Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“But not this one,” An Li noted.

“Nope. Oh, there are fields where wild holes wink in and out all the time. Somethin’ causes ’em, some kind of forces of nature, who knows? But they still wink in, wink out, wink in, wink out, and who knows where the hell they go to? This one, and this one alone, supposedly always goes the same place, and it’s been doin’ it for at least the couple of centuries or so since it was found, maybe a lot longer. It’s a natural hole that’s also consistent and predictable. And that ain’t possible. Even I know that much physics. Like some kind of predictable lightning bolt. Nope, this sucker may look natural and feel natural, but if you can go there and it shows up, it ain’t natural . And that to me spells ‘trap.’ ”

Queson shook her head slowly from side to side, almost in disbelief. “Everybody’s suddenly so gloomy about this, even me. Is it the new paneling or something in the coffee? I mean, didn’t we all just volunteer for this? And didn’t we all know we were probably going into some kind of trap? I mean, why else all the weapons and sensor equipment? We’re about as well-armed with weaponry and probes as a naval destroyer! If everybody thinks this is a one-way trip into an alien dissection lab, why did we all volunteer?”

Cross looked at An Li, who stared back at Cross. Finally, they both shrugged, and it was An Li who answered, “Maybe because we had nothing better to do?”

It took eleven days to reach the entry region. From the command center aboard the Stanley, they could see that this was in fact one of the places you’d expect to find the entry point, but picking the right wild hole was something else entirely.

It was one of hundreds of such places in the galaxy which, for unknown reasons, had from dozens to hundreds or even thousands of natural holes winking in and out. It was not a region that ships stayed in for long, but almost all trips had to go through such a region, since the genholes themselves tended to anchor at these spots.

Normally, a ship would emerge from a genhole and then immediately head into another in a preprogrammed sequence; in this case, they emerged into a kind of space that looked as ordinary and as empty as the rest but which set off every sort of alarm a ship might have—and caused even one the size of the Stanley to shudder, shake, and apply some real power just to stay in one spot for long. Things were happening out there, things well outside the visible spectrum.

There were no windows in the Stanley, nor any space-based visible cameras. They weren’t needed and wouldn’t show much in any event. The master board, though, in the C&C could show things the way the captain, with all sorts of sensors, could see things. The main difference was that they could see each method of viewing serially, while the captain saw them all at once.

They were looking at energy surges and hot spots, and the only things that came to Randi Queson’s mind were a Christmas display and some sort of ancient artillery battle.

“ We’re supposed to go in there ?” she asked, incredulous. It didn’t appear that there was enough room to do it without getting potted by one or another of those flares.

“Oh, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Cross assured her. “I’ve been on ships that went all through this area, and hundreds of ships come through the genholes here all the time. Things are a lot farther apart than they look. We’re looking at several parsecs of space here. No, getting in the way of one of those isn’t the problem. It’s the fact that the next thing we have to do is fly into one.”

“You can sure see why nobody’s found this thing,” Sark noted. “I don’t think you’d get far with trial and error.”

“Maybe not,” An Li responded. “One of them keeps winking on and off in the same space for generations.”

“It is not as easy as all that,” the captain’s voice came in. “No wild hole is all that consistent in where it emerges. It could emerge almost anywhere in this field, and the only thing you’d notice was that it lasted a bit longer than most—several seconds, in fact. But once I get the pattern, it becomes predictable. When we get one flash that holds for precisely the same length of time and repeats a location or a series of locations according to the pattern fed into my memory banks, then we will be able to go right through. I will have to match speed, trajectory, and a lot more, but the figures I have will allow me, with the observations, to know which one is the one and only gateway to the Three Kings.”

“Um, out of curiosity, what would happen if you picked the wrong one?” Queson asked anybody else in the C&C.

“Simple. You either go the wrong place if you make it through,” Cross responded, “or, more likely, you wind up in an uncontrolled vortex that sucks you in and instantly compresses you to the size of a pinhead. Gives you a whole new respect for the ones who set up the first genholes, don’t it?”

“They were mostly robots,” Jerry Nagel told her. “Very few lives were risked in that kind of operation. Robots made the tries, drew the energy needed to keep the things open and stable long enough to get the genhole anchor on one end, then—if the robot inside made it through—it retained enough of a linkage to allow another anchor to go through the hole and shore up the other end. Even when they had it down cold, they ran robotic ship after robotic ship through until they were sure it was safe.”

“That isn’t correct, Jerry,” the captain commented. “ First a scout went through, a cybership like me, only designed specifically for the job of threading the wormhole needle. It was the scout that provided the anchor on the other end and used it to transmit data back. The Three Kings, of course, are an exception. Somehow most of the report got back, but there was no anchor, and, thus, nobody knew which of these was the right one.”

“ Somebody knew,” Randi Queson pointed out.

“What? What do you mean?” the captain asked.

“We have the information. We got it from somebody else who had it, and they got it from somebody else who had it and so on. No, that information got back here, somehow. It just never got into the public record. I bet if you really worked on the problem enough you’d discover that somebody got greedy, that that somebody truncated or erased part of that report after they’d copied it. They went for the Kings themselves, and vanished just like everybody else, and now they’re pretty well lost to history. But they knew. This doesn’t have to be an alien plot. Just some good old-fashioned greed and corruption, I’d wager.”

“Interesting idea,” Nagel said. “If not, that description sure covers people like Sanders and us, doesn’t it? I guess all us greedy, corrupt skunks get attracted to things like that.”

“Kind of ironic, though,” Randi noted.

“Huh? Why?” Nagel responded.

“Discovered by a monk who named them for the three rich and powerful men who brought gifts to the Christ child, then turned almost immediately into an object of greed and a source of death.”

“Well, that’s what people have always done to religion. Why stop with this?” An Li said cynically. “Cap, when do we go through? You found it yet?”

“I have it, yes,” she replied. “But it will be a very difficult maneuver to enter it at just the right time and angle so that I can avoid damaging the ship. You do seem exceptionally eager to get on with this, though, which could very easily be the last thing any of us does.”

“Beats being bored, Cap,” Sark commented. “Nobody lives forever.”