Man-Kzin Wars III by Larry Niven (good short books TXT) 📕

ages had eroded the hollow shell, wearing away its strength until a rock traveling at mere KPS could drive a hole through. Of course, that might mean resistance equal to ordinary armor plate, but it might be considerably less, if not everywhere then at certain points; and he could have happened to land at one of those points.

Otherwise the stuff kept unbelievable properties. Measurements taken on the escaping radiation showed what an inferno raged inside. Yet on this opposite hemisphere, a glance at instruments on his vambrace confirmed the findings made by the robot. Nothing was coming off but infrared at a temperature hardly above ambient.

Saxtorph realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a gust. His ribs ached, his sweat stank. Why had he undertaken the flit, anyway?

Well, it was irresistible. Nobody felt able to leave without exploring just a little bit more. And after all, you never knew; a search could turn up a clue to Peter Nordbo’s fate.

Saxtorph made for a surrealistic jumble of pipes, reticulations, and clustered globules. Dust, millimeters thick, scuffed up in ghost-wisps wherever his boots struck. After several leaps, he halted. “Okay, Carita, come join the fun. Don’t land, remember. Stay a few meters above and behind me, on the alert.”

“You’re afraid maybe I’ll take a nap?” the crewman gibed. Edged with their luminance, her spacesuit arrowed across the stars.

I suppose we shouldn’t crack jokes in the presence of something ancient and inscrutable, Saxtorph thought. We should be duly awed, reverent, and exalted. To hell with that. We’ve got a job to do. I hope Tyra will understand, when she writes this up.

Of course she will. She’s our own sort. If her whole life didn’t prove it already, the past couple of weeks sure did.

Saxtorph neared the complex. At hover, Carita directed a search beam as he desired, supplementing his flash. Undiffused, the brightness flowed like water over a substance that was not rock nor metal nor anything the humans knew. They both operated cameras as well as instruments, while their suits transmitted to the ship. Saxtorph’s eyes strained.

“I think the microcraters everywhere were formed in the last hundred million years, plus or minus x,” he said. “Otherwise we’d see much more overlap.”

“You’re supposing the construction is older than that, then,” Carita deduced.

“It certainly is,” Dorcas told them from the ship. “The computer just finished evaluating our data on the dust. Isotope ratios prove it’s been collecting for a minimum of two billion years, likely more.” After a moment: “Incidentally, that suggests cosmic radiation isn’t what weakened the shell to the point where impacts started leaving pockmarks and at last a big one broke through. The radiation inside must be mainly responsible. But if it hasn’t done more damage, well, the thing was built to last.”

“Besides,” Saxtorph said, “if I’ve got any feeling for machinery, this bears every earmark of tnuctipun work.”

“How can you tell?” Carita asked. Her words sounded thin. Ordinarily she would have kept silence, except for business and an occasional wisecrack, but the weirdness had shaken her a bit, roused a need to talk. Saxtorph sympathized. “What do we know about the Slaver era? What little the bandersnatchi remember, or believe they do, and what got learned from the thrint that came out of stasis for a short while, before they got it bottled again.”

“That includes a smidgen of technical information, and a lot of thinking has been done about it ever since,” he reminded her. “I’ve studied the subject some. It interests me. Come on.”

He bounded ahead to the next aggregation and examined it as best he cursorily could.

And the next and the next and the next. Time ceased to exist. He drank from his water tube, stuffed rations through his chowlock, excreted into his disposer, without noticing. He had become pure search. Sturdily, Carita followed. She made no attempt to call halt, nor did anyone aboard ship. The quest had seized them all.

Monkey curiosity, Saxtorph thought once, fleetingly. The kzinti would sneer. But they’d examine this too, in detail, till they used up every possibility of discovery that was in their equipment and their brains. Because to them it’d spell power.

The knowledge was chill: It is a terrible weapon.

“I suspect it’s one of a kind,” he said. “Humans and their acquaintances haven’t found any mini-black holes yet, and that hasn’t been for lack of looking. They’re bound to be uncommon.”

“Yes,” Dorcas agreed. “The tnuctipun doubtless came on this one by chance. I’d guess that was after they’d rebelled. They saw how to use it against the Slavers. Otherwise, if they’d built the machine around it earlier, the Slavers would have been in possession, and might have quelled the uprising early on. They might be alive today.”

Carita shuddered audibly. “A black hole—”

It could only be that. Mass, dimensions, radiation spectrum, everything fitted astrophysical theory. Peter Nordbo had recorded the idea in his notes, but he couldn’t reconcile it with the sudden apparition in the heavens. The tumbling shell and the meteoroid gap accounted for that. Perhaps while they were here the kzinti, under his guidance, had found indirect ways to study the interior, the eerie effects of so mighty a gravitation on space-time. But Rover’s crew already had ample data to be confident of what it was they confronted.

Burnt out, a giant star collapses into a form so dense, infinitely dense at the core singularity, that light itself can no longer escape its grip. The minimum mass required is about three Sols. Today. In the first furious instants of creation, immediately after the Big Bang, immeasurably great forces were at play. Where they chanced to concentrate, they had the power to compress any amount of mass, however small, into the black hole state. It must have happened, over and over. Countless billions must have formed, a few large, most diminutive.

In the universe of later epochs, they are not stable. Quantum tunneling causes them to give off particles, matter and antimatter, which mutually annihilate. For a