There was a long, worried pause. “It wouldn’t have been right, talking about you like that. And Jeanie, I don’t own you, you know.”

McAndrew, McAndrew. If I weren’t so fond of you, I’d wring your scrupulous Puritan neck.

“But you know what?” he went on, “I’m afraid that it’s going to make for a more difficult working atmosphere during the experiments.”

It’s a good thing it was dark, so I couldn’t take a shot at his nose, too.

The first twenty-three days of the trip out had seemed pretty bad. I learned the next morning that the remaining five were going to be a lot worse — and then after that we had the period of McAndrew’s experiments to look forward to, followed by a four-week return journey to the Institute.

The pattern was established on the twenty-fourth day. Van Lyle was back on his feet early. The bruise from his broken nose had mysteriously spread, to give him two purple-black eyes. With a white, rigid plaster across the middle of his face, he resembled a vengeful owl as he staggered out of his bunk. He glared around him.

“The inside of this capsule is dirty. It must be cleaned.”

“It’s not bad,” I said. “It’s just the way you’d expect the ship to look after three weeks.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” Lyle picked up a dish of soggy cereal, inverted it, and deliberately dropped it to the floor. “Get to work. This cabin first, then my quarters. I’ll be back to inspect your progress this afternoon.”

I held myself in — just. When Stefan Parmikan appeared ten minutes later, I had all the cleaning equipment out of the ceiling racks and ready for use.

He looked, not at me but past me. “What do you think you are doing?”

“Getting ready to clean the cabin. Following Officer Lyle’s instruction.”

“Very well. You can do that later. I need you to explain the procedure for ship automatic course tracking to me.”

Unbelievable. Could it be that Stefan Parmikan was at last taking an interest in the way that the Hoatzin worked? I rose to follow him, but he turned and pointed to the cleaning equipment.

“Put those away first, back in the ceiling racks. I’m not going to spend the whole day falling over your stuff. And I’m not going to waste time arguing. You can get everything out again later.”

It didn’t help to recognize that Parmikan was quoting my own words, about the luggage of his that I had refused to allow aboard.

I began to put away the cleaning equipment, and thought favorably of Fletcher Christian.

No one on the Hoatzin seemed happy for the next five days. Parmikan and Lyle constantly tried to push me over the edge, and were constantly disappointed. They came close, but I certainly wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of knowing how close.

And McAndrew, who should have been as happy as a pig because the time of his experiments had arrived, had become intense and introverted. The Hoatzin had homed in close to his strongest anomalous signal, but it did not seem to have resolved his problem.

“Look at this, Jeanie,” he said, during one of my rare breaks from slavery. I had just checked that the ship had achieved its final location and velocity, and confirmed that we were at rest again relative to Sol. “These are real-time signals, happening right this minute. I’ve got instruments focused on a region only two light-seconds from here. You can see the visual display of it on the left half of the screen.”

I looked. Other than a triangle of three bright reference stars, the visible wavelength display was blank.

“Nothing there,” I said.

“Quite right. And now, the input from the mass detectors. They’re set up to scan the same field, and I’ve got them in imaging mode focused for two light-seconds away.” McAndrew popped the mass detector result on the right, as a split-screen display.

I stared. I expected to see nothing on the right side of the screen, either, and that’s exactly what I saw. The region two light-seconds from us, where McAndrew’s mass detection instruments were focused, was empty of matter — more empty, in fact, than any other known region.

“Well,” I began to say. And then something impossible happened. The left-hand screen at visible wavelengths continued to show nothing but distant reference stars; but the screen displaying the mass imaging system inputs showed an object floating steadily across it, from top to bottom. The blob was clean-edged and irregular in shape, its outline like a fat, curved and pimpled cigar. It took maybe ten seconds from the first appearance on the top of the screen to its leisurely disappearance from the lower boundary. It must be moving at just a few miles a second relative to the Hoatzin.

“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.”