«What?»
«I could be right. Insufficient data. I'll have to see what Forward thinks.»
«I hope you both choke. I'm going to sleep.»
Out here in the broad borderland between Sol system and interstellar space, Julian Forward had found a stony mass the size of a middling asteroid. From a distance it seemed untouched by technology: a lopsided spheroid, rough-surfaced and dirty white. Closer in, flecks of metal and bright paint showed like randomly placed jewels. Air locks, windows, projecting antennae, and things less identifiable. A lighted disk with something projecting from the center: a long metal arm with half a dozen ball joints in it and a cup on the end. I studied that one, trying to guess what it might be … and gave up.
I brought Hobo Kelly to rest a fair distance away. To Ausfaller I said, «You'll stay aboard?»
«Of course. I will do nothing to disabuse Dr. Forward of the notion that the ship is empty.»
We crossed to Forward Station on an open taxi: two seats, a fuel tank, and a rocket motor. Once I turned to ask Carlos something and asked instead, «Carlos? Are you all right?»
His face was white and strained. «I'll make it.»
«Did you try closing your eyes?»
«It was worse. Futz, I made it this far on hypnosis. Bey, it's so empty.»
«Hang on. We're almost there.»
The blond Belter was outside one of the air locks in a skintight suit and a bubble helmet. He used a flashlight to flag us down. We moored our taxi to a spur of rock — the gravity was almost nil — and went inside.
«I'm Harry Moskowitz,» the Belter said. «They call me Angel. Dr. Forward is waiting in the laboratory.»
The interior of the asteroid was a network of straight cylindrical corridors, laser-drilled, pressurized, and lined with cool blue light strips. We weighed a few pounds near the surface, less in the deep interior. Angel moved in a fashion new to me: a flat jump from the floor that took him far down the corridor to brush the ceiling, push back to the floor, and jump again. Three jumps and he'd wait, not hiding his amusement at our attempts to catch up.
«Doctor Forward asked me to give you a tour,» he told us.
I said, «You seem to have a lot more corridor than you need. Why didn't you cluster all the rooms together?»
«This rock was a mine once upon a time. The miners drilled these passages. They left big hollows wherever they found air-bearing rock or ice pockets. All we had to do was wall them off.»
That explained why there was so much corridor between the doors and why the chambers we saw were so big. Some rooms were storage areas, Angel said; not worth opening. Others were tool rooms, life-support systems, a garden, a fair-sized computer, a sizable fusion plant. A mess room built to hold thirty actually held about ten, all men, who looked at us curiously before they went back to eating. A hangar, bigger than need be and open to the sky, housed taxis and powered suits with specialized tools and three identical circular cradles, all empty.
I gambled. Carefully casual, I asked, «You use mining tugs?»
Angel didn't hesitate. «Sure. We can ship water and metals up from the inner system, but it's cheaper to hunt them down ourselves. In an emergency the tugs could probably get us back to the inner system.»
We moved back into the tunnels. Angel said, «Speaking of ships, I don't think I've ever seen one like yours. Were those bombs lined up along the ventral surface?»
«Some of them,» I said.
Carlos laughed. «Bey won't tell me how he got it.»
«Pick, pick, pick. All right, I stole it. I don't think anyone is going to complain.»
Angel, frankly curious before, was frankly fascinated as I told the story of how I had been hired to fly a cargo ship in the Wunderland system. «I didn't much like the looks of the guy who hired me, but what do I know about Wunderlanders? Besides, I needed the money.» I told of my surprise at the proportions of the ship: the solid wall behind the cabin, the passenger section that was only holographs in blind portholes. By then I was already afraid that if I tried to back out, I'd be made to disappear.
But when I learned my destination, I got really worried. «It was in the Serpent Stream — you know, the crescent of asteroids in Wunderland system? It's common knowledge that the Free Wunderland Conspiracy is all through those rocks. When they gave me my course, I just took off and aimed for Sirius.»
«Strange they left you with a working hyperdrive.»
«Man, they didn't. They'd ripped out the relays. I had to fix them myself. It's lucky I looked, because they had the relays wired to a little bomb under the control chair.» I stopped, then, «Maybe I fixed it wrong. You heard what happened? My hyperdrive motor just plain vanished. It must have set off some explosive bolts, because the belly of the ship blew off. It was a dummy. What's left looks to be a pocket bomber.»
«That's what I thought.»
«I guess I'll have to turn it in to the goldskin cops when we reach the inner system. Pity.»
Carlos was smiling and shaking his head. He covered by saying, «It only goes to prove that you can run away from your problems.»
The next tunnel ended in a great hemispherical chamber lidded by a bulging transparent dome. A man-thick pillar rose through the rock floor to a seal in the center of the dome. Above the seal, gleaming against night and stars, a multi-jointed metal arm reached out blindly into space. The arm ended in what might have been a tremendous iron puppy dish.
Forward was in a horseshoe-shaped control console near the pillar. I hardly noticed him. I'd seen this arm-and-bucket thing before, coming in from space, but I hadn't grasped its size.
Forward caught me gaping. «The Grabber,» he said.
He approached us in a bouncing walk, comical but effective. «Pleased to meet you, Carlos Wu. Beowulf Shaeffer.» His handshake was not crippling, because he was being careful. He had a wide, engaging smile. «The Grabber is our main exhibit here. After the Grabber there's nothing to see.
I asked, «What does it do?»
Carlos laughed. «It's beautiful! Why does it have to do anything?»
Forward acknowledged the compliment. «I've been thinking of entering it in a junk-sculpture show. What it does is manipulate large, dense masses. The cradle at the end of the arm is a complex of electromagnets. I can actually vibrate masses in there to produce polarized gravity waves.»
Six massive arcs of girder divided the dome into pie sections. Now I noticed that they and the seal at their center gleamed like mirrors. They were reinforced by stasis fields.
More bracing for the Grabber? I tried to imagine forces that would require such strength.
«What do you vibrate in there? A megaton of lead?»
«Lead sheathed in soft iron was our test mass. But that was three years ago. I haven't worked with the Grabber lately, but we had some satisfactory runs with a sphere of neutronium enclosed in a stasis field. Ten billion metric tons.»
I said, «What's the point?»
From Carlos I got a dirty look. Forward seemed to think it was a wholly reasonable question. «Communication, for one thing. There must be intelligent species all through the galaxy, most of them too far away for our ships. Gravity waves are probably the best way to reach them.»
«Gravity waves travel at lightspeed, don't they? Wouldn't hyperwave be better?»
«We can't count on their having it. Who but the Outsiders would think to do their experimenting this far from a sun? If we want to reach beings who haven't dealt with the Outsiders, we'll have to use gravity waves once we know how.»
Angel offered us chairs and refreshments. By the time we were settled, I was already out of it; Forward and Carlos were talking plasma physics, metaphysics, and what are our old friends doing? I gathered that they had large numbers of mutual acquaintances. And Carlos was probing for the whereabouts of cosmologists specializing in gravity physics.