Closed System

'One more question, honey,' he said. 'Why wereyou working on Zede II?'

She smiled. 'You thought, at first, that I was anagent of Zede II, didn't you? You thought that Ihad been sent to Taratwo to get something from Brenden. Well, so didthey, so did the Zedeians.They thought I was their agent, and what theywanted was the Brenden's jewels. Pat, Taratwo is the richest diamond planet in the galaxy. We haveenough diamonds stored to decorate every fancylady on every world. And the Zedeians had heardrumors. They wanted diamonds. What they didn'tknow was that I was a Brenden, that I was onZede to influence them into trade, into tradingships and weapons for emeralds and rubies.'

'Smart,' Pat said, with a little feeling of unease.

'How'd you keep it quiet that there were dia­monds on Taratwo?'

'The government monopoly controlled all of thegood diamond sources. We developed a surefireway of locating such areas. Now and then an inde­pendent would find a few diamonds, but they wereusually purchased by the monopoly. Those few that slipped past went unnoticed.'

'And Murphy's Stone?'

'I told you the truth about that. The old mancame to me, thinking that my greed would influ­ence me into

helping him get the diamond off theplanet.'

'And you knew he was going to be killed. Thesecurity police didn't have detection instrumentsto see Murphy in the ashfall—you told them hewas going to be there.'

'Pat, he had to die. The secret of such a dia­mond could not be allowed to get back to Zede.They had the power. We owe them billions. TheUP would not have raised a hand had the Zedeianssent a fleet to collect the debt, to take over.'

Well, old Murphy, Pat was thinking, so yourdeath wasn't just an unlucky accident after all.Rest in peace.

Can a man ever know a woman? This one. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. God help him, he was still in love with her, and she'dcalled for the death of an old boonie rat as if byroutine, all in the name of the cause. Goddam all people with a cause, he was thinking. For twentycenturies the populated galaxy had_been advanc­ing, always pushing outward, just as if, as somethought, man's purpose was to dominate all of it, the entire universe, first the Milky Way and then the other numberless galaxies which stretched outward into the unknown. For a thousand years thatmass madness of humanity, war, had been undercontrol, and now this slight, beautiful, shapely,desirable, deadly girl was going to bring back the madness.

She saw his expression change, and mistook hisintent.

'Youare with me,' she whispered, smilinghappily.

'All the way,' he said.

Before she, herself, broke off the heated kisseswhich almost led to other things, he had begun towonder if, after all, she wouldn't be worth it. Withher in his arms he had all he wanted out of theuniverse, but if she came with power, riches, andall the goodies, wouldn't that be permissible?

NINE

Corinne was busy. Doing what, Pat didn't ask. Hehad the freedom of the temple. His first stop was a shielded, armored room in which rested one mu­seum case with a set of ancient, leather-coveredbooks, real books, enclosed in climate-controlledglass and resting on velvet. A priest went through a complicated ritual before opening the case. Pathad no hope of being able to read all the books,all the thick volumes. He picked up the first.

The language was German, ponderous, careful,exacting.

'From the beginning,' Klaus von Forster hadwritten, far away and back into the dimness oftime, 'man, at the mercy of the elements and the mysteries of the world, sought reassurance, some­thing to prove that his life was no mere accident,that his existence had meaning beyond meetingthe day to day needs of his body. It was, perhaps,the elements themselves which first awoke in manthe need to recognize a power greater than himself.'

Pat put the book down. Such thinking was stillcurrent at the coffee table of undergraduates atXanthos U. 'In the beginning,' the young onessaid, 'man created God.' And one not quite sodaring might say, 'If there were no God, manwould have had to invent him.'

Pat picked passages at random from the various volumes. Interesting, very, very interesting. Thescholars at the university would bury themselvesin these books for decades, for in the ponderouswords of von Forster, in the history of religion onOld Earth, were hints of information which was new and dazzling. If von Forster could be trusted,Earth had had a rich and long history before thedestruction, with fragmented and isolated segmentsof the population reaching for modern civilizationat different times, in different areas.

Von Forster would be a feast for the scholar, andthere was no doubt in Pat's mind that the informa­tion which the man had written to explain thesocial basis for the various religions and cults andgods and goddesses would give man his deepestlook into his forgotten past.

But that could, perhaps, come later.

He had Corinne's permission to go anywherewithin the temple complex. It was just a matter of exploration. The word had obviously been passedto the priests who presided over the functions ofthe temple, for he was never stopped, never ques­tioned. When he discovered an elevator which onlywent down, he felt tendrils of excitement. He pushedthe button. The car came up, the door opened, andgoing into the car, he saw that there was but onefloor below ground level. The elevator opened intoa cavernous chamber, crowded with equipment,test benches, people.

He wandered around idly, being nodded to by the 'priests' working at various tasks. To him, a lot of the work going on looked like humbug, forsome of the priests were working with native pro­duce and vegetation, testing various chemical re­actions. His opinion was confirmed when one busypriest told him that for twenty years he'd beenworking with a particularly hardy native thornbush, feeding it variously treated extracts of po­tato pulp in order to influence it to produce edible fruit.

But behind a shielded door, deep under the earth,white-smocked young men monitored the hundredsof instruments of the nuclear reactor, and they, atleast, knew what they were doing.

He saw no odd, deadly weapon. He did not get his first hint of it until he discovered an almosthidden doorway and went through a sound lockinto the bedlam of excited young voices and anodd hissing of power followed by low claps ofthunder. He rounded another baffle and saw adozen young men seated in command chairs, some­thing very much like his own fire-control helmeton their heads. At the far end of the chamber therewas swift movement and he saw a small, perfectlyoutlined UP battle cruiser flash across the wall, quickly realized that it was a holo image, saw it shudder as a great shout went up from the youngmen.

The next target, for target practice it was, wasmarked with the autonomous flag of the Zede sys­tems, and that cruiser was blasted—the low thun­der was artificial and came from speakers mounted near the target area—by his young friend Gorben,occupying the command chair closest to him. Hewalked over to stand behind Gorben.

'Honored One,' Gorben said, 'we are indeedblessed that you come to watch our schooling.'

'Carry on,' Pat said.

'I shall blast an enemy ship especially for you,Honored One,' Gorben said.

A UP destroyer zoomed toward them out of thedistance, and with incredible swiftness and dex­terity Gorben brought the snout of his weapon tobear and caught the destroyer in a looping evasiveturn. The low thunder came as the image of the destroyer glowed.

'And thus perish all followers of the Anti-Christ,'Gorben said.

'You're pretty good with that thing,' Pat said.

'Honored One, I am the cadet leader, thus hon­ored for my studious concentration and my luckwith the Devil Destroyer.'

'Congratulations,' Pat said. 'Keep up the good work, Gorben.'

They were all good, all the young men. And thefire-direction controls were the latest available.All Gorben had to do was direct his eyes and histhoughts to the target and the odd-looking short- snouted weapon swiveled with a hum of gears, thesnout moving almost faster than the eye couldfollow. Pat suspected that the entire setup wasnothing more than a simulator. If the weaponshad been putting out any kind of beam, or charge,the solid stone wall behind the target area would have been affected, possibly reflecting the force back toward the men behind the weapons. How­ever, it was a highly effective simulator, with the target ships being in scale to the distances at whicha battle in space would be fought at laser range.

Pat watched until a priest called a halt to thefiring practice, dismissed one group of young men,and while they stood around, chattering excitedlyabout the exercise, seated another group behindthe weapons. Pat walked toward