"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 airlocks in a skin-tight suit and a bubble helmet.

He used a flashlight to flag us down. We moored our taxi to a spur of rockthe 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. Thee jumps and he'd wait, not hiding his amus.e.m.e.nt 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 cl.u.s.ter all the rooms together?"

"This rock was a mine, once upon, a time. The miners drilled these pa.s.sages. 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' 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' think I'e 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 pa.s.senger 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 armand-bucket thing before, coming in from s.p.a.ce, 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 ma.s.ses. The cradle at the end of the arm is a complex of electromagnets. I can actually vibrate ma.s.ses in there to produce polarized gravity waves."

Six ma.s.sive 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 ma.s.s. But that was three years ago. I haven't worked with the Grabber lately, but we hd 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.

A few were in the Quicksilver Group. Others were among the colony worlds ...especially on Jinx, trying to get the Inst.i.tute of Knowledge to finance various projects, such as more expeditions to the collapsar in Cygnus.

"Are you still with the Inst.i.tute, Doctor?"

Forward shook his head.

"They stopped backing me. Not enough results. But I can continue to use this station, which is Inst.i.tute property. One day they'll sell it and we'l have to move."

"I was wondering why they sent you here in the first place," said Carlos.

"Sirius has an adequate cometary belt."

"But Sol is the only system with any kind of civilization this far from its sun. And I can count on better men to work with. Sol system has always had its fair share of cosmologists."

"I thought you might have come to solve an old mystery. The Tunguska meteorite.

You've heard of it, of course."

Forward laughed.

"of course. Who hasn't? I don't think we'll ever know just what it was that hit Siberia that night. It may have been a chunk of antimatter. I'm told that there is antimatter in known s.p.a.ce."

"If it was, we'll never prove it," Carlos admitted.

"Shall we discuss your problem?" Forward seemed to remember my existence.

"Shaeffer, what does a professional pilot think when his hyperdrive motor disappears?"

"He gets very upset."

"Any theories?"

I decided not to mention pirates. I wanted to see if Forward would mention them first.

"n.o.body seems to like my theory," I said, and I sketched out the argument for monsters in hypers.p.a.ce.

Forward heard me out politely. Then, "I'll give you this, it' be hard to disprove. Do you buy it?"

"I'm afraid to. I almost got myself killed once, looking for s.p.a.ce monsters when I should have been looking for natural causes."

"Why would the hypers.p.a.ce monsters eat only your motor?"

"Um ...futz. I pa.s.s."

"What do you think Carlos? Natural phenomena or s.p.a.ce monsters?"

"Pirates," said Carlos.

"How are they going about it?"

"Well, this business of a hyperdrive motor disappearing and leaving the ship behind-- that's brand new. I'd think it would take a sharp gravity gradient, with a tidal effect as strong as that of a neutron star or a black hole."

"You won't find anything like that anywhere in Human s.p.a.ce."

"I know." Carlos looked frustrated. That had to be faked. Earlier he'd behaved as if he already had an answer.

Forward said, "I don't think a black hole would have that effect anyway. If it did you'd never know it, because the ship would disappear down the black hole."

"What about a powerful gravity generator?"

"Hmmm." Forward thought about it, then shook his ma.s.sive head.

"You're talking about a surface gravity in the millions. Any gravity generator I've ever heard of would collapse itself at that level. Let's see, with a frame supported by stasis fields... no. The frame would hold and the rest of the machinery would flow like water."

"You don't leave much of my theory."

"Sorry."

Carlos ended a short pause by asking, "How do you think the universe started?"

Forward looked puzzled at the change of subject.

And I began to get uneasy.

Given all that I don't know about cosmology, I do know att.i.tudes and tones of voice.

Carlos was giving out broad hints, trying to lead Forward to his own conclusion. Black holes, pirates, the Tunguska meteorite, the origin of the universe--he was offering them as clues. And Forward was not responding correctly.

He was saying, "Ask a priest. Me, I lean toward the Big Bang. The Steady State always seemed so futile."

"I like the Big Bang too," said Carlos.

There was something else to worry about. Those mining tugs: they almost had to belong to Forward Station. How would Ausfaller react when three familiar s.p.a.cecraft came cruising into his s.p.a.ce?

How did I want him to react? Forward Station would make a dandy pirate base.

Permeated by laser-drilled corridors distributed almost at random... could there be two networks of corridors, connected only at the surface? How would we know?

Suddenly I didn't want to know. I wanted to go home. If only Carlos would stay off the touchy subjects-- But he was speculating about the ship eater again. "That ten billion metric tons of neutronium, now, that you were using for a test ma.s.s. That wouldn't be big enough or dense enough to give us enough of a gravity gradient."

"It might, right near the surface." Forward grinned and held his hands close together.

"It was about that big.