Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (403 page)

“We wish 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 #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 in 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 remainder. 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 #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 with the 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 hyperspacial link. It was expected, and nobody had worned—then. Later, the same effect must have stopped them from escaping 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 disc 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 mini-credit 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 asymmetric beard. I let my face freeze and started to get up.

“Sit down, Mr. Shaeffer.”

“Why?”

He told me by showing me a blue disc. 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 Wonderland.”

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 Wonderland…

“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 Sky-diver 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 non-habitable world. Clear?”

“Clear.”

“If I am wrong, you may take a lie-detector test and prove it. Then you may punch me in the nose, and I will apologize handsomely.”

I shook my head. He stood up, bowed and left me sitting there cold sober.

* * * *

Four films had been taken from the Laskins’ cameras. In the time left to me, I ran through them several times, without seeing anything out of the way. If the ship had run through a gas cloud, the impact could have killed the Laskins. At perihelion they were moving at better than half the speed of light. But there would have been friction, and I saw no sign of heating in the films. If something alive had attacked them, the beast was invisible to radar and to an enormous range of light frequencies. If the attitude jets had fired accidentally—I was clutching at straws—the light showed on none of the films.

There would be savage magnetic forces near BVS-1, but that couldn’t have done any damage. No such force could penetrate a General Products hull. Neither could heat, except in special bands of radiated light, bands visible to at least one of the puppeteers’ alien customers. I hold adverse opinions on the General Products hull, but they all concern the dull anonymity of the design. Or maybe I resent the fact that General Products holds a near-monopoly on spacecraft hulls and isn’t owned by human beings. But if I’d had to trust my life to, say, the Sinclair yacht I’d seen in the drugstore, I’d have chosen jail.

Jail was one of my three choices. But I’d be there for life. Ausfaller would see to that.

Or I could run for it in the Skydiver. But no world within reach would have me, that is. Of course, if I could find an undiscovered Earthlike world within a week of We Made It …

Fat chance. I preferred BVS-1 to that any day.

III

I thought that flashing circle of light was getting bigger, but it flashed so seldom I couldn’t be sure. BVS-1 wouldn’t show even in my telescope. I gave that up and settled for just waiting.

Waiting, I remembered a long-ago summer I spent on Jinx. There were days when, unable to go outside because a dearth of clouds had spread the land with raw blue-white sunlight, we amused ourselves by filling party balloons with tap water and dropping them on the sidewalk from three stories up. They made lovely splash patterns—which dried out too fast. So we put a little ink in each balloon before filling it. Then the patterns stayed.

Sonya Laskin had been in her chair when the chairs collapsed. Blood samples showed that it was Peter, who had struck them from behind, like a water balloon dropped from a great height.

What could get through a General Products hull?

Ten hours to fall.

I unfastened the safety net and went for an inspection tour. The access tunnel was three feet wide, just right to push through in free fall. Below me was the length of the fusion tube; to the left, the laser cannon; to the right, a set of curved side tubes leading to inspection points for the gyros, the batteries and generator, the air plant hyperspace shunt motors. All was in order—except me. I was clumsy. My jumps were always too short or too long. There was no room to turn
at the stern end, so I had to back fifty feet to a side tube.

Six hours to go, and still I couldn’t find the neutron star. Probably I would see it only for an instant, passing at better than half the speed of light. Already my speed must be enormous.

Were the stars turning blue?

Two hours to go, I was sure they were turning blue. Was my speed that high? Then the stars behind should be red. Machinery blocked the view behind me, so I used the gyros. The ship turned with peculiar sluggishness. And the stars behind were blue, not red. All around me were blue-white stars.

Imagine light falling into a savagely steep gravitational well. It won’t accelerate. Light can’t move faster than light. But it can gain in energy, in frequency. The light was falling on me, harder and harder as I dropped.

I told the dictaphone about it. That dictaphone was probably the best protected item on the ship. I had already decided to earn my money by using it, just as if I expected to collect. Privately I wondered just how intense the light would get.

Skydiver had drifted back to vertical, with its axis through the neutron star, but now it faced outward. I’d thought I had the ship stopped horizontally. More clumsiness. I used the gyros. Again the ship moved rnushily, until it was halfway through the swing. Then it seemed to fall automatically into place. It was as if the Skydiver preferred to have its axis through the neutron star.

I didn’t like that in the least.

I tried the maneuver again, and again the Skydiver fought back. But this time there was something else. Something was pulling at me.

So I unfastened my safety net and fell headfirst into the nose.

* * * *

The pull was light, about a tenth of a gee. It felt more like sinking I through honey than falling. I climbed back into my chair, tied myself in with the net, now hanging face down, turned on the dictaphone. I told my story in such nitpicking detail that my hypothetical listeners could not but doubt my hypothetical sanity. “I think this is what happened to the Laskins,” I finished. “If the pull increases, I’ll call back.”

Think? I never doubted it. This strange, gentle pull was inexplicable. Something inexplicable had killed Peter and Sonya Laskin.
Q.E.D.

Around the point where the neutron star must be, the stars were like smeared dots of oilpaint, smeared radially. They glared with an angry, painful light. I hung face down in the net and tried to think.

It was an hour before I was sure. The pull was increasing. And I still had an hour to fall.

Something was pulling on me, but not on the ship.

No, that was nonsense. What could reach out to me through a General Products hull? It must be the other way around. Something was pushing on the ship, pushing it off course.

If it got worse I could use the drive to compensate. Meanwhile, the ship was being pushed
away
from BVS-1, which was fine by me.

But if I was wrong, if the ship were not somehow being pushed away from BVS-1, the rocket motor would send the Skydiver crashing into eleven miles of neutronium.

And why wasn’t the rocket already firing? If the ship was being pushed off course, the autopilot should be fighting back. The accelerometer was in good order. It had looked fine when I made my inspection tour down the access tube.

Could something be pushing on the ship
and
on the accelerometer, but not on me?

It came down to the same impossibility. Something that could reach through a General Products hull.

To hell with theory, said I to myself, said I. I’m getting out of here. To the dictaphone I said, “The pull has increased dangerously. I’m going to try to alter my orbit.”

Of course, once I turned the ship outward and used the rocket, I’d be adding my own acceleration to the X force. It would be a strain, but I could stand it for a while. If I came within a mile of BVS-1, I’d end like Sonya Laskin.

She must have waited face down in a net like mine, waited without a drive unit, waited while the pressure rose and the net cut into her iesh, waited until the net snapped and dropped her into the nose, to lie crushed and broken until the X force tore the very chairs loose and dropped them on her.

I hit the gyros.

The gyros weren’t strong enough to turn me. I tried it three times. Each time the ship rotated about fifty degrees and hung there, motionless, while the whine of the gyros went up and up. Released, the ship immediately swung back to position. I was nose down to the neutron star, and I was going to stay that way.