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turies of research, but it will only move one man. As is, the
ship is a failure. Shall we go inside?"
The lifesystem was two circular rooms, one above the
other, with a small airlock to one side. The lower room was
the control room, with banks of switches and dials and blink-
ing lights dominated by a huge spherical mass pointer. The
upper room was bare walls, transparent, through which I
could see air- and food-producing equipment.
"This will be the relaxroom," said the puppeteer. "We de-
cided to let the pilot decorate it himself."
"Why me?"
"Let me further explain the problem." The puppeteer be-
gan to pace the floor. I hunkered down against the wall and
watched. Watching a puppeteer move is a pleasure. Even in
Jinx's gravity the deerlike body seemed weightless, the tiny
hooves tapping the floor at random. "The human sphere
of colonization is some thirty light-years across, is it
not?"
"Maximum. It's not exactly a sphere "
"The puppeteer region is much smaller. The Kdatlyno
sphere is half the size of yours, and the Kzinti is fractionally
larger. These are the important space-traveling species. We
must discount the Outsiders since they do not use ships. Some
spheres coincide, naturally. Travel from one sphere to an-
other is nearly nil except for ourselves, since our sphere of
influence extends to all who buy our hulls. But add all these
regions, and you have a region sixty light-years across. This
ship could cross it in seventy-five minutes. Allow six hours
for takeoff and six for landing, assuming no traffic snarls
near the world of destination, and we have a ship which can
go anywhere in thirteen hours but nowhere in less than
twelve, carrying one pilot and no cargo, costing seven billion
stars."
"How about exploration?"
"We puppeteers have no taste for abstract knowledge. And
how should we explore?" Meaning that whatever race flew
the ship would gain the advantages thereby. A puppeteer
wouldn't risk his necks by flying it himself. "What we need
is a great deal of money and a gathering of intelligences, to
design something which may go slower but must be less
bulky. General Products (Joes not wish to spend so much on
something that may fail. We will require the best minds of
each sentient species and the richest investors. Beowulf
Shaeffer, we need to attract attention."
"A publicity stunt?"
"Yes. We wish to send a pilot to the center of the galaxy
and back."
"Ye.. .gods! Will it go that fast?"
"It would require some twenty-five days to reach the cen-
ter and an equal time to-return. You can see the reasoning
behind "
"It's perfect. You don't need to spell it out. Why me?"
"We wish you to make the trip and then write of it. I have
a list of pilots who write. Those I have approached have been
reluctant. They say that writing on the ground is safer than
testing unknown ships. I follow their reasoning."
"Me too."
"Will you go?"
"What am I offered?"
"One hundred thousand stars for the trip. Fifty thousand
to write the story, in addition to what you sell it for."
"Sold."
From then on, my only worry was that my new boss would
find out that someone had ghost-written that neutron star
article.
Oh, I wondered at first why General Products was willing
to trust, me. The first time I worked for them I tried to steal
their ship, for reasons which seemed good at the time. But
the ship I now called Long Shot really wasn't worth stealing..
Any potential buyer would know it was hot; and what good
would it be to him? Long Shot could have explored a globular
cluster; but her only other use was publicity.
Sending her to the Core was a masterpiece of promotion.
Look: It was twelve days from We Made It to Jinx by
conventional craft, and twelve hours by Long Shot. What's
the difference? You spent twelve years saving for the trip.
But the Core! Ignoring refueling and reprovisioning prob-
lems, my old ship could have reached the galaxy's core in
three hundred years. No known species had ever seen the
Core! It hid behind layer on layer of tenuous gas and dust
clouds. You can find libraries of literature on those central
stars, but they all consist of generalities and educated guesses
based on observation of other galaxies, like Andromeda.
Three centuries dropped to less than a month! There's
something anyone can grasp. And with pictures!
The lifesystem was finished in a couple of weeks. I had
them leave the control-room walls transparent and paint the
relaxroom solid blue, no windows. When they finished, I had
entertainment tapes and everything it takes to keep a man
sane for seven weeks in a room the size of a large closet.
On the last day the puppeteer and I spoke the final version
of my contract. I had four months to reach the galaxy's center
and return. The outside cameras would run constantly; I was
not to interfere with them. Jf the ship suffered a mechanical
failure, I could return before reaching the center; otherwise,
no. There were penalties. I took a copy of the tape to leave
with a lawyer.
"There is a thing you should know," the puppeteer said
afterward. "The direction of thrust opposes the direction of
hyperdrive." "I don't get it."
The puppeteer groped for words. "If you turned on the
reaction motors and the hyperdrive together, the flames
would precede your ship through hyperspace."
I got the picture then. Ass backward into the unknown.
With the control room at the ship's bottom, it made sense.
To a puppeteer, it made sense.
3
And I was off.
I went up under two standard gees because I like my com-
fort. For twelve hours I used only the reaction motors. It
wouldn't do to be too deep in a gravity well when 1 used a
hyperdrive, especially an experimental one. Pilots who do
that never leave hyperspace. The relaxroom kept me enter-
tained until the bell rang. I slipped down to the control room,
netted myself down against free fall, turned off the motors,
rubbed my hands briskly together, and turned on the hyper-
drive.
It wasn't quite as I'd expected.
I couldn't see out, of course. When the hyperdrive goes on,
it's like your blind spot expanding to take in all the windows,
It's not just that you don't see anything; you forget that
there's anything to see. If there's a window between the
kitchen control bank and your print of Dali's "Spam," your
eye and mind will put the picture right next to the kitchen
bank, obliterating the space between. It takes getting ased
to, in fact it has driven people insane, but that wasn't what
bothered me. I've spent thousands of man-hours in hyper-
space. I kept my eye on the mass pointer.
The mass pointer is a big transparent sphere with a num-
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