"And?"
"His health is perfect and vigorous. His age, twenty four-and-a-third terrestrial years. Six generations of his ancestors were all born through winning lottery tickets. Best of all, he enjoys travel; he exhibits the restlessness we need.
"Naturally we tried to contact him in person. For three days my agent tracked him through a series of transfer booths, always a jump behind him, while Norman Haywood went skiing in Suisse, and surfing in Ceylon, to shops in New York, and to house parties in the Rockies and the Himalayas. Last night my agent caught up to him as he entered a passenger spacecraft bound for Jinx. The ship departed before my agent could conquer his natural fear of your jury-rigged ships."
"I've had days like that myself. Couldn't you send him a hyperwave message?"
"Louis, this voyage is supposed to be secret."
"Yah," said Louis. And he watched a python head circling, circling, searching out unseen enemies.
"We will succeed," said Nessus. "Thousands of potential crew members cannot hide forever. Can they, Louis? They do not even know we are seeking them!"
"You'll find someone. You're bound to."
"I pray that we do not! Louis, how can I do it? How can I ride with three aliens in an experimental ship designed for one pilot? It would be madness!"
"Nessus, what's really bugging you? This whole trip was your idea!"
"It was not. My orders came from those-who-lead, from two hundred light years away."
"Something's terrified you. I want to know what it is. What have you found out? Do you know what this trip is really all about? What's changed since you were ready to insult four kzinti in a public restaurant? Hey, easy, easy!"
Tle puppeteer had tucked his heads and necks between his forelegs and rolled into a ball.
"Come on," said Louis. "Come on out." He ran his hands gently along the backs of the puppeteer's necks — the parts that showed. The puppeteer shuddered. His skin was soft, like chamois skin, and pleasant to the touch.
"Come on out of there. Nothing's going to hurt you here. I protect my guests."
The puppeteer's wail came muffled from under his belly. "I was mad. Mad! Did I really insult four kzinti?"
"Come on out. You're safe here. That's better." A flat head peeped out of the warm shadow. "Now, you see? Nothing to be afraid of."
"Four kzinti? Not three?"
"My mistake. I miscounted. It was three."
"Forgive me, Louis." The puppeteer exposed his other head as far as the eye. "My manic phase has ended. I am in the depressive leg of my cycle."
"Can you do anything about it?" Louis thought of the consequences, if Nessus should hit the wrong leg of his cycle at a crucial time.
"I can wait for it to end. I can protect myself, to the extent possible. I can try not to let it affect my judgment."
"Poor Nessus. You're sure you haven't learned anything new?"
"Do I not know enough already to terrify any sane mind?" The puppeteer stood up somewhat shakily. "Why did I meet Teela Brown? I had thought she would have departed."
"I asked her to stay with me until we find your fourth crewmate."
"Why?"
Louis had wondered about that himself. It had little to do with Paula Cherenkov. Louis had changed too much since her time; and he was not a man to force one woman into the mold of another.
Sleeping plates were designed for two occupants, not one. But there had been other girls at the party … not as pretty as Teela. Could wise old Louis Wu still be snared by beauty alone?
But something more than beauty looked out of those flat silver eyes. Something highly complex.
"For purposes of fornication," said Louis Wu. He had remembered that he was talking to an alien, who would not understand such complexities. He realized that the puppeteer was still shivering, and added, "Let's go to my office. It's under the hill. No meteors."
After the puppeteer left, Louis went looking for Teela. He found her in the library, in front of a reading screen, clicking frames past at a speed high even for a speedreader.
"Hi," she said. She froze a frame and turned. "How's our two-headed friend?"
"Scared witless. And I'm exhausted. I've been playing psychiatrist to a Pierson's puppeteer."
Teela brightened. "Tell me about a puppeteer's sex life."
"All I know is, he isn't allowed to breed. He broods on it. One may assume that he could breed if there weren't a law against it. Aside from that, he stayed off the subject completely. Sorry."
"Well, what did you talk about?"
Louis waved a hand. "Three hundred years of traumas. That's how long Nessus has been in human space. He hardly remembers the puppeteer planet. I get the feeling he's been scared for three hundred years." Louis dropped into a masseur chair. The strain of empathizing with an alien had exhausted his mind, used up his imagination.
"How about you? What are you reading?"
"The Core explosion." Teela waved at the reading screen.
There were stars in clusters and bunches and masses. You couldn't see black, there were so many stars. It might have been a dense star cluster, but it wasn't; it couldn't be. Telescopes wouldn't reach that far, nor would any normal spacecraft.
It was the galactic core, five thousand light years across, a tight sphere of stars at the axis of the galactic whirlpool. One man had reached that far, two hundred years ago, in an experimental puppeteer-built ship. The frame showed red and blue and green stars, all superimposed, the red stars biggest and brightest. In the center of the picture was a patch of blazing white the shape of a bloated comma. Within it were lines and blobs of shadow; but the shadow within the white patch was brighter than any star outside it.
"That's why you need the puppeteer ship," said Teela. "Isn't it?"
"Right."
"How did it happen?"
"The stars are too close together," said Louis. "An average of half a light year apart, all through the core of any galaxy. Near the center, they're packed even tighter. In a galactic core, stars are so close to each other that they can heat each other up. Being hotter, they burn faster. They age faster.
"All the stars of the core must have been just that much closer to going nova, ten thousand years ago.
"Then one star went nova. It let loose a lot of heat and a blast of ganuna rays. The few stars around it got that much hotter. I gather the gamma rays also make for increased stellar activity. So a couple of neighboring stars blew up.
"That made three. The combined heat set off a few more. It was a chain reaction. Pretty soon there was no stopping it. That white patch is all supernovae. If you like, you can get the math of it a little further along in the tape."
"No thanks," she said — predictably. "I gather it's an over by now?"
"Yeah. That's old light you're looking at, though it hasn't reached this part of the galaxy yet. The chain reaction must have ended ten thousand years ago."
"Then what is everyone excited about?"
"Radiation. Fast particles, all kinds." The masseur chair was beginning to relax him; he settled deeper into its formless bulk and let the standing wave patterns knead his muscles. "Look at it this way. Known space is a little bubble of stars thirty-three thousand light years out from the galactic axis. The novae began exploding more than ten thousand years ago. That means that the wave front from the combined explosion will get here in about twenty thousand years. Right?"
"Sure."
"And the subnuclear radiation from a million novae is traveling right behind the wave front."
"… Oh."
"In twenty thousand years we'll have to evacuate every world you ever heard of, and probably a lot more."
"That's a long time. If we started now, we could do it with the ships we've got. Easily."
"You're not thinking. At three days to the light year, it would take one of our ships about six hundred years to reach the Clouds of Magellan."