Crashlander

AT THE CORE

I couldn't decide whether to call it a painting, a relief mural, a sculpture, or a hash, but it was the prize exhibit in the art section of the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx. The Kdatlyno must have strange eyes, I thought. My own were watering. The longer I looked at FTLSPACE, the more blurred it got.

I'd tentatively decided that it was supposed to look blurred when a set of toothy jaws clamped gently on my arm. I jumped a foot in the air. A soft, thrilling contralto voice said, «Beowulf Shaeffer, you are a spendthrift.»

That voice would have made a singer's fortune. And I thought I recognized it — but it couldn't be; that one was on We Made It, light-years distant. I turned.

The puppeteer had released my arm. It went on: «And what do you think of Hrodenu?»

«He's ruining my eyes.»

«Naturally. The Kdatlyno are blind to all but radar. FTLSPACE is not meant to be seen but to be touched. Run your tongue over it.»

«My tongue? No, thanks.» I tried running my hand over it. If you want to know what it felt like, hop a ship for Jinx; the thing's still there. I flatly refuse to describe the sensation.

The puppeteer cocked its head dubiously. «I'm sure your tongue is more sensitive. No guards are nearby.»

«Forget it. You know, you sound just like the regional president of General Products on We Made It.»

«It was he who sent me your dossier, Beowulf Shaeffer. No doubt we had the same English teacher. I am the regional president on Jinx, as you no doubt recognized from my mane.»

Well, not quite. The auburn mop over the brain case between the two necks is supposed to show caste once you learn to discount variations of mere style. To do that, you have to be a puppeteer. Instead of admitting my ignorance, I asked, «Did that dossier say I was a spendthrift?»

«You have spent more than a million stars in the past four years.,

«And loved it.»

«Yes. You will shortly be in debt again. Have you thought of doing more writing? I admired your article on the neutron star BVS-1. 'The pointy bottom of a gravity well … 'Blue starlight fell on me like intangible sleet. Lovely.»

«Thanks. It paid well, too. But I'm mainly a spaceship pilot.»

«It is fortunate, our meeting here. I had thought of having you found. Do you wish a job?»

That was a loaded question. The last and only time I took a job from a puppeteer, the puppeteer blackmailed me into it, knowing it would probably kill me. It almost did. I didn't hold that against the regional president of We Made It, but to let them have another crack at me — «I'll give you a conditional maybe. Do you have the idea I'm a professional suicide pilot?»

«Not at all. If I show details, do you agree that the information shall be confidential?»

«I do,» I said formally, knowing it would commit me. A verbal contract is as binding as the tape it's recorded on.

«Good. Come.» He pranced toward a transfer booth.

The transfer booth let us out somewhere in Jinx's vacuum regions. It was night. High in the sky, Sirius B was a painfully bright pinpoint casting vivid blue moonlight on a ragged lunar landscape. I looked up and didn't see Binary, Jinx's bloated orange companion planet, so we must have been in the Farside End.

But there was something hanging over us.

A No. 4 General Products hull is a transparent sphere a thousand-odd feet in diameter. No bigger ship has been built anywhere in the known galaxy. It takes a government to buy one, and they are used for colonization projects only. But this one could never have been so used; it was all machinery. Our transfer booth stood between two of the landing legs, so that the swelling flank of the ship looked down on us as an owl looks down at a mouse. An access tube ran through vacuum from the booth to the air lock.

I said, «Does General Products build complete spacecraft nowadays?»

«We are thinking of branching out. But there are problems.»

From the viewpoint of the puppeteer-owned company, it must have seemed high time. General Products makes the hulls for ninety-five percent of all ships in space, mainly because nobody else knows how to build an indestructible hull. But they'd made a bad start with this ship. The only room I could see for crew, cargo, or passengers was a few cubic yards of empty space right at the bottom, just above the air lock and just big enough for a pilot.

«You'd have a hard time selling that,» I said.

«True. Do you notice anything else?»

«Well …» The hardware that filled the transparent hull was very tightly packed. The effect was as if a race of ten-mile-tall giants had striven to achieve miniaturization. I saw no sign of access tubes; hence, there could be no in-space repairs. Four reaction motors poked their appropriately huge nostrils through the hull, angled outward from the bottom. No small attitude jets; hence, oversized gyros inside. Otherwise … «Most of it looks like hyperdrive motors. But that's silly. Unless you've thought of a good reason for moving moons around.»

«At one time you were a commercial pilot for Nakamura Lines. How long was the run from Jinx to We Made It?»

«Twelve days if nothing broke down.» Just long enough to get to know the prettiest passenger aboard, while the autopilot did everything for me but wear my uniform.

«Sirius to Procyon is a distance of four light-years. Our ship would make the trip in five minutes.»

«You've lost your mind.»

«No.»

But that was almost a light-year per minute! I couldn't visualize it. Then suddenly I did visualize it, and my mouth fell open, for what I saw was the galaxy opening before me. We know so little beyond our own small neighborhood of the galaxy. But with a ship like that —!

«That's goddamn fast.»

«As you say. But the equipment is bulky, as you note. It cost seven billion stars to build that ship, discounting centuries of research, but it will move only one man. As is, the ship is a failure. Shall we go inside?»

The lifesystem was two circular rooms, one above the other, with a small air lock to one side. The lower room was the control room, with banks of switches and dials and blinking lights dominated by a huge spherical mass pointer. The upper room was bare walls, transparent, through which I could see air— and food-producing equipment.

«This will be the relaxroom,» said the puppeteer. «We decided to let the pilot decorate it himself.»

«Why me?»

«Let me further explain the problem.» The puppeteer began to pace the floor. I hunkered down against the wall and watched. Watching a puppeteer move is a pleasure. Even in Jinx's gravity the deerlike body seemed weightless, the tiny hooves tapping the floor at random. «The human sphere of colonization is some thirty light-years across, is it not?»

«Maximum. It's not exactly a sphere —»

«The puppeteer region is much smaller The Kdatlyno sphere is half the size of yours, and the kzinti is fractionally larger. These are the important space-traveling species. We must discount the Outsiders since they do not use ships. Some spheres coincide, naturally. Travel from one sphere to another is nearly nil except for ourselves, since our sphere of influence extends to all who buy our hulls. But add all these regions, and you have a region sixty light-years across. This ship could cross it in seventy-five minutes. Allow six hours for takeoff and six for landing, assuming no traffic snarls near the world of destination, and we have a ship which can go anywhere in thirteen hours but nowhere in less than twelve, carrying one pilot and no cargo, costing seven billion stars.»

«How about exploration?»

«We puppeteers have no taste for abstract knowledge. And how should we explore?» Meaning that whatever race flew the ship would gain the advantages thereby. A puppeteer wouldn't risk his necks by flying it himself. «What we need is a great deal of money and a gathering of intelligences to design something which may go slower but must be less bulky. General Products does not wish to spend so much on something that may fail. We will require the best minds of each sentient species and the richest investors. Beowulf Shaeffer, we need to attract attention.»

«A publicity stunt?»

«Yes. We wish to send a pilot to the center of the galaxy and back.»

«Ye … gods! Will it go that fast?»

«It would require some twenty-five days to reach the center and an equal time to return. You can see the reasoning behind —»

«It's perfect. You don't need to spell it out. Why me?»

«We wish you to make the trip and then write of it. I have a list of pilots who write. Those I have approached have been reluctant. They say that writing on the ground is safer than testing unknown ships. I follow their reasoning.»

«Me, too.»

«Will you go?»

«What am I offered?»

«One hundred thousand stars for the trip. Fifty thousand to write the story, in addition to what you sell it for.»

«Sold.»

From then on my only worry was that my new boss would find out that someone had ghostwritten that neutron star article.

Oh, I wondered at first why General Products was willing to trust me. The first time I worked for them, I tried to steal their ship for reasons which seemed good at the time. But the ship I now called Long Shot really wasn't worth stealing. Any potential buyer would know it was hot, and what good would it be to him? Long Shot could have explored a globular cluster, but her only other use was publicity.

Sending her to the Core was a masterpiece of promotion.

Look: It was twelve days from We Made It to Jinx by conventional craft, and twelve hours by Long Shot. What's the difference? You spent twelve years saving for the trip. But the Core! Ignoring refueling and reprovisioning problems, my old ship could have reached the galaxy's core in three hundred years. No known species had ever seen the Core! It hid behind layer on layer of tenuous gas and dust clouds. You can find libraries of literature on those central stars, but they all consist of generalities and educated guesses based on observation of other galaxies, like Andromeda.

Three centuries dropped to less than a month! There's something anyone can grasp. And with pictures!

The lifesystem was finished in a couple of weeks. I had them leave the control-room walls transparent and paint the relaxroom solid blue, no windows. When they finished, I had entertainment tapes and everything it takes to keep a man sane for seven weeks in a room the size of a large closet.

On the last day the puppeteer and I spoke the final version of my contract. I had four months to reach the galaxy's center and return. The outside cameras would run constantly; I was not to interfere with them. If the ship suffered a mechanical failure, I could return before reaching the center; otherwise, no. There were penalties. I took a copy of the tape to leave with a lawyer.

«There is a thing you should know,» the puppeteer said afterward. «The direction of thrust opposes the direction of hyperdrive.»

«I don't get it.»

The puppeteer groped for words. «If you turned on the reaction motors and the hyperdrive together, the flames would precede your ship through hyperspace.»

I got the picture then. Ass backward into the unknown. With the control room at the ship's bottom, it made sense. To a puppeteer, it made sense.

And I was off.

I went up under two standard gees because I like my comfort. For twelve hours I used only the reaction motors. It wouldn't do to be too deep in a gravity well when I used a hyperdrive, especially an experimental one. Pilots who do that never leave hyperspace. The relaxroom kept me entertained until the bell rang. I slipped down to the control room, netted myself down against free-fall, turned off the motors, rubbed my hands briskly together, and turned the hyperdrive.

It wasn't quite as I'd expected.

I couldn't see out, of course. When the hyperdrive goes on, it's like your blind spot expanding to take in all the windows. It's not just that you don't see anything; you forget that there's anything to see. If there's a window between the kitchen control bank and your print of Dali's Spain, your eye and mind will put the picture right next to the kitchen bank, obliterating the space between. It takes getting used to, in fact it has driven people insane, but that wasn't what bothered me. I've spent thousands of manhours in hyperspace. I kept my eye on the mass pointer.

The mass pointer is a big transparent sphere with a number of blue lines radiating from the center. The direction of the line is the direction of a star; its length shows the star's mass. We wouldn't need pilots if the mass pointer could be hooked into an autopilot, but it can't. Dependable as it is, accurate as it is, the mass pointer is a psionic device. It needs a mind to work it. I'd been using mass pointers for so long that those lines were like real stars.

A star came toward me, and I dodged around it. I thought that another line that didn't point quite straight ahead was long enough to show dangerous mass, so I dodged. That put a blue dwarf right in front of me. I shifted fast and looked for a throttle. I wanted to slow down.

Repeat, I wanted to slow down.

Of course there was no throttle. Part of the puppeteer research project would be designing a throttle. A long fuzzy line reached for me: a protosun …

Put it this way: Imagine one of Earth's freeways. You must have seen pictures of them from space, a tangle of twisting concrete ribbons, empty and abandoned but never torn down. Some lie broken; others are covered with houses. People use the later rubberized ones for horseback riding. Imagine the way one of these must have looked about six o'clock on a week night in, say, 1970. Groundcars from end to end.

Now, let's take all those cars and remove the brakes. Further, let's put governors on the accelerators so that the maximum speeds are between sixty and seventy miles per hour, not all the same. Let something go wrong with all the governors at once so that the maximum speed also becomes the minimum. You'll begin to see signs of panic.

Ready? Okay. Get a radar installed in your car, paint your windshield and windows jet black, and get out on that freeway.

It was like that.

It didn't seem so bad at first. The stars kept coming at me, and I kept dodging, and after a while it settled down to a kind of routine. From experience I could tell at a glance whether a star was heavy enough and close enough to wreck me. But in Nakamura Lines I'd only had to take that glance every six hours or so. Here I didn't dare look away. As I grew fired, the near misses came closer and closer. After three hours of it I had to drop out.

The stars had a subtly unfamiliar look. With a sudden jar I realized that I was entirely out of known space. Sirius, Antares — I'd never recognize them from here; I wasn't even sure they were visible. I shook it off and called home.

«Long Shot calling General Products, Long Shot calling —»

«Beowulf Shaeffer?»

«Have I ever told you what a lovely, sexy voice you have?»

«No. Is everything going well?»

«I'm afraid not. In fact, I'm not going to make it.»

A pause. «Why not?»

«I can't keep dodging these stars forever. One of them's going to get me if I keep on much longer. The ship's just too goddamn fast.»

«Yes. We must design a slower ship.»

«I hate to give up that good pay, but my eyes feel like peeled onions. I ache all over. I'm turning back.»

«Shall I play your contract for you?»

«No. Why?»

«Your only legal reason for returning is a mechanical failure. Otherwise you forfeit twice your pay.»

I said, «Mechanical failure?» There was a toolbox somewhere in the ship, with a hammer in it …

«I did not mention it before, since it did not seem polite, but two of the cameras are in the lifesystem. We had thought to use films of you for purposes of publicity, but —»

«I see. Tell me one thing, just one thing. When the regional president of We Made It sent you my name, did he mention that I'd discovered your planet has no moon?»

«Yes, he did mention that matter. You accepted one million stars for your silence. He naturally has a recording of the bargain.»

«I see.» So that's why they'd picked Beowulf Shaeffer, well-known author. «The trip'll take longer than I thought.»

«You must pay a penalty for every extra day over four months. Two thousand stars per day late.»

«Your voice has acquired an unpleasant grating sound. Good-bye.»

I went on in. Every hour I shifted to normal space for a ten-minute coffee break. I dropped out for meals, and I dropped out for sleep. Twelve hours per ship's day I spent traveling, and twelve trying to recover. It was a losing battle.

By the end of day two I knew I wasn't going to make the four-month limit. I might do it in six months, forfeiting one hundred and twenty thousand stars, leaving me almost where I started. Serve me right for trusting a puppeteer!

Stars were all around me, shining through the floor and between the banked instruments. I sucked coffee, trying not to think. The Milky Way shone ghostly pale between my feet. The stars were thick now; they'd get thicker as I approached the Core, until finally one got me.

An idea! And about time, too.

The golden voice answered immediately. «Beowulf Shaeffer?»

«There's nobody else here, honey. Look, I've thought of something. Would you send —»

«Is one of your instruments malfunctioning, Beowulf Shaeffer?»

«No, they all work fine, as far as they go. Look —»

«Then what could you possibly have to say that would require my attention?»

«Honey, now is the time to decide. Do you want revenge, or do you want your ship back?»

A small silence. Then, «You may speak,»

«I can reach the Core much faster if I first get into one of the spaces between the arms. Do we know enough about the galaxy to know where our arm ends?»

«I will send to the Institute of Knowledge to find out.»

«Good.»

Four hours later I was dragged from a deathlike sleep by the ringing of the hyperphone. It was not the president but some flunky. I remembered calling the puppeteer «honey» last night, tricked by my own exhaustion and that seductive voice, and wondered if I'd hurt his puppeteer feelings. «He» might be a male; a puppeteer's sex is one of his little secrets. The flunky gave me a bearing and distance for the nearest gap between stars.

It took me another day to get there. When the stars began to thin out, I could hardly believe it. I turned off the hyperdrive, and it was true. The stars were tens and hundreds of light-years apart. I could see part of the Core peeking in a bright rim above the dim flat cloud of mixed dust and stars.

From then on it was better. I was safe if I glanced at the mass pointer every ten minutes or so. I could forget the rest breaks, eat meals, and do isometrics while watching the pointers. For eight hours a day I slept, but during the other sixteen I moved. The gap swept toward the Core in a narrowing curve, and I followed it.

As a voyage of exploration the trip would have been a fiasco. I saw nothing. I stayed well away from anything worth seeing. Stars and dust, anomalous wispy clusters shining in the dark of the gap, invisible indications that might have been stars — my cameras picked them up from a nice safe distance, showing tiny blobs of light. In three weeks I moved almost seventeen thousand light-years toward the Core.

The end of those three weeks was the end of the gap.

Before me was an uninteresting wash of stars backed by a wall of opaque dust clouds. I still had thirteen thousand light-years to go before I reached the center of the galaxy-I took some pictures and moved in.

Ten-minute breaks, mealtimes that grew longer and longer for the rest they gave, sleep periods that left my eyes red and burning. The stars were thick and the dust was thicker, so that the mass pointer showed a blur of blue broken by sharp blue lines. The lines began to get less sharp. I took breaks every half hour …

Three days of that.

It was getting near lunchtime on the fourth day. I sat watching the mass pointer, noting the fluctuations in the blue blur which. showed the changing density of the dust around me. Suddenly it faded out completely. Great, wouldn't it be nice if the mass pointer went out on me? But the sharp starlines were still there, ten or twenty of them pointing in all directions. I went back to steering. The clock chimed to indicate a rest period. I sighed happily and dropped into normal space.

The clock showed that I had half an hour to wait for lunch. I thought about eating anyway, decided against it. The routine was all that kept me going. I wondered what the sky looked like, reflexively looked up so I wouldn't have to look down at the transparent floor. That big an expanse of hyperspace is hard even on trained eyes. I remembered I wasn't in hyperspace and looked down.

For a time I just stared. Then, without taking my eyes off the floor, I reached for the hyperphone.

«Beowulf Shaeffer?»

«No, this is Albert Einstein. I stowed away when the Long Shot took off, and I've decided to turn myself in for the reward.»

«Giving misinformation is an implicit violation of contract. Why have you called?»

«I can see the Core.»

«That is not a reason to call. It was implicit in your contract that you would see the Core.»

«Damn it, don't you care? Don't you want to know what it looks like?»

«If you wish to describe it now, as a precaution against accident, I will switch you to a dictaphone. However, if your mission is not totally successful, we cannot use your recording.»

I was thinking up a really searing answer when I heard the click. Great; my boss had hooked me into a dictaphone. I said one short sentence and hung up.

The Core.

Gone were the obscuring masses of dust and gas. A billion years ago they must have been swept up for fuel by the hungry, crowded stars. The Core lay before me like a great jeweled sphere. I'd expected it to be a gradual thing, a thick mass of stars thinning out into the arms. There was nothing gradual about it. A clear ball of multicolored light five or six thousand light-years across nestled in the heart of the galaxy, sharply bounded by the last of the dust clouds. I was 10,400 light-years from the center.

The red stars were the biggest and brightest. I could actually pick some of them out as individuals. The rest was a finger painting in fluorescent green and blue. But those red stars … they would have sent Aldebaran back to kindergarten.

It was all so bright. I needed the telescope to see black between the stars.

I'll show you how bright it was.

Is it night where you are? Step outside and look at the stars. What color are they? Antares may show red if you're near enough; in the system, so will Mars. Sirius may show bluish. But all the rest are white pinpoints. Why? Because it's dark. Your day vision is in color, but at night you see black and white, like a dog.

The Core suns were bright enough for color vision.

I'd pick a planet here! Not in the Core itself but right out here, with the Core on one side and on the other the dimly starred dust clouds forming their strange convoluted curtain.

Man, what a view! Imagine that flaming jeweled sphere rising in the east, hundreds of times as big as Binary shows on Jinx, but without the constant feeling Binary gives you, the fear that the orange world will fall on you, for the vast, twinkling Core is only starlight, lovely and harmless. I'd pick my world now and stake a claim. When the puppeteers got their drive fixed up, I'd have the finest piece of real estate in the known universe! If I could only find a habitable planet.

If only I could find it twice.

Hell, I'd be lucky to find my way home from here. I shifted into hyperspace and went back to work.

An hour and fifty minutes, one lunch break and two rest breaks, and fifty light-years later, I noticed something peculiar in the Core.

It was even clearer then, if not much bigger; I'd passed through the almost transparent wisps of the last dust cloud. Not too near the center of the sphere was a patch of white, bright enough to make the green and blue and red look dull around it. I looked for it again at the next break, and it was a little brighter. It was brighter again at the next break …

«Beowulf Shaeffer?»

«Yeah.»

«Why did you use the dictaphone to call me a cowardly two-headed monster?»

«You were off the line. I had to use the dictaphone.»

«That is sensible. Yes. We puppeteers have never understood your attitude toward a natural caution.» My boss was peeved, though you couldn't tell from his voice.

«I'll go into that if you like, but it's not why I called.»

«Explain, please.»

«I'm all for caution. Discretion is the better part of valor and like that. You can even be good businessmen, because it's easier to survive with lots of money. But you're so damn concerned with various kinds of survival that you aren't even interested in something that isn't a threat. Nobody but a puppeteer would have turned down my offer to describe the Core.»

«You forget the kzinti.»

«Oh, the kzinti.» Who expects rational behavior from kzinti? You whip them when they attack; you reluctantly decide not to exterminate them; you wait till they build up their strength; and when they attack, you whip 'em again. Meanwhile you sell them foodstuffs and buy their metals and employ them where you need good games theorists. It's not as if they were a real threat. They'll always attack before they're ready.

«The kzinti are carnivores. Where we are interested in survival, carnivores are interested in meat alone. They conquer because subject peoples can supply them with food. They cannot do menial work. Animal husbandry is alien to them. They must have slaves or be barbarians roaming the forests for meat. Why should they be interested in what you call abstract knowledge? Why should any thinking being if the knowledge has no chance of showing a profit? In practice, your description of the Core would attract only an omnivore.»

«You'd make a good case if it were not for the fact that most sentient races are omnivores.»

«We have thought long and hard on that.»

Ye cats. I was going to have to think long and hard on that.

«Why did you call, Beowulf Shaeffer?»

Oh, yeah. «Look, I know you don't want to know what the Core looks like, but I see something that might represent personal danger. You have access to information I don't. May I proceed?»

«You may.»

Hah! I was learning to think like a puppeteer. Was that good? I told my boss about the blazing, strangely shaped white patch in the Core. «When I turned the telescope on it, it nearly blinded me. Grade two sunglasses don't give any details at all. It's just a shapeless white patch, but so bright that the stars in front look like black dots with colored rims. I'd like to know what's causing it.»

«It sounds very unusual.» Pause. «Is the white color uniform? Is the brightness uniform?»

«Just a sec.» I used the scope again. «The color is, but the brightness isn't. I see dimmer areas inside the patch. I think the center is fading out.»

«Use the telescope to find a nova star. There ought to be several in such a large mass of stars.»

I tried it. Presently I found something: a blazing disk of a peculiar blue-white color with a dimmer, somewhat smaller red disk half in front of it. That had to be a nova. In the core of Andromeda galaxy, and in what I'd seen of our own Core, the red stars were the biggest and brightest.

«I've found one.»

«Comment.»

A moment more and I saw what he meant. «It's the same color as the patch. Something like the same brightness, too. But what could make a patch of supernovas go off all at once?»

«You have studied the Core. The stars of the Core are an average of half a light-year apart. They are even closer near the center, and no dust clouds dim their brightness. When stars are that close, they shed enough light on each other to increase materially each other's temperature. Stars burn faster and age faster in the Core.»

«I see that.»

«Since the Core stars age faster, a much greater portion are near the supernova stage than in the arms. Also, all are hotter considering their respective ages. If a star were a few millennia from the supernova stage and a supernova exploded half a light-year away, estimate the probabilities.»

«They might both blow. Then the two could set off a third, and the three might take a couple more …»

«Yes. Since a supernova lasts on the order of one human standard year, the chain reaction would soon die out. Your patch of light must have occurred in this way.»

«That's a relief Knowing what did it, I mean. I'll take pictures going in.»

«As you say.» Click.

The patch kept expanding as I went in, still with no more shape than a veil nebula, getting brighter and bigger. It hardly seemed fair, what I was doing. The light which the patch novas had taken fifty years to put out, I covered in an hour, moving down the beam at a speed which made the universe itself seem unreal. At the fourth rest period I dropped out of hyperspace, looked down through the floor while the cameras took their pictures, glanced away from the patch for a moment, and found myself blinded by tangerine afterimages. I had to put on a pair of grade one sunglasses, out of the packet of twenty which every pilot carries for working near suns during takeoff and landing.

It made me shiver to think that the patch was still nearly ten thousand light-years away. Already the radiation must have killed all life in the Core if there ever had been life there. My instruments on the hull showed radiation like a solar flare.

At the next stop I needed grade two sunglasses. Somewhat later, grade three. Then four. The patch became a great bright amoeba reaching twisting tentacles of fusion fire deep into the vitals of the Core. In hyperspace the sky was jammed bumper to bumper, so to speak, but I never thought of stopping. As the Core came closer, the patch grew like something alive, something needing ever more food. I think I knew, even then.

Night came. The control room was a blaze of light. I slept in the relaxroom to the tune of the laboring temperature control. Morning, and I was off again. The radiation meter snarled its death song, louder during each rest break. If I'd been planning to go outside, I would have dropped that plan. Radiation couldn't get through a General Products hull. Nothing else can, either, except visible light.

I spent a bad half hour trying to remember whether one of the puppeteers' customers saw X-rays. I was afraid to call up and ask.

The mass pointer began to show a faint blue blur. Gases thrown outward from the patch. I had to keep changing sunglasses …

Sometime during the morning of the next day I stopped. There was no point in going farther.

«Beowulf Shaeffer, have you become attached to the sound of my voice? I have other work than supervising your progress.»

«I would like to deliver a lecture on abstract knowledge.»

«Surely it can wait until your return.»

«The galaxy is exploding.»

There was a strange noise. Then: «Repeat, please.»

«Have I got your attention?»

«Yes.»

«Good. I think I know the reason so many sentient races are omnivores. Interest in abstract knowledge is a symptom of pure curiosity. Curiosity must be a survival trait.»

«Must we discuss this? Very well. You may well be right. Others have made the same suggestion, including puppeteers. But how has our species survived at all?»

«You must have some substitute for curiosity. Increased intelligence, maybe. You've been around long enough to develop it. Our hands can't compare with your mouths for tool building. If a watchmaker had taste and smell in his hands, he still wouldn't have the strength of your jaws or the delicacy of those knobs around your lips. When I want to know how old a sentient race is, I watch what he uses for hands and feet.»

«Yes. Human feet are still adapting to their task of keeping you erect. You propose, then, that our intelligence has grown sufficiently to ensure our survival without depending on your hit-or-miss method of learning everything you can for the sheer pleasure of learning.»

«Not quite. Our method is better. If you hadn't sent me to the Core for publicity, you'd never have known about this.»

«You say the galaxy is exploding?»

«Rather, it finished exploding some nine thousand years ago. I'm wearing grade twenty sunglasses, and it's still too bright. A third of the Core is gone already. The patch is spreading at nearly the speed of light. I don't see that anything can stop it until it hits the gas clouds beyond the Core.»

There was no comment. I went on. «A lot of the inside of the patch has gone out, but all of the surface is new novas. And remember, the light I'm seeing is nine thousand years old. Now, I'm going to read you a few instruments. Radiation, two hundred and ten. Cabin temperature normal, but you can hear the whine of the temperature control. The mass indicator shows nothing but a blur ahead. I'm turning back.»

«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?»

«Me 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.»

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.