Those automobiles had no radar.
They were being steered with a cabin wheel geared directly to four ground wheels. A mistake in steering and they'd crash into each other or into the concrete curbs. They were steered and stopped by muscle power, but whether they could turn or stop depended on how hard four rubber balloons could grip smooth concrete. If the tires lost their grip, Newton's first law would take over; the fragile metal mass would continue moving in a straight line until stopped by a concrete curb or another groundcar.
«A man could get killed in one of those.»
«Not to worry,» said Elephant. «Nobody does, usually.»
«Usually?»
The race ended twenty minutes later at another tangle of fallen concrete. I was wet through. We landed and met some of the racers. One of them, a thin guy with tangled, glossy green hair and a bony white face with a widely grinning scarlet mouth, offered me a ride. I declined with thanks, backing slowly away and wishing for a weapon. This joker was obviously dangerously insane.
I remember flatlander food, the best in known space, and an odd, mildly alcoholic drink called Taittinger Comtes de Champagne 59. I remember invading an outworlder bar, where the four of us talked shop with a girl rock miner whose inch-wide auburn crest of hair fell clear to the small of her back. I remember flying cross-country with a lift belt and seeing nothing but city enclosing widely separated patches of food-growing land. I remember a submerged hotel off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and a dolphin embassy off Italy, where a mixed group of dolphins and flatlanders seemed to be solving the general problem of sentient beings without hands (there are many, and we'll probably find more). It seemed more a coffee-break discussion than true business.
We were about to break up for bed on the evening of the fourth day when the tridphone rang. Don Cramer had found an Outsider.
I said, disbelieving, «You're leaving right now?»
«Sure!» said Elephant. «Here, take one of these pills. You won't feel sleepy till we're on our way.»
A deal is a deal, and I owed Elephant plenty. I took the pill. We kissed Sharrol and Dianna goodbye, Dianna standing on a chair to reach me, Sharrol climbing me like a beanpole and wrapping her legs around my waist. I was a foot and a half taller than either of them.
Calcutta Base was in daylight. Elephant and I took the transfer booth there, to find that the ST8 had been shipped ahead of us.
Her full name was Slower Than Infinity. She had been built into a General Products No. 2 hull, a three-hundred-foot spindle with a wasp-waist constriction near the tail. I was relieved. I had been afraid Elephant might own a flashy, vulnerable dude's yacht. The two-man control room looked pretty small for a lifesystem until I noticed the bubble extension folded into the nose. The rest of the hull held a one-gee fusion drive and fuel tank, a hyperspace motor, a gravity drag, and belly-landing gear, all clearly visible through the hull, which had been left transparent.
She held fuel, food, and air. She must have been ready for days. We took off twenty minutes after arriving.
Using the fusion drive in Earth's atmosphere would have gotten us into the organ banks, in pieces. Flatlander laws are strict about air pollution. A robot rocket with huge wings lifted us to orbit, using air compressed nearly to degenerate matter as a propellant. We took off from there.
Now there was plenty of time for sleep. It took us a week at one gee just to get far enough out of the solar system's gravity well to use the hyperdrive. Somewhere in that time I removed my false coloring (it had been false; I'd continued to take tannin-secretion pills against Earth's sunlight), and Elephant turned his skin back to light tan and his beard and hair back to black. For four days he'd been Zeus, with marble skin, a metal-gold beard, and glowing molten-gold eyes. It had fitted him so perfectly that I hardly noticed the change.
Hyperdrive — and a long, slow three weeks. We took turns hovering over the mass indicator, though at first-quantum hyperdrive speeds we'd have seen a mass at least twelve hours before it became dangerous. I think I was the only man who knew there was a second quantum, a puppeteer secret. The Outsider ship was near the edge of known space, well beyond Tau Ceti.
«It was the only one around,» Elephant had said. «Number fourteen.»
«Fourteen? That's the same ship I dealt with before.»
«Oh? Good. That should help.»
Days later he asked, «How'd it happen?»
«The usual way. Number fourteen was on the other side of known space then, and she sent out an offer of information exchange. I was almost to Wunderland, and I caught the offer. When I dropped my passengers, I went back.»
«Did they have anything worthwhile?»
«Yah. They'd found the Lazy Eight II.»
The Lazy Eight II had been one of the old slowboats, a circular-flying wing taking colonists to Jinx. Something had gone wrong before turnover, and the ship had continued on, carrying fifty passengers in suspended animation and a crew of four, presumed dead. With a ramscoop to feed hydrogen to her fusion drive, she could accelerate forever. She was five hundred years on her way.
«I remember,» said Elephant. «They couldn't reach her.»
«No. But we'll know where to find her when the state of the art gets that good.» Which wouldn't be soon, I thought. A hyperdrive ship not only would have to reach her but would have to carry fuel to match her speed. Her speed was barely less than a photon's, and she was more than five hundred light-years away, seventeen times the diameter of known space.
«Did you have any problems?»
«Their translator is pretty good. But we'll have to be careful, Elephant. The thing about buying information is that you don't know what you're getting until you've got it. They couldn't just offer to sell me the present position of the Lazy Eight II. We'd have tracked their course by telescope until we saw the light of a fusion drive and gotten the information free.»
The time came when only a small green dot glowed in the center of the mass indicator. A star would have shown as a line; no star would have shown no dot. I dropped out of hyperspace and set the deep radar to hunt out the Outsider.
The Outsider found us first.
Somewhere in the cylindrical metal pod near her center of mass, perhaps occupying it completely, was the reactionless drive. It was common knowledge that that drive was for sale and that the cost was a full trillion stars. Though nobody, and no nation now extant, could afford to pay it, the price was not exorbitant. In two or three minutes, while we were still searching, that drive had dropped the Outsider ship from above point nine lights to zero relative and pulled it alongside the ST8.
One moment, nothing but stars. The next, the Outsider ship was alongside.
She was mostly empty space. I knew her population was the size of a small city, but she was much bigger because more strung out. There was the minuscule-seeming drive capsule, and there, on a pole two and a half miles long, was a light source. The rest of the ship was metal ribbons, winding in and out, swooping giddily around themselves and each other, until the ends of each tangled ribbon stopped meandering and joined the drive capsule. There were around a thousand such ribbons, and each was the width of a wide city pedwalk.
«Like a Christmas tree decoration,» said Elephant. «What now, Bey?»
«They'll use the ship radio.»
A few minutes of waiting, and here came a bunch of Outsiders. They looked like black cat-o'-nine-tails with grossly swollen handles. In the handles were their brains and invisible sense organs; in the whip ends, the clusters of motile root tentacles, were gas pistols. Six of them braked to a stop outside the air lock.