A BETTER MOUSETRAP

 

 

There was, of course, Charles Fort. Some of my fellow SF writers loved him for his iconoclasm, his dogmatic nonconformity, and his writing style. I always found him exasperating.

Perhaps his most celebrated statement was this one, simple and devastating. After sifting for years through stories of scientifically impossible happenings, he decided that the only explanation covering them all was to assume that we inhabit an artificial environment and summed the entire hypothesis into this brief phrase: “I think we’re property.”

Eric Frank Russell made a classic novel out of that: Sinister Barrier. But even when I first read it, many years ago, I was struck by a nagging thought. That suggestion implies a shred of unjustifiable vanity. Our masters, presumably, would be superintelligent beings—and what superintelligent creature would want to own a race like us?

I think we’re more likely to be a bloody nuisance.

 

* * *

 

“I’d like you to meet Professor Aylward of Copernicus Observatory,” said Angus.

Up to that point, Captain Martinu had been seriously

considering leaving the party. The band was much too loud, the dancing was far too energetic for someone like himself who was used to long periods of free fall that wasted the muscles, and the promise of fascinating people to talk to with which Angus had persuaded him to come along had not been fulfilled.

Now, though, he felt a sudden stir of interest as he shook the hand of the short, bespectacled, balding scientist. He said, “You mean you’re the Aylward they named the Aylward Field after?”

“Er—” Aylward looked uncomfortable. “Well, as a matter of fact, yes, I am.”

“As a result of which,” Angus said, “I owe you my life, among other things.” He ran his hand through his shock of coarse black hair, which stuck up from his head in the currently fashionable Fijian style, like a chimney sweep’s brush.

Martinu said, “And I owe you a couple of billion dollars. We picked up a buster with your Field in the old Castor, when I was a junior engine tech.”

Rather diffidently, Aylward eyed the other’s immaculate uniform. “And stayed on in the space service?” he said. “Isn’t that unusual?”

“Oh, unique!” Martinu agreed with a trace of pride. “I’m the only man in the service who’s picked up a buster and not immediately bought himself out of a career job. I say, is there anything I can do for you?”

Aylward seemed to be in some distress, his breathing deep and stertorous, his shoulders hunching forward. He said, “You can help me to a chair, if you will. I’ve been on Luna for the past seventeen years or so, and full gravity makes me terribly tired.”

Martinu hastily took the professor’s arm; he was in top physical condition—had to be—but even so he was quickly exhausted by a couple of hours on his feet, so he could apprecite Aylward’s discomfort. Angus, as always, had vanished the moment he saw a conversation starting and had gone to spark another one elsewhere.

There was a vacant double seat in the nearest of the alcoves off the dance floor. Martinu headed for it. There was a couple engaged in violent lovemaking on the other seat, but he ignored their looks of irritation as he sat Aylward down. He said, “Let me get you a drink.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Aylward. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a bandanna handkerchief matching his Mexican-style cummerbund. “A long cool one, for choice.”

“Will do,” said Martinu, and went in search of a waiter.

He was on his way back with the drinks when Angus, a look of anxiety on his long face, pushed through a cluster of other guests and caught his arm.

“Martinu, I guess I should warn you about old Aylward. I mean, he’s a nice guy and a genius and all that, but like a lot of geniuses he’s a bit nutty on one point, and unfortunately you’ve hit it right away.”

“What? Busters?”

“Yes. He has a perfectly absurd theory about what they are and where they come from, and if you get him started on it, he’ll bend your ear all night.”

Martinu shrugged. “If he hasn’t got a right to theorize about busters, who has? Besides, the Aylward Field got me a share in one—I reckon listening to him for an hour or two is a cheap price to pay for that.”

“Damn it, I had to tell him what a buster was, once!” Angus made a sweeping gesture, which spilled his drink over the back of his hand. Fishing for a handkerchief to dry it, he went on, “In fact, if it hadn’t been for me—”

Something in Martinu’s expression warned him. He broke off. “I guess I told you about that. Sorry. But don’t say I didn’t warn you, will you?”

Martinu grinned and walked on.

The lovers had gone, presumably in search of more privacy. He set a tall frosted glass beside the professor and sat down himself. “I got you a julep,” he said. “Is that all right?”

“Perfect.” Aylward produced a length of tubing and dropped one end into the glass to save himself the effort of holding it up while he drank. “What are you having?”

“Slivovitz,” said Martinu. “Sort of homage to my Balkan ancestry. Anyway, what brings you back to Earth after such a long time, professor?”

“Oh, someone seems to be infringing the patents on the Field,” Aylward answered. “Angus told me I was needed, so I came down. He’s my agent, you know—and very good he is. I don’t know how I’d manage without him. I’ve always found the world of commerce far more complicated than any problem in astrophysics, because it’s easier to improve your equipment than yourself.”

“You have quite a setup at Copernicus, don’t you? They tell me it’s the best-equipped observatory in the system, and you financed practically all of it yourself. May I inquire—does the Field bring you in a good income?”

Aylward gave a tired smile. “Excellent! I never expected so much return for so little effort.”

He drew out the tube from his now half-empty glass and began to run it absently between his fingers. “People sometimes ask me,” he went on, “why I stick at my job when I’m wealthy enough to live in luxury on Earth. I think you’ll probably understand me when I say I think I made a sensible decision.” He cocked an eyebrow at Martinu.

The captain suddenly found himself liking Aylward a lot. He smiled, and as he nodded agreement his hair bobbed around his face. It was too soft for the Fijian style, so he had had to settle for curls like a Queen Anne wig, and being used to a free-fall crewcut he found it a permanent irritation. Damn these silly Earthside fads!

“I wouldn’t even have come to this party but for Angus’s insistence,” Aylward went on. “I depend completely on him, as I said, and he does have this tendency to fly off into space over the littlest things. … We were on the Algol together when we located the buster that started the whole thing. Did he ever tell you the story?”

Martinu almost said, “He’s told everybody!” But he checked himself. For one thing, Angus’s version of the story had probably been colored by the passage of time, while Aylward’s might give a different slant. And for another, though the professor’s tone had been conventionally light, Martinu sensed that he was actually aching to find someone to listen to him. Angus had more than likely gone around warning all his other guests about Aylward’s obsession with the buster problem.

He set his glass down on his knee. “That was when Rusch was in command, wasn’t it?” he said. “Yes, I’d very much like to hear about it.”

 

The radar tech first class at number three screen held his breath for a long moment. When he let it out, it was to speak in a voice shaky with excitement.

“Buster, sir!” he said.

The lieutenant on the other side of the room whipped around and bounded over with a hard kick at the far wall. He caught the back of the tech’s chair with one hand and hung floating, his eyes wide. “Where?” he demanded.

“There, sir.” The tech put his finger on a large green blip near the center of the screen. “It broke through about ten seconds ago. I saw it arrive. And the range and mass are exactly right.”

“Are you sure?” said the lieutenant. But he didn’t wait for an answer before shouting to the orderly at the phone desk.

“Green, get me a line to the bridge!”

“Aye aye, sir,” said the orderly unemotionally.

The lieutenant turned to the screen again. He said, “What is the range?”

“About four and a half kil, sir. Right under our feet.”

The lieutenant whistled. “Well, for sure it didn’t sneak up on us. Read it for relative velocity, will you?”

The tech slid cross-hairs over the screen, centered on the blip, and pressed the switch of the doppler integrator. They waited the necessary five seconds, and a figure went up on the dial.

“Six hundred,” the lieutenant said. “Hasn’t settled into its natural orbit yet. I think—”

He was going to say he thought the tech was right, but the communications orderly interrupted. “Bridge, sir!”

“Chuck it over,” said the lieutenant, and picked the phone out of the air as it soared across the room. He continued into it, “Ahmed, screen room watch, sir. One of my techs thinks we’re on a buster.”

“Hah!” said Captain Rusch skeptically. “How are we doing for white whales this week?”

“It showed up without warning on number three screen at four and a half kilomiles, sir. We haven’t had a chance to check its orbit yet, but its relative velocity is only six hundred.”

There was a pause. At length Rusch grunted. “Right, I’ll get a ’scope on it,” he said. “Bearing?”

“Oh-seven-six and a half, sir.”

“Thank you, lieutenant. I’ll let you know the verdict. Don’t get too worked up till we’re sure, will you?”

That, of course, was a pious hope, Rusch reflected as he gave the bridge phone back to his own communications orderly. He could tell from the expressions on the faces around him. Even the normally placid Commander Gabrilov, who had been close enough to hear what Ahmed said, was showing excitement.

“OK,” Rusch said. “OK. I don’t have to say it again.”

Gabrilov gave a shamefaced grin and pushed himself over to the ’scope controls. “Oh-seven… six and a half,” he said under his breath as he set them. “Four and a half kil … Yes, there’s something there all right.”

“Get it on the screens,” Rusch said. “Come on now!” He felt his heart pounding faster as he glanced at the big screen mounted over the pilot board at the forward end of the bridge. A click. An ill-defined, misshapen object appeared in the center of the square frame. It could have been anything out of the asteroid belt.

There was a long silence. At last Gabrilov said, “Do you think it could really be a buster?”

“Well, why the hell don’t you take steps to find out?” Rusch snapped.

Gabrilov colored. “Sorry, sir!” he mumbled. He barked at the communications orderly. “Tell Warrant Officer Fisher to draw power for a laser beam! Ask Lieutenant Ahmed to stand by for spectroanalysis!”

“Aye aye!” said the orderly fervently, his eyes bright.

While they were waiting, Rusch glanced at Gabrilov. He said as though there had been no interruption, “It could be a buster, of course. It’s some while since the last one was found, but there have been forty-five of the things, and they turned up all over the system. One was found in a lunar equilateral, wasn’t it? But even if this is a buster, you’ve got to remember one thing.”

“What?”

“They may not all be worth picking up. Some of them may only be lumps of iron, for instance. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s possible.”

Gabrilov bit his lip and looked lugubrious.

The communications orderly said, “Sir! Screen room!”

Rusch seized the phone. Gabrilov came diving over to hover beside him.

“Get this, sir!” Ahmed’s voice said. “Spectroanalysis shows iron—cobalt—nickel—”

Gabrilov pulled a face, looking down at the floor.

“But also!” Ahmed said triumphantly. “Also silver, gold, uranium, thorium, platinum, osmium, iridium …”

He went on, but Rusch had lowered the phone.

“Number forty-six,” he said quietly.

 

Whatever the reason for all that shouting and banging and laughing, Aylward wished they would stop it and let him concentrate. He was trying to cope with more figures than his portable calculator could handle, and running side factors in his head always gave him a headache. Two zero six five nine—

The door of his cabin slammed back and Angus burst in, frantic with excitement. The chain of figures vanished into limbo, and Aylward clapped his hand to his face.

“For heaven’s sake, what are you playing at?” he snarled.

“Didn’t you hear?” said Angus, braking himself on the far wall with his foot and bouncing back towards Aylward. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to resolve some survey data—if you’ll kindly give me the chance to finish the job.” Aylward spoke with heavy sarcasm; he was an old-young man of thirty-five, with glasses and an expression that was usually mild but now was thunderous. “I never heard such a racket!”

“But we’ve picked up a buster!” Angus exclaimed.

Aylward sighed and pushed his papers under a clip to hold them to the table before sliding his chair back in its guides. “Is that serious?” he said. “Does it take long?”

Angus hooked a leg under the tabletop and shook his head pityingly. “Are you trying to make out that you don’t know what a buster is?” he demanded incredulously. “You can carry an ivory-tower pose too far, you know!”

“All right, tell me what it is,” Aylward snapped.

Angus rolled his eyes, but shrugged and complied. “Nobody knows what they are—exactly. They’re lumps of matter that apparently drop from nowhere. Radar doesn’t show them till they’re well within detector range, and they think this may have something to do with the fact that they’re fuller of high-number radioactives than a pudding is of plums.”

“Oh, yes!” Aylward said. “Of course I’ve heard of them! But there haven’t been any for some time, have there? What are they like?”

“Turn your screen on, and you’ll see one. Captain Rusch had the ’scope image piped in for everyone to look at.”

Aylward did so. The screen lit with a knife-sharp picture of a roughly spherical object, scarred across by the sweep of the high-powered laser beam. It was approximately a hundred feet in diameter. Lights from the ship were playing on it now, and made it gleam against the black depths of space.

“I wonder how much we’ll get,” Angus said in an awed tone.

“Come again?”

“These things contain fabulous riches!” Angus gave him a supercilious glance. “So your ignorance doesn’t show too much, listen and I’ll give you the background.

“The first one was found by the Aurora about six years ago. They couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw it drop out of nowhere—a hundred-foot ball of concentrated wealth. They got thousands of tons of platinum out of it, gold, silver, uranium, and so many diamonds they practically bankrupted the commercial manufacturers. All the rest—there’ve been forty-five to date—have been cast in the same mold. The precious metals have more or less flooded the market, but the demand for radioactives is still high, and everyone who’s found a buster has become rich for life.

“After the Aurora case there was a gold rush to the asteroid belt—no, don’t interrupt, let me finish! But you don’t seem to find busters with the ordinary planetoids; they showed up all over the system. And another odd thing—this is the first to be discovered in some years, although at one time they were being found at the rate of about two a month. Of course, this is probably a statistical accident; they’re virtually undetectable until you’re right on top of them.”

Aylward said, “All right, all right! I remember now. Rudolf Cotteril was prophesying economic chaos, wasn’t he? But in the event we absorbed the impact pretty well.”

“So well you don’t seem to have noticed it at all,” Angus commented dryly.

Aylward ignored the jab. “Just a second,” he said. He was frowning, for no reason Angus could think of. “If forty-five were found, and they were coming at an average two per month, the rush lasted two years. You don’t know the dates of the first and last reported findings, do you?”

“Huh?” Angus blinked. “Well, the Aurora got the first on twenty-seventh April, ’eighty-six—uh—and the Capella got the forty-fifth some time in March of ’eighty-eight. Middle of March—I think the seventeenth. Why?”

Aylward said, “And it’s ’ninety-two now!” He began frantically unstrapping himself from his chair.

“Hey! Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

Aylward looked grim. “Not being a seasoned spacetraveler,” he said, “I was a bit worried before making this trip about the number of ships that have been lost lately. I looked into it fairly closely to make sure I had a statistical chance of getting home.”

“What’s that got to do with—?”

“Since you have such a good memory for dates, you can tell me when the current run of losses started. They said thirty had gone missing in the past four years—more than in the preceding two decades!”

Bewildered, Angus said, “Sure I can tell you. The Dubhe was lost on the Venus run some time between tenth March and first April of ’eighty-eight.”

“And the next ship to go?”

“The Lucifer. She vanished—” He broke off and bit his lip.

“About two weeks later,” Aylward said, kicking himself through the door. Angus hung where he was for a moment; then he gave a gasp and dived in the other’s wake.

 

The door of the bridge slid back with a squeal of complaint. Rusch turned; when he saw who the intruder was, he frowned. It was all very well to say that young Aylward was potentially the greatest living authority on theoretical astrophysics; it was all very well for him to want to make surveys distant from the sun—but on simple principle Rusch disapproved of nonservice personnel shipping on anything other than a proper passenger liner.

However, the rosy glow attendant on the discovery of a buster had mellowed him to the point at which he did not even ask brusquely who had authorized Aylward to trespass on the bridge. He merely said, “Yes, Mr. Aylward? What do you want?”

“Angus tells me you’ve located what they call a buster,” Aylward said. His face was pale, and his eyes were very wide behind his glasses.

“Yes, we have,” Rusch agreed. A thought struck him, and he called to Gabrilov on the other side of the room. “I forgot to order ‘splice the mainbrace,’ Mr. Gabrilov! I imagine the men are expecting it.”

“Aye aye, sir!”

“Captain!” Aylward said desperately. Rusch turned a frosty eye on him; he had jumped to the obvious conclusion.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Aylward. There’s enough valuable material in that thing out there to keep all of us in comfort for the rest of our natural lives. And spatial law provides that nonservice personnel are entitled to two-thirds of a crewman’s share. All we can do right now is stake our claim, of course, and with luck tow it into orbit at our destination. But we’ll start the mining as soon as—”

“Captain, if I were you I’d be very chary even of staking a claim, let alone mining that thing!” Aylward regretted that force of habit had made him draw his feet down to the floor, because the captain was floating a foot off it and so looked a long way down at him.

There was a frigid silence. At last Rusch said, “Would you like to explain yourself, Mr. Aylward? If you can, that is.”

“Well, it seems to me—” Aylward hesitated: how to make this clear? Then he plunged on. “Isn’t it a fact that no buster has been reported for four years, though there was a positive spate of them before that? And didn’t the start of the current run of ships lost in space—thirty known vessels and who knows how many others belonging to prospectors and freebooters—didn’t this coincide with the end of the stream of reported busters?”

“By God, that’s right!” The exclamation came from Gabrilov. “I’m sorry, sir,” he added to Rusch. “But the Dubhe was the first to go since they perfected atomics, and I have every reason to remember that she vanished about a fortnight after the forty-fifth buster—the Capella’s. I was due to go aboard, but I was held back by an ear infection.”

“The odds against this are tremendous,” Aylward said. He saw that Gabrilov’s interruption had impressed Rusch and was in haste to seize his momentary advantage. “Which is why I think it would be terribly dangerous to come too close to the buster. Uh—what exactly is involved in what you call ‘staking a claim?’ ”

“Just a moment!” Rusch said. “Are you envisaging that the buster might be unstable and blow up?”

“Well …” Aylward looked at the floor. “There’s an awful lot of reactive material in it, they tell me.”

“Hmph! It can’t be very sensitive, then. We spectroanalyzed it. with a laser beam intense enough to boil some of its surface off. What do you think, Gabrilov?”

Gabrilov was silent for a few seconds. At length he said, “Well, sir—we don’t lose anything by being careful. To stake our claim, we’d normally match velocities and coast in close, wouldn’t we? We’re still calculating whether we have enough reaction mass to take the thing in tow, but I don’t think we have, so we’ll have to send someone over and plant an identification beacon—but much of the surface will be hot. I see several reasons why we should stand well off and take time out to program a remote-controlled missile to act as a marker.”

Rusch pondered. “Yes, it’d be cutting things fine to try and get something that massive into orbit at the end of this trip—I was working on the assumption that all we could do would be to mark her with a long-life beacon and come back under no-load to fetch her. … Very well, Mr. Aylward. I’ll arrange to send out an unmanned lifeboat with the beacon in it—there’s enough iron in the buster for electromagnets to get a grip. And to satisfy your qualms, we’ll keep our distance.”

“Thank you, captain,” Aylward said. He was surprised to find, now that he’d made his point, that he was shaking all over and his forehead was slippery with sweat.

 

They tied the lifeboat controls directly into the pilot board on the bridge, and Gabrilov took charge. On the screen was a split-image projection: one half showed the view from the lifeboat itself, the other the picture from the side of the ship as the lifeboat curved outwards towards the buster.

Almost a quarter of an hour crept by on leaden feet as Gabrilov delicately maneuvered the tiny lifeboat closer and closer to the buster. Abruptly a tiny buzzer on the control board beeped and kept on beeping.

“A hundred miles,” Gabrilov said, not looking away from the screen in which the buster had grown progressively from a mere spot of light to a sizable globe. “The homer has picked it up. Shall I just let it go its own way now?”

“How far above the surface will the magnets take charge?”

“From about ten miles they ought to give a soft enough landing for the beacon to survive undamaged.”

“Then try and match velocities with the lifeboat about ten miles off.”

Gabrilov raised an eyebrow and looked worried, but he moved the main jet control slightly, and the image of the lifeboat in the other half of the screen showed a spurt of reaction mass.

More time limped by.

At last Gabrilov gave a precisely timed touch to the braking jet control, and sat back. “Very nice,” Rusch said under his breath. “Yes, she’s going down.”

Aylward wondered if his heartbeats were audible to those around him; he was almost deaf with the rush of blood in his ears, and he was breathing fast and urgently. On the screen, the buster grew to moon-size, earth-size, and still larger; by now the lifeboat and the buster could no longer be seen separately from the ship without high magnification. The beeping grew to an intolerable unbroken buzz and stopped short.

“Well, she’s down,” Gabrilov said unnecessarily. “And it looks as though—”

He got no further. On both halves of the screen there was suddenly an eruption of incredible, sunlike light, as though a miniature star had been born.

 

“Crew’s getting restive, sir,” Gabrilov said, putting back the phone. “That was the MO with the casualty statement. One man was watching through binoculars, and he’s going to need new eyes when we land, and a man in the nav section was looking down a ’scope, and he’ll need one new retina. The radar tech who first spotted it has gone hysterical and needed sedation, and we have at least half a dozen cases of radiation sickness incipient.”

Rusch grunted. He had been more affected by their narrow escape than he wanted to reveal. He said, “It seems to me some of us joined the service for no better reason than the chance of sharing in a buster! The thing would have blown us to glory if we’d gone much closer. Tell ’em they’re lucky to be alive. Did the thing leave any debris, by the way?”

“Not a scrap,” said Gabrilov gloomily. “Oh, there’s probably some dust hell-bent for the stars, but nothing big enough to pick up on radar.”

“It can’t have been a total-conversion reaction!” The idea seemed to hit Rusch like a physical blow.

“No—or even at this distance, we wouldn’t have survived to talk about it.” Gabrilov drew himself down to a chair and formed his body into a posture as though resting on the seat. After a moment, he said, “Lieutenant Ahmed was talking about space mines. Weapons of war. At first I thought he was just suffering from the after effects of seeing his dreams of riches go bang—but the more I reflect, the more I’m inclined to wonder.”

Rather unwillingly, Rusch looked across the room at Aylward. “What do you think?” he demanded.

Aylward shook his head seriously. “I don’t think it’s war. I mean—well, we haven’t suffered much material damage. It’s cost us thirty or so ships, but we have three and a half thousand in regular service; the loss of experienced space personnel is probably more serious, but still it’s a fleabite. And besides, why should … someone who can afford to disguise a mine with thousands of tons of metal and induce a reaction as efficient as the one we saw waste effort on sowing a few mines randomly in space? They could so easily make a job of it by launching a few into orbits intersecting Earth’s. No, I don’t think we have to involve an enemy. My guess is that the busters are inherently unstable, being composed of such heavy elements, and conceivably they don’t even belong in our order of space-time. Alteration of the nature of the space around them—on the arrival in the vicinity of a large and massive object, such as a spaceship—might upset their not very good equilibrium and blow them back into the continuum from which they came.” He frowned deeply. “And yet this leaves so many questions unanswered. Why, for instance, were many of them safely brought into orbits around human-occupied worlds? I had it in the back of my mind that they might be contraterrene, but since some of them were—uh—hooked, this is out of the question. I think that I am going to give this matter some further investigation.”

“Well, we can’t do much here,” Rusch said heavily. “We have sick men on board who need planetside medical care, but even if we hadn’t I’d order immediate planetfall. This news about busters is too urgent to keep to ourselves. Gabrilov!”

“Sir?”

“Get the nav section to program us an orbit that will take us in radio range of a government station as soon as possible, and then home. Have the men strap down for a turning maneuver. And you’d better have the MO issue decelerine, too. We’re in a hurry!”

 

Martinu looked regretfully at his empty glass and realized as he did so that the gentle voice of Professor Aylward had stopped. With an effort he brought himself back to the present, eyeing the other with curiosity. One would never have taken him for such a damned good storyteller.

“So that was how it all began,” he said after a pause.

Aylward was tying knots now in his length of tubing. He nodded. “Mark you,” he said, “it wasn’t easy to convince the authorities. I say, I’m sorry to have to ask you, but would you do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Well—I’d like another drink and I don’t feel up to going and fetching one.”

“Oh, certainly!” Martinu pulled himself to his feet. His muscles complained a little, but he adjusted after a moment or two and walked off with their glasses to find a waiter again. He was feeling a little superior by the time he got back—after all, Aylward enjoyed at least some gravity most of his life, whereas a spaceman like himself had to cope with the change from no gravity at all to one full gee every time he landed on earth.

Handing Aylward his new drink, Martinu wondered whether it was genuine devotion to duty or some defect of personality that made the tubby man hide himself away on the far side of the moon. He suspected the latter, now he came to think about it. What a shame—to be so outstanding in one narrow field and yet basically incompetent in the most important field of all, that of being an ordinary person.

With disconcerting insight Aylward said, “There’s no need to be sorry for me, you know.”

Martinu choked on a mouthful of his drink and began to make frantic denials. Aylward ignored him. Staring at the dancers inexhaustibly whirling around the floor, he went on, “I pity you as much as you pity me, and both of us ought to pity the people here. Like mice, when the cat’s away.”

Was he going to become maudlin, for heaven’s sake? Martinu decided to change the subject as quickly as possible. He said, “You were saying something about convincing the authorities, professor.”

“Was I?” Aylward blinked; the alcohol was taking effect on him. “Ah, so I was! Yes, I remember a blockheaded idiot named Machin—a bureaucrat if ever there was one—who tried to make out that we’d concocted a plot to filch all future busters away from their rightful owners. Like most people, he needed to have his nose rubbed in the truth before he’d accept it. But for him, we could have saved the Sirius.”

“I remember the Sirius!” Martinu said. “I had friends on her. She found a buster within radio range of Luna Port—”

“And because of Machin and his like,” Aylward interrupted, “went right in to grab it and was blown up with eight hundred people aboard. To many people saw it happen with their own eyes, and went blind like the crewmen of the Algol, for that affair to be hushed up.

“So they fell over backwards to make amends. I was given facilities for taking proper equipment to the spot when the next buster appeared, and by the time the fifth or sixth one showed up, I’d worked out the theoretical pattern of the Field. They try and tell me it was difficult to do, but don’t you believe it—the math is simple enough. What did give trouble was getting the generating equipment down to portable size. But we managed it in the end, made it a commercial proposition—and busters held no more terrors; we could stabilize them in our space-time long enough to cut them up and separate out the radioactives.” His s’s were getting the least bit slurred, and he was staring at his fingers as though unsure quite how many he could see.

“Angus tells me,” he went on after a pause, “that it might have been a very bad thing. It was the direct cause of the vast inflation we underwent—when?—oh, thirteen or fourteen years ago, because the market for precious metals was saturated. It’s the cause of prices like five bucks for a cup of coffee and two hundred for a taxi ride. I remember I used to dream of having a million dollars. Now where would a million get you? I bet Angus is spending a million on this party!” He waved to include the whole of the gaiety around them. Distantly in the background a theremin was playing a solo in imitation of a trumpet. Martinu nodded pontifically.

“But of course it also cured us of the tendency to place arbitrary values on things,” Aylward finished. “Now we prize only work invested as a backing for currency, and the uranium from the busters made cheap fission power possible, so maybe the trade was a good one. Ah!”

A waiter in search of empty glasses entered the alcove, and Aylward signaled to him. “Get the captain another!” he instructed. “And one of the same for me.”

Martinu hesitated, then shrugged. “Slivovitz,” he told the waiter, who nodded and hurried away. A man and a girl, holding hands, looked in to see if the alcove was unoccupied, and on finding it wasn’t, moved away. The waiter returned with the fresh glasses.

“Foof!” Aylward said, having gulped at his. “That’s rather good.” He lowered the glass cautiously beside him, then leaned back, sleepily half-closing his eyes.

“Look at them,” he said. “Three thousand million blind mice. Who’ll bell the cat?”

Martinu, whose own wits were apparently slipping a little, said foggily, “I beg your pardon?”

“I said, ‘Three thousand million blind mice. Who’ll bell the cat?’ ” repeated Aylward with dignity. “Though there isn’t a cat, that I know of. For ‘Who’ll bell the cat?’ read ‘The mouse ran up the clock.’ ”

No, it was no good. Martinu didn’t try to follow that one.

Aylward finished his drink with an appreciative belch, and said, “I suppose mice don’t do so badly, really. What were we talking about?”

“Mice, apparently,” Martinu said.

“I was talking about mice,” Aylward corrected. “We were talking about busters. This can’t last, you know.”

“What can’t last?”

“All this!” said Aylward largely. He gestured. “Not just this party—everything else, too. All unconscious of their doom the little victims play. Tell me, do you think the human race is master of its fate, or do you believe, like some people, that we’re property?”

Martinu was relieved to hear a fairly sensible remark for a change. He considered the question. “That’s one of Fort’s speculations, isn’t it? I—well, I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you,” Aylward promised. “Do you think you’re of value to anyone but yourself?”

“No,” said Martinu positively. “Nobody’d mourn me—except perhaps the crew of my ship, and some of them I’m not sure of.”

“You’re lucky. So am I. Just think of all the poor people who think they do matter. How disappointed they’ll be when they find they don’t!”

“When will that be?” Martinu said, feeling it was expected.

“Oh, definitely some time. Do you know what a buster is? I mean, what it’s for?”

Martinu was finding this a little tedious. He wished he had taken Angus’s advice. “Tell me,” he requested resignedly.

“I warn you, you won’t believe me. Angus doesn’t, and he’s a typical hardheaded individual, and none of the other people I’ve told has believed me either. Anyway, I’ll tell you. You said you didn’t know if we were property or not. Well, we aren’t property. Because we aren’t worth owning. We’re just one hell of a nuisance.

“Did you ever find yourself bothered with mice?”

Sheer politeness, nothing else, drove Martinu to bring to bear what concentration he had left. “When I was a kid,” he said finally, “I recall my mother had a house full of them. But they never bothered me. I rather liked them—except for the stink.”

“How did your mother get rid of them?”

“Well, I guess we tried trapping them first, but that didn’t work for long—the cunning so-and-so’s soon learned to avoid the traps. So in the end we poisoned them.”

Another couple appeared at the entrance of the alcove, with their arms round each other. They were too absorbed to notice that anyone else was present, and walked past the seat where Aylward and Martinu were towards the curtains hanging behind it. Glad of some distraction, Martinu glanced over his shoulder and saw that they had drawn one of the curtains back to reveal an open window; they were leaning on the sill and staring at the stars. He envied them.

“All right,” Aylward said. “Now if you wanted to do something like that to men, what would you use for baiting your traps?”

“I’m sorry?” Martinu came back with a start. Aylward repeated the question.

“Well,” Martinu said, humoring him, “I’d use something either useful or precious.”

“Exactly. And you’d lay some ground bait first, in order to lure the unsuspecting victims to the traps when they were put down.”

Suddenly Martinu got it. He wondered why it had taken him so long. “You mean the busters, don’t you?” he said disgustedly. But after a moment he saw the amusing side of it—and after all, Angus had warned him!

He chuckled. “So they’re mousetraps, and we’re the mice!” he said. “What an idea! But aren’t you overlooking one thing in your analogy? How about the poison?”

“I was coming to that,” said Aylward with equanimity. “And so, I judge, are the ‘people’ who planned the busters. When the mice started dodging the traps, did your mother latch on at once?”

“No, we kept right on setting them for a while. It was only when they became a real pest that we turned to poison.”

“Pre-cisely!” Aylward looked pleased. “I imagine that they—whoever they are—will decide that their traps aren’t working any more. Then someone will find a super-large, stable buster and bring it to Earth, and—that will be that.”

A cold chill moved down Martinu’s spine. Trying to ascribe it to the open window behind him, he said slowly, “Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“Mohammed Abdul in the Vega just brought in the first stable buster since the Capella’s! Parked it in orbit today! And—it’s an outsize one, a giant!”

Aylward’s face, all of a sudden, went pasty-pale. He looked at Martinu and tried to speak but couldn’t.

Behind them, the girl looking out the window said in a tone of puzzlement, “Honey, what’s the time?”

“Three o’clock. Why?” said her companion.

“I thought it wasn’t dawn yet. And that isn’t even the east over there. But look how red the sky is getting!”