Crashlander

But Ausfaller was doing a job on them with his other instruments. I approved. Hobo Kelly had looked peaceful enough a moment ago. Now her belly bristled with weaponry. The tugs could be equally deceptive.

From behind me Carlos asked, «Bey? What happened?»

«How the futz would I know?»

«What do the instruments show?»

He must mean the hyperdrive complex. A couple of the indicators had gone wild; five more were dead. I said so. «And the drive's drawing no power at all. I've never heard of anything like this. Carlos, it's still theoretically impossible.»

«I'm … not so sure of that. I want to look at the drive.»

«The access tubes don't have cabin gravity.»

Ausfaller had abandoned the receding tugs. He'd found what looked to be a large comet, a ball of frozen gases a good distance to the side. I watched as he ran the deep radar over it. No fleet of robber ships lurked behind it.

I asked, «Did you deep-radar the tugs?»

«Of course. We can examine the tapes in detail later. I saw nothing. And nothing has attacked us since we left hyperspace.»

I'd been driving us in a random direction. Now I turned us toward Sol, the brightest star in the heavens. Those lost ten minutes in hyperspace would add about three days to our voyage.

«If there was an enemy, you frightened him away. Shaeffer, this mission and this ship have cost my department an enormous sum, and we have learned nothing at all.»

«Not quite nothing,» said Carlos. «I still want to see the hyperdrive motor. Bey, would you run us down to one gee?»

«Yeah. But … miracles make me nervous, Carlos.»

«Join the club.»

* * *

We crawled along an access tube just a little bigger than a big man's shoulders, between the hyperdrive motor housing and the surrounding fuel fivikage. Carlos reached an inspection window. He looked in. He started to laugh.

I inquired as to what was so futzy funny.

Still chording, Carlos moved on. I crawled after him and looked in.

There was no hyperdrive motor in the hyperdrive motor housing.

I went in through a repair hatch and stood in the cylindrical housing, looking about me. Nothing. Not even an exit hole. The superconducting cables and the mounts for the motor had been sheared so cleanly that the cut ends looked like little mirrors.

Ausfaller insisted on seeing for himself. Carlos and I waited in the control room. For a while Carlos kept bursting into fits of giggles. Then he got a dreamy, faraway look that was even more annoying.

I wondered what was going on in his head and reached the uncomfortable conclusion that I could never know. Some years ago I took IQ tests, hoping to get a parenthood license that way. I am not a genius.

I knew only that Carlos had thought of something I hadn't, and he wasn't telling, and I was too proud to ask.

Ausfaller had no pride. He came back looking like he'd seen a ghost. «Gone! Where could it go? How could it happen?»

«That I can answer,» Carlos said happily. «It takes an extremely high gravity gradient. The motor hit that, wrapped space around itself, and took off at some higher level of hyperdrive, one we can't reach. By now it could be well on its way to the edge of the universe.»

I said, «You're sure, huh? An hour ago there wasn't a theory to cover any of this.»

«Well, I'm sure our motor's gone. Beyond that it gets a little hazy. But this is one well-established model of what happens when a ship hits a singularity. At a lower gravity gradient the motor would take the whole ship with it, then strew atoms of the ship along its path till there was nothing left but the hyperdrive field itself.»

«Ugh.»

Now Carlos burned with the love of an idea. «Sigmund, I want to use your hyperwave. I could still be wrong, but there are things we can check.»

«If we are still within the singularity of some mass, the hyperwave will destroy itself.»

«Yeah. I think it's worth the risk.»

We'd dropped out, or been knocked out, ten minutes short of the singularity around Sol. That added up to sixteen light-hours of normal space, plus almost five light-hours from the edge of the singularity inward to Earth. Fortunately, hyperwave is instantaneous, and every civilized system keeps a hyperwave relay station just oumide the singularity. Southworth Station would relay our message inward by laser, get the return message the same way, and pass it on to us ten hours later.

We turned on the hyperwave, and nothing exploded.

Ausfaller made his own call first, to Ceres, to get the registry of the tugs we'd spotted. Afterward Carlos called Elephant's computer setup in New York, using a code number Elephant doesn't give to many people. «I'll pay him back later. Maybe with a story to go with it,» he gloated.