Juggler of Worlds Read Online Free Page A

was agreed that exploration was madness. It could not be otherwise, when to leave home world and herd was insanity.
    Hence these humans.
    Trial and error had shown humans made excellent explorers. Humans didn’t know about the experiments, of course. Nessus had no intention of revealing them. He didn’t dare. No Puppeteer would.
    The invisible
it
they distantly orbited was a recently discovered neutron star, designated BVS-1. Like every neutron star, BVS-1 was the extremely compressed remains of a supernova. Implosion had crushed the stellar slag, more massive than many a normal star, into a sphere just 17 kilometers in diameter. Its own gravity kept it that small. A film of ordinary matter coated a slightly thicker layer of free-ranging subatomic particles, which covered—no one knew what, exactly. That inner orb approached the density of an atomic nucleus. Physicists called the core material neutronium or neutron-degenerate matter. Engineers called it unobtainium. Both argued heatedly about its properties.
    Most neutron stars shouted their presence across light-years, transforming cosmic dust and gas into cataclysmic X-ray blasts or gamma bursts. But it wasn’t radiation that kept explorers away from neutron stars and a close look at the mysterious neutronium. It was those in-spiraling clouds of dust and gas themselves, accelerated to relativistic speeds as they were sucked in. No matter how impervious the hull, the pummeling would be fatal to instruments or crew.
    And then there was BVS-1, cold and dark, its presence recently revealed by a gravitational anomaly.
    BVS-1 had long ago devoured its accretion disc and ceased to pulse. Its surface temperature, scarcely warmer than empty space itself, implied it had been a neutron star for at least a billion years. That made it approachable—
    Or so the theory went.
    THEY CIRCLED BVS-1 at the presumed safe distance of two million kilometers. Nessus tried not to dwell on that presumption. Peter and SonyaLaskin had monitored BVS-1 for days from a closer orbit, reporting regularly by hyperwave radio, before swooping in for a close look.
    The
Hal Clement
had not been heard from since.
    “Any signs of them?” Nessus asked. His calm tone was a lie. Every instinct demanded that he flee—if not from the astronomical enigma, then at least from the unpredictable humans. He wanted to lock himself into his cabin, to curl into a ball, his heads tucked tightly inside, and hide from the universe.
    Trisha shook her head. “No response to our broadcasts. Nothing on radar.”
    “Could be interference,” Raul said hopefully. “Or simple equipment breakdown.”
    True, the Laskins’ comm gear might have failed. That didn’t explain the lack of a radar sighting. “Keep trying,” Nessus ordered. He fought the urge to pluck at his already-disheveled mane. Something had gone badly wrong here.
    This
was why his people didn’t explore.
    Raul broke the lengthening silence, his manner apologetic. “Still nothing.”
    Nessus settled astraddle the Y-shaped padded bench that was his post on the bridge. With his lip nodes, far nimbler than human fingers, he operated a human computer console. The Laskins’ planned course was as he remembered. Their hyperbolic plunge would have them skim within two kilometers of BVS-1’s mysterious surface. If their autopilot had erred only slightly and they had somehow impacted…
    If he could contemplate
that
malfunction, why not others? Nessus contemplated the planned hairpin turn, the ship hurled back into space. It had been days since the Laskins went missing. “What if the autopilot didn’t resume orbit after the dive? How far would they coast?”
    Trisha plopped onto an empty crash couch. Her body blocked whatever she did with her console. “I’ll expand our radar search.”
    She found the ship adrift, millions of kilometers from where they had searched. It did not answer hails. Raul brought them alongside.
    Through his view port, Nessus studied