"We call it the Great Attractor," said the Qax. "We know something about its properties. It is three hundred million light years from here. And it's massive: a hundred thousand times the mass of our Galaxy, crammed into a region about half the Galaxy's diameter."

A cold mist settled over us; the Qax restlessly stirred its oceanic muscles. I felt like a flea on the back of a hippopotamus.

"We need to understand what is happening out there," the Qax went on. "Now: we have trading contacts throughout the Local Cluster, and we've been analyzing sightings of Xeelee ships. We had the idea of trying to track down the Xeelee Prime Radiant -- their source and center of activities. We have done so."

"The Prime Radiant is at the center of the Galaxy," I said.

Lipsey smiled thinly. "You're not thinking big enough, Bolder. The Xeelee transcend any one Galaxy."

I thought that through... and my mouth dried up. "You're not suggesting," I asked slowly, "that the Xeelee are responsible for the Great Attractor? That they're building it?"

"We plan to send a probe to find out," said the Qax. "Our captured Xeelee ship is the technology we need to cross such distances."

"Which is where I come in?"

"Do you accept the commission, Bolder?"

"Yes," I said immediately, staring fixedly at the translator box. To fly a Xeelee fighter to the center of everything... my only fear now was that I'd be turned down.

Lipsey interrupted smoothly: "Subject to a suitable fee, of course." He smiled like a good agent.

Surrounded by the primeval murk, we began discussing powers of ten.

We returned to Lipsey's flitter.

"Lipsey... why do the Qax care? What turns them on?"

"Short-term profit," he said simply. "This is a young planet, not all that stable. Hot spots come and go, and individuals tend to be broken up quickly.

"As a result they don't have a strong sense of self, and they find it hard to plan for -- or even imagine -- the future." His face creased with wonder. "There are only a few hundred of them, you know, each of them miles across... but thanks to their peculiar biology their awareness and material control go right down to the molecular level. They've developed a high, miniaturized technology; it's the basis of their commercial power. Of course," he smiled, "they trade by proxy."

I frowned. "We're millions of years from a crisis over this Great Attractor. If they're so shortlived, why spend so much on gathering data about it?"

"Profit. With a secret as big as this they can name their own price."

We rendezvoused with a Spline craft, orbiting the Qax star. The Spline was a gunship. We scurried around huge walls covered with thirty-feet-wide scales, and I peered curiously into hundreds of weapon emplacements -- and then, drifting through the Spline's long shadow, we found the Xeelee ship.