A lot had happened in those half million years. There was now a fifth body, an "almost" star, in the Orion Nebula, formed after the Heechee had taken their last look at the area. The new body was called the Becklin-Neugebauer object; it was in its early
hydrogen-burning stage, less than a hundred thousand years old. And it seemed that the Schoen sisters had the bad luck to come almost inside it.
MISSION NAKED BLACK HOLE
The crew was William Sakyetsu, Marianna Morse, Hal M'Buna, Richard Smith, and Irma Malatesta. All of them had been Out before-Malatesta had done it five times-but luck hadn't favored any of their ventures. None of them had yet made a big enough score to pay their Gateway bills.
So for their mission they were careful to choose an armored Five with a record of success. The previous crew in that ship had earned a "nova" science bonus in it, managing to come close enough to a recurring nova to get some good pictures, though not so close that they didn't live through the experience. They had collected a total of seven and a half million dollars in bonus money and had gone back to Earth, rejoicing. But before they left they gave their ship a name. They called it Victory.
When Sakyetsu and the others in his crew got to their destination they looked for the planet-or the star, or the Heechee artifact, or the object of any interesting sort-that might have been its target.
They were disappointed. There wasn't anything like that to be found anywhere around. There were stars in sight, sure. But the nearest of them was nearly eight light-years away. By all indications they had landed themselves in one of the most boringly empty regions of interstellar space in the galaxy. They could not find even a nearby gas cloud.
They didn't give up. They were experienced prospectors. They spent a week checking out every possibility. First, they made sure they hadn't missed a nearby star: with interferometry they could measure the apparent diameter of some of the brighter stars; by spectral analysis they could determine their types; combining the two gave them an estimate of distance.
Their first impression had been right. It was a pretty empty patch of sky they had landed in.
There was, to be sure, one really spectacular object in view-the word Marianna used was "glorious"-a globular cluster, with thousands of bright stars interweaving their orbits in a volume a few hundred light-years across. It was certainly spectacular. It dominated the sky. It was much nearer to them than any such object had ever been to a human eye before. But it was still at least a thousand light-years away.
A globular cluster is an inspiring sight. It was a long way from Sakyetsu and his ship Victory, but by the standards of Earthly astronomers that was nothing at all. Globular clusters live on the outer fringe of the galaxy. There aren't any in the crowded spiral-arm regions like the neighborhood of Earth. There are almost none less than twenty thousand light-years from Earth, and here was one a twentieth as far-and thus, by the law of inverse squares, four hundred times as bright. It was not an unusually large specimen, as globular clusters go; the big ones run upward of a million stars, and this one was nowhere near that. It was big enough to be exciting to look at, all the same.
But it was neither big enough nor near enough for Victory's instruments to reveal any more than Earth's own orbiting observatories, with their far more powerful mirrors and optical systems, had seen long ago.
So there was very little chance that the instruments on Victory could earn them any kind of decent bonus. Still, those instruments were all they had. So the crew doggedly put them to work. They photographed the cluster in red light, blue light, ultraviolet light, and several bands of the infrared. They measured its radio flux in a thousand frequencies, and its gamma rays and X-rays. And then, one sleeping period, while only H~tl M'Buna was awake at the instruments, he saw the thing that made the trip worthwhile.
His shout woke everybody up. "Something's eating the cluster!"
Marianna Morse was the first to get to the screens with him, but the whole crew flocked to see. The fuzzy circle of the cluster wasn't a circle anymore. An arc had been taken out of its lower rim. It looked like a cookie a child had bitten into.
But it wasn't a bite.
As they watched, they could see the differences. The stars of the cluster weren't disappearing. They were just, slowly, moving out of the way of-something.
"My God," Marianna whispered. "We're in orbit around a black hole."
Then they cursed the week they had wasted, because they knew what that meant. Big money! A black hole. One of the rarest objects (and, therefore, one of the most highly rewarded in science bonuses) in the observable universe-because black holes are, intrinsically, unobservable.
