Closed System

thanthree hours from now.' 'Yes, ma'am,' Pat said. Maybe it was just the computer. The old manhad been ailing, cranky. He'd have a talk with that

gentleman, get to the bottom of it. But as he hur­ried out of his office a feeling of deep, agonizing depression hit him. What was the use? His worldhad been compressed into the twin green eyes of agirl.

So what if X&A grounded him? What did itmatter?

FOUR

A smart little flux-drive runabout with X&A mark­ing sat directly in front of the pad on whichSkimmer squatted, her hull showing the dullness of a longtime in space, the thousand-parsec syndrome, itwas called. When Pat left his vehicle and walkedonto the pad a uniformed security guard blockedhis way to Skimmer's hatch.

'Sorry, friend,' the security guard said. 'Thiscrate has been impounded by X&A.'

Jeanny Thompson's pert face appeared in theopen hatch. 'It's all right, guard. Please let thegentleman

pass.'

'You've already seized the ship?' Pat asked, as he followed Jeanny ontoSkimmer's bridge.

'No, final seizure will take court action. Mean­while, we're just making sure that no one comesaboard

and destroys evidence.'

'Jeanny, you know I didn't erase the tape,' hesaid.

She turned to face him. 'Someone did.'

Corinne. He had been ill for days. Had she triedto use the computer? There were, of course, safe­guards against erasing the trip log. It would takean intimate knowledge of computers or some acci­dent against which the odds were astronomical totamper with that separate chamber in the old man'sstorage areas where the trip information was re­ corded.

'Well?' Jeanny demanded.

'Jeanny, let me talk to the old man for a fewminutes.'

'I'm on your side,' Jeanny said, 'but I'm notabout to put myself in a sling, Pat. I'm going to belooking

over your shoulder. I see you trying totamper and I call the guard.'

'OK, OK,' he said testily, seating himself at theold man's console. He punched up the trip tapeand checked coordinates with his own handwrit­ ten log.

'Holy—' Jeanny said unbelievingly, as the fourrandom blinks outbound from Taratwo showed onthe star map which the computer was laying outon the screen. 'What in the holy hell were youdoing, Pat? Four random blinks?'

'I had two hostile light cruisers with all thelatest armament on my tail,' Pat said. 'There's nolaw against random blinks.'

'There should be a law against stupidity,' shesaid.

The map built smoothly to record the coursechanges Pat had made on flux and on the blinkSkimmer had made to get back onto an establishedblink route.

'Coming up,' Jeanny said.

You had to be watching closely. The map showedthe next blink down the range toward UP space,but there was, before that blink, just a tiny glitch,a sort of instantaneous glimmer on the screen. Patbacked up

the tape and ran it again.

'That's where the delete button was pushed,' Jeanny said.

'Jeanny, if I'd wanted to erase a portion of thetape I wouldn't have left such obvious tracks.'

'That's why I'm here. That's why I haven't turnedthe case over to the action section.'

'That I appreciate,' Pat said. 'Look, honey, Ineed a little time. I know this old bird here. Iknow him like

a friend, inside out. I need to have along, long talk with him.'

'I just can't allow you to be alone on board,'Jeanny said, 'and I have work to do back at theoffice.'

'Come on, Jeanny.'

She shook her head. 'Pat, dammit, if you get meinto trouble—'

'You know better than that.'

'All right, look. I can hold up notifying actionsection until tomorrow afternoon at the latest. Idon't think you're going to find anything morethan our techs found, but I'm willing to give youthe chance. On one condition. I want to knowwhat the hell you were up to out there and who itis you suspect might have tampered with yourcomputer.'

'Later,' he said. He didn't think he could talkabout Corinne without displaying emotion. Jeannyknew him too well. He didn't want to have toadmit to her that he had been suckered in by abunch of city slickers from Zede II and made tolook like a complete fool by a redheaded film star.

'Now,' Jeanny said.

'I had a passenger. That was my main gig goingto Taratwo, to pick up a woman—'

'Ah,' Jeanny said.

'—and take her back to Zede II. What they didn'ttell me was that the Man, Brenden, didn't wantthe woman to leave his comfortable bed.' Andeven as he said it a fist closed over his heart. But after what she'd done, what else could he believe?One lie almost guaranteed others. And she'd notonly stolen Murphy's Stone, she'd fooled aroundwith the computer while he was ill.

'Do you think she erased the tape?'

'That's not the only possibility,' Pat said. 'There'sthis. The ship went nowhere except the places which are recorded on tape. Once the computer locatedour position, I blinked onto the route and then wewent straight down the route to Zede II. The com­puter had been cranky. Maybe that glitch there, which indicates that the delete button was pushedafter going through half a dozen fail-safe's is acomputer glitch. If so, maybe I can reproduce it.'

'What are the other possibilities?' Jeanny asked.

'I was off the ship for a night on Zede II,' he said. 'Zede City Port is a big one, with all themodern equipment. Someone might have used somepretty sophisticated gear to bypass my securitysystem, get on board, get into the computer.'

'Why?'

'Why? I don't know. It's just a possibility.'

'I still think the best bet is the passenger,' Jeannysaid.

'I don't think she had enough computer trainingto be able to do it,' Pat said. 'She'd have had todo it by oral order, and the old man was, and is,cranky, fancying himself to be hard of hearing.'

'So you think you'd have heard her talking, evenif you were asleep at the time?'

'Yeah,' Pat said. Now why didn't he just tellJeanny that he'd come down with the mindheatfever? He'd been out for days. Corinne had hadplenty of time to carry on lengthy conversationswith the old man.

'OK, Audrey,' she said, and he didn't even bother to tell her not to call him Audrey. 'You have about twenty- four hours.'

He had the servo make coffee, pulled himself upto the computer console, settled in. First he told the old man to run a comprehensive check of allfunctions during the time period beginning withthe first blink after the ship was lost in space.There was a mass of material, because the com­puter monitored all functions of all the ship's sys­ tems. He couldn't afford to skip over any of it, noteven the inventory of stores in the nutrition ser­vos. An unskilled computer operator might justhave had to hunt and seek for a successful way toget the old man to erase, or at least push thedelete button on the trip log.

Nothing is ever wasted, he felt, after he'd spentfour hours checking the boring, seemingly endlesscatalog of ship's functions, because that minuteexamination told him just how wellSkimmer func­ tioned. He was proud of her. As for the computer,those automatic functions were carried out assmoothly as if the machine had been fresh off theassembly line.

The fact was that the ship could not have goneanywhere not recorded on the tape because he'dbeen lost in delirium and fever for seven and a halfdays. When he tabulated the time he was shocked.As he remembered it—and he couldn't be sure of his memory, when he'd asked Corinne how longhe'd been

out he was still pretty weak—she'd toldhim that he'd been ill five days.

That was when he first began to think that maybethe ship had been moved and that maybe the tapehad been