Closed System

twenty-four hours you might haveto have Central check with me. It takes a whileto counteract something as serious as having your license lifted.'

'Jeanny, when I get back, the best dinner foryou, and a nice little gift.'

'So you are going?'

'Wouldn't you?'

'I don't know. I might just write off my lossesand forget it. You were playing in the big time onthat trip to Taratwo, Pat. Maybe out of your class. You're alive, and our scan on your affairs showed that you made a bundle out of the trip. Why don't you just stay here, get the overhaul completed onSkimmer?'

To that point she'd been all business. Now herfacial expression softened. 'I have two weeks ofvacation

coming up. If you'd like some companywhen you take the ship out for a check ride afterthe overhaul—'

'Jeanny, that sounds great,' he said. 'Hold thatvacation until I get back, OK?'

She shrugged. 'Have yourself a ball,' she said,standing, making it clear that she was dismissinghim.

FIVE

Skimmerlifted into space with her hull still show­ing the dullness of the thousand-parsec syndrome.Pat had taken time only to restock the food sup­plies and pick out a few new movies. The first partof the trip was routine, along well-maintained blinkroutes, and he was able to program several blinksat one time, then let the old man do the work. Thelong oral sessions with the computer seemed tohave had an invigorating effect. There was, at first,no indication of the sluggishness associated withionization of the memory chambers.

Pat didn't have a cup of coffee for three days. Heused the time to try to make estimates, a difficulttask, of just how far toward the core of the galaxyCorinne's route would take him.

He passed within a few light-years of Zede II,then began to retrace the routeSkimmer had fol­lowed in taking Corinne home. It was difficult notto think of her. X&A had made some preliminaryinquiries, based on the solid evidence in the oldman's self-diagnosis chamber, and had run head-oninto a gaggle of space lawyers who said that Co­rinne Tower, the famous Zedeian holo star, hadnot been off Zede II in over five years, and thatany half-baked space mercenary who said that shehad was risking a libel suit.

Well, it was X&A's baby now. Since there wasno record of Corinne Tower holding a space li­cense there was little X&A could do, even if itsinvestigators did wade through the banks of law­yers. Pat guessed that they'd file the informationand forget it. That was all right with him. Hecouldn't bring himself to want to see Corinne pun­ished. Not while he was there alone on the ship, re­membering how she looked when she first awoke inthe morning and came out of the mate's cabin forbreakfast.

As the days passed and the nightmares began to fade, he began to rationalize her actions. All right,so she was a professional actress. So her tender­ness, that one time that he'd kissed her, couldhave been sheer acting. Certainly she'd double-crossed him. She'd stolen his diamond, or at least his half of the diamond. It was sort of pleasant to think of what he could have done with half of thevalue of Murphy's Stone, but what would he dowith himself if he were fabulously wealthy? Hedidn't take on sometimes dangerous assignmentsjust for the thrill of it. He did it for money, but didhe really want the things that megamillions couldbuy?

Hell, yes. The newest and best in space yachts,manor houses on the most pleasant planets, some of those beautiful and awesome light-brush paint­ ings by Anleian of Selbelle III which brought mil­lions at auction. Hell, yes. But what the hell.What he wanted most was what he couldn't evenhope to have. He could hope for another big strike.He'd made one, in Murphy's Stone, so he could makeanother and have the yacht and the houses and the paintings. What he couldn't have was Corinne, andit was, he realized, that loss which was sendinghim out and away from UP space into uncharted space. If he couldn't have her he had to know why.He couldn't believe, down in his heart, that shecould have acted that scene when he kissed her,when the quiet tears came as she fought againstthe desires of her own body.

The first part of the trip, reversing the coursethey'd traveled together, was preliminary. The bigshow got underway after he'd reached the firstblink beacon they'd found after those lovely daysof being lost and alone in space. He punched in thecoordinates of the first jump Corinne had takenalone and held his breath. Three jumps later theold man was going bananas, because Pat wouldn'tgive him time to make those time-consuming360-degree scans for points of identification.

The star patterns were entirely different. Themassive glow of the Milky Way was before them,growing dense. The blinks were becoming shorterbecause of increasing star population, and all thestars were alone, bright solitaires in space, with­out a comforting family of planets. That's the way it was in toward the core, and that was the mainreason why all of X&A's exploration efforts weredirected toward less densely starred areas outtoward the periphery.

The only suns with planets which were knownto be tucked away amid that glaring, hard chaosof stars toward the core were nowhere near Pat'sroute, but off at a bearing of about 45 degrees to his port. He'd been there. Once after he'd finisheda particularly profitable trip he'd taken a sweetyoung girl from Xanthos University, a former student, not that much younger than himself, to cruiseslowly by a dozen worlds which had, at some timein the distant past, been sterilized by some unimag­inable weapon. The Dead Worlds. Hundreds of ex­peditions had searched for their secret. The rubblepiled over bedrock showed, in minutes bits andpieces, that once a thriving civilization had ex­isted there on each of the closely packed planets ofan odd grouping of a family of interrelated stars.And because of that rubble, because of that total destruction of a dozen worlds, X&A ships wentarmed with weapons of war which had not been used in a thousand years. For any race which couldpulverize a dozen civilizations had to have potentweapons, and on each X&A expedition there were two hopes among the crew. One, that they'd find asweet, beautiful water planet with livable condi­tions and, possibly, an intelligent race with whomman could exchange ideas and information, no longer alone in a big, big universe. Two, that they would not encounter the beings who had reducedthe Dead Worlds to rubble lying loosely atopbedrock.

Space, to a man alone, engenders a variety ofthoughts. Pat thought of the Dead Worlds, andwondered if he'd find anything like that up ahead, where the stars were densely packed and a confu­sion of solar winds from that vast population ofsuns sent radiation counters clattering. He thoughtmostly of Corinne, just a little about a two- week vacation with Jeanny, and scolded himself because he couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the latter.And he remembered his drug-induced nightmares, tried to sort them, identify them as spinoffs ofchildhood horrors, things he'd heard, things he'dread. After all, the unconscious can't create. Itmerely stores, like a computer, and distorts storedinformation in seemingly random patterns.

It was interesting to analyze his nightmares. Hecould identify three or four childhood dreams,dreams which were fairly common. He had flownin his illness, soaring, pumping his legs against airto gain altitude—that, of course, a distortion bythe unconscious of the act of swimming upward toward the surface of a pool after diving deep. Hehad fled unseen terror fighting against clinging, molasses-like resistance. He couldn't trace that one back to any known influence. He had gnashed histeeth in his fever, feeling them crumble and fallout in pieces. That, of course, went back to child­hood and the first traumatic loss of baby teeth, or,perhaps, to adult visits to the dentist.

Monsters he could remember from his night­mares during that time were really not so mon­strous. Upon analysis, they became nothing morethan composites from horror movies, legends,stories.

There was one thing, however, that he could not trace back. His memory of the entire episode washazy, dredged up with difficulty and little clarity,but twice during the trip outward from Xanthoshe had seen in his dream a huge, centuries-oldstarship, hull marked and battered, floating alonein space, dead, silent. He supposed that his uncon­scious mind had composed the ship from space-opera stories or movies, but still that memoryseemed to have a solidity that the others from thefevered period lacked.

Skimmer'sgenerator had no difficulty chargingwhen he had emptied it with the multiple blinkswhich led him even closer to the core, ever deeper,by zig and zag past blue giants and white dwarfs,all the various types of stars, some of them very, very old, some of them surprisingly young.

There was a school of astrophysics which theo­rized that stars were continually being createdthere in the inaccessible heart, in the core heat of the galaxy. Pat chose not to believe that. He be­lieved in a single act of creation and, although hewas not pious or devout, in a single creator. WhenPat's God said, 'Let there be light,' there waslight,the Big Bang, a light never seen before orsince. Faced with an act of creation, he had toaccept a creator, and that rather pleased him. Hecouldn't accept the orthodox opinion that God spenthis time watching sparrows fall and listening toevery prayer by the pious. He imagined God to bea bit too busy for that, but there, nevertheless.