07-Beowulf Shaeffer Page 7

  "Did you have any problems?"

  "Their translator is pretty good. But we'll have to be careful, Elephant. The thing about buying information is that you don't know what you're getting until you've got it. They couldn't just offer to sell me the present position of the Lazy Eight II. We'd have tracked their course by telescope until we saw the light of a fusion drive and gotten the information free."

  The time came when only a small green dot glowed in the center of the mass indicator. A star would have shown as a line; no star would have shown no dot. I dropped out of hyperspace and set the deep radar to hunt out the Outsider.

  The Outsider found us first.

  Somewhere in the cylindrical metal pod near her center of mass, perhaps occupying it completely, was the reactionless drive. It was common knowledge that that drive was for sale and that the cost was a full trillion stars. Though nobody, and no nation now extant, could afford to pay it, the price was not exorbitant. In two or three minutes, while we were still searching, that drive had dropped the Outsider ship from above point nine lights to zero relative and pulled it alongside the ST¥.

  One moment, nothing but stars. The next, the Outsider ship was alongside.

  She was mostly empty space. I knew her population was the size of a small city, but she was much bigger because more strung out. There was the minuscule-seeming drive capsule, and there, on a pole two and a half miles long, was a light source. The rest of the ship was metal ribbons, winding in and out, swooping giddily around themselves and each other, until the ends of each tangled ribbon stopped meandering and joined the drive capsule. There were around a thousand such ribbons, and each was the width of a wide city pedwalk.

  "Like a Christmas tree decoration," said Elephant. "What now, Bey?"

  "They'll use the ship radio."

  A few minutes of waiting, and here came a bunch of Outsiders. They looked like black cat-o'-nine-tails with grossly swollen handles. In the handles were their brains and invisible sense organs; in the whip ends, the clusters of motile root tentacles, were gas pistols. Six of them braked to a stop outside the air lock.

  The radio spoke. "Welcome to Ship Fourteen. Please step outside for conveyance to our office. Take nothing on the outsides of your pressure suits."

  Elephant asked, "Do we?"

  I said, "Sure. The Outsiders are nothing if not honorable."

  We went out. The six Outsiders offered us a tentacle each, and away we went across open space. Not fast. The thrust from the gas pistols was very low, irritatingly weak. But the Outsiders themselves were weak; an hour in the gravity of Earth's moon would have killed them.

  They maneuvered us through the tangled clutter of silver ribbons, landing us on a ramp next to the looming convex wall of the drive capsule.

  It wasn't quite like being lost in a giant bowl of noodles. The rigid ribbons were too far apart for that. Far above us was the light source, about as small and intense and yellowish-white as Earth's sun seen from a moon of Neptune. Shining down through the interstellar vacuum, it cast a network of sharp black shadows across all the thousand looping strands that made up, the city.

  Along every light-shadow borderline were the Outsiders. Just as their plantlike ancestors had done billions of years ago on some unknown world near the galactic core, the Outsiders were absorbing life energy. Their branched tails lay in shadow, their heads in sunlight, while thermoelectricity charged their biochemical batteries. Some had root tentacles dipped in shallow food dishes; the trace elements which kept them alive and growing were in suspension in liquid helium.

  We stepped carefully around them, using our headlamps at lowest intensity, following one of the Outsiders toward a door in the wall ahead.

  The enclosure was dark until the door closed behind us. Then the light came on. It was sourceless, the color of normal sunlight, and it illuminated a cubicle that was bare and square. The only furnishing was a transparent hemisphere with an Outsider resting inside. Presumably the hemisphere filtered out excess light going in.

  "Welcome," said the room. Whatever the Outsider had said was not sonic in nature. "The air is breathable. Take off your helmets, suits, shoes, girdles, and whatnot." It was an excellent translator, with a good grasp of idiom and a pleasant baritone voice.

  "Thanks," said Elephant, and we did.

  "Which of you is Gregory Pelton?"

  "Gronk."

  The wall was not confused. "According to your agent, you want to know how to reach that planet which is most unusual inside or within five miles of the sixty-light-year wide region you call known space. Is this correct?"

  "Yes."

  "We must know if you plan to go there or to send agents there. Also, do you plan a landing, a near orbit, or a distant orbit?"

  "Landing."

  "Are we to guard against danger to your life?"

  "No." Elephant's voice was a little dry. The Outsider ship was an intimidating place.

  "What kind of ship would you use?"

  "The one outside."

  "Do you plan colonization? Mining? Growth of food plants?"

  "I plan only one visit."

  "We have selected a world for you. The price will be one million stars."

  "That's high," said Elephant. I whistled under my breath. It was, and it wouldn't get lower. The Outsiders never dickered.

  "Sold," said Elephant.

  The translator gave us a triplet set of coordinates some twenty-four light-years from Earth along galactic north. "The star you are looking for is a protosun with one planet a billion and a half miles distant. The system is moving at a point eight lights toward -- " He gave a vector direction. It seemed the protosun was drawing a shallow chord through known space; it would never approach human space.

  "No good," said Elephant. "No hyperdrive ship can go that fast in real space."

  "You could hitch a ride," said the translator, "with us. Moor your ship to our drive capsule."

  "That'll work," said Elephant. He was getting more and more uneasy; his eyes seemed to be searching the walls for the source of the voice. He would not look at the Outsider business agent in the vacuum chamber.

  "Our ferry fee will be one million stars."

  Elephant sputtered.

  "Just a sec," I said. "I may have information to sell you."

  There was a long pause. Elephant looked at me in surprise.

  "You are Beowulf Shaeffer?"

  "Yeah. You remember me?"

  "We find you in our records. Beowulf Shaeffer, we have information for you, already paid. The former regional president of General Products on Jinx wishes you to contact him. I have a transfer-booth number."

  "That's late news," I said. "The puppeteers are gone. Anyway, why would that two-headed sharpie want to see me?"

  "I do not have that information. I do know that not all puppeteers have left this region. Will you accept the transfer-booth number?"

  "Sure."

  I wrote down the eight digits as they came. A moment later Elephant was yelling just as if he were a tridee set turned on in the middle of a program. " -- hell is going on here?"

  "Sorry about that," said the translator.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "I couldn't hear anything! Did that mon -- Did the Outsider have private business with you?"

  "Sort of. I'll tell you later."

  The translator said, "Beowulf Shaeffer, we do not buy information. We sell information and use the proceeds to buy territory and food soil."

  "You may need this information," I argued. "I'm the only man within reach who knows it."

  "What of other races?"

  The puppeteers might have told them, but it was worth taking a chance. "You're about to leave known space. If you don't deal with me, you may not get this information in time."

  "What price do you set on this item?"

  "You set the price. You've got more experience at putting values on inforrnation, and you're honorable."

  "We may not be able to afford an honest price
."

  "The price may not exceed our ferry fee."

  "Done. Speak."

  I told him of the Core explosion and how I'd come find out about it. He made me go into detail on what I'd seen: the bright patch of supernovas, spreading out as my ship caught up with ancient light waves, until all the bright multicolored ball of the Core was ablaze with supernovas. "You wouldn't have known this until you got there, and then it would have been too late. You don't use faster-than-light drives."

  "We knew from the puppeteers that the Core had exploded. They were not able to go into detail because they had not seen it for themselves."

  "Oh. Ah, well. I think the explosion must have started at the back side of the Core from here. Otherwise it would have seemed to go much more slowly."

  "Many thanks. We will waive your ferry fee. Now, there is one more item. Gregory Pelton, for an additional two hundred thousand stars we will tell you exactly what is peculiar about the planet you intend to visit."

  "Can I find out for myself?"

  "It is likely."

  "Then I will."

  Silence followed. The Outsider hadn't expected that. I said, "I'm curious. Your galaxy is rapidly becoming a death trap. What will you do now?"

  "That information will cost you -- "

  "Forget it."

  Outside, Elephant said, "Thanks."

  "Forget it. I wonder what they will do."

  "Maybe they can shield themselves against the radiation."

  "Maybe. But they won't have any starseeds to follow."

  "Do they need them?"

  Finagle only knew. The starseeds followed a highly rigid migratory mating pattern out from the Core of the galaxy and into the arms, almost to the rim, before turning back down to the Core. They were doomed. As they returned to the Core, the expanding wave of radiation from the multiple novas would snuff out the species one by one. What would the Outsiders do without them? What the hell did they do with them? Why did they follow them? Did they need starseeds? Did starseeds need Outsiders? The Outsiders would answer these and related questions for one trillion stars apiece. Personal questions cost high with the Outsiders.

  A crew was already bringing the ST¥ into dock. We watched from the ramp, with crewmen sunbathing about our feet. We weren't worried. The way the Outsiders handled it, our invulnerable hull might have been made of spun sugar and sunbeams. When a spiderweb of thin strands fastened the ST¥ to the wall of the drive capsule, the voice of the translator spoke in our ears and invited us to step aboard. We jumped a few hundred feet upward through the trace of artificial gravity, climbed into the air lock, and got out of our suits.

  "Thanks again," said Elephant.

  "Forget it again," I said magnanimously. "I owe you plenty. You've been putting me up as a houseguest on the most expensive world in known space, acting as my guide where the cost of labor is -- "

  "Okay okay okay. But you saved me a million stars, and don't you forget it." He whopped me on the shoulder and hurried into the control room to set up a million-star credit base for the next Outsider ship that came by.

  "I won't," I called at his retreating back, and wondered what the hell I meant by that.

  Much later I wondered about something else. Had Elephant planned to take me to "his" world? Or did he think to go it alone, to be the first to see it and not one of the first two? After the Outsider episode it was already too late. He couldn't throw me off the ship then.

  I wished I'd thought of it in time. I never wanted to be a batman. My stake in this was to gently, tactfully keep Elephant from killing himself if it became necessary. For all his vast self-confidence, vast riches, vast generosity, and vast bulk, he was still only a flatlander and thus a little bit helpless.

  We were in the expansion bubble when it happened. The bubble had inflatable seats and an inflatable table and was there for exercising and killing time, but it also supplied a fine view; the surface was perfectly transparent.

  Otherwise we would have missed it.

  There was no pressure against the seat of the pants, no crawling sensation in the pit of the stomach, no feel of motion. But Elephant, who was talking about a Jinxian frail he'd picked up in a Chicago bar, stopped just as she was getting ready to tear the place apart because some suicidal idiot had insulted her.

  Somebody heavy was sitting down on the universe.

  He came down slowly, like a fat man cautiously letting his weight down on a beach ball. From inside the bubble it looked like all the stars and nebulas around us were squeezing themselves together. The Outsiders on the ribbons outside never moved, but Elephant said something profane, and I steeled myself to look up.

  The stars overhead were blue-white and blazing. Around us, they were squashed together; below, they were turning red and winking out one by one. It had taken us a week to get out of the solar system, but the Outsider ship could have done it in five hours.

  The radio spoke. "Sirs, our crewmen will remove your ship from ours, after which you will be on your own. It has been a pleasure to do business with you."

  A swarm of Outsider crewmen hauled us through the maze of basking ramps and left us. Presently the Outsider ship vanished like a pricked soap bubble, gone off on its own business.

  In the strange starlight Elephant let out a long, shaky sigh. Some people can't take aliens. They don't find puppeteers graceful and beautiful; they find them horrifying, wrong. They see kzinti as slavering carnivores whose only love is fighting, which is the truth, but they don't see the rigid code of honor or the self-control which allows a kzinti ambassador to ride a human-city pedwalk without slashing out with his claws at the impertinent stabbing knees and elbows. Elephant was one of those people.

  He said, "Okay," in amazed relief. They were actually gone. "I'll take the first watch, Bey."

  He did not say, "Those bastards would take your heart as collateral on a tenth-star loan." He didn't see them as that close to human.

  "Fine," I said, and went into the control bubble. The Fast Protosun was a week away. I'd been in a suit for hours, and there was a shower in the extension bubble.

  If Elephant's weakness was aliens, mine was relativity.

  The trip through hyperspace was routine. I could take the sight of the two small windows turning into blind spots, becoming areas of nothing, which seemed to draw together the objects around them. So could Elephant; he'd done some flying, though he preferred the comfort of a luxury liner. But even the best pilot occasionally has to drop back into the normal universe to get his bearings and to assure his subconscious that the stars are still there.

  And each time it was changed, squashed flat. The crowded blue stars were all ahead; the sparse, dim red stars were all behind. Four hundred years ago men and women had lived for years with such a view of the universe, but it hadn't happened since the invention of hyperdrive. I'd never seen the universe look like this. It bothered me.

  "No, it doesn't bug me," said Elephant when I mentioned it. We were a day out from our destination. "To me, stars are stars. But I have been worried about something. Bey, you said the Outsiders are honorable."

  "They are. They've got to be. They have to be so far above suspicion that any species they deal with will remember their unimpeachable ethics a century later. You can see that, can't you? Outsiders don't show up more often than that."

  "Um. Okay. Why did they try to screw that extra two hundred kilostars out of me?"

  "Uh -- "

  "See, the goddamn problem is, what if it was a fair price? What if we need to know what's funny about the Fast Protosun?"

  "You're right. Knowing the Outsiders, it's probably information we can use. All right, we'll nose around a little before we land. We'd have done that anyway, but now we'll do it better."

  What was peculiar about the Fast Protosun?

  Around lunchtime on the seventh ship's day a short green line in the sphere of the mass indicator began to extend itself. It was wide and fuzzy, just what you'd expect of a protosun. I let it reach almost
to the surface of the sphere before I dropped us into normal space.

  The squashed universe looked in the windows, but ahead of us was a circular darkening and blurring of the vivid blue-white stars. In the center of the circle was a dull red glow.

  "Let's go into the extension bubble," said Elephant.

  "Let's not."

  "We'll get a better view in there." He turned the dial that would make the bubble transparent. Naturally we kept it opaque in hyperspace.

  "Repeat, let's not. Think about it, Elephant. What sense does it make to use an impermeable hull, then spend most of our time outside it? Until we know what's here, we ought to retract the bubble."

  He nodded his shaggy head and touched the board again. Chugging noises announced that air and water were being pulled out of the bubble. Elephant moved to a window.

  "Ever see a protosun?"

  "No," I said. "I don't think there are any in human space."

  "That could be the peculiarity."

  "It could. One thing it isn't is the speed of the thing. Outsiders spend all their time moving faster than this."

  "But planets don't. Neither do stars. Bey, maybe this thing came from outside the galaxy. That would make it unusual."

  It was time we made a list. I found a pad and solemnly noted speed of star, nature of star, and possible extragalactic origin of star.

  "I've found our planet," said Elephant.

  "Whereabouts?"

  "Almost on the other side of the protosun. We can get there faster in hyperspace."

  The planet was still invisibly small where Elephant brought us out. The protosun looked about the same.

  A protosun is the fetus of a star: a thin mass of gas and dust, brought together by slow eddies in interstellar magnetic fields or by the presence of a Trojan point in some loose cluster of stars, which is collapsing and contracting due to gravity. I'd found material on protosuns in the ship's library, but it was all astronomical data; nobody had ever been near one for a close look. In theory the Fast Protosun must be fairly well along in its evolution, since it was glowing at the center.