Crashlander

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.