egg that once contained all the matter in the universe. In the ferocity of that explosion there must have been loci of unimaginable pressure. Black holes could have formed of mass down to two point two times ten to the minus fifth grams, one point six times ten to the minus twenty-fifth angstroms in radius.”

  “Of course you’d never detect anything that small,” said Carlos. He seemed almost cheerful. I wondered why…and then I knew. He’d been right about the way the ships were disappearing. It must compensate him for being tied to a pillar.

  “But,” said Forward, “black holes of all sizes could have formed in that explosion, and should have. In more than seven hundred years of searching no quantum black hole has ever been found. Most cosmologists have given up on them, and on the big bang, too.”

  Carlos said, “Of course there was the Tunguska meteorite. It could have been a black hole of, oh, asteroidal mass—”

  “—and roughly molecular size. But the tide would have pulled down trees as it went past—”

  “—and the black hole would have gone right through the Earth and headed back into space a few tons heavier. Eight hundred years ago there was actually a search for the exit point. With that they could have charted a course—”

  “Exactly. But I had to give up that approach,” said Forward. “I was using a new method when the I
nstitute, ah, severed our relationship.”

  They must both be mad, I thought. Carlos was tied to a pillar and Forward was about to kill him, yet they were both behaving like members of a very exclusive club…to which I did not belong.

  Carlos was interested. “How’d you work it?”

  “You know that it is possible for an asteroid to capture a quantum black hole? In its interior? For instance, at a mass of ten to the twelfth kilograms—a billion metric tons,” he added for my benefit, “a black hole would be only one point five times ten to the minus fifth angstroms across. Smaller than an atom. In a slow pass through an asteroid it might absorb a few billions of atoms, enough to slow it into an orbit. Thereafter it might orbit within the asteroid for eons, absorbing very little mass on each pass.”

  “So?”

  “If I chance on an asteroid more massive than it ought to be, and if I contrive to move it, and some of the mass stays behind…”

  “You’d have to search a lot of asteroids. Why do it out here? Why not the asteroid belt? Oh, of course. You can use hyperdrive out here.”

  “Exactly. We could search a score of masses in a day, using very little fuel.”

  “Hey. If it was big enough to eat a spacecraft, why didn’t it eat the asteroid you found it in?”

  “It wasn’t that big,” said Forward. “The black hole I found was exactly as I have described it. I enlarged it. I towed it home and ran it into my neutronium sphere. Then it was large enough to absorb an asteroid. Now it is quite a massive object. Ten to the twentieth power kilograms, the mass of one of the larger asteroids, and a radius of just under ten to the minus fifth centimeters.”

  There was satisfaction in Forward’s voice. In Carlos’s there was suddenly nothing but contempt. “You accomplished all that, and then you used it to rob ships and bury the evidence. Is that what’s going to happen to us? Down the rabbit hole?”

  “To another universe, perhaps. Where does a black hole lead?”

  I wondered about that myself.

  Angel had taken Forward’s place at the control console. He had fastened the seat belt, something I had not seen Forward do, and was dividing his attention between the instruments and the conversation.