“What for?”
“Just in case. Well give the Ox a lifeboat. If the Outsider plays rough someone might get away.”
Lit did not say paranoia, but he was visibly restraining himself.
“He’s big,” Nick said patiently. “His technology is powerful enough to get him across interstellar space. He could be friendly as a puppy, and someone could still say something wrong.” He picked up the phone and said, “Get me Achilles, main switchboard.”
It would take awhile for the operator to focus a laser on Achilles. Nick hung up to wait. And the phone went off jarringly in his hand.
“Yes?”
“This is Traffic Control,” said the phone. “Cutter. Your office wanted anything on the big monopole source.”
Nick opened the volume control so Shaeffer could hear. “Right. What?”
“It’s matching course with a Belt ship. The pilot doesn’t seem to be evading contact.”
Sohl’s lips tightened. “What kind of ship?”
“We can’t tell from this distance. Probably a mining singleship. They’ll be matching orbit in thirty-seven hours twenty minutes, if neither of them change their minds.”
“Keep me posted. Set nearby telescopes on watch. I don’t want to miss anything.” Nick rang off. “You heard?”
“Yah. Finagle’s First Law.”
“Can we stop that Belter?”
“I doubt it.”
It could have been anyone. It turned out to be Jack Brennan.
He was several hours from turnover en route to Earth’s Moon. The Mariner XX’s discarded booster rode his hull like an undernourished Siamese twin. Its whistle was still fixed in the flat nose, the supersonic whistle whose pitch had controlled the burning of the solid fuel core. Brennan had crawled inside to look, knowing that any damage might lower the relic’s value.
For a used one-shot, the relic was in fine shape. The nozzle had burned a little unevenly, but not seriously so; naturally not, given that the probe had reached its destination. The Museum of Spaceflight would pay plenty for it.
In the Belt, smuggling is illegal but not immoral. Smuggling was no more immoral to Brennan than forgetting to pay a parking meter would have been to a flatlander. If you got caught you paid the fine and that was that.
Brennan was an optimist. He didn’t expect to be caught.
He had been accelerating for four days at just short of one gee. Uranus’s orbit was far behind him; the inner system far ahead. He was going at a hell of a clip. There were no observed relativity effects, he wasn’t going that fast, but his watch would need resetting when he arrived.
Have a look at Brennan. He masses one hundred and seventy-eight pounds per one gee, stands six feet two inches tall. Like any Belter, he looks much like an undermuscled basketball player. Since he has been sitting in that control couch for most of four days, he is beginning to look and feel crumpled and weary. But his brown eyes are clear and steady, twenty-twenty, having been corrected by microsurgery when he was eighteen. His straight dark hair is an inch-wide strip running from forehead to nape along a brown polished scalp. He is white; which is to say that his Belter tan is no darker than Cordovan leather; as usual it covers only his hands and his face and scalp above the neck. Elsewhere he is the color of a vanilla milkshake.
He is forty-five years old. He looks thirty. Gravity has been kind to the muscles of his face, and growth salve to the potential bald spot at the crown of his head. But the developing fine lines around his eyes stand out clearly now, since he has been wearing a puzzled frown for the past twenty hours. He has become aware that something is following him.
At first he’d thought it was a goldskin, a Ceres cop. But what would a goldskin be doing this far from the sun?
Even at second glance it could not have been a goldskin. Its drive flame was too fuzzy, too big, not bright enough. Third glance included a few instrument readings. Brennan was accelerating, but the stranger was decelerating, and still had enormous velocity. Either it had come from beyond Pluto’s orbit, or its drive must generate tens of gees. Which gave the same answer.
The strange light was an Outsider.
How long had the Belt been waiting for him? Let any man spend some time between the stars, even a flatland moonship pilot, and someday he would realize just how deep the universe really was. Billions of light years deep, with room for anything at all. Beyond doubt the Outsider was out there somewhere; the first alien species to contact Man was going about its business beyond the reach of Belt telescopes.
Now the Outsider was here, matching courses with Jack Brennan.
And Brennan wasn’t even surprised. Wary, yes. Even frightened. But not surprised, not even that the Outsider had chosen him. That was an accident of fate. They had both been beading into the inner system from roughly the same direction.
Call the Belt? The Belt must know by now. The Belt telescope net tracked every ship in the system; the odds were that it would find any wrong-colored dot moving at the wrong speed. Brennan had expected them to find his own ship, had gambled that they wouldn’t find it soon enough. Certainly they’d found the Outsider. Certainly they were watching it; and by virtue of that fact they must be watching Brennan too. In any case Brennan couldn’t laser Ceres. A flatland ship might pick up the beam. Brennan didn’t know Belt policy on Earth-Outsider contacts.
The Belt must act without him.
Which left Brennan with two decisions of his own.
One was easy. He didn’t have a snowman’s chance of smuggling anything. He would have to alter course to reach one of the major asteroids, and call the Belt the first chance he had to advise them of his course and cargo.
But what of the Outsider?
Evasion tactics? Easy enough. Axiomatically, it is impossible to stop a hostile ship in space. A cop can match course with a smuggler, but he cannot make an arrest unless the smuggler cooperates — or runs out of fuel. He can blow the ship out of space, or even ram with a good autopilot; but how can he connect airlocks with a ship that keeps firing its drive in random bursts? Brennan could head anywhere, and all the Outsider could do was follow or destroy him.
Running would be sensible. Brennan did have a family to protect. Charlotte could take care of herself. She was an adult Belter, as competent to run her own life as Brennan himself, though she had never found enough ambition to earn her pilot’s license. And Brennan had paid the customary fees in trust for Estelle and Jennifer. His daughters would be raised and educated.
But he could do more for them. Or he could become a father again… probably with Charlotte. There was money strapped to his hull. Money was power. Like electrical or political power, its uses could take many forms.
Contact the alien and he might never see Charlotte again. There were risks in being the first to meet an alien species.
And obvious honors.
Could history ever forget the man who met the Outsider?
Just for a moment he felt trapped. As if fate were playing games with his lifeline… but he couldn’t turn this down. Let the Outsider come to him. Brennan held his course.
The Belt is a web of telescopes. Hundreds of thousands of them.
It has to be that way. Every ship carries a telescope. Every asteroid must be watched constantly, because asteroids can be perturbed from their orbits, and because a map of the solar system has to be up-to-date by seconds. The light of every fusion drive has to be watched. In crowded sectors ships can run through each other’s exhausts if someone doesn’t warn them away; and the exhaust from a fusion motor is deadly.
Nick Sohl kept glancing up at the screen, down at the stack of dossiers on his desk, up at the screen… The screen showed two blobs of violet-white light, one bigger than the other, and vaguer. Already they could both appear on the same screen, because the asteroid taking the pictures was almost in line with their course.