“Mac, you’ve got the displays set up wrong. Those have to be showing different fields of view.”
“They’re not, Jeanie. I’ve checked a dozen times. They’re showing the same part of the sky.”
“Rerun it. Let me see it again.”
“I don’t need to. Wait twenty seconds, and you’ll see another one. About one a minute.”
We waited. At last a second shape, apparently identical to the first, came floating across the mass detector screen. And again the visible wavelength screen remained blank.
“Ultra-violet,” I said. “Or infrared, or microwave…”
“I’ve checked them all. Nothing, from radiation or particle sensors. Only the signal from the mass detectors.”
“So they’re black holes. Kernels. They have to be.”
“That’s exactly what I thought, when we were a ways off and the signal was just a fuzzy blob with no structure. But just you look at the shape of that” — a third shape like a thick, warty banana was crossing the screen — “when you know as well as I do that any black hole has to have at least rotational symmetry. Those things have no axis of symmetry at all. And another thing. I did an active test. I sent a particle stream off to intercept one of those objects. If it were a black hole, you’d get a return radiation signal as the particles were gravitationally caught. But I got nothing. The particles went right on through as though there wasn’t anything there at all.”
I had a strange, prickly feeling up the back of my neck. We were observing nothing, a vacuum specter, a lost memory of matter. By a knight of ghosts and shadows, I summoned am to tourney, ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end… Except that in our case, ten leagues had grown to half a light-year.
“Mac, they’re impossible. They can’t exist.”
“They do, though.” McAndrew’s eyes were gleaming. I realized that I had mistaken his emotion. It wasn’t frustration. It was immense, pent-up excitement and secret delight. “And now I’ve seen them in more detail, I know what they are.”
“What, then?”
“I’ll tell you — but not until we get a chance for a real close-up look. Come on, Jeanie.”
He headed straight for Parmikan’s private quarters, banged on the wall, and pulled the curtain to one side without waiting for an invitation. Parmikan and Lyle were both inside, heads close together. They had kept to themselves completely since the previous day, after an unusually long message to or from Earth. They jerked apart as McAndrew barged through.
“We want to move the Hoatzin a bit,” he said without preamble. “And I have to go outside. I’d like Captain Roker to go with me.”
If he was asking permission, calling me “Captain Roker” to Stefan Parmikan was the worst way to go about getting it. I expected an instant refusal. Instead a rapid glance passed between the two men, then Parmikan turned to McAndrew.
“What do you mean, move the ship?”
“Just a smidgeon, a couple of light-seconds. There’s something I need to look at as part of my experiments. As soon as we’re in the right position I need to take a couple of mass detectors outside with me and examine a structure. It will take a few hours, that’s all. But it’s a two-person job, and I’ll need help.”
I certainly didn’t expect that Lyle or Parmikan would volunteer for the job of helper, but equally I didn’t expect that they’d agree to my doing it — if I were outside, how could they give me disgusting chores? But Parmikan nodded his head at once.
“Right,” said McAndrew. His diffident manner had vanished. “Jeanie, while I get the equipment ready I want you to take the Hoatzin to encounter one of the anomalies. Put us smack in the middle, and set us to hold at zero relative velocity.”
I didn’t argue. But as he went off to the rear of the living-capsule, I did exactly half of what he had requested. A small, watchful region of my brain was awakening, from a slumber it must have been in ever since I decided to reply to McAndrew’s letter by flying straight to the Institute. Now I closed in on one of the objects and set us to zero relative velocity — but I kept our ship a couple of kilometers clear rather than providing McAndrew’s requested encounter. He might know exactly what he was dealing with, and be sure that it was safe. Until I had that knowledge, too, I was going to regard any region of empty space occupied by a mystery as possibly dangerous.
As I was completing my task I noticed a minor oddity in the operations of the Hoatzin’s computer. The program was functioning flawlessly, but as I directed each change in position or speed, a status light indicated that an extra data storage was being performed. The response time was a fraction of a second longer than usual.
I’d probably have caught it when at Parmikan’s insistence we switched the drive on and off every day, but Mac had programmed all those changes as a favor to me. And if McAndrew had been ready to go outside at once, I might have ignored it now. Instead, I took a look to see where the generated data were being stored.
I found a Dummy’s Delight.
The data I was creating were being placed in a trajectory control program of a type much despised by professionals. It was the sort of thing that anyone could use and no one ever did, because it was guaranteed to be inefficient. In a Dummy’s Delight, for every move made by the ship the inverse move was generated and stored. If the program were then executed, the ship would return to its point of origin along whatever convoluted trajectory it may have taken to fly out.
The program’s only advantage was simplicity. One push of a button, and all need for piloting went away.
But there was no way that we would fly back along our original trajectory — there were much more efficient thrust patterns. And I certainly hadn’t given the command to place the required data into the Dummy’s Delight before the Hoatzin left the Penrose Institute.
Had Mac done it? And if so, why?
My wariness node had started to work overtime. On impulse I wiped from memory the whole Dummy’s Delight sequence, and left a message on the control screen: AUTOMATIC RETURN PROGRAM TO TERRA HAS BEEN ERASED BY CAPTAIN ROKER. It seemed reasonable when I did it, but I started to have second thoughts as I hurried to join McAndrew. He had his mass detector survey instruments working as free-standing units and was already in his suit.
“Mac.” I waited until I had my own suit on, and was absolutely sure that we could not be overheard by Van Lyle or Stefan Parmikan. “Did you set up a Dummy’s Delight in the Hoatzin’s computer?”
He was busy, guiding the bulky detectors into the lock. “Now why would I do a daft thing like that?” he said, and vanished into the lock himself.
Why would he do a thing like that? I asked myself. Why would anyone do it? — unless they suspected that no competent pilot, like me or McAndrew, would be around to fly the Hoatzin on its return journey to Sol.
Paranoid? You bet. It’s the only way to fly.
I emerged from the lock into that great forever silence that fills all the space between the stars. Sol was dwindled, indistinguishable from dozens of others. I picked it out from its position, not its superior brightness. The region I floated in appeared totally empty and featureless, despite the suit’s vision enhancement systems. Particles were fewer here, the vacuum a little harder. But the human observer would never know the difference.