"I gambled that you would not see my ship take off, that you would be distracted by the coin, that you could see only from the front of your head. The risks seemed better than one-half."
Louis nodded. It all seemed clear.
"There was also the chance that you had lured me down to destroy me." The computer was still translating into the first person singular. "I have lost at, least one exploring ship that flew in this direction."
"Not guilty. So have we." A thought struck him and he said, "Prove that you hold a weapon."
The alien obliged. No beam showed, but sand exploded to Louis's left, with a vicious crack! and a flash the color of lightning. The alien held something that made holes.
So much for that. Louis bent and picked up the coin. "As long as we're here, shall we finish the game?"
"To what purpose?"
"To see who would have won. Doesn't your species gamble for pleasure?"
"To what purpose? We gamble for survival."
"Then Finagle take your whole breed!" he snarled and flung himself to the sand. His chance for glory was gone, tricked away from him. There is a tide that governs men's affairs... and there went the ebb, carrying statues to Louis Wu, history books naming Louis Wu, jetsam on the tide.
"Your attitude is puzzling. One gambles only when gambling is necessary."
"Nuts."
"My translator will not translate that comment."
"Do you know what that artifact is?"
"I know of the species who built that artifact. They traveled far."
"We've never found a stasis box that big. It must be a vault of some kind."
"It is thought that that species used a single weapon to end their war and all its participants."
The two looked at each other. Possibly each was thinking the same thing. What a disaster, if any but my own species should take this ultimate weapon!
But that was anthropomorphic thinking. Louis knew that a Kzin would have been saying: Now I can conquer the universe, as is my right.
"Finagle take my luck!" said Louis Wu between his teeth. "Why did you have to show at the same time I did?"
"That was not entirely chance. My instruments found your craft as you backed into the system. To reach the vicinity of the artifact in time, it was necessary to use thrust that damaged my ship and killed one of my crew. I earned possession of the artifact."
"By cheating, damn you!" Louis stood up...
And something meshed between his brain and his semicircular canals.
IV
One gravity.
The density of a planet's atmosphere depended on its gravity, and on its moon. A big moon would skim away most of the atmosphere, over the billions of years of a world's evolution. A moonless world the size and mass of Earth should have unbreathable air, impossibly dense, worse than Venus.
But this planet had no moon. Except--
The alien said something, a startled ejaculation that the computer refused to translate.
"Secree! Where did the water go?"
Louis looked. What he saw puzzled him only a moment. The ocean had receded, slipped imperceptibly away, until what showed now was half a mile of level, slickly shinning sea bottom.
"Where did the water go? I do not understand."
"I do."
"Where did it go? Without a moon, there can be no tides. Tides are not this quick in any case. Explain, please."
"It'd be easier if we use the telescope in my ship."
"In your ship there may be weapons."
"Now pay attention," said Louis. "Your ship is very close to total destruction. Nothing can save your crew but the comm laser in my ship."
The alien dithered, then capitulated. "If you have weapons, you would have used them earlier. You cannot stop my ship now. Let us enter your ship. Remember that I hold my weapon."
The alien sood beside him in the small cabin, his mouth working disturbingly around the serrated edges of his teeth as Louis activated the scope and screen. Shortly a starfield appeared. So did a conical spacecraft, painted green with darker green markings. Along the bottom of the screen was the blur of thick atmosphere.
"You see? The artifact must be nearly to the horizon. It moves fast."
"That fact is obvious even to low intelligence."
"Yah. Is it obvious to you that this world must have a massive satellite?"
"But it does not, unless the satellite is invisible."
"Not invisible. Just too small to notice. But then, it must be very dense."
The alien didn't answer.
"Why did we assume the sphere was a Slaver stasis box? Its shape was wrong; its size was wrong. But it was shiny, like the surface of a stasis field, and spherical, like an artifact. Planets are spheres too, but gravity wouldn't ordinarily pull something ten feet wide into a sphere. Either it would have to be very fluid, or it would have to be very dense. Do you understand me?"
"No."
"I don't know how your equipment works. My deepradar uses a hyperwave pulse to find stasis boxes. When something stops a byperwave pulse, it's either a stasis box, or it's something denser than degenerate matter, the matter inside a normal star. And this object is dense enough to cause tides."
A tiny silver bead had drifted into view ahead of the cone. Telescopic foreshortening seemed to bring it right alongside the ship. Louis reached to scratch at his beard and was stopped by his faceplate.
"I believe I understand you. But how could it happen?"
"That's guesswork. Well?"
"Call my ship. They would be killed. We must save them!"
"I had to be sure you wouldn't stop me." Louis Wu went to work. Presently a light glowed; the computer had found the alien ship with its comm laser.
He spoke without preliminaries. "You must leave the spherical object immediately. It is not an artifact. It is ten feet of nearly solid neutronium, probably torn loose from a neutron star."
There was no answer, of course. The alien stood behind him but did not speak. Probably his own ship's computer could not have handled the double translation. But the alien was making one two-armed gesture, over and over.
The green cone swung sharply around, broadside to the telescope.
"Good, they're firing lateral," said Louis to himself. "Maybe they can do a hyperbolic past it." He raised his voice. "Use all the power available. You must pull away."
The two objects seemed to be pulling apart. Louis suspected that that was illusion, for the two objects were almost in line-of-sight. "Don't let the small mass fool you," he said, unnecessarily now. "Computer, what's the mass of a ten-foot neutronium sphere?--Around two times ten to the minus six times the mass of this world, which is pretty tiny, but if you get too close... Computer, what's the surface gravity?--I don't believe it."
The two objects seemed to be pulling together again. Damn, thought Louis. If they hadn't come along, that'd be me.
He kept talking. It wouldn't matter now, except to relieve his own tension. "My computer says ten million gravities at the surface. That may be off. Newton's formula for gravity. Can you hear me?"
"They are too close," said the alien. "By now it is too late to save their lives." It was happening as he spoke. The ship began to crumble a fraction of a second before impact. Impact looked no more dangerous than a cannonball striking the wall of a fort. The tiny silver bead Simply swept through the side of the ship. But the ship closed instantly, all in a moment, like tinsel paper in a strong man's fist. Closed into a bead glowing yellow with heat. A tiny sphere ten feet through or a bit more.