Back to the control room, where Ausfaller set up a relay to the Alien Affairs Bureau 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 recognise 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 Schwarzschild 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 today.
"Carlos, what does all this have to do with anything?"
