“By the time they realize it,” I replied calmly, “it will be too late. And then their fury won’t matter, will it? They won’t be able to tell us how annoyed they are with us. Or to report to their home world, for that matter, that they had an encounter with intelligent aliens who might be worth exploiting.”
He gave me an odd look. The truth was starting to sink in.
I turned on the external screens and punched up a close look at the black hole region. Yes, there was the alien ship, the little metallic sphere, the six odd outthrust legs. It was in the zone of criticality now. It seemed hardly to be moving at all. And it was growing dimmer and dimmer as it slowed. The gravitational field had it, and it was being drawn in. Blacking out, becoming motionless. Soon it would have gone beyond the point where outside observers could perceive it. Already it was beyond the point of turning back.
I heard Lina sobbing behind me. Bryce-Williamson was muttering to himself: praying, perhaps.
I said, “Who can say what they would have done to us—in their casual, indifferent way—once they came to Earth? We know now that Spargs worry only about Spargs. Anybody else is just so much furniture.” I shook my head. “To hell with them. They’re gone, and in a universe this big we’ll probably never come across any of them again, or they us. Which is just fine. We’ll be a lot better off having nothing at all to do with them.”
“But to die that way—” Lina murmured. “To sail blindly into a black hole—”
“It is a great tragedy,” said Bryce-Williamson.
“A tragedy for them,” I said. “For us, a reprieve, I think. And tomorrow we can get moving on the neutronium-scoop project.” I tuned up the screen to the next level. The boiling cloud of matter around the mouth of the black hole blazed fiercely. But of the alien ship there was nothing to be seen.
Yes, a great tragedy, I thought. The valiant exploratory mission that had sought the remains of the Nine Sparg home world has been lost with all hands. No hope of rescue. A pity that they hadn’t known how unpleasant black holes can be.
But why should we have told them? They were nothing to us.