computer was compensating for red shift.
He was wrestling with that problem when the screen exploded.
A dazzling flash of light left him blinded. For an instant, through the haze, he saw a brilliant glare in the center of the screen. Supernova!
When his vision came back, the stars were rushing toward him as the screen zoomed to the limits of magnification. The library was about to show him something interesting.
The light went out like a dying light bulb and there was nothing except the engorged white star shining in space. The image must have been computer-enhanced. He could see a disk the size of a cotton ball.
The cotton ball began to wobble. The computer was manipulating the strobe effect—at a ratio of thousands of images to one—to show that it was dancing with …
Something invisible.
A background star became a smear of light and winked off. An instant later it reappeared and shrank to a point again. The stars immediately nearby were rippling, like objects seen through heat waves. By looking closely, Jameson could see that the rippling stars were lapping around a fairly well-defined circle where no background stars shone.
Something was bending light, swallowing it. The invisible something that was whirling in dervish circles around the white star that had fed on its substance.
There was only one thing in the universe that swallowed light.
Jameson watched in awe, hardly daring to blink, until his eyes were burning. The circling dance went on a long time—as long, it seemed to him, as the entire stellar sequence leading up to it had taken. He wished fervently that he had a watch so that he could time the relative duration. His eyes began to play tricks on him. The moving boundary where light splattered and disappeared seemed to become tangible: a black blot against the blackness of space. It was an illusion, he knew. The thing—the
Now, with startling suddenness, the white star began to grow again. Its color changed to blue as it inflated to enormous size, bigger even than the red giant had been.
Blue supergiant! It had exhausted its hydrogen and become a helium star.
Now, in a blink, the black hole became visible—not the hole itself, but the terrible events in its accretion disk. For a moment of cosmic time there was a flash of hideous light as the Cygnan computer selectively shifted an X-ray source burning with the power of ten thousand suns to the visible spectrum.
The screens went blank.
Before Jameson could move, the room was filled with hissing Cygnans, Triad and Tetrachord among them. They saw the trussed-up Augie and set up a din that sounded like the shrill of a roomful of teakettles. There was a blur of flashing movement in Jameson’s direction. He flung up an arm to protect his face, then felt a searing flash of pain that wiped him out of existence.
Chapter 21
Tetrachord tugged gently at the leash. Jameson gagged as the loop of cord, threaded through his nostrils and dangling down his throat, tickled his pharynx. Then the moment of nausea passed, and he ambled obediently down the concave sidewalk after the two aliens.
The kitten was in his arms. He’d managed to scoop the animal up before they led him off in disgrace. He damn well wasn’t going to leave it to Augie’s tender mercies.
The tether wasn’t too uncomfortable once he got used to it. Jameson once had been fed by a tube through his nose in the hospital, and he’d found that it looked worse than it felt. It made the back of his throat feel sore, that was all, and he didn’t want to think about what would happen to his septum if he resisted the tug of the leash. But all the same, he was glad he hadn’t been conscious when the cord was inserted, and he dreaded its removal.
Perhaps it was the usual practice for Cygnans, with the peculiar anatomy of their planet’s life forms, to fetter their domestic animals through some analagous body cavity. It was a damned effective way to lead a human being around.
They had decided Jameson could no longer be trusted. He’d proved to be a dangerous animal, no longer fit to be a house pet. As with a puppy gone bad, they might feel some lingering affection for him, but they were regretfully taking him away all the same.
He trudged along behind the hand-holding pair, trying to keep the cord slack as much as possible. Augie, sans poncho, was slithering along behind him at a safe distance, holding the electric prod.
Around him the Cygnan city swarmed with mottled life. He was being led through something akin to a commercial district, with the Cygnan equivalent of shops and restaurants and perhaps theaters. Vividly colored angular structures soared crazily up to a luminescent approximation of a sky a quarter mile above. The faces of the buildings were alive with thousands of busy Cygnans, clinging to latticework perches that extended all the way up. The long tubular snouts turned in Jameson’s direction as he passed, and the twittering noise level went up as they caught sight of him and paused in their activities. The scurrying crowds parted to make way for the dangerous procession, and a swarm of the curious trailed in Jameson’s wake, keeping a respectful distance and piping questions at a sullenly silent Augie.
A little Cygnan the size of a beagle skittered up to him and was pulled back out of harm’s way by an adult, exactly as a human parent might snatch a curious child out of the way of a circus animal. Jameson lost his step, trying to avoid tripping over the thing, and was rewarded by a painful yank of the cord snubbed around his septum. There was a sickening sensation inside his head as a loop of the tether scraped the walls of the nasal cavity, and he had a fit of coughing and choking.
His feet stumbled along automatically. When the tears cleared from his eyes the path was emerging from the overhanging cliffsides of the vertical structures into a parklike stretch with pale blue lawns of packed fuzzballs and contorted shrubs like tangles of red spaghetti on either side.
Jameson looked across an open plaza spoked with transparent travel tubes clogged with Cygnans entering or leaving the area. The tubes snaked at every level through walls, through enormous aquarium tanks, through enclosed habitats, through cages.
Cages.
A frightful stench was in the air, a fetid compound of rotting straw and halogens, of barnyard odors and ammonia, as if a menagerie had been set down in a chemical factory. The place was noisy, too—a hubbub of screeches and bellows and clicks and yaps and howls.
Jameson could make out some of the creatures in the nearby cages. He saw a tall insectoid thing like a cluster of milky bubbles on a tripod. And a thing like a fluffy dishrag that flapped miserably along a filthy cage floor. A pair of tendriled sacs that dangled like hanging baskets from the wire roof of their enclosure. A shaggy pear- shaped cyclops that scratched itself with its single long arm.
Here and there across the plaza random groups of Cygnan sightseers paused to stare in Jameson’s direction, then turned their attention to the more interesting exhibits. Tetrachord made encouraging noises. When Jameson didn’t move, the Cygnan pulled gently at the nose tether and urged him like a trained bear across the graveled plaza into the main body of the zoo.
They stopped at what must have been Tetrachord and Triad’s living quarters at the back of a warehouse area. They rated an apartment all to themselves, a musty cubical—if “cubical” was the word for an interior space shaped like a crazily leaning polyhedron—crammed with peculiar objects on spoon-shaped shelves. Jameson recognized a couple of resting perches, side by side beneath
They made him wait in the center of the room. Tetrachord went to a cupboard and came back with three of the bulb-handled, shotgun-size neural weapons with the flaring muzzles. He handed two of them to Triad and Augie and kept the third for himself.
Jameson found that not at all comforting.
