07-Beowulf Shaeffer Page 5

  "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 150,000 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's 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.

  FLATLANDER

  The most beautiful girl aboard turned out to have a husband with habits so solitary that I didn't know about him until the second week. He was about five feet four and middle-aged, but he wore a hellflare tattoo on his shoulder, which meant he'd been on Kzin during the war thirty years back, which meant he'd been trained to kill adult kzinti with his bare hands, feet, elbows, knees, and whatnot. When we found out about each other, he very decently gave me a first warning and broke my arm to prove he meant it.

  The arm still ached a day later, and every other woman on the Lensman was over two hundred years old. I drank alone. I stared glumly into the mirror behind the curving bar. The mirror stared glumly back.

  "Hey. You from We Made It. What am I?"

  He was two chairs down, and he was glaring. Without the beard he would have had a round, almost petulant face...I think. The beard, short and black and carefully shaped, made him look like a cross between Zeus and an angry bulldog. The glare went with the beard. His square fingers wrapped a large drinking bulb in a death grip. A broad belly matched broad shoulders to make him look massive rather than fat.

  Obviously he was talking to me. I asked, "What do you mean, what are you?"

  "Where am I from?"

  "Earth." It was obvious. The accent said Earth. So did the conservatively symmetrical beard. His breathing was unconsciously natural in the ship's standard atmosphere, and his build had been forged at one point zero gee.

  "Then what am I?"

  "A flatlander."

  The glare heat increased. He'd obviously reached the bar way ahead of me. "A flatlander! Damn it, everywhere I go I'm flatlander. Do you know how many hours I've spent in space?"

  "No. Long enough to know how to use a drinking bulb."

  "Funny. Very funny. Everywhere in human space a flatlander is a schnook who never gets above the atmosphere. Everywhere but Earth. If you're from Earth, you're a flatlander all your life. For the last fifty years I've been running about in human space, and what am I? A flatlander. Why?"

  "Earthian is a clumsy term."

  "What is WeMadeItian?" he demanded.

  "I'm a crashlander. I wasn't born within fifty miles of Crashlanding City, but I'm a crashlander anyway."

  That got a grin. I think. It was hard to tell with the beard. "Lucky you're not a pilot."

  "I am. Was."

  "You're kidding. T
hey let a crashlander pilot a ship?"

  "If he's good at it."

  "I didn't mean to pique your ire, sir. May I introduce myself? My name's Elephant."

  "Beowulf Shaeffer."

  He bought me a drink. I bought him a drink. It turned out we both played gin, so we took fresh drinks to a card table...

  When I was a kid, I used to stand out at the edge of Crashlanding Port watching the ships come in. I'd watch the mob of passengers leave the lock and move in a great clump toward customs, and I'd wonder why they seemed to have trouble navigating. A majority of the starborn would always walk in weaving lines, swaying and blinking teary eyes against the sun. I used to think it was because they came from different worlds with different gravities and different atmospheres beneath differently colored suns.

  Later I learned different.

  There are no windows in a passenger spacecraft. If there were, half the passengers would go insane; it takes an unusual mentality to watch the blind-spot appearance of hyperspace and still keep one's marbles. For passengers there is nothing to watch and nothing to do, and if you don't like reading sixteen hours a day, then you drink. It's best to drink in company. You get less lushed, knowing you have to keep up your side of a conversation. The ship's 'doc has cured more hangovers than every other operation combined, right down to manicures and haircuts.

  The ship grounded at Los Angeles two days after I met Elephant. He'd made a good drinking partner. We'd been fairly matched at cards, he with his sharp card sense, I with my usual luck. From the talking we'd done, we knew almost as much about each other as anyone knows about anyone. In a way I was sorry to see him leave.

  "You've got my number?"

  "Yeah. But like I said, I don't know just what I'll be doing." I was telling the truth. When I explore a civilized world, I like to make my own discoveries.

  "Well, call me if you get a chance. I wish you'd change your mind. I'd like to show you Earth."

  "I decline with thanks. Goodbye, Elephant. It's been fun."

  Elephant waved and turned through the natives' door. I went on to face the smuggler baiters. The last drink was still with me, but I could cure that at the hotel. I never expected to see Elephant again.

  Nine days ago I'd been on Jinx. I'd been rich. And I'd been depressed.

  The money and the depression had stemmed from the same source. The puppeteers, those three-legged, two-headed professional cowards and businessmen, had lured me into taking a new type of ship all the way to the galactic core, thirty thousand light years away. The trip was for publicity purposes, to get research money to iron out the imperfections in the very ship I was riding.

  I suppose I should have had more sense, but I never do, and the money was good. The trouble was that the Core had exploded by the time I got there. The Core stars had gone off in a chain reaction of novas ten thousand years ago, and a wave of radiation was even then (and even now) sweeping toward known space.

  In just over twenty thousand years we'll all be in deadly danger.

  You're not worried? It didn't bother me much, either. But every puppeteer in known space vanished overnight, heading for Finagle knows what other galaxy.

  I was depressed. I missed the puppeteers and hated knowing I was responsible for their going. I had time and money and a black melancholia to work off. And I'd always wanted to see Earth.

  Earth smelled good. There was a used flavor to it, a breathed flavor, unlike anything I've ever known. It was the difference between spring water and distilled water. Somewhere in each breath I took were molecules breathed by Dante, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Heinlein, Carter, and my own ancestors. Traces of past industries lingered in the air, sensed if not smelled: gasoline, coal fumes, tobacco and burnt cigarette filters, diesel fumes, ale breweries. I left the customs house with inflated lungs and a questing look.

  I could have taken a transfer booth straight to the hotel. I decided to walk a little first.

  Everyone on Earth had made the same decision.

  The pedwalk held a crowd such as I had never imagined. They were all shapes and all colors, and they dressed in strange and eldritch ways. Shifting colors assaulted the eye and sent one reeling. On any world in human space, any world but one, you know immediately who the natives are. Wunderland? Asymmetrical beards mark the nobility, and the common people are the ones who quickly step out of their way. We Made It? The pallor of our skins in summer and winter, in spring and fall, the fact that we all race upstairs, above the buried cities and onto the blooming desert, eager to taste sunlight while the murderous winds are at rest. Jinx? The natives are short, wide, and strong; a sweet little old lady's handshake can crush steel. Even in the Belt, within the solar system, a Belter strip haircut adorns both men and women. But Earth -- !

  No two looked alike. There were reds and blues and greens, yellows and oranges, plaids and stripes. I'm talking about hair, you understand, and skin. All my life I've used tannin-secretion pills for protection against ultraviolet, so that my skin color has varied from its normal pinkish-white (I'm an albino) to (under blue-white stars) tuxedo black. But I'd never known that other skin-dye pills existed. I stood rooted to the pedwalk, letting it carry me where it would, watching the incredible crowd swarm around me. They were all knees and elbows. Tomorrow I'd have bruises.

  "Hey!"

  The girl was four or five heads away, and short. I'd never have seen her if everyone else hadn't been short, too. Flatlanders rarely top six feet. And there was this girl, her hair a topological explosion in swirling orange and silver, her face a faint, subtle green with space-black eyebrows and lipstick, waving something and shouting at me.

  Waving my wallet.

  I forced my way to her until we were close enough to touch, until I could hear what she was saying above the crowd noise.

  "Stupid! Where's your address? You don't even have a place for a stamp!"

  "What?"

  She looked startled. "Oh! You're an offworlder."

  "Yeah!" My voice would give out fast at this noise level.

  "Well, look..." She shoved her way closer to me. "Look, you can't go around town with an offworlder's wallet. Next time someone picks your pocket he may not notice till you're gone."

  "You picked my pocket?"

  "Sure! Think I found it? Would I risk my precious hand under all those spike heels?"

  "How if I call a cop?"

  "Cop? Oh, a stoneface." She laughed merrily. "Learn or go under, man. There's no law against picking pockets. Look around you."

  I looked around me, then looked back fast, afraid she'd disappear. Not only my cash but my Bank of Jinx draft for forty thousand stars was in that wallet. Everything I owned.

  "See them all? Sixty-four million people in Los Angeles alone. Eighteen billion in the whole world. Suppose there was a law against picking pockets? How would you enforce it?" She deftly extracted the cash from my wallet and handed the wallet back. "Get yourself a new wallet, and fast. It'll have a place for your address and a window for a tenth-star stamp. Put your address in right away, and a stamp, too. Then the next guy who takes it can pull out the money and drop your wallet in the nearest mailbox -- no sweat. Otherwise you lose your credit cards, your ident, everything." She stuffed two hundred-odd stars in cash between her breasts, flashing me a parting smile as she turned.

  "Thanks," I called. Yes, I did. I was still bewildered, but she'd obviously stayed to help me. She could just as easily have kept wallet and all.

  "No charge," she called back, and was gone.

  I stopped off at the first transfer booth I saw, dropped a half star in the coin slot, and dialed Elephant.

  The vestibule was intimidating.

  I'd expected a vestibule. Why put a transfer booth inside your own home, where any burglar can get in just by dialing your number? Anyone who can afford the lease on a private transfer booth can also afford a vestibule with a locked door and an intercom switch.

  There was a vestibule, but it was the size of a living room, furnished
with massage chairs and an autovendor. There was an intercom, but it was a flat vidphone, three hundred years old, restored at perhaps a hundred times its original cost. There was a locked door; it was a double door of what looked like polished brass, with two enormous curved handles, and it stood fifteen feet high.

  I'd suspected Elephant was well off, but this was too much. It occurred to me that I'd never seen him completely sober, that I had in fact turned down his offer of guidance, that a simple morning-after treatment might have wiped me from his memory. Shouldn't I just go away? I had wanted to explore Earth on my own.

  But I didn't know the rules!

  I stepped out of the booth and glimpsed the back wall. It was all picture window, with nothing outside -- just fleecy blue sky. How peculiar, I thought, and stepped closer. And closer.

  Elephant lived halfway up a cliff. A sheer mile-high cliff.

  The phone rang.

  On the third ear-jarring ring I answered, mainly to stop the noise. A supercilious voice asked, "Is somebody out there?"

  "I'm afraid not," I said. "Does someone named Elephant live here?"

  "I'll see, sir," said the voice. The screen had not lit, but I had the feeling someone had seen me quite clearly.

  Seconds crawled by. I was half minded to jump back in the transfer booth and dial at random. But only half; that was the trouble. Then the screen lit, and it was Elephant. "Bey! You changed your mind!"

  "Yeah. You didn't tell me you were rich."

  "You didn't ask."

  "Well, no, of course not."

  "How do you expect to learn things if you don't ask? Don't answer that. Hang on, I'll be right down. You did change your mind? You'll let me show you Earth?"

  "Yes, I will. I'm scared to go out there alone."

  "Why? Don't answer. Tell me in person." He hung up. Seconds later the big bronze doors swung back with a bone-shaking boom. They just barely got out of Elephant's way. He pulled me inside, giving me no time to gape, shoved a drink in my hand, and asked why I was afraid to go outside.