Worlds of IF (March 1967) (Modified) by Galaxy Publishing Corporation

Author:Galaxy Publishing Corporation
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: jackson, priss, bloom, elephant, ahmuls, beale, susiem, hugo, sepia, sepia springs, billiard ball, mortal mountain, iron thorn, science fiction, transfer booth, springs affair, outsider ship, lilly bell, general products
Published: 1967-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

“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 //.”

T he 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 ram-scoop 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.”

“That won’t be soon.”

He was right. A hyperdrive ship would not only have to reach her, but to carry reaction fuel to match her speed. Her speed was just less than a photon’s, and she was more than five hundred light-years away, seventeen times the diameter of known space.

“They’ll wait for us,” I said.

“Did you have any problems?” “Their translator is pretty good. But we’ll have to be careful. The thing about buying information is that you don’t know what you’ve got until you’ve bought it. They couldn’t just offer to sell me the present position of the Lazy Eight II. We’d have tracked their course by scope until we saw fusion light, 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 as no dot. I dropped out of hyperspace and set the deep-radar to hunt out the Outsider.

IV

he 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 ST oo 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,

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