A Hole In Space

"Occupational hazard. I may return to this subject." I had threatened to kill Kelsey before this.

He sounded disspirited. "It won't help you. I'm careful, Carson. I took a gun, and it was a public place, and I got there first. Besides, there are my files. If I die the cops'll go through those."

I was going to need that information, someday, maybe. But it wasn't fun to hear. "So you met him in this bar and grill. What then?"

"Well," he had the money right with him. He put it right out on the table, and I grabbed it quick because someone might be watching. Someone was, too. I saw the flashbulb go off, and by the time my eyes had stopped watering whoever it was was out the door. Ra—" He caught himself. "Horatio stopped me from getting out. He said, ‘Do you know what the statute of limitations is for embezzlement?"

"I remembered then. It was seven years, and Horatio had me by the balls. Blackmail. He figures I've taken him for sixteen thousand nine hundred dollars and no cents, plus forty bucks for the guy with the camera. He wants it back or he turns me in to the police, complete with photographs."

Kelsey had never heard me laugh before and mean it. "That's hilarious. The Biter Bit bit. If you turn in your files it'll just be more evidence against you. You'll just have to fight it out in court, Kelsey. Tell ‘em it's a first offense."

"I've got a better idea. I'll get the money from you."

"Nope. If I make that much money disappear, too many people would start wondering why. If they find out, I'm dead. Dead. Now I want you to remember that word, Kelsey, because it's important."

"Files, Carson. I want you to remember that word, because it's important. If I die, somebody will go through my files and then call the cops."

Well, it hadn't worked. Poor hard-luck Kelsey. "Okay, Kelsey. I'll have the money. Where can we meet?"

"No need. Just get it to me the usual way."

"Now, don't be a damn fool. I probably can't get it until Saturday, which means I'll have to get it to you Sunday. There isn't any mail Sunday."

He didn't answer for awhile. Then, "Are you thinking of killing me?"

I kept it light. "I'm always thinking of killing you, Kelsey."

"Files."

"I know. Do you want the, money or don't you?"

I listened to the scared silence on the other end. Dammit, now I didn't want him scared. I was going to kill him. I'd have to find out where the files were first, and for that I'd have to have him alone, somewhere far away, for several bouts. He was going to be too wary for that. I could sense it.

"Listen, there's a third way," he said suddenly. "If you move the money someone's likely to notice. If you kill me someone's sure to notice. But there's a third way."

"Let's hear it."

"Kill Horatio."

I yelped. "Kelsey, what do you think I am, Murder Incorporated? I made one mistake. One."

"You're not thinking. Carson, there is no co

"Um." He was right.

"You've got to do this for me, Carson. I'll never tap you for another dime..." He went on talking, but now I was way ahead of him. If I could get Horatio's photograph of Kelsey, I'd have Kelsey. No more payments. We'd have each other by the throats.

Poor hard luck Horatio.

THE HOLE MAN

One day Mars will be gone.

Andrew Lear says that it will start with violent quakes, and end hours or days later, very suddenly. He ought to know. It's all his fault.

Lear also says that it won't happen for from years to centuries. So we stay, Lear and the rest of us. We study the alien base for what it can tell us, while the center of the world we stand on is slowly eaten away. It's enough to give a man nightmares.

It was Lear who found the alien base.

We had reached Mars: fourteen of us, in the cramped bulbous life-support system of the Percival Lowell. We were circling in orbit, taking our time, correcting our maps and looking for anything that thirty years of Mariner probes might have missed.

We were mapping mascons, among other things. Those mass concentrations under the lunar maria were almost certainly left by good-sized asteroids, mountains of rock falling silently out of the sky until they struck with the energies of thousands of fusion bombs. Mars has been cruising through the asteroid belt for four billion years. Mars would show bigger and better mascons. They would affect our orbits.

So Andrew Lear was hard at work, watching pens twitch on graph paper as we circled Mars. A bit of machinery fell alongside the Percival Lowell, rotating. Within its thin shell was a weighted double lever system, deceptively simple: a Forward Mass Detector. The pens mapped its twitchings.

Over Sirbonis Palus, they began mapping strange curves.

Another man might have cursed and tried to fix it. Andrew Lear thought it out, then sent the signal that would stop the free-falling widget from rotating.

It had to be rotating to map a stationary mass.

But now it was mapping simple sine waves.

Lear went ru

Ru

Childrey—who was an athlete—waited with a patient, slightly contemptuous smile while Lear caught his breath.

He already thought Lear was crazy. Lear's words only confirmed it. "Gravity for sending signals? Dr. Lear, will you please quit bothering me with your weird ideas. I'm busy. We all are."

This was not entirely unfair. Some of Lear's enthusiasms were peculiar. Gravity generators. Black holes. He thought we should be searching for Dyson spheres: stars completely enclosed by an artificial shell. He believed that mass and inertia were two separate things: that it should be possible to suck the inertia Out of a spacecraft, say, so that it could accelerate to near lightspeed in a few minutes. He was a wide-eyed dreamer, and when he was flustered he tended to wander from the point.

"You don't understand," he told Childrey. "Gravity radiation is harder to block than electromagnetic waves. Patterned gravity waves would be easy to detect. The advanced civilizations in the galaxy may all be communicating by gravity. Some of them may even be modulating pulsars—rotating neutron stars. That's where Project

Ozma went wrong: they were only looking for signals in the electromagnetic spectrum."

Childrey laughed. "Sure. Your little friends are using neutron stars to send you messages. What's that got to do with us?"

"Well, look!" Lear held up the strip of flimsy, nearly weightless paper he'd torn from the machine. "I got this over Sirbonis Palus. I think we ought to land there."

"We're landing in Mare Cimmerium, as you perfectly well know. The lander is already deployed and ready to board. Dr. Lear, we've spent four days mapping this area. It's flat. It's in a green-brown area. When spring comes next month, we'll find out whether there's life there! And everybody wants it that way except you!"

Lear was still holding the graph paper before him like a shield. "Please. Take one more circuit over Sirbonis Palus."

Childrey opted for the extra orbit. Maybe the sine waves convinced him. Maybe not. He would have liked inconveniencing the rest of us in Lear's name, to show him for a fool.

But the next pass showed a tiny circular feature in Sirbonis Palus. And Lear's mass indicator was making sine waves again.