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.
V.
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 supemova 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.»
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.