Closed System

Deep and shallow thoughts while alone. The oldman chuckling and complaining because the shipwas hopelessly lost, except for Corinne's series ofblink coordinates, the ship functioning perfectly, Pat back on coffee. No blink beacons. And yet it was impossible for a ship to have established the route by random blinks. One random blink there near the core and the ship would never emerge,having merged forever with the molten subatomic particles of the sun. No. Someone, in some ship, atsome time, had had to feel his way along thatroute, perhaps at sublight speeds, although that was farfetched, because a ship traveling at sublightspeeds would have taken not just one generationbut several to chart that route and leave blink coordinates. More likely the course was charted as X&A ships now charted new blink routes, makingblinks to the safe extent of their optical and sensorscouting ability, covering short, short distances in an instant, then taking hours to determine how farthe next blink can take them without contact witha solid body.

Even with the X&A method it would have takenyears, decades, to chart the route.Skimmer's trackon the chart being constructed by the computerextended backward far and away in that zigzaggingline out toward the areas where the stars werethinner.

It was hard work. Corinne had made the tripthere and back in seven and a half days. At the endof three days, with only a few catnaps while thedepleted generator drew on the energies of thestars themselves for its charge, he had just one more blink to make to be at the end of Corinne'scourse. He forced himself to wait for a full genera­tor charge. He wanted to have all the power hecould when he blinked out at the end of his jour­ney. He had no idea what he'd find there and if ithad teeth, he'd have to rely on that brute of agenerator inSkimmer's engine room to make moremultiple blinks than whatever it was that hadteeth. He had two hours' sleep, awoke, ate. Co­rinne looked almost frail, but she'd been toughenough to go without sleep in more than two-hour segments for at least six days and look fresh andbeautiful when he came out of his drugged condition.

'OK, old man,' he said, when the generator wascharged to a capacity which so energized the wholeof Skimmer that the hairs on his arms and hands tingled. 'Here we go.'

Tensed, he waited for the alarms to start whin­ing, clanging, shouting. A calm computer told himthat he was one quarter of an astronomical unit from a planet about the size of ancient Mars in theSolar System, and that the planet emanated noenergies other than the natural reflections of thesolar winds of a weak yellow star which was onlya small disk in the distance.

He gave it some time. He scanned the planet. Itwas a planet of rock and sand, barren, and yet itshowed an atmosphere. Men had settled worse plan­ets, drawing the subterranean water upward tothe surface, altering the climate with importedplant life.

Nothing happened. All sensors working showed no danger, no manmade emanations. He putSkim­mer on flux and made his approach. When he coulddistinguish surface features on the planet he saw barren mountain ranges, deep chasms. Once theplanet had lived, had built mountains, had shothot lava and rock into the air, had possessed sur­face water to cut those massive gorges.

The planet hung over him now, theSkimmer inorbit, all sensors and instruments at work. Theonly change in readings was a hint of water in anarrow belt around the equator. That was onlymildly interesting. The optics picked up hints of green in that belt. More interesting. And it becameeven more interesting when a half-dozen alarms clanged and whistled and whined at the same timeand the old man broke his sulky silence.

'Alert, alert. Unidentified vessel.'

She came swimming toward theSkimmer in aslightly higher orbit, clearing the curve of the planet with stately, slow, majestic movement, a huge ship.

Pat jerked on the arms-control helmet, went intoaction. The alarms were quieted. The computer spat out information. There was no radiation ofany kind coming from the huge ship. There wereno overt signs of hostile intent.

The ship looked very familiar to Pat. It took himonly seconds to realize that the ship which movedslowly and majestically toward him in an orbit which would bring it almost directly over theSkimmerwas the ship of his nightmares.

He threw the optics on highest magnification.The ship expanded on his screen. The hull showedmultiples of the effects of the thousand-parsec syn­drome. Pat waited. She was almost spherical inshape, a design from the past, and she had a feel­ ing, a sense of age. She was close enough now sothat he could see the closed ports which, in allprobability, housed weapons. There was no sign oflife, no emanations detectable by theSkimmer'sarray of instruments.

When she was directly overhead he could see the exit ports. They were open. The ship was dead in space, open to space, silent, deserted, eerie.

When she had disappeared behind the curve ofthe planet, her discolored hull sending back onegleaming flash of reflected sunlight from the weakyellow sun, he went to the computer and punchedup a tape on spaceship design and history.

The ship which was in a high, stable orbit aroundthis barren planet in an area where there shouldnot even

be a planet, so near the core that thehuge, fiery monsters, the crowded stars, seemed topush down, to overwhelm, was of a type whichhad not been built for a thousand years. She wasan ancient colonization ship, a ship of the typeused in the days of early expansion outward from the core of the UP, a ship whose only purpose wasto carry masses of people, with their possessions,to a new home among the stars.

SIX

There are few things in existence which attaininfinite perfection. The universe itself is flawed,for it is not eternal. All of it, all that small portionknown to man and that vast unknown portion, ison a minutely slow slide to nothing, expendingenergies which cannot, short of another creation,be replaced. Someday it will all be cold, and mo­ tionless, and sterile. An orchid approaches perfec­tion, but nevertheless is subject to mutation,environmental damage, and swift decay.

Of all the things that approach perfection, PatHowe thought, as he exitedSkimmer's airlock, space comes closest in quality to the absolute perfectionof loneliness. No man is ever more alone than aman in self-contained space gear outside the frail protection of the hull of his ship.

He had dosed himself heavily with radiation pre­ventatives, and had the after-exposure doses readyon the bridge to take when he returned.Skimmer was on her own, in the care of the old man. He lefther with the out hatch open, the inner hatch of the airlock closed. He pushed off, and the movementgave him a slow tumbling motion which he counteracted with the control jets. Then he was oneman alone, a tiny mote in the glare of those claus­trophobic star fields, one side of his suit beingcooled by frantically working units, the other sidebeing warmed until he was out ofSkimmer's shadowand the full impact of the solar winds from thethousands of stars hit him, sending the counter clattering.

Skimmerwas parked in a matching orbit lessthan a hundred yards from the ancient, giant colo­nization ship. Pat looked back, just once. The shiplooked dearly familiar, warm, inviting. There wasa great urge in him to go back, run for the airlock, close the hatch behind him, and seek safety withinSkimmer's friendly confines.

But somehow, the woman he loved, or had loved,had obtained the access codes to the computer's restricted chambers. The Zede connection had tobe the answer—the 'businessmen.' He guessed thatif an investigation could plow through to the heartof the matter there'd be a traceable link betweenCorinne's 'film producers' and Century Subatom­ics. Simple enough for the right people to get theaccess codes from company records. Which meant,of course, that they had had to have the serialnumber of the computer onSkimmer. Had theycome up with the computer number and the ac­cess codes and then come to seek him out, or hadthey found him, then obtained the access codes?

None of that really mattered, except as a ques­tion of curiosity. What mattered was Corinne's motivation.

Jetting carefully toward the big ship, he had time to wonder just what significance the shiphad. Obviously, it had been the destination of Co­rinne's solo trip. What had been on the ship whichwas important enough to make her drug him andtake a long, tiresome trip into the area near thegalactic core? If she had taken something from that ancient derelict it had been small, for she'dleft the ship with only her one bag, and a good bitof the storage area inside the bag had been taken up by Murphy's Stone.

He eased himself up to the hull of the old shipnear a large, gaping hatch, pulled himself along to the hatch