Twenty thousand years is a long time. It's four times as long as human written history. We'll all be less than dust before things get dangerous, and I for one am not going to worry about it.
But the puppeteers are different. They're scared. They're getting out right now. Paying off their penalty clauses and buying motors and other equipment to put in their indestructible hulls will take so much money that even confiscating my puny salary would have been a step to the good. Interstellar business can go to hell; from now on the puppeteers will have no time for anything but running.
Where will they go? Well, the galaxy is surrounded by a halo of small globular clusters. The ones near the rim might be safe. Or the puppeteers may even go as far as Andromeda. They have the Long Shot for exploring if they come back for it, and they can build more. Outside the galaxy is space empty enough even for a puppeteer pilot, if he thinks his species is threatened.
It's a pity. This galaxy will be dull without puppeteers. Those two-headed monsters were not only the most dependable faction in interstellar business, they were like water in a wasteland of more or less humanoids. It's too bad they aren't brave, like us.
But is it?
I never heard of a puppeteer refusing to face a problem. He may merely be deciding how fast to run, but he'll never pretend the problem isn't there. Sometime within the next twenty millennia we humans will have to move a population that already numbers forty-three billion. How? To where? When should we start thinking about this? When the glow of the Core begins to shine through the dust clouds?
Maybe men are the cowards — at the core.
GHOST: THREE
I said, «And there you were in Sirius Mater, all ready to write my story for me. I guessed then that Ausfaller must have sent you both times.»
«So why did you hire me?»
«I didn't care much. The big question was, How do I tell the human race about the Core explosion? How do I make them believe? I hoped you were an ARM. Maybe you could do something.»
Ander said, «I should have asked you then. There's supposed to be a huge black hole in there, millions of solar masses. Did you see it?»
I shook my head. «Maybe the shell of novas hid it, if it's there at all. Maybe it even caused the chain reaction. Sucking gas and dust and stars for fifteen billion years, maybe its mass passed some kind of threshold and boom! Maybe you'd even find it if you processed the recordings I took. They're proprietary, Ander. Get them from General Products.»
«Well, but they're gone.» But he had that smirk again. «Where did you go after that?»
«Earth. After the galactic core, what else could measure up?»
Ander laughed.
Five teams were fighting over two prey turtles that glowed intermittently among thrashing bodies. The crowd was standing, yelling their heads off. And Ander pulled a flat portable out of his backpurse, ten inches by ten inches by a quarter inch thick, and opened it in my lap. He tapped rapidly.
A picture stood above my lap. Five blue-white points rotated against a black background. They pulled apart, growing slowly brighter, coming toward me. Suddenly they blossomed into blue and white globes; the starscape wheeled; the spheres went murky red and began to recede. Ander tapped, and the picture froze.
Tiny suns circled four of the globes. The fifth glowed of itself, as if the continents of a world had caught fire. Flying planets! And nobody around us was looking at anything but the miniature war beyond the glass.
Ander said, «The puppeteers are still in known space. Receding at relativistic speeds, and they took their planets with them.» He snapped his portable shut. «Five worlds all about the same size, orbiting in a pentagon around each other. Do the math yourself. You'll find that you can put a sun at the center, or not, and the orbits are stable either way. They understand tides just fine, Beowulf. That's what they hid from you.»
My mind lurched. Cowards or not, peaceable or not, I could see how the traditionally paranoid ARM might react to so much sheer brute power. «What are they like? Oxygen worlds? Natural or terraformed? How —»
«Sigmund says we've dropped cameras in their path, not too close. The system goes flying by at point eight lights. We haven't learned much. Free oxygen, liquid water, fusion light sources redder than Sol, and we don't know why the odd one looks so odd. There's nothing else in the system, no asteroids, no cometary halo, just chains of spacecraft moving between the five worlds.»
«Where are they going?»
«Straight north along the galactic axis.»
«That's what I did, coming back from the Core. Get clear of occupied space and then turn … turning five planets could be a bitch.»
«Well, there's nothing but empty space where they're going.»
«Maybe that's what they want.»
Ander mulled it. «Possible.. Meanwhile, we've got to guard them and keep their secret. They won't pass all that close to the Patriarchy, but that's too close. It's not that they can't defend themselves. It's that they're cowards.»
I began to see what he meant. «Free enterprise.»
«No species can control all its members.»
«If some futzer published their location, you could see pirates of every shape and size.»
«Yes, and reporters and news anchors likewise. Any entrepreneur with a money-making offer. Any undertrained ARM out to make a name. Whole fleets lying in wait for the puppeteer worlds to pass. Any kind of fool might cause the puppeteer government to defend themselves in some drastic fashion, with power like that,» Ander said. «So we have to stop any passing ships from interfering with the fleet and guard their secret, too. Meanwhile, they haven't all left. There are business matters, loose ends being wrapped up.»
«I know. I had dealings with one of their agents myself.»
He perked up. «How did that come about?»
«I had a complaint about a General Products hull.»
«Again?»
FLATLANDER
The most beautiful girl aboard turned out to have a husband with habits so solitary that I didn't know about him until the second week. He was about five feet four and middle-aged, but he wore a hellflare tattoo on his shoulder, which meant he'd been on Kzin during the war thirty years back, which meant he'd been trained to kill adult kzinti with his bare hands, feet, elbows, knees, and whatnot. When we found out about each other, he very decently gave me a first warning and broke my arm to prove he meant it.
The arm still ached a day later, and every other woman on the Lensman was over two hundred years old. I drank alone. I stared glumly into the mirror behind the curving bar. The mirror stared glumly back.
«Hey. You from We Made It. What am I?»
He was two chairs down, and he was glaring. Without the beard he would have had a round, almost petulant face … I think. The beard, short and black and carefully shaped, made him look like a cross between Zeus and an angry bulldog. The glare went with the beard. His square fingers wrapped a large drinking bulb in a death grip. A broad belly matched broad shoulders to make him look massive rather than fat.
Obviously he was talking to me. I asked, «What do you mean, what are you?»
«Where am I from?»
«Earth.» It was obvious. The accent said Earth. So did the conservatively symmetrical beard. His breathing was unconsciously natural in the ship's standard atmosphere, and his build had been forged at one point zero gee.
«Then what am I?»
«A flatlander.»
The glare heat increased. He'd obviously reached the bar way ahead of me. «A flatlander! Damn it, everywhere I go I'm flatlander. Do you know how many hours I've spent in space?»