"Quite mad, as you say… And Wunderland still does have a lot of queer fish… like me."
We like Wunderland," said Richard. "Partly because of the queer fish. We've been thinking of settling there."
"May I say… I hope you do."
"Only five hundred and forty million years ago, billions of years after the time when the thing we seek was built," said Richard, "our ancestors on Earth lived in a placid sea. They were parading the vicinity of the Burgess Shale on multiple jelly legs. Your ancestors and ours cannot have looked much different."
We know thrint and tnuctipun planted common life-forms throughout the galaxy," Peter Robinson replied. "You and I are alike enough to indicate common primordial ancestors."
"Alike enough to eat each other. I do not mean that observation to be cruel or offensive, but it emphasizes our common biology."
"Also, there have been speculations that the telepaths' power is somehow-I know not how-related to the Slaver Power-some inherited vestige of tnuctipun biological engineering, perhaps? Something in our nucleonic acid? A laboratory experiment that was thrown away and survived?"
"It's hard to see how that could be. Thrint and kzin are not contemporaries by billions of years."
I find much hard to see. You will have another bourbon? You face quite a long watch."
I'm used to it. It goes with the job."
"A lot goes with my job." The Wunderkzin said, "Thank you for being my… friend, Richard. It will be good to go to sleep with that emotion in my mind."
"The human race as it is today evolved out of a lot of different breeds," said Richard awkwardly. "You've seen that on Wunderland. A lot of humans must have asked at times: 'What am I?' But in the end we shook down fairly well."
"I wonder if they ever asked as emphatically as I do," said Peter Robinson, "and who they asked."
Richard was still on watch when the mass-detector dropped the Wallaby out of hyperspace. The nearest stars were distant but the singularity that was a stasis field was sharp and bright in the center of the radar screen. By the time the awakened crew assembled on the bridge it had grown.
Behind it was a deep-radar ghost. The artifact was in wide orbit around a flattened sphere-a free-floater planet, dark and cold, a gas giant too small to glow. How had the Puppeteers found this thing? "Big," said Melody. "Bigger than we thought."
"It certainly is," said Richard. "As a matter of fact it is in visual range now."
"It's too far away!"
Richard touched the control panel. Spotlights flooded space, and illuminated nothing except a silver bead.
A pale gray sphere. With nothing to give a scale it was impossible for the unaided eye to tell how big it was. But there was a scale projected on the screen. And it was growing. There were a few circles like shallow, immensely eroded craters. The Wallaby orbited it, cameras busy. There were darker patches and one black spot. It looked much like the Moon seen from Earth.
"Where on the surface is the stasis box?" asked Gatley Ivor. "Or is it buried?"
"That is the point: the deep radar lacks fine definition yet, but it appears to be almost all stasis field. It is about nine miles in diameter."
"The Puppeteers did not tell us it was so big," said Melody.
"I suspect they may not have known. Perhaps they only picked it up on their deep radar at extreme range as a point whose magnitude had to be guessed. They would be too cautious to explore further themselves. Or perhaps they never saw it-the Outsiders may have told them about it. I suspect they have a standing order with the Outsiders to buy information about any stasis boxes they come across, but perhaps they thought they could no longer afford to pay extra for details like size."
"If that is so, whether it was caution or miserliness that prevented them knowing, they made a mistake," said Peter Robinson. "Had they explored boldly, or bought full information, they would have discovered it is too big for an expedition of this size."
"A Hero-a kzin-is not daunted by size," said Charrgh-Captain.
"I think," said Richard, "it may not have been caution only. With so few Puppeteers left in known space, their resources and personnel are stretched thin. A Puppeteer ship that detected this at very long range would probably have been on business it could not divert from. As for miserliness, if they bought the information about it from Outsiders, well, we know the Outsiders do not sell information cheaply."
Perhaps," said Gay, "when they saw an asteroid and then a stasis field indicated from a distance on deep-radar, they thought the field was somewhere on the asteroid, as we just did. They did not realize the asteroid was the whole stasis field."
"In any event," said Peter Robinson, "you must agree it is too big for us to open. It is far bigger than any spaceship I have heard of. Assuming that this giant stasis field contains an artifact of a size to justify it, the chances are that there are live Slavers within. We are not equipped to handle them if they are released."
"I am tempted in one part of me to proceed," said Gatley Ivor. "There may be more knowledge of the ancients here than the total of all that has been gathered to date. And yet every rational instinct says this is too big for us. I must say reluctantly that we should return with a bigger expedition-perhaps a warship."
"Would that not simply be presenting the Slavers with the warship, should they seize the minds of its crew?" asked Charrgh-Captain. "Think of human history and your Napoleon's march on Paris after his escape from Elba-the monkeys sent to capture him simply joined him, and the more that were sent the bigger his army became."
"Can the Slaver Power penetrate a General Products hull?" demanded Melody.
"I believe it can," Gatley Ivor said. "First, because the Power is not a physical event and is not governed by the laws of physics. It is not a wave effect, nor does it depend on particles. Further, we know from ample experience that a General Products hull does not block the probing of kzinti-or even human-telepaths. Matter does not shield against telepathy."
Charrgh-Captain's tail lashed. His ears knotted and unknotted. A kzin like Charrgh-Captain could not-physically could not-admit before either aliens or his own kind that he was too fearful to execute a task.
If we return for reinforcements, Richard thought, Charrgh-Captain will, quite legally, report the situation to the Patriarchy. Diminished as they are, they still, unlike us, have a command economy. By the time we, or the human bureaucracy, raises the finance for a bigger expedition, the Kzin might easily be here and have it open.
"It is too important simply to leave," said Melody Fay.
"What I am saying when I say it is too big," said Gatley Ivor, "is that I see a high probability there are Slavers inside it. It is much more than a mere good chance. A stasis field of this size plainly contains something on the order of a spaceship or a space station. Or perhaps it was once an installation on the surface of a planet that has disappeared. I have never heard of one so big. Surely it will be crewed. Perhaps it contains a Slaver army. And one Slaver alone would be more than danger enough!" Charrgh-Captain bridled again at the mention of danger, but his ears settled back into a position of tacit acceptance and his tail stilled. Richard saw him curl it out of the way with a conscious motion. The big kzin might not like the suggestion that he would shy from danger, but this was plainly something beyond the normal. The threat of live Slavers might daunt the boldest of any species.
"At any rate," said Richard, "now that we are here, let us explore what we may. Our sponsors will hardly be pleased if we come away without having done that. First, we should make a survey of the accretion material and see where underneath it the stasis field begins. We can send progress reports back by hyperwave."