Crashlander

by Ларри Нивен

  He nodded. But he was amused.

  «So what's our next move? We can't run from hyperdrive ships. Not now. Is Forward likely to try to kill us?»

  «If we don't reach Forward Station on schedule, he might send ships after us. We know too much. We've told him so,» said Carlos. «The hyperdrive motor disappeared completely. I know half a dozen people who could figure out how it happened, knowing just that.» He smiled suddenly. «That's assuming Forward's the ship eater. We don't know that. I think we have a splendid chance to find out one way or the other.»

  «How? Just walk in?»

  Ausfaller was nodding approvingly. «Dr. Forward expects you and Carlos to enter his web unsuspecting, leaving an empty ship. I think we can prepare a few surprises for him. For example, he may not have guessed that this is a General Products hull. And I will be aboard to fight.»

  True. Only antimatter could harm a GP hull … though things could go through it, like light and gravity and shock waves. «So you'll be in the indestructible hull,» I said, «and we'll be helpless in the base. Very clever. I'd rather run for it myself. But then, you have your career to consider.»

  «I will not deny it. But there are ways in which I can prepare you.»

  * * *

  Behind Ausfaller's cabin, behind what looked like an unbroken wall, was a room the size of a walk-in closet. Ausfaller seemed quite proud of it. He didn't show us everything in there, but I saw enough to cost me what remained of my first impression of Ausfaller. This man did not have the soul of a pudgy bureaucrat.

  Behind a glass panel he kept a couple of dozen special-purpose weapons. A row of four clamps held three identical hand weapons, disposable rocket launchers for a fat slug that Ausfaller billed as a tiny atomic bomb. The fourth clamp was empty. There were laser rifles and pistols, a shotgun of peculiar design with four inches of recoil shock absorber, throwing knives, an Olympic target pistol with a sculpted grip and room for just one.22 bullet.

  I wondered what he was doing with a hobbyist's touch-sculpting setup. Maybe he could make sculptures to drive a human or an alien mad. Maybe something less subtle: maybe they'd explode at the touch of the right fingerprints.

  He had a compact automated tailor's shop. «I'm going to make you some new suits,» he said. When Carlos asked why, he said, «You can keep secrets? So can I.»

  He asked us for our preference in styles. I played it straight, asking for a falling jumper in green and silver with lots of pockets. It wasn't the best I've ever owned, but it fit.

  «I didn't ask for buttons,» I told him.

  «I hope you don't mind. Carlos, you will have buttons, too.»

  Carlos chose a fiery red tunic with a green and gold dragon coiling across the back. The buttons carried his family monogram. Ausfaller stood before us, examining us in our new finery, with approval.

  «Now, watch,» he said. «Here I stand before you, unarmed.»

  «Right.»

  «Sure you are.»

  Ausfaller grinned. He took the top and bottom buttons between his fingers and tugged hard. They came off. The material between them ripped open as if a thread had been strung between them.

  Holding the buttons as if to keep an invisible thread taut, he moved them to either side of a crudely done plastic touch sculpture. The sculpture fell apart.

  «Sinclair molecule chain. It will cut through any normal matter if you pull hard enough. You must be very careful. It will cut your fingers so easily that you will hardly notice they are gone. Notice that the buttons are large to give an easy grip.» He laid the buttons carefully on a table and set a heavy weight between them. «This third button down is a sonic grenade. Ten feet away it will kill. Thirty feet away it will stun.»

  I said, «Don't demonstrate.»

  «You may want to practice throwing dummy buttons at a target. This second button is Power Pill, the commercial stimulant. Break the button and take half when you need it. The entire dose may stop your heart.»

  «I never heard of Power Pill. How does it work on crashlanders?»

  He was taken aback. «I don't know. Perhaps you had better restrict yourself to a quarter dose.»

  «Or avoid it entirely,» I said.

  «There is one more thing I will not demonstrate. Feel the material of your garments. You feel three layers of material? The middle layer is a nearly perfect mirror. It will reflect even X rays. Now you can repel a laser blast for at least the first second. The collar unrolls to a hood.»

  Carlos was nodding in satisfaction.

  I guess it's true: all flatlanders think that way.

  For a billion and a half years humanity's ancestors had evolved to the conditions of one world: Earth. A flatlander grows up in an environment peculiarly suited to him. Instinctively he sees the whole universe the same way.

  We know better, we who were born on other worlds. On We Made It there are the hellish winds of summer and winter. On Jinx, the gravity. On Plateau, the all-encircling cliff edge and a drop of forty miles into unbearable heat and pressure. On Down, the red sunlight and plants that will not grow without help from ultraviolet lamps.

  But flatlanders think the universe was made for their benefit. To them, danger is unreal.

  «Earplugs,» said Ausfaller, holding up a handful of soft plastic cylinders.

  We inserted them. Ausfaller said, «Can you hear me?»

  «Sure.» «Yeah.» They didn't block our hearing at all.

  «Transmitter and hearing aid with sonic padding between. If you are blasted with sound, as by an explosion or a sonic stunner, the hearing aid will stop transmitting. If you go suddenly deaf, you will know you are under attack.»

  To me, Ausfaller's elaborate precautions only spoke of what we might be walking into. I said nothing. If we ran for it, our chances were even worse.

  * * *

  Back to the control room, where Ausfaller set up a relay to the Bureau of Alien Affairs on Earth. He gave them a condensed version of what had happened to us, plus some cautious speculation. He invited Carlos to read his theories into the record.

  Carlos declined. «I could still be wrong. Give me a chance to do some studying.»

  Ausfaller went grumpily to his bunk. He had been up too long, and it showed.

  Carlos shook his head as Ausfaller disappeared into his cabin. «Paranoia. In his job I guess he has to be paranoid.»

  «You could use some of that yourself.»

  He didn't hear me. «Imagine suspecting an interstellar celebrity of being a space pirate!»

  «He's in the right place at the right time.»

  «Hey, Bey, forget what I said. The, uh, ship-eating device has to be in the right place, but the pirates don't. They can just leave it loose and use hyperdrive ships to commute to their base.»

  That was something to keep in mind. Compared to the inner system, this volume within the cometary halo was enormous, but to hyperdrive ships it was all one neighborhood. I said, «Then why are we visiting Forward?»

  «I still want to check my ideas with him. More than that: he probably knows the head ship eater without knowing it's him. Probably we both know him. It took something of a cosmologist to find the device and recognize it. Whoever it is, he has to have made something of a name for himself.»

  «Find?»

  Carlos grinned at me. «Never mind. Have you thought of anyone you'd like to use that magic wire on?»

  «I've been making a list. You're at the top.»

  «Well, watch it. Sigmund knows you've got it, even if nobody else does.»

  «He's second.»

  «How long till we reach Forward Station?»

  I'd been rechecking our course. We were decelerating at thirty gravities and veering to one side. «Twenty hours and a few minutes,» I said.

  «Good. I'll get a chance to do some studying.» He began calling up data from the computer.

  I asked permission to read over his shoulder. He gave it.

  Bastard. He reads twice as fast as I do. I tried to skim to get some idea of what
he was after.

  Collapsars: three known. The nearest was one component of a double in Cygnus, more than a hundred light-years away. Expeditions had gone there to drop probes.

  The theory of the black hole wasn't new to me, though the math was over my head. If a star is massive enough, then after it has burned its nuclear fuel and started to cool, no possible internal force can hold it from collapsing inward past its own Swartzchild radius. At that point the escape velocity from the star becomes greater than lightspeed, and beyond that deponent sayeth not, because nothing can leave the star, not information, not matter, not radiation. Nothing — except gravity.

  Such a collapsed star can be expected to weigh five solar masses or more; otherwise its collapse would stop at the neutron star stage. Afterward it can only grow bigger and more massive.

  There wasn't the slightest chance of finding anything that massive out here at the edge of the solar system. If such a thing were anywhere near, the sun would have been in orbit around it.

  The Siberia meteorite must have been weird enough, to be remembered for nine hundred years. It had knocked down trees over thousands of square miles, yet trees near the touchdown point were left standing. No part of the meteorite itself had ever been found. Nobody had seen it hit. In 1908, Tunguska, Siberia, must have been as sparsely settled as the Earth's moon is today.

  «Carlos, what does all this have to do with anything?»

  «Does Holmes tell Watson?»

  I had real trouble following the cosmology. Physics verged on philosophy here, or vice versa. Basically the big bang theory — which pictures the universe as exploding from a single point mass, like a titanic bomb — was in competition with the steady state universe, which has been going on forever and will continue to do so. The cyclic universe is a succession of big bangs followed by contractions. There are variants on all of them.

  When the quasars were first discovered, they seemed to date from an earlier stage in the evolution of the universe, which, by the steady state hypothesis, would not be evolving at all. The steady state went out of fashion. Then, a century ago, Hilbury had solved the mystery of the quasars. Meanwhile one of the implications of the big bang had not panned out. That was where the math got beyond me.

  There was some discussion of whether the universe was open or closed in four-space, but Carlos turned it off. «Okay,» he said with satisfaction.

  «What?»

  «I could be right. Insufficient data. I'll have to see what Forward thinks.»

  «I hope you both choke. I'm going to sleep.»

  * * *

  Out here in the broad borderland between Sol system and interstellar space, Julian Forward had found a stony mass the size of a middling asteroid. From a distance it seemed untouched by technology: a lopsided spheroid, rough-surfaced and dirty white. Closer in, flecks of metal and bright paint showed like randomly placed jewels. Air locks, windows, projecting antennae, and things less identifiable. A lighted disk with something projecting from the center: a long metal arm with half a dozen ball joints in it and a cup on the end. I studied that one, trying to guess what it might be … and gave up.

  I brought Hobo Kelly to rest a fair distance away. To Ausfaller I said, «You'll stay aboard?»

  «Of course. I will do nothing to disabuse Dr. Forward of the notion that the ship is empty.»

  We crossed to Forward Station on an open taxi: two seats, a fuel tank, and a rocket motor. Once I turned to ask Carlos something and asked instead, «Carlos? Are you all right?»

  His face was white and strained. «I'll make it.»

  «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.