Closed System

go over ninethousand. A man could name his own price forthat stone, millions, perhaps even a billion.

And Murphy had died for it.

THREE

For a long moment, Pat Howe stood in the airlock,the hatch still open, stunned, his eyes hypnotizedby the fiery depths of the diamond. Finally, hepushed the button to close the hatch and began to think again. The stone was not his. He consideredhis alternatives. He could call the hard-eyed secur­ity man and try to explain how the stone hadcome into his possession. Or he could get the hell off Taratwo and from a safe distance worry aboutfinding the rightful owner of what just might bethe most valuable single object in the civilizedgalaxy.

That was no choice at all. He was beginning tobe just a little bit spooked. He'd been involved inmore than one hairy situation during his relativelybrief career in free enterprise. Once he'd played a deadly game of hide-and-seek on an airless moonwith his air running out and two men intent onkilling him. Once he'd had to run for his life afterhe'd lifted the ransom loot from a Hogg Moonspirate, the kidnap victim clinging to him, slowinghim down. And the total amount of money at stakein both those incidents wouldn't buy a cuttingchip from the diamond he held in his hands. Menhad killed for a tiny fraction of the worth of thatdiamond, and even a man who had never enter­ tained a criminal thought might be tempted toward murder by something so valuable.

He left the diamond, in its bag, with the othergems in cargo, ran to the bridge, and wonderedwhat had happened to his passenger. The passen­ger would be housed in the spare cabin. It was crowded, for he used it to store items used onlyoccasionally, but the bed was as large and as com­fortable as his own. He jerked the door open tofind the room empty.

There were not many places aboardSkimmerwhere a man could hide. He didn't like the idea ofhis passenger wandering around down in the en­gine room, so he decided to check his own quar­ters first. The lock on the door had gone bad onthe trip out and he hadn't bothered to fix it. Hethrew the door open.

She stood beside his bed, the white one-piece ather feet, breather and hat removed to show a fallof lustrous auburn hair, slightly mussed but stillglorious. Her skin was the pale hue of old china. She wore only a tight, brief silken camiknicker,blue.

'Sorry,' he said, starting to close the door. Theshock was slow to penetrate. A woman. And not just any woman. It was as if the holographic im­age had come to life, full-sized and breathing, in his cabin.

She reached for a garment she'd removed fromher bag, not in haste or modesty. 'I assumed this would be my cabin,' she said, with a smile whichmatched the blaze of her hair. 'I also assumedthat you would knock before entering.'

Corinne Tower. His passenger was Corinne Tower,the film star from Zede II, and she was not at all discomfited as she stood there in a silken piece ofunderwear which emphasized her perfect figure.She seemed to flow into a wraparound which closedoff the view of womanly curves. Her smile hadfaded into a musing expression.

Pat was paralyzed until the buzz of an alarmjerked his head around, and then he was on therun, the redheaded woman following him moreslowly. Four police vehicles were approaching atdifferent angles to surround the ship. There was,as yet, no light of dawn. The ashfall had dimin­ished almost to nothing. The night-vision camerasshowed clearly that the police vehicles had uncov­ered their weapons. Pat's hand slapped switches, buttons. Shield up, weapons ready. The lead vehi­cle mounted a respectable laser cannon with along, graceful barrel. Up close, it could punch ahole inSkimmer's shieldand hull.

'Should we be worried about this?' he askedthe girl.

She was taut, her mouth open, eyes narrowed.'I'm not sure.'

'Did the Man know you planned to leave?' Hereyes instantly shifted away from his.

'Quickly,' he said, his voice urgent. 'I'm goingto have to rely on your knowledge and judgment. Idon't want to do anything drastic unlessit'snecessary.'

She seemed doubtful. 'He was in the outback.Not due back until tomorrow.'

The lead vehicle had come to a halt, cannonpointed towardSkimmer's weakest point, the mainentry hatch. The same tall, efficient security manwho had visited him only a short time before wasstanding behind the laser cannon. Pat activatedthe outside pickups.

'You have just ten seconds to open, Captain,and then we'll blast you open.'

He couldn't wait for more information from thegirl. 'Wake up, old man,' he told the computer.The blink was already programmed, but it wascustomary for a ship to lift from the surface onflux. It was possible to blink away from a planet'ssurface, but decidedly unsafe for anything nearenough to the ship to be affected by the field of theblink generator.

The policeman was counting,'...six, five . . .'

'Let's go, baby,' Pat said, hitting the buttonwhich activated the drive circuits.

'...three, two . . .'

There was a brief, uneasy slide into nothingness.On the screen Pat saw three of the police vehicles tumbling in free space. They'd been too near the ship. They'd been enclosed inSkimmer's powerfulfield, and now men were dying of explosive de­compression in the vacuum of space. A body, burst­ing as he watched, separated itself from a vehicleand spun slowly, eerie things happening to frailflesh and blood. It was the security officer.

'Oh, my God,' Corinne Tower whispered as analarm screamed, sending Pat into motion. Two Taratwo light cruisers were closing rapidly. His screen was up. He jerked the fire-control helmetonto his head, wondering how the hell the cruisershad known to be there. True, a blinking ship sends a signal ahead of itself into space, pointing to the emergence site, but the cruisers would have had to be ready to blink instantly, would have had to bewatching him in order to detect that preblink signal.

Gun ports began to flare on the closing warships. Lasers. Two sleek and deadly ship-to-shipmissiles swam out as if in slow motion from thelead cruiser and then accelerated with slashes of light. Range seven miles. Seconds. No time toprogram a blink. The lead missile was growing rap­idly on the screen as the ship buzzed and screamedwarnings.

'Alert, alert,' the computer chanted, losing, forthe moment, its reluctance for audio commun­ication.

'I hear you,' Pat said, forgetting the presence ofthe tense, silent girl.

He had only one advantage. He couldn't hope to match shields and armaments with two new cruis­ers, but he had power to spare, power built into theold space tug, power to latch on to and haul the biggest space liner ever built, the generator built oversize, huge enough to store power for multipleblinks without draining the charge. He had usedonly a small portion of the charge in blinking up from the surface of Taratwo.

No time to select known coordinates. No time totrust a cranky, aging computer to obey a vocal order to select a registered blink beacon at ran­dom and put it in B for boogie. The old boy mightdecide to take a full survey of all blink beaconswithin range.

He acted on his only choice.

In spite of what Jeanny Thompson, and others,might have thought, Pat Howe was not like some old-fashioned mercenaries, imbued with a secret death wish, seeking danger for the thrill of riskingit, courting the final solution, death, as ordinarymen court women. Pat valued his freedom, and hevalued his life. He did what he had to do to pre­serve that life with two homing missiles inchesaway from his thrusters, heading in, and two light cruisers ticklingSkimmer's shield with laser can­non. Either of the cruisers could best him in aclose-in fight, and there was no question in hismind that their intent was to blast him out ofspace.

The computer was cranky. The missiles shouldhave been taken out by AMMs before they wereallowed to get in so close. At the last moment the old man sent out the hunter-killer AMMs, and the resultant explosions were far too close to the hull,but there was no new blare of noise from thealarms to indicate hull rupture, only a wild ridefor a moment, and then Pat's fingers stabbed once,twice, three times and there was that sliding feel­ing of blinking and he was still alive and breath­ing after doing the most dangerous thing a spacemancould do, take a wild blink.

Taking a random blink was recklessly dangerousbecause astronomical bodies ranging in size downto the tiniest asteroids were deadly hazards. Twobodies cannot exist at the same point in space andtime. A ship, passing through that nowhere whichis a blink, would merge, down to the molecularlevel, with any object already occupying a point inspace and time on the chosen route, the resultbeing instant death for any life form.

Pat had gambled and he'd won. He had set coor­dinates in no conscious order. It gave him, how­ever, only a few seconds respite, for the Taratwocruisers were equipped with the latest in follow-and-detect equipment, and there they were, withinten miles of theSkimmer, and they loosed a cloudof missiles,