«I didn't ask for buttons,» I told him.
«I hope you don't mind. Carlos, you will have buttons, too.»
Carlos chose a fiery red tunic with a green and gold dragon coiling across the back. The buttons carried his family monogram. Ausfaller stood before us, examining us in our new finery, with approval.
«Now, watch,» he said. «Here I stand before you, unarmed.»
«Right.»
«Sure you are.»
Ausfaller grinned. He took the top and bottom buttons between his fingers and tugged hard. They came off. The material between them ripped open as if a thread had been strung between them.
Holding the buttons as if to keep an invisible thread taut, he moved them to either side of a crudely done plastic touch sculpture. The sculpture fell apart.
«Sinclair molecule chain. It will cut through any normal matter if you pull hard enough. You must be very careful. It will cut your fingers so easily that you will hardly notice they are gone. Notice that the buttons are large to give an easy grip.» He laid the buttons carefully on a table and set a heavy weight between them. «This third button down is a sonic grenade. Ten feet away it will kill. Thirty feet away it will stun.»
I said, «Don't demonstrate.»
«You may want to practice throwing dummy buttons at a target. This second button is Power Pill, the commercial stimulant. Break the button and take half when you need it. The entire dose may stop your heart.»
«I never heard of Power Pill. How does it work on crashlanders?»
He was taken aback. «I don't know. Perhaps you had better restrict yourself to a quarter dose.»
«Or avoid it entirely,» I said.
«There is one more thing I will not demonstrate. Feel the material of your garments. You feel three layers of material? The middle layer is a nearly perfect mirror. It will reflect even X rays. Now you can repel a laser blast for at least the first second. The collar unrolls to a hood.»
Carlos was nodding in satisfaction.
I guess it's true: all flatlanders think that way.
For a billion and a half years humanity's ancestors had evolved to the conditions of one world: Earth. A flatlander grows up in an environment peculiarly suited to him. Instinctively he sees the whole universe the same way.
We know better, we who were born on other worlds. On We Made It there are the hellish winds of summer and winter. On Jinx, the gravity. On Plateau, the all-encircling cliff edge and a drop of forty miles into unbearable heat and pressure. On Down, the red sunlight and plants that will not grow without help from ultraviolet lamps.
But flatlanders think the universe was made for their benefit. To them, danger is unreal.
«Earplugs,» said Ausfaller, holding up a handful of soft plastic cylinders.
We inserted them. Ausfaller said, «Can you hear me?»
«Sure.» «Yeah.» They didn't block our hearing at all.
«Transmitter and hearing aid with sonic padding between. If you are blasted with sound, as by an explosion or a sonic stunner, the hearing aid will stop transmitting. If you go suddenly deaf, you will know you are under attack.»
To me, Ausfaller's elaborate precautions only spoke of what we might be walking into. I said nothing. If we ran for it, our chances were even worse.
Back to the control room, where Ausfaller set up a relay to the Bureau of Alien Affairs on Earth. He gave them a condensed version of what had happened to us, plus some cautious speculation. He invited Carlos to read his theories into the record.
Carlos declined. «I could still be wrong. Give me a chance to do some studying.»
Ausfaller went grumpily to his bunk. He had been up too long, and it showed.
Carlos shook his head as Ausfaller disappeared into his cabin. «Paranoia. In his job I guess he has to be paranoid.»
«You could use some of that yourself.»
He didn't hear me. «Imagine suspecting an interstellar celebrity of being a space pirate!»
«He's in the right place at the right time.»
«Hey, Bey, forget what I said. The, uh, ship-eating device has to be in the right place, but the pirates don't. They can just leave it loose and use hyperdrive ships to commute to their base.»
That was something to keep in mind. Compared to the inner system, this volume within the cometary halo was enormous, but to hyperdrive ships it was all one neighborhood. I said, «Then why are we visiting Forward?»
«I still want to check my ideas with him. More than that: he probably knows the head ship eater without knowing it's him. Probably we both know him. It took something of a cosmologist to find the device and recognize it. Whoever it is, he has to have made something of a name for himself.»
«Find?»
Carlos grinned at me. «Never mind. Have you thought of anyone you'd like to use that magic wire on?»
«I've been making a list. You're at the top.»
«Well, watch it. Sigmund knows you've got it, even if nobody else does.»
«He's second.»
«How long till we reach Forward Station?»
I'd been rechecking our course. We were decelerating at thirty gravities and veering to one side. «Twenty hours and a few minutes,» I said.
«Good. I'll get a chance to do some studying.» He began calling up data from the computer.
I asked permission to read over his shoulder. He gave it.
Bastard. He reads twice as fast as I do. I tried to skim to get some idea of what he was after.
Collapsars: three known. The nearest was one component of a double in Cygnus, more than a hundred light-years away. Expeditions had gone there to drop probes.
The theory of the black hole wasn't new to me, though the math was over my head. If a star is massive enough, then after it has burned its nuclear fuel and started to cool, no possible internal force can hold it from collapsing inward past its own Swartzchild radius. At that point the escape velocity from the star becomes greater than lightspeed, and beyond that deponent sayeth not, because nothing can leave the star, not information, not matter, not radiation. Nothing — except gravity.
Such a collapsed star can be expected to weigh five solar masses or more; otherwise its collapse would stop at the neutron star stage. Afterward it can only grow bigger and more massive.
There wasn't the slightest chance of finding anything that massive out here at the edge of the solar system. If such a thing were anywhere near, the sun would have been in orbit around it.
The Siberia meteorite must have been weird enough, to be remembered for nine hundred years. It had knocked down trees over thousands of square miles, yet trees near the touchdown point were left standing. No part of the meteorite itself had ever been found. Nobody had seen it hit. In 1908, Tunguska, Siberia, must have been as sparsely settled as the Earth's moon is today.
«Carlos, what does all this have to do with anything?»
«Does Holmes tell Watson?»
I had real trouble following the cosmology. Physics verged on philosophy here, or vice versa. Basically the big bang theory — which pictures the universe as exploding from a single point mass, like a titanic bomb — was in competition with the steady state universe, which has been going on forever and will continue to do so. The cyclic universe is a succession of big bangs followed by contractions. There are variants on all of them.
When the quasars were first discovered, they seemed to date from an earlier stage in the evolution of the universe, which, by the steady state hypothesis, would not be evolving at all. The steady state went out of fashion. Then, a century ago, Hilbury had solved the mystery of the quasars. Meanwhile one of the implications of the big bang had not panned out. That was where the math got beyond me.
There was some discussion of whether the universe was open or closed in four-space, but Carlos turned it off. «Okay,» he said with satisfaction.