Closed System

pirate strongholds on the Hogg Moons.

When Pat didn't like a proposition, he set the fee impossibly high. He had named a figure, knowingthat it would be refused, and without blinking aneye the Zedeians had accepted. Obviously, therewas more to the proposition than appeared on thesurface. But it was a lot of money. Pat liked hisfreedom, and without financial freedom there isno personal freedom. And, after all, he was paid totake risks.

'Just what business are you in?' Pat had asked.

'We are involved in several areas,' the spokes­man had said. 'Import-export, for example. Re­cently we've become interested in producing enter­tainment films.'

Just plain, ordinary businessmen. Businessmenwho were willing to spend a small fortune withouteven bargaining over the price to send a legally armed mercenary on a simple passenger-carryingmission. The problem was that there was nothingsimple about anything Zedeian. It had been a thou­sand years since the prosperous, populous Zede worlds had engaged in their last war of conquest,but historians, to whom Pat had been often ex­ posed, talked about 'the War' as if it had hap­pened yesterday. For a while, during that last ofman's big wars, the first all-out war in space, ithad been anyone's victory, touch and go. In desperation, the free worlds of the United PlanetsConfederation had used a terrible new weapon,the planet reducer, for the first and last time inrecorded history. Seven Zede planets were rup­ tured, blown apart, sent flying into space in chunksand pieces, all life destroyed, before the Zede war­lords capitulated.

UP historians justified the use of the planet de­stroyer by saying that freedom had been preserved,that millions of lives had been spared by endingthe war. Some historians and moralists went allthe way back to the mid- twentieth century to findhistorical precedents.

The peace treaty had been generous. The surviv­ing Zede worlds had become a semiautonomous part of the Confederation, a status which contin­ued into modern times. UP laws governed all the Zede planets, but the Zedeians were notoriouslyindependent, and sometimes rather frustratinglyinventive. Zede led the Confederation in innova­tive industrial development, in subatomic technol­ogy. The Vervoldt Cloud memory chambers whichhad given a relatively small shipboard computerthe storage capacity and reasoning ability of asomewhat backward human brain had been devel­oped on Zede's Valhalla. The advanced weaponswhich were mounted on the latest ships of the UPFleet and the ship of the Department of Explora­ tion and Alien Search, were largely Zedeian. Thearms trade, indeed, was at the core of Zede's pros­perity, big business within the UP, a profitable sideline when dealing with non-aligned, indepen­dent planets of which there were very few, andthose mostly on the far fringes of the explored andcharted portion of the galaxy.

Had the Zede 'businessmen' had a small ship­ment of arms in mind when they hinted at a more profitable cargo for theSkimmer? Pat didn't thinkso. Armaments were often bulky. The store of Class AAA drugs inSkimmer's storage areas was, Patfelt, just about the most profitable cargo he couldcarry, for you could pack a lot of high-class medi­cine into a small space.

Pat had taken theSkimmer to Zede II to buy hiscargo, having been assured of the lowest prices inthe Confederation. He'd done some talking aroundthe port, and the word was that a man with theright connections could buy just about anything he wanted to buy somewhere on Zede II. It wasthere that he had heard repeated a persistent ru­ mor, unproven as yet, that someone was dealing inthe filth of the old nuclear weapons, and perhapseven the long-since-outlawed planet reducers.

The rumor had leaked originally from the crewof an X&A ship back from charting a new blink route in search of always scarce habitable planets.A long way from home, in a previously unchartedarea, the ship had picked up suspicious readingsfrom a barren, small, Mercury-like planet. Theplanet, if the X&A ship's analyzers were workingproperly, had recently, in the past two decades at the most, been the site of hydrogen fusion tests.Since the need for power from either fusion orfission had been eliminated soon after the first starship went out from Old Earth, there was onlyone possible use for the nasty power of the atom,nuclear power was good only for destruction,and not even efficient destruction. An X&A destroyer had more firepower than a thousand hydrogenbombs. If someone had been playing around withthe antique nuclear weapons their intent couldonly be blackmail. Livable planets were rare, widelyscattered. The constantly multiplying populationsof the UP worlds made X&A's search for new livingspace the most important function of government.A madman with nuclear bombs, threatening tomake a life-zone planet unlivable with slowlydecaying radioactivity would be in a powerfulposition.

All of these old thoughts replayed through Pat'smind as he sat, scratching himself. That was asmall but important luxury, to be able to scratchwhere he itched when he itched and not worryabout couth. He liked living alone.

He grinned at the computer. 'Give me the dis­play file on Taratwo,' he said.

The computer disliked oral orders. It fancieditself an old man, hearing becoming impaired. He had to repeat the order, loudly. The computer mut­tered to itself for a few seconds, punished him bytaking extra seconds to check and crosscheck allreferences to the planet Taratwo, then deliveredthe file to the screen.

Pat had examined the file a dozen times on the trip out. He had in his data banks all the informa­tion available on Taratwo, fourth planet of thestar Upsilon Ophiuchus. He had data not availablein the public banks, thanks to Jeanny Thompson.

A few years back, when Pat was enduring tenure in the Roget Seat of Philology at Xanthos Univer­sity, both he and Jeanny had thought that an alli­ance between learning and practical science, be­tween the learned professor and the upwardly mo­bile X&A technician, might work. Neither of themcould remember the moment of mutual decision,nor place blame, for the realization that a perma­nent marriage would be undesirable.

Jeanny just bent the rules a little bit when sheallowed Pat access to X&A's file on Taratwo.

'That's a long way from home,' Jeanny hadsaid, when he made his needs known.

'That makes it interesting,' Pat had said.

They had read the file together as it slid silentlyfrom the printer.

'If I were you, boy, I'd walk easy out there,'Jeanny said. 'That planet is an anachronism. Anabsolute ruler in this enlightened, unquote, age?'

Taratwo had been discovered by accident and peopled by political dissidents who had carefully nursed on their journey through space an old, oldgrudge from the Old Earth, a grudge so ancientthat the reason for it was a long- forgotten mys­tery. When a race can lose its home planet forthousands of years the reasons behind a simplelittle family fight among tribes of men can also belost.

'This is interesting,' Jeanny had said. 'The nameof the planet is taken from the site of the palace ofa legendary race of kings, back on Old Earth.'

Pat had been more interested in solid informa­tion. Taratwo's political status was Independent.There were no organized trade routes to any UP planet, but there were records of trips to the planetby free traders. The autocratic ruler of Taratwodidn't call himself a king, but according to allinformation he was the boss, the absolute ruler.

'He fancies himself to be a great leader,' Jeannyhad said. 'He's a bad dude, Audrey—'

'Don't call me Audrey,' Pat had said.

'—standing tall and alone on the frontier of theinhabited galaxy. And look at this. He's been buying warships from the Zede munitions plants.'

The figures were impressive. Taratwo, a small,insignificant planet, had the most powerful fleetarm of any independent planet or group of inde­pendent planets.

Pat whistled through his teeth in surprise. Itwould take a full UP battle fleet to reduce Taratwo'spower, and not without loss, because Taratwo had been buying the latest, most powerful ships andweapons, every modern weapon except, of course, reducers.

'Let's run down all recorded trips by free trad­ers,' Pat had said, not too concerned about Tara­two's powerful fleet. TheSkimmer was armed, true,but no one in his right mind would use an entirefleet to chase—if the need arose—one small deep-space tug converted into an armed mercenary.

Taratwo seemed to welcome free traders. Iso­lated as they were, no established trade routeswithin a dozen parsecs, free traders would keepthem up to date and bring in the latest in, forexample, medicines.

There in Jeanny's office at X&A Headquarterson Xanthos, they had stared, together, at a holo­graphic chart of the Taratwo sector. Jeanny shud­dered. 'It's lonely out there,' she'd said.

Pat had nodded, musing. Taratwo was alone, theonly populated planet in a twelve-parsec radius of space. She was a relatively new planet, as plane­ tary age goes, and she was, in theory, too small to hold a viable atmosphere. Mountain formation wasstill going on, and that made for considerable vol­ canic activity along with the resultant