Juggler of Worlds Read Online Free Page B

the
Hal Clement
. It had a ferocious spin. Why had the Laskins spun up their ship like that?
    “We can’t board for a look while it’s spinning,” Nessus said. “Any ideas?”
    Raul rubbed his chin. “Nessus, are the landing struts on the other ship steel? Ours are.”
    Nessus retrieved the specs. “Steel, yes.”
    “Then we use our magnetic docking couplers for drag. Like all ourequipment, the couplers are way overengineered. We slow the
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spin while our attitude thrusters keep us at a safe distance.”
    There were several bursts of keyboarding, and then Raul slapped the console in frustration. “Tanj! It’s going to take a while.”
    Of course their systems were overengineered. Nessus would not otherwise have set hoof aboard. “Proceed,” he said.
    And so Raul managed the braking pulses, adjusting the pulse rate as spin bled away. Trisha and the nav computer muttered to each other. Nessus… fretted.
    Until—
    Trisha whistled.
“That’s
why they’re spinning and so far off-course. The rotation of a massive object—tiny though it is, BVS-1 outmasses Sol—warps nearby space. I ran the numbers and it comes down to this. The spin the
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picked up and the kink from its planned trajectory show BVS-1 rotates about every two and a half minutes.”
    “Interesting,” Nessus said atonally. In truth, he couldn’t imagine how knowing the spin of the neutron star could possibly matter. If his kind had any curiosity, though, they’d probably be as foolishly brave as these humans.
    All that interested Nessus at that moment was the still-silent ship. It had finally slowed down enough for meaningful observation—and cautious boarding. Its landing struts looked
odd
somehow. That had to be in his imagination. Peter and Sonya could not possibly have landed. If they had, they could not have launched.
    Trisha and Nessus checked Raul’s suit gauges twice before allowing him into the air lock. Their comm link checked out. So did his helmet cam. Holding a gas pistol, Raul jetted the few meters to the derelict. A dimple of curdled sky, where gravity bent even starlight, showed the general location of BVS-1.
    Something was terribly wrong. Nessus could tell Trisha felt it, too. She leaned forward anxiously as Raul disappeared into the air lock of the Laskins’ ship.
    “Nessus, Trish, are you there?” Raul’s camera relayed the inner hatch of the air lock. They watched his gloved finger stretch toward the controls. Status lamps flashed. The hatch began to cycle. “Life-support systems all register nominal.”
    “We’re here,” Nessus said. “I suggest you keep your suit sealed anyway.”
    “Will do,” Raul said.
    Nessus watched the inner hatch open. Raul and camera moved inward, panned along a corridor, turned a corner—
    The next thing Nessus saw, as his heads whipped uncontrollably to a point of safety between his front legs, was the underside of his belly.

Sigmund sat alone at a small table in the packed ship’s lounge. Beyond his left elbow lay a coat of blue paint, a supposedly impregnable hull, and an unknowable amount of… he didn’t know what.
    No one did.
    The good thing about hyperspace was hyperdrive. Hyperdrive travel corresponded, in normal space, to a light-year every three days. The bad thing about hyperspace was no one knew what it was. Every so often, a hyperdrive ship disappeared. Scientists declaimed learnedly that the pilot must have flown too close to a mathematical singularity, the warping of space near a stellar mass.
    What happened in such cases was unclear. Perhaps the errant ship fell down a wormhole, only to emerge unreachably incommunicably far, far away. Perhaps the ship became trapped forever in hyperspace. Or, just maybe, the ship ceased to exist. The math was ambiguous.
    Compared to the less-than-nothingness centimeters away, odd scents and strange constellations were inconsequential. Sigmund yearned for a world. Any world.
    He took more comfort from the beer