Though he had never realized it until now, his system for saving fuel was based on the assumption that he would never find a Slaver box. But the fleck was there again, a black dot on the gray ghost of a planet. Louis Wu moved in.
The world looked something like Earth. It was nearly the same size, very much the same shape, somewhat the same color. There was no moon.
Louis used his telescope on the planet and whistled appreciatively. Shredded white cloud over misty blue ... faint continental outlines ... a hurricane whorl near the equator. The ice caps looked big, but there would be warm climate near the equator. The air looked sweet and noncarcinogenic on the spectrograph. And nobody on it. Not a soul!
No next door neighbors. No voices. No faces.
"What the hell," he chortled.
"I've got my box. I'll just spend the rest of my vacation here. No men. No women. No children." He frowned and rubbed the fringe of hair along his jaw. "Am I being hasty? Maybe I should knock."
But he scanned the radio bands and got nothing. Any civilized planet radiates like a small star in the radio range. Moreover, here was no sign of civilization, even from a hundred miles up.
"Great! Okay, first I'll get that old stasis box... He was sure it was that. Nothing but stars and stasis boxes were dense enough to show black in the reflection of a hyperwave, pulse.
He followed the image around the bulge of the planet. It seemed the planet had a moon after all. The moon was twelve hundred miles up, and it was ten feet across.
"Now why," he wondered aloud, "would the Slavers have put it in orbit? It's too easy to find. They were in a war, for Finagle's sake! And why would it stay here?"
The little moon was still a couple of thousand miles away, invisible to the naked eye. The scope showed it clearly enough. A silver sphere ten feet through, with no marks on it.
"A billion and a half years it's been there," said Louis to himself, said he. "And if you believe that, you'll believe anything. Something would have knocked it down. Dust, a meteor, the solar wind. Tnuctip soldiers. A magnetic storm. Nah." He ran his fingers through straight black hair grown too long. "It must have drifted in from somewhere else. Recently. Wha--"
Another ship, small and conical, had appeared behind the silvery sphere. Its hull was green, with darker green markings.
II
"Damn," said Louis. He didn't recognize the make. It was no human ship. "Well, it could be worse. They could have been people." He used the comm laser.
The other ship braked to a stop. In courtesy, so did Louis.
"Would you believe it?" be demanded of himself. "Three years total time I've spent looking for stasis boxes. I finally find one, and now something else wants it too!"
The bright blue spark of another laser glowed in the tip of the alien cone. Louis listened to the autopilot-computer chuckling to itself as it tried to untangle the signals in an unknown laser beam. At least they did use lasers, not telepathy or tentacle-waving or rapid changes in skin color.
A face appeared on Louis's screen.
It was not the first alien he had seen. This, like some others, had a recognizable head: a cluster of sense organs grouped around a mouth, with room for a brain. Trinocular vision, he noted; the eyes set deep in sockets, well protected, but restricted in range of vision. Triangular mouth, too, with yellow, serrated bone knives showing their edges behind three gristle lips.
Definately, this was an unknown species.
"Boy, are you ugly," Louis refrained from saying. The alien's translator might be working by now.
His own autopilot finished translating the alien's first message. It said, "Go away. This object belongs to me."
"Remarkable," Louis sent back.
"Are you a Slaver?" The being did not in the least resemble a Slaver, and the Slavers had been extinct for eons.
"That word was not translated," said the alien. "I reached the artifact before you did. I will fight to keep it."
Louis scratched at his chin, at two week's growth of bristly beard. His ship had very little to fight with. Even the fusion plant which powered the thruster was designed with safety in mind. A laser battle, fought with comm lasers turned to maximum, would be a mere endurance test; and he'd lose, for the alien ship had more mass to absorb more heat. He had no weapons per se. Presumably the alien did.
But the stasis box was a big one.
The Tnuctipun-Slaver war had wiped out most of the intelligent species of the galaxy, a billion and a half years ago. Countless minor battles must have occurred before a Slaver-developed final weapon was used. Often the Slavers, losing a battle, had stored valuables in a stasis box, and hidden it against the day they would again be of use. No time passed inside a closed stasis box. Alien meat a billion and a half years old had emerged still fresh from its hiding place. Weapons and tools showed no trace of rust. Once a stasis box had disgorged a small, tarsierlike sentiment being, still alive. That former slave had lived a strange life before the aging process claimed her, the last of her species.
Slaver stasis boxes were beyond value. It was known that the Tnuctipun, at least, had known the secret of direct conversion of matter. Perhaps their enemies had too. Someday, in a stasis box somewhere outside known space, such a device would be found. Then fusion power would be as obsolete as internal combustion.
And this, a sphere ten feet in diameter, must be the largest stasis box ever found.
"I too will fight to keep the artifacts" said Louis. "But consider this. Our species has met once, and will meet again regardless of who takes the artifact now. We can be friends or enemies. Why should we risk this relationship by killing?"
The alien sense-cluster gave away nothing. "What do you propose?"
"A game of chance, with the risks even on both sides. Do you play games of chance?"
"Emphatically yes. The process of living is a game of chance. To avoid chance is insanity."
"That it is. Hmmm." Louis regarded the alien head that seemed to be all triangles. He saw it abruptly whip around, flick, to face straight backward, and snap back in the same instant. The sight did something to the pit of his stomach.
"Did you speak?" the alien asked.
"No. Won't you break your neck that way?"
"Your question is interesting. Later we must discuss anatomy. I have a proposal."
"Fine."
"We shall land on the world below us. We will meet between our ships. I will do you the courtesy of emerging first. Can you bring your translator?"
He could connect the computer with his suit radio. "Yes."
"We will meet between our ships and play some simple game, familiar to neither of us, depending solely on chance. Agreed?"
"Provisionally. What game?"
The image on the screen rippled with diagonal lines. Something interfering with the signal? It cleared quickly. "There is a mathematics game," said the alien. Our mathematics will certainly be similar."
"True." Though Louis had heard of some decidedly peculiar twists in alien mathematics.
"The game involves a screee--" Some word that the autopilot couldn't translate. The alien raised a threeclawed hand, holding a lens-shaped object. The alien's mutually opposed fingers turned it so that Louis could see the different markings on each side. "This is a screee. You and I will throw it upward six times each. I will choose one of the symbols, you will choose the other. If my symbol falls looking upward more often than yours, the artifact is mine. The risks are even."