Closed System

using magnetic clingers, moved his headto shine his helmet light into the dark interior.The inner hatch of the lock was also open. That part of the big ship, at least, was open to space,cold, dead. According to the information he hadfromSkimmer's library, such ships had carriedfour to six space launches. There were tiedowns for such a launch in the lock which he entered, using the suit's jets to swim clear of the discoloredbulkheads and decking.

The airlock was empty, any speck or mote ofloose dust sucked into the insatiable maw of space's vacuum long ago.

Fighting an urge to keep looking over his shoul­der, he floated into a corridor, his way lit only by the helmet light. The corridor was as bare as thelock. Brackets on the bulkheads showed that somekind of equipment, perhaps spacesuits or safetygear, had been removed.

He contacted the computer onSkimmer. 'Giveme the shortest route to the control areas,' he said.

The computer, checking Pat's oral reports againstthe plans for similar ships fromSkimmer's infor­mation store, sent Pat on a route which took himtoward the core of the ship, heading for a point onthe opposite side where the control bridge perchedon the outside circumference of the huge sphere.

Since he was near, he detoured into the engineareas.

It became quickly obvious to him that the shiphad not met with some totally damaging disaster,but had been abandoned, and not in panic. Theship had been thoroughly cannibalized. All mov­able equipment and gear had been removed, andthe gold shielding of the almost unbelievably hugeand antique blink drive had been removed. It had been necessary, in the technology of a thousandyears past, to use a lot of gold for shielding. It wasall gone, and the more accessible parts of the gen­erator itself had been removed.

He passed through an area of living quarters tofind the same conditions. In places, even the divid­ing bulkheads had been ripped out, presumably forreclamation of the lightweight metals therein.

Far down in the guts of the ship, alone in asilence which caused a continuous reaction in hisinner ears, a vacuous, almost unrealized hissingwhich was the psychological reaction to the totalabsence of sound, he could hear his own heartbeating, could sense the song of his blood as it waspumped through his veins.

He whirled once, swiftly, panic causing his heartto race, for there in the closeness of the engineering spaces his fully alerted senses had given him a false signal of movement where there was onlyvacuum, and space- discolored bulkheads andstripped-down machinery.

'Whoa, Pat,' he said. 'No ghosts here. Theydidn't die here. They left the ship.'

Although he sent the words aloud to the oldman, the computer made no reply. It was not pro­grammed for small talk.

He found the instrument and computer sectionsbefore he reached the bridge. Computers had beenquite large when the ship was built. They werestill using microchips then, but the microchipshad all been removed. He'd been hoping to find afew in place. He could have rigged the old man to read them, if indeed, information had lasted for athousand years. But even the light-metal accessdoors had been removed.

The viewports on the control bridge were open.Radiation had clouded the plastic of the ports, sothat it now acted as an inefficient filter for thestorm of particles which swirled constantly aroundthe ship.

And on the bridge, as elsewhere, all instruments,anything movable, had been removed. There was not so much as a scrap of paper, a mote of dust, asmall personal item left behind to give him a clue.

He found the reason for the ship's abandonmentin the guidance and navigational section. Therehad been a severe explosion, and a resulting fire. That he could tell by twisted shards of metal andscorch marks, but the people of the ship had gut­ted that section, too.

'Old man,' he said, 'do you think it would beworthwhile to search the ship? I mean every com­partment, every nook and cranny?'

'Such a course would give the most availableinformation,' the computer said.

Pat felt a little shiver. The damned ship was big.He'd have to make several trips back toSkimmer to recharge the suit's life-support gear. It wouldtake days. And each time he stuck his head into a new hole, the beam of light from his helmet doingnot the world's best job of dispelling the totaldarkness, he felt that shiver come again. He per­sisted, however, until he had located the ship'slibrary. There'd been a fire there, too, for the li­brary, although there was no direct connection,backed the section which had taken the full forceof the explosion. The fire must have been fed by anoxygen-rich mixture, for in the library area, identifiable by the twisted, ruined, gutted pans whichhad once held computer tapes, even light metals had been consumed.

He was within thirty minutes of having to go on reserve on the suit's life-support system. There wasone more thing he wanted to check. He found asmall exit hatch open near the control areas anddid the checking from space, jetting around theglobe of the ancient ship to locate all six of the airlocks where once the space launches had beenstored. All were empty. All the launches had beenused.

For what? There was but one answer. For some reason the old colony ship had chosen to explore toward the core, and, following a slow and erraticcourse, dodging stars, had found a planet. It wasnot much of a planet. It loomed over Pat's head ashe jetted back towardSkimmer, colorful, true, withred and orange pigments in the barren areas, butpoor as planets go. So the ship had found the planet,before the explosion had destroyed its abil­ity to maneuver, and the people had left the dis­abled ship on the space launches. The launches werenot lifeboats. If there'd been a full complement ofcolonists aboard, enough to people those warrensof quarters, the launches would have had to makeseveral trips. There was only one place which couldhave been a destination for such back-and-forth ferrying. The planet.

He'd set the computer to analyzing the planetduring his absence. He checked over the information while he was taking the multiple doses ofafter-exposure drugs, washing them down with cof­fee. There was a viable atmosphere, surprisinglyrich in oxygen. There was a bit of surface water,much of it frozen into thin icecaps at the poles,some of it in the greenbelt around the equator. The deep basins which once had been oceans werearid. The tall mountains were eroded only slightlyin areas, showing that they'd been formed late inthe planet's wet period, before something happenedto stop the rains, and the water which had filled

the vast ocean spaces had disappeared, evaporat­ing into space, or sinking into porous rock.

There was enough carbon dioxide in the atmo­sphere to block out most of the harmful radiationfrom the suns which surrounded the small area ofopen space occupied by the planet and its small star.

In spite of the fact thatSkimmer's state-of-the-art sensors and instruments showed no evidence oflife on the scrubby planet, Pat made his prepara­tions for a low-level scouting run with care.Skimmerlowered through atmosphere on her flux thrusters,leveled off at ten thousand feet with all her eyesand ears on full amplification, her shield up, herskipper wearing the fire-control helmet, the com­puter humming and purring as it digested and correlated the flood of data.

It was pretty good down there. Good air. Water just under the surface, close enough so that several species of vegetation existed. The greenest areaswere on low ground, at the lowest points of what had once been ocean beds.

It didn't occur to Pat until he had takenSkimmer halfway around the circumference of the planet atthe equator, passing through the night zone intosunlight, that he might have himself a planet. Hewouldn't own all of it. There were too few habit­able planets to allow one man or a small group ofmen to claim an entire world by right of discov­ery, but there was a well-established reward sys­tem. To qualify for right of discovery he'd have toprove that the planet was unrecorded on X&Acharts, and that it was uninhabited.

He didn't know, for a moment, whether to hopeto find descendants of the survivors of the big colonization ship or to hope that there was no intelligent life down there. He didn't have too longto muse over it, however, because the computerwas sending him a shrill little warning from oneparticular instrument which worked only when aship was very close to a particular form of lifewhich emanated the faint results of oxygen-basedmetabolism.

'Oh ho,' Pat said. There were, after all, people,or at least animal forms, down there.

He saw the village on the optics screen just afterthe computer had alerted him. He putSkimmer onhover and let the ship's instruments and sensors work, but he could see himself that there wereartifacts of man there, log cabins with thatched roofs, cultivated fields. He ordered the computerto try contact on all known wavelengths. He didn'treally expect an answer, because there were noenergy emanations, just the detection of combus­tion, wood smoke, coming from the chimneys ofseveral of the