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  That left the Lord High Mufti, which was more mascot than crew member, more court jester than sailor, quite possibly insane if it had a mind at all, and a genuine hazard during all phases of a hunt. Still, he would have felt somehow incomplete without the Mufti, so he computed its food supply—live insects and dead reptiles—and jotted down a reminder to tranquilize it just before takeoff.

  He made arrangements to leave in five days, which would give him time to hire his crew, equip his ship, and have one last fling at all the pleasures of Tchaka's, alcoholic and otherwise....

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  CHAPTER 2

  The Sillyworms giggled and howled and hooted all the way to Kakkab Kastu IV, the gigantic shipping center that handled most of the commerce in this section of the galaxy. The worms, averaging some twelve feet in length and possessing a paralyzing venom—in fact, Lane still couldn't understand why they weren't classified as poisonous snakes—never seemed to know when they were dead. If you shot them with a laser, or hit them with a toxic gas, they behaved like any other defunct animals; but if you killed one with an ultrasonic weapon it set up some sympathetic vibration deep within the animal, causing the corpse to giggle maniacally for months, and frequently years, after the Sillyworm was officially dead. Hence its name, and hence Lane's relief at getting them off the Deathmaker. He instructed the port authorities to ship his various kills off to their sundry purchasers, left the Mufti happily chattering to itself on the ceiling of his hotel room, and went out to dinner.

  He remained in port for four days, until all his money for the most recent hunt had been cabled to him, then made preparations to pick up the Baffledivers in the Pinnipes system. He kept his crew intact and added a Gillsniffer to his staff; Baffledivers spent a lot of time under what passed for water on Pinnipes II, and he would probably need help in tracking them down. Gillsniffers didn't come cheaply—just finding an animal that could both survive space flight and follow an odor beneath a dozen fathoms of water and other liquids was hard enough, let alone training and domesticating it—but he knew where to look and what to spend, and it wasn't too long before he picked up a prime one.

  Then it was off on the long, seemingly endless voyage to Pinnipes. He toyed with taking a Deepsleep for forty or fifty days but decided against leaving the Dabihs and the Mufti unsupervised. Both had cast covetous and hungry eyes at the Gillsniffer from time to time, and he'd spent too much money on the damned thing to risk losing it before the hunt was over. So he stayed awake, and ate, and slept, and read, and listened, and ran in place, and participated in a thousand other little rituals he had created over the quarter-century of his hurry-up-and-wait existence. When the boredom became too great he donned his space suit and walked around the Deathmaker's hull or let the ship tow him through the void.

  In fact, he was standing on the outside of the hull on the day he noticed the warning buoy, a huge red flare some half-billion miles out from Pinnipes. He immediately reentered the ship and walked to the radio panel. When he was unable to find any Mayday broadcast on any of the frequencies he switched on his transmitting device.

  “This is the Deathmaker, fifty-three Galactic Standard days out of Kakkab Kastu IV, headed for Pinnipes II, Nicobar Lane commanding. What seems to be the problem?”

  There was a pause of perhaps five minutes, followed by a reply bristling with static:

  “We read you, Deathmaker. The Pinnipes system is off limits since the discovery of a black hole in the position of a binary. All traffic to Pinnipes is being urged to return to its home base.”

  “Oh, shit,” muttered Lane. “Not another one.” He logged the black hole on his Carto-System, then had the computer log a course to Pinnipes II that would avoid its fierce attraction. The computer came up with three courses; one was too dangerous, but the other two seemed to bypass the black hole very comfortably.

  “This is Deathmaker” he said into the microphone. “I am proceeding to Pinnipes II, in search of Baffledivers, which I am duly licensed to hunt. I expect to be there for the better part of two Standard months, after which time I will radio you again.”

  He broke contact and fed the course he had chosen into the navigational computer. He was getting sick and tired of black holes cropping up more and more frequently. Once they were merely a theory, then a rare phenomenon; but it was now estimated that there were well over 100,000 black holes in the galaxy, and literally billions upon billions of them in the universe. They were collapsed stars, huge giants that had created such immense gravitational fields that they did not stop even at the neutron star stage, but continued collapsing upon themselves until all the laws of the normal universe were broken. No light could escape from a black hole, and it could gobble up planets millions of times its own size. It was theorized that if a man could survive inside the event horizon—that section beyond which light could not escape—time and space would become totally meaningless. Some theorists opted for the existence of white holes as well—holes somehow connected to the black holes, in which all the stellar material and garbage they devoured reappeared elsewhere and formed new stars—but thus far none had been observed, and the theory was fast falling into disrepute.

  The philosophy and theories of black holes, however, did not interest Lane in the least. His sole concern was avoiding them, and, more particularly, the thirty-eight-mile hole currently on the far side of Pinnipes.

  His approach took him the better part of a day. As he entered an elliptical orbit around Pinnipes II, he began checking out the islands dotting the filthy liquid where he would be doing his hunting, searching for the one that would afford him the best shelter, the safest landing field, mid the least chance of being caught up in one of the tidal waves that regularly raced across the planet, sometimes reaching heights of more than a mile.

  He was just about to begin his descent when his ship told him that he was no longer alone.

  Someone was about 150,000 miles off and above his port bow, inside the orbit of Pinnipes II. It didn't read like a ship, but there were a lot of races in the galaxy, and not all of them used the type of material that his sensing devices were programmed to read.

  He switched on his radio.

  “This is the Deathmaker, place of origin Northpoint, race of Man. Who are you?”

  He repeated the signal at regular intervals but received no acknowledgment. He hadn't really expected any, but he was disappointed anyway, for it meant that he would have to delay his hunt for awhile. He hadn't survived this long by being incautious, and he had no intention of immobilizing himself on the planet until he had determined the identity and intentions of what he now assumed to be an alien ship.

  He broke out of his orbit and began slowly approaching the ship. It withdrew from him at a leisurely pace. He increased his speed and flicked off the various safety switches on his laser cannon.

  The alien ship continued retreating in the direction of the star, and now Lane began to worry in earnest. If it didn't alter its course in the next couple of hours it would be too close to the star for him to follow. That would lead to two inescapable conclusions: that the alien ship was impervious to the heat and radiation of a star, and that it would realize the limitations of the Deathmaker.

  He followed it for another hour, and when it showed no sign of veering off on a tangent to Pinnipes, he took the initiative by increasing his speed and changing his course to take a position above the plane of the ecliptic. He didn't know whether the alien ship would pass above, beneath, or beside the star, but at least he'd be able to track it from his new vantage point

  He also attempted a spectroscopic analysis of the ship but drew an absolute blank. It was puzzling. His sensing devices told him that he was chasing a very real object, but neither they nor any other instrument aboard the Deathmaker could give him the slightest information about its makeup.

  “Deathmaker, we have been reading your signals,” said a static-ridden voice. “Who are you trying to raise? We I cannot
detect any other ships in your locale.”

  “There's something out there,” said Lane. “I have just begun chasing it. Now will you kindly shut the hell up so this guy doesn't feel surrounded and maybe begin using his weapons?”

  He flicked off his radio once more and turned back to his sensing panel, trying those basic tests he was acquainted with to determine exactly what he was chasing. He came up with a series of blanks.

  When he reached his vantage point above and well beyond Pinnipes, he had the computer plot the alien ship's course. It was going to pass under the star, and he quickly laid in an I intercept course. He spent the next few minutes tending to 1 the needs of his inhuman passengers. Then, when the Deathmaker had stabilized at its preselected intercept point, he sat back, his hand on the mechanism that would fire the laser cannon, and waited for the alien ship to appear.

  It took him almost half an hour to realize that the ship had anticipated him and, once hidden from his sensors by Pinnipes, had immediately changed course and was heading in the general direction of the black hole at an increased speed. He immediately laid in a compensating course, designed to take him as close as possible to the hole.

  When he arrived he couldn't see the hole at all, which wasn't too surprising. His instruments found it, though—a super gravitational field surrounded by small amounts of gas and debris which had taken up orbit around it.

  “We still pick up no reading, Deathmaker,” said the voice on his radio. “Are you sure you're not tracking some sort of reflection?”

  “When's the last time you heard of something making that kind of reflection in space?” asked Lane disgustedly. “Besides, it's heading right into the black hole. Let me give you its coordinates and then maybe you'll get off my back,”

  “We have its coordinates,” said the voice some five minutes later, “and have projected its course, on the unlikely assumption that it really exists. However, our instruments still can't find anything out there.”

  “Then you'd better get some new instruments,” said Lane, “because it's within a million miles of the hole right now.”

  The alien ship seemed totally unaware that it was on a collision course—or absorption course, amended Lane—with the black hole. Not that it mattered any longer. From this distance, not even Pinnipes itself would be able to escape its grasp.

  And then something strange happened. The alien ship's velocity should have been increasing as it was sucked nearer and nearer to the event horizon, but instead its speed remained unchanged. Then, when it was perhaps five hundred miles away from the black hole, it veered off and avoided the hole altogether.

  “You guys must be wrong,” said Lane, switching on his radio again. “That thing can't be a black hole.”

  “Why not?” said the voice a few minutes later.

  “Because the ship just escaped from its field.” He explained in detail what had happened.

  “There is definitely a black hole there,” said the voice. “It has been charted, logged, and scientifically examined. Since our instruments did not register your supposed alien vessel, we are forced to conclude that your ship's sensing devices are in error.”

  Lane broke off communications, walked down to his cargo hold, selected a small probe, and attached a long-duration space flare to it. Then he released it in the direction of the black hole. His instruments followed its flight as it approached the hole, while he himself was able to watch the glare of the flare through his viewing screen. It vanished from sight the instant it passed the event horizon, and his tracking panel lost all trace of it at the same moment.

  Which meant that there was a black hole after all.

  Which also meant that the alien ship had broken every physical law he knew of.

  He opened his radio again. “Is there anything that would be immune to the gravitational field of a black hole?”

  “No,” came the reply. “Even light can't escape from it.”

  That's not what I mean,” said Lane. “Is there anything that would be immune to the gravitational pull of a black hole prior to entering it?”

  “Nothing solid,” was his answer. “Maybe x-rays or some forms of energy, though I doubt it. Nothing else.”

  “Which of these things wouldn't show up on your instrument board?” asked Lane.

  “We'd pick up x-rays, that's for sure. At this distance we might miss some of the more exotic forms of energy, especially if they were partially or completely into the infra-red portion of the spectrum.”

  “Has any ship you've ever heard of been constituted of energy?” asked Lane.

  “Nope. I'd check your ship's main computer banks for a malfunction if I were you.”

  “Everything's functioning perfectly,” said Lane. “I just fired a probe into the hole and followed it every centimeter of the way.”

  “Well, Deathmaker, we have no other suggestions.”

  “I have,” said Lane, “I think I just bumped into the Dreamwish Beast.”

  “Oh, hell,” said the voice disgustedly. “Another crackpot. Now listen here, Deathmaker—don't you go spreading any crazy rumors about seeing the damned thing here. If there's one thing we don't need, it's ten thousand idiot trophy hunters falling into that black hole.”

  “No problem,” said Lane. “I've got no interest in the Dreamwish Beast, if that's what it was. I'm here to hunt Baffledivers, and now that that thing—whatever it was—is gone, that's just what I'm going to do.”

  And, within another fifteen hours, he was walking across the floor of the murky ocean of Pinnipes II, his Gillsniffer's sonar signal pack in one hand and a stungun in the other, the day's adventure in space filed in that corner of his mind which was reserved for unimportant trivia to be withdrawn only when swapping tall tales at Tchaka's.

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  * * *

  CHAPTER 3

  It took Lane almost three months to round up his quota. Halfway through the hunt his Gillsniffer was attacked and killed by some denizen of the ocean, and he had to capture the rest of his prey unaided. But catch them he did, and another hunt was over. He dropped the Baffledivers off on a nearby shipping world and then, physically and mentally exhausted, he returned to Hellhaven.

  He left the Deathmaker in its hangar, paid off the Dabihs, took a long nap, and, with the Mufti perched happily on his shoulder, he trudged down the dirt street to Tchaka's.

  Tchaka himself was behind the bar, an impressive sight as always. He stood almost eight feet tall, his teeth were made of the finest and brightest gold, he wore a living lizard in his grotesquely stretched right earlobe, his bejeweled fingers glittered like ten tiny but brilliant suns, and he wore an intricately designed robe of some semimetallic fabric that seemed to change from primary to pastel and back again with his every movement. Perhaps most bizarre of all was his left eye: it was artificial, and it twinkled and sparkled with an equally artificial luminescence. It was originally rumored that the eye had been cut out in a knife fight during Hellhaven's infancy. Then it was whispered that it had been lost to some strange—and possibly contagious—disease that was eating away at every inch of Tchaka's enormous body. The current theory was that Tchaka had gouged it out himself so that he could replace it with the wondrous orb that now resided inside his head, a notion Lane considered more terrifying than the other two stories, and more likely as well.

  “Nicobar!” shouted Tchaka, looking up from his bartending duties. “Back from the wars and ready to spend your booty here?”

  Lane smiled and walked over to the bar.

  “You've been gone a long time, Nicobar,” said Tchaka.

  Lane nodded. “More than a year.”

  “Make a nice haul?”

  “Pretty good. Fix me up something special.”

  “The first one's on the house,” said Tchaka, shaking and mixing ingredients with the finesse of a concert pianist. “Is this all I can do for you? A year's a long time to be away from a lot of things, Nicobar,” he added with a wink.

 
“I don't understand it,” said Lane, shaking his head.

  “What?”

  “Why you wink with your good eye,” said Lane. “Now, if it was me, I'd wink with the blind one.”

  “They're both good eyes, Nicobar,” said Tchaka with a broad smile. “Don't you think they're pretty?”

  “Gorgeous,” said Lane, sampling the drink that Tchaka set before him. “But you can't see out of one of them.”

  “You think not?” said Tchaka. He closed his right eye and turned his flashing, blinking artificial eye toward the door. “A pair of men just walked in. The one on the left is about forty years old, bearded, wearing an old military uniform. The one on the right is a few years older, a little shorter, fat as all getout, clean-shaven, and, though you probably can't tell, he's missing most of his right leg.”

  “Well, I'll be damned!” said Lane, genuinely surprised. “What colors are they wearing?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” said Tchaka, opening his right eye again. “So you're surprised, Nicobar!” He threw back his massive head and laughed. “That's more emotion than I've ever seen you show.”

  “How do you do it?” asked Lane.

  “You thought this eye was just for beauty?” said Tchaka. “Nicobar, I'm surprised at you. What need does the proprietor of the best whorehouse on Northpoint have for beauty? No, my friend, this eyeball is more than a work of art: it's a work of science. It possesses both infrared and ultraviolet lenses and is tied in to my optic nerve endings. Poor Nicobar, with only the two eyes God gave him! Poor, poor man, who only sees the surface of things, while Tchaka sees colors and shapes that you can't even imagine!”

  “I'm impressed,” said Lane.

  “Come, Nicobar,” said Tchaka, leaning over the bar. “Look deeply into it, and see the secrets of all time and space.”

  Lane was about to peer closely into the shining orb when the Mufti tensed, digging its claws into his shoulder. He straightened up immediately.