Crashlander

I listened as Carlos outlined his needs. He wanted full records on a meteorite that had touched down in Tunguska, Siberia, USSR, Earth, in 1908 A.D. He wanted a reprise on three models of the origin of the universe or lack of same: the big bang, the cyclic universe, and the steady state universe. He wanted data on collapsars. He wanted names, career outlines, and addresses for the best known students of gravitational phenomena in Sol system. He was smiling when he clicked off.

I said, «You got me. I haven't the remotest idea what you're after.»

Still smiling, Carlos got up and went to his cabin to catch some sleep.

I turned off the main thrust motor entirely. When we were deep in Sol system, we could decelerate at thirty gravities. Meanwhile we were carrying a hefty velocity picked up on our way out of Sirius system.

Ausfaller stayed in the control room. Maybe his motive was the same as mine. No police ships out here. We could still be attacked.

He spent the time going through his pictures of the three mining tugs. We didn't talk, but I watched.

The tugs seemed ordinary enough. Telescopic photos showed no suspicious breaks in the hulls, no hatches for guns. In the deep-radar scan they showed like ghosts: we could pick out the massive force-field rings, the hollow, equally massive drive tubes, the lesser densities of fuel tank and life-support system. There were no gaps or shadows that shouldn't have been there.

By and by Ausfaller said, «Do you know what Hobo Kelly was worth?»

I said I could make a close estimate.

«It was worth my career. I thought to destroy a pirate fleet with Hobo Kelly. But my pilot fled. Fled! What have I now, to show for my expensive Trojan horse?»

I suppressed the obvious answer, along with the plea that my first responsibility was Carlos's life. Ausfaller wouldn't buy that. Instead, «Carlos has something. I know him. He knows how it happened.»

«Can you get it out of him?»

«I don't know.» I could put it to Carlos that we'd be safer if we knew what was out to get us. But Carlos was a flatlander. It would color his attitudes.

«So,» said Ausfaller. «We have only the unavailable knowledge in Carlos's skull.»

A weapon beyond human technology had knocked me out of hyperspace. I'd run. Of course I'd run. Staying in the neighborhood would have been insane, said I to myself, said I. But, unreasonably, I still felt bad about it.

To Ausfaller I said, «What about the mining tugs? I can't understand what they're doing out here. In the Belt they use them to move nickel-iron asteroids to industrial sites.»

«It is the same here. Most of what they find is useless — stony masses or balls of ice — but what little metal there is, is valuable. They must have it for building.»

«For building what? What kind of people would live here? You might as well set up shop in interstellar space!»

«Precisely. There are no tourists, but there are research groups here where space is flat and empty and temperatures are near absolute zero. I know that the Quicksilver Group was established here to study hyperspace phenomena. We do not understand hyperspace, even yet. Remember that we did not invent the hyperdrive; we bought it from an alien race. Then there is a gene-tailoring laboratory trying to develop a kind of tree that will grow on comets.»

«You're kidding.»

«But they are serious. A photosynthetic plant to use the chemicals present in all comets … it would be very valuable. The whole cometary halo could be seeded with oxygen-producing plants — «Ausfaller stopped abruptly, then, «Never mind. But all these groups need building materials. It is cheaper to build out here than to ship everything from Earth or the Belt. The presence of tugs is not suspicious.»

«But there was nothing else around us. Nothing at all.»

Ausfaller nodded.

When Carlos came to join us many hours later, blinking sleep out of his eyes, I asked him, «Carlos, could the tugs have had anything to do with your theory?»

«I don't see how. I've got half an idea, and half an hour from now I could look like a half-wit. The theory I want isn't even in fashion anymore. Now that we know what the quasars are, everyone seems to like the steady state hypothesis. You know how that works: the tension in completely empty space produces more hydrogen atoms, forever. The universe has no beginning and no end.» He looked stubborn. «But if I'm right, then I know where the ships went to after being robbed. That's more than anyone else knows.»

Ausfaller jumped on him. «Where are they? Are the passengers alive?»

«I'm sorry, Sigmund. They're all dead. There won't even be bodies to bury.»

«What is it? What are we fighting?»

«A gravitational effect. A sharp warping of space. A planet wouldn't do that, and a battery of cabin gravity generators wouldn't do it; they couldn't produce that sharply bounded a field.»

«A collapsar,» Ausfaller suggested.