Juggler of Worlds (24 page)

“True,” Sigmund agreed. “When you and Gregory Pelton went barreling into Sirius system six years ago, it seemed pretty obvious you’d gotten a lift from the Outsiders. I’d like to hear that story.”

“I was crew on that trip. That makes it Elephant’s story, not mine.” Bey loved to tell stories, but his tone of voice made it clear this story was an exception. He brought a foot up to his face and took a long drag. “That’s not to admit or deny we encountered Outsiders.” Puff, puff. “Speaking of the Outsiders, a few months ago I saw a starseed open.
That
was truly amazing.”

And Beowulf was off, spinning tales of the galaxy’s elder race.

The Outsiders were immensely fragile, looking something like large cat-o’-nine-tails, with a metabolism based on liquid helium. They roamed the galaxy in city-sized ships, shunning the inner solar systems. (“Those amazing ships of theirs have the galaxy’s least imaginative names. I had business with one once. It was called Ship Fourteen.”) Their civilization was billions of years old, moving to a less-than-glacial tempo impossible for the warm-world races to imagine.

It had been an Outsider, native to regions outside of solar singularities, in the dawn of time, who discovered hyperspace and perfected the hyperdrive shunt. By selling that technology to the human colony of We Made It (“Not to a relative, though”), the Outsiders indirectly saved humanity from enslavement by the Kzinti. For reasons of their own, Outsiders themselves traveled only in normal space.

Sigmund thought, not for the first time: If Bey wrote half as well as he spoke, Ander would never have gotten his foot in the door.

“Bey?” Carlos interrupted. “Starseeds?”

“I’m getting there. We don’t know much about the Outsiders. One of those few things we know is this: They spend their time in pursuit of starseeds.” A great smile lit Beowulf’s face. “Giant creatures, about two kilometers across. They follow slow migratory patterns from the rim of the galaxy to and from the core.

“That’s two klicks across
furled
. Inbound to Gummidgy, our ship passed a starseed. A starseed is mostly gossamer-thin sail, tightly rolled. Imagine that sail, thousands of kilometers across, slowly unfurling. Four muscular shrouds connect the sail to its tiny central kernel. Now picture that great, silvery mirrored sail catching the sun.…”

In his mind’s eye, Sigmund
did
see the starseed. It was beautiful. Yes, if Bey could write half as well as he spoke, he’d never have needed Ander.

CARLOS AND BEY had met by accident. Bey had been bound for Earth; the captain of the passenger ship had diverted to Jinx rather than face whatever was eating ships in Sol system.

One “coincidence” explained—it was a start.

Then again, Gregory Pelton could certainly bribe a cruise-line captain. Pelton would scarcely notice the expense.

It was almost time to drop out of hyperspace. Their wide-ranging conversations abruptly focused. Pirates, ship eaters, wandering uncharted planets—theories suddenly ceased to be mere intellectual exercise.

“It boils down to three possibilities,” Bey decided abruptly. “Kzinti, Puppeteers, and humans.”

Carlos guffawed. “Puppeteers? Puppeteers wouldn’t have the guts!”

“I threw them in because they might have some interest in manipulating the interstellar stock market. Look, our hypothetical pirates have set up an embargo, cutting Sol system off from the outside world. The Puppeteers have the capital to take advantage of what that does to the market. And they need money. For their migration.”

It was the first theory Sigmund heard that made any sense. He’d had similar thoughts about the Crash when the Puppeteers vanished. Bey—and Carlos?—had been involved then.…

Carlos wasn’t buying it. “The Puppeteers are philosophical cowards.”

“That’s right,” Bey agreed. “They wouldn’t risk robbing the ships or coming anywhere near them. Suppose they can make them disappear from a distance?”

Carlos wasn’t laughing now. “That’s easier than dropping them out of hyperspace to rob them. It wouldn’t take more than a great big gravity generator… and we’ve never known the limits of Puppeteer technology.”

So Shaeffer suddenly had a plausible explanation, without any new information. Had he been holding back for the whole trip? Sigmund asked, “You think this is possible?”

Bey nodded. “Just barely. The same goes for the Kzinti. The Kzinti are ferocious enough. Trouble is, if we ever learned they were preying on our ships, we’d raise pluperfect hell. The Kzinti know that, and they know we can beat them. Took them long enough, but they learned.”

“So you think it’s humans,” Carlos said.

Bey looked unhappy. “Yeah. If it’s pirates.”

IN THE MASS POINTER, the narrow line that marked Sol grew longer. Bey claimed the controls as his own. As tense as he looked, he found the energy to chain-smoke with his feet.

The three of them shared the bridge as
Hobo Kelly
penetrated the Oort Cloud. Only twelve hours remained until they returned to normal space. Then it was ten. Five. One.

Bey asked suddenly, “Carlos, just how large a mass would it take to make us disappear?”

Their resident genius didn’t hesitate. “Planet size, Mars and up. Beyond that, it depends on how close you get and how dense it is. If it’s dense enough, it can be less massive and still flip you out of the universe. But you’d see it in the mass sensor.”

“Only for an instant… and not then if it’s turned off. What if someone turned on a giant gravity generator as we went past?”

“For what? They couldn’t rob the ship. Where’s their profit?”

“Stocks.”

Sigmund shook his head. They’d talked all through this. Was Shaeffer trying to divert them at a critical moment? “The expense of such an operation would be enormous. No group of pirates would have enough additional capital on hand to make it worthwhile. Of the Puppeteers I might believe it.”

The long line marking Sol was almost touching the surface of the mass sensor. Bey said, “Breakout in ten minutes.”

And the ship lurched savagely.

“Strap down!” Bey yelled. He stared wide-eyed at the hyperdrive controls.

Sigmund stared just as incredulously. The hyperdrive motor was drawing no power. None of the instrument readings made any sense. Unless…

Bey had the same thought. He activated the view ports, kept inert in hyperspace. The displays came on, revealing stars.

Somehow, they were in normal space.

“Futz! They got us anyway.” Carlos sounded neither frightened nor angry but awed.

The hidden access panel. Why was Bey reaching for it? Sigmund shouted, “Wait!”

Bey threw the red switch anyway. The ship shuddered as explosive bolts blew. A monstrous blip appeared on the radar screen, slowly receding.

That blip was most of the ship: the false hull, their disguise. Now anyone watching would see a GP #2 hull, ringed with weapons. Sigmund cursed in every language he knew.

Shaeffer didn’t know the old words, or he didn’t care. He lit the main fusion drive and ran it up to full power.

Sigmund squeezed the padded arms of his crash couch, his knuckles white. “Shaeffer, you idiot, you coward!” Or traitor? That was a possibility, too. How could he have considered trusting this man? “We run without knowing what we run from. Now they know exactly what we are. What chance that they will follow us now? This ship was built for a specific purpose, and you have ruined it!”

“I’ve freed your special instruments,” Shaeffer said with aggravating calm. “Why don’t you see what you can find?”

There were ships out there. Sigmund got a close-up of them: three space tugs of the Belter type. They were shaped like thick saucers, equipped with oversized drives and powerful electromagnetic generators. Asteroid haulers. With those heavy drives they could probably catch
Hobo Kelly
, assuming they had adequate cabin gravity.

They weren’t even trying. They continued on their course, three points of a slow-moving triangle.

Carlos asked, “Bey? What happened?”

“How the futz would I know?” their pilot snapped. It seemed a fair answer. Several hyperdrive indicators had gone wild; the rest looked completely dead. “And the drive’s drawing no power at all. I’ve never heard of anything like this. Carlos, it’s still theoretically impossible.”

Carlos said, “I’m… not so sure of that. I want to look at the drive.”

Shaeffer didn’t look up from his console. “The access tubes don’t have cabin gravity.”

On radar, the three innocent-looking tugs receded. Of course, until moments ago
Hobo Kelly
had also looked entirely innocent, not like the warship it was. Rather than scream, Sigmund said, “If there were 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,” Carlos said. “I still want to see the hyperdrive motor. Bey, would you run us down to one gee?”

“Yeah. But… miracles make me nervous, Carlos.”

Crawling one by one through the access tunnel, they encountered a miracle.

Their hyperdrive motor had vanished from the ship.

CARLOS BROKE THE STUNNED SILENCE. “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.”

He seemed very confident for someone without an opinion a few minutes ago.

With some trepidation, they powered up the hyperwave radio. It neither disappeared like the hyperdrive nor exploded. Sigmund relayed a coded query through Southworth Station to get registry data on the three tugs. From the ship to the relay, comm was instantaneous. The link between the station and the inner solar system was another story. There, light-speed crawl was the rule. They’d have a ten-hour round-trip delay for any answer.

Carlos used the comm gear next. He wanted data about cosmology and cosmologists, astronomy and astronomers. There was also something in his request about a meteor strike in Siberia in 1908. What Sigmund found most significant was
who
Carlos asked. The call went to one of Gregory Pelton’s unlisted numbers.

Shaeffer didn’t understand, either. “I haven’t the remotest idea what you’re after.”

Smiling enigmatically, Carlos went to his cabin.

Sigmund needed urgently to shake answers out of someone—and couldn’t. Not without hard proof of a crime. Wu was among Earth’s chosen. Shaeffer was under the protection of Gregory Pelton.

Futz.

THEY TOOK TURNS ON watch before the answer to Sigmund’s message arrived via Southworth Station. The registration check on the tugs was worthless. All were supposedly owned by the Sixth Congregational Church of Rodney—libertarian Belter nonsense. The United Nations would never tolerate such evasions.

Soon after, information began pouring in for Carlos. The physicist refused to share his thinking. The fool would rather be dead than proven wrong. As for the data stream itself, for all the sense it made to Sigmund it might as well have been in hieroglyphics.

Sigmund concentrated on the bit he could understand: the list of Sol system’s leading experts in gravity theory. Name after name was paired with a Southworth Station hyperwave comm ID. That put all of them here in the Oort Cloud. Here where ships disappeared.

Where in the Cloud hardly mattered. The fringes of the solar system were practically next door to any hyperdrive-equipped ship. “These people,” Sigmund said. “You wish to discuss your theory with one of them?”

Carlos seemed surprised by the question. “That’s right, Sigmund.”

“Carlos, has it occurred to you that one of these people may have built the ship-eating device?”

“What? You’re right. It would take someone who knew something about gravity. But I’d say the Quicksilver Group”—and Carlos gestured at the long block of names that shared a comm ID—“was beyond suspicion. With upwards of ten thousand people at work, how could anyone hide anything?”

One name on the list looked familiar. He knew a gravity theorist? Sigmund couldn’t imagine why. Whoever he was, the comm ID showed he wasn’t with Quicksilver. “What about this Julian Forward?”

Carlos looked thoughtful. “Forward. Yeah. I’ve always wanted to meet him.”

“You know of him? Who is he?” Shaeffer asked.

“He used to be with the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx. I haven’t heard of him in years. He did some work on the gravity waves from the galactic core… work that turned out to be wrong. Sigmund, let’s give him a call.”

Jinx. Sigmund suppressed a shiver. Now he placed the name. Forward was one of the experts who had vouched for the integrity of Shaeffer’s galactic-core-explosion data. Ander had spoken to him six years earlier. And now Forward turns up
here?

“And ask him what?” Shaeffer said pointedly.

“Why…?” Then Carlos remembered the situation. “Oh. You think he might—yeah.”

“How well do you know this man?” Sigmund asked.

“I know him by reputation. He’s quite famous. I don’t see how such a man could go in for mass murder.”

Sigmund wondered: How can someone so brilliant be so innocent?
“Earlier you said that we were looking for a man skilled in the study of gravitational phenomena.”