Crashlander

From then on it was better. I was safe if I glanced at the mass pointer every ten minutes or so. I could forget the rest breaks, eat meals, and do isometrics while watching the pointers. For eight hours a day I slept, but during the other sixteen I moved. The gap swept toward the Core in a narrowing curve, and I followed it.

As a voyage of exploration the trip would have been a fiasco. I saw nothing. I stayed well away from anything worth seeing. Stars and dust, anomalous wispy clusters shining in the dark of the gap, invisible indications that might have been stars — my cameras picked them up from a nice safe distance, showing tiny blobs of light. In three weeks I moved almost seventeen thousand light-years toward the Core.

The end of those three weeks was the end of the gap.

Before me was an uninteresting wash of stars backed by a wall of opaque dust clouds. I still had thirteen thousand light-years to go before I reached the center of the galaxy-I took some pictures and moved in.

Ten-minute breaks, mealtimes that grew longer and longer for the rest they gave, sleep periods that left my eyes red and burning. The stars were thick and the dust was thicker, so that the mass pointer showed a blur of blue broken by sharp blue lines. The lines began to get less sharp. I took breaks every half hour …

Three days of that.

It was getting near lunchtime on the fourth day. I sat watching the mass pointer, noting the fluctuations in the blue blur which. showed the changing density of the dust around me. Suddenly it faded out completely. Great, wouldn't it be nice if the mass pointer went out on me? But the sharp starlines were still there, ten or twenty of them pointing in all directions. I went back to steering. The clock chimed to indicate a rest period. I sighed happily and dropped into normal space.

The clock showed that I had half an hour to wait for lunch. I thought about eating anyway, decided against it. The routine was all that kept me going. I wondered what the sky looked like, reflexively looked up so I wouldn't have to look down at the transparent floor. That big an expanse of hyperspace is hard even on trained eyes. I remembered I wasn't in hyperspace and looked down.

For a time I just stared. Then, without taking my eyes off the floor, I reached for the hyperphone.

«Beowulf Shaeffer?»

«No, this is Albert Einstein. I stowed away when the Long Shot took off, and I've decided to turn myself in for the reward.»

«Giving misinformation is an implicit violation of contract. Why have you called?»

«I can see the Core.»

«That is not a reason to call. It was implicit in your contract that you would see the Core.»

«Damn it, don't you care? Don't you want to know what it looks like?»

«If you wish to describe it now, as a precaution against accident, I will switch you to a dictaphone. However, if your mission is not totally successful, we cannot use your recording.»

I was thinking up a really searing answer when I heard the click. Great; my boss had hooked me into a dictaphone. I said one short sentence and hung up.

* * *

The Core.

Gone were the obscuring masses of dust and gas. A billion years ago they must have been swept up for fuel by the hungry, crowded stars. The Core lay before me like a great jeweled sphere. I'd expected it to be a gradual thing, a thick mass of stars thinning out into the arms. There was nothing gradual about it. A clear ball of multicolored light five or six thousand light-years across nestled in the heart of the galaxy, sharply bounded by the last of the dust clouds. I was 10,400 light-years from the center.

The red stars were the biggest and brightest. I could actually pick some of them out as individuals. The rest was a finger painting in fluorescent green and blue. But those red stars … they would have sent Aldebaran back to kindergarten.

It was all so bright. I needed the telescope to see black between the stars.

I'll show you how bright it was.

Is it night where you are? Step outside and look at the stars. What color are they? Antares may show red if you're near enough; in the system, so will Mars. Sirius may show bluish. But all the rest are white pinpoints. Why? Because it's dark. Your day vision is in color, but at night you see black and white, like a dog.

The Core suns were bright enough for color vision.

I'd pick a planet here! Not in the Core itself but right out here, with the Core on one side and on the other the dimly starred dust clouds forming their strange convoluted curtain.

Man, what a view! Imagine that flaming jeweled sphere rising in the east, hundreds of times as big as Binary shows on Jinx, but without the constant feeling Binary gives you, the fear that the orange world will fall on you, for the vast, twinkling Core is only starlight, lovely and harmless. I'd pick my world now and stake a claim. When the puppeteers got their drive fixed up, I'd have the finest piece of real estate in the known universe! If I could only find a habitable planet.

If only I could find it twice.