beautiful crystal substance. An air of crisis hung around them. Outside, nearby as space is measured, their home system continued its eternal march around a star, which had birthed the energy to give them life. The system had not changed. The universe, save for its natural evolution, was unchanging. And yet Hara felt as if something had altered inside her, something that made her realize her life would never be the same. She stood beside
Walker Heath, staring out the viewport, willing her eyes to see the shuttle.
She felt a touch on her arm and turned to look into the almost lifelike face of Plank's mobile form. The hand on her arm was warm, humanly soft. She felt a shudder begin, but cut it off. «Help me think it out,» Plank said. She nodded. «Both of them couldn't be mistaken. I mean about seeing a ship out there, a ship my instruments can't see.» «No,» she said. «It's there,» Heath said. «Or it was.»
«Yes, it blinked out just before I fired at it,» Plank said. «I felt the blink. Why couldn't I see it?» «You're not seeing with human eyes,» Hara said. «You're seeing with ship's instruments. Wouldn't it be possible for those who built you, I mean the ship, to blank away certain areas? Leaving you blind to the ship that both Webb and Commander Heath saw?» Plank considered. «I don't think so. I am literally a part of this ship. I know every micrometer of her. I know the function of every circuit, the beginning and the end of each system.» «And yet you couldn't detect the ship,» Heath said. «But I'd know if there were tampering,» Plank said. «Would you?» Heath asked. «You've been wondering why, when you found yourself out in unknown space, you couldn't relate the position of the Sol system to any known landmark. You admitted that this was strange and you wondered how it could happen. Let's say that brain tampering could explain it. Would you know if someone had been playing about with your mind?» «I don't know,» Plank said. «No,» Heath said. «You would not know.» «Are you saying it was done?» Hara asked. «Very few people know,» Heath said. «Yes, there is a certain amount of preconditioning imposed upon every man who goes into deep space.» «When?» Hara asked unbelievingly. «Remember the final physical? Did you ever hear anyone say, coming out of the physical, that the thing seemed to last forever?» «As a matter of fact, I felt the same way myself,» Hara said, «but there was no loss of time.» «At least you were not aware of any loss of time,» Heath said. «Actually, you lost some three hours and forgetting that three hours was a minor part of the conditioning. The major purpose of the conditioning was to blank out, under certain circumstances, any knowledge of home.» «I think I understand,» Plank said. «I don't, however, like the idea of someone messing around with my mind.» «I think the secretary and others would be interested to know that in your case total memory loss did not occur,» Heath said. «But perhaps your, ah, alteration did not involve enough stress or pain to complete the job.» «Are you saying that if one of us were captured or tortured, that we would be unable to reveal the point of our origin?» Hara asked. «The program was implemented when ships began to disappear,» Heath said. «It was purely precautionary. But there were those who didn't accept the disappearances as being accidents. They feared that our ships were being seized somehow, by some rather powerful aliens. I, for one, argued that if one of our ships were captured as near to home as the Centauri systems, then anyone with a grain of intelligence would be able to cast about in near space and find the only possible source. I lost. Each man going into space was conditioned so that, under stress or torture, his mind would be wiped clean of any knowledge of the solar system, its makeup, its location, its position in relationship to anything in the galaxy.» «But it's so childish,» Hara said. «All an alien would have to do is follow a ship home.» «Man has always been a slightly paranoid creature,» Heath said. «We've always feared the unknown. And something out there, something unknown, was eating our ships. The precaution was somewhat silly, but it eased a few timid minds and allowed us to continue the space program. There were those who wanted to pull in, cease all travel outside the system.» «And you think that something similar to the mind tampering has been performed on me, on my systems,» Plank said. «It's a good guess.» «Excuse me,» Plank said. «I'll be busy for a while.» The mobile extension went off in the direction of the cargo hold. Plank was already withdrawn from it, concentrating himself, sending himself out, checking with minute care each tiny integrated part of himself. Hours later he rested, having found nothing. Hara and Heath were growing impatient. He instructed them on the use of the galley and left them again to return to the crucial area of the ship, the computer. He went painstakingly through all the circuits involved in detection of objects in space and, once again, was blanked. Reason told him than any tampering would be with those circuits involved in perceiving the outside universe. His examination told him that no tampering had been done. His knowledge told him that tampering had been accomplished in a way he could not detect. Irritable and frustrated, he directed a total probe of the volume of space around him, increasing power steadily, extending the circuits to their maximum capacity. Still nothing. The dark ship seen by both Heath and Webb had blinked away.
Perhaps, he thought, it had not, as yet, blinked back. It could be sitting off at limitless distances, awaiting a move. It could detect a jump. He programed a jump, out past the orbit of Pluto, and made it. Hara demanded to know what was going on, having felt the buildup of power in the generator. He told her, rather moodily, to bear with him. He had been
especially alert for the feel of a blinking ship, but the feeling of his own blink, he knew, would override the feel of another ship blinking nearby. He had to assume, however, that his dark companion was now with him. Once again he threw full power into the detection circuits, finding nothing. He increased power steadily, feeding it in from other sources,
exceeding the capacity of the circuits until, overloaded, a circuit blew. The redundancy system switched in and the ship began repair on the blown circuit. He fed power in and blew the standby circuit before repairs were completed. This blinded him in one sector for several minutes before the repaired circuit was completed. He was acting purely on hunch and in desperation. One by one he overloaded the circuits in the detection system and one by one they were repaired. By watching the repair process he learned. Materials were being manipulated at the atomic level, the system drawing on a bank of stored atoms, building tiny components a block at a time to replace the microscopic circuits as he destroyed them. And after hours of destruction and repair the results were the same. He could not detect any ship within light-minutes of his position. He was convinced, then, that any actions he himself might take were fruitless. A technology able to manipulate materials at the atomic level by preprogrammed automation could plant the blanking device in any repaired circuit. But he was not going to admit defeat. If he had been followed by a ship that had deliberately been blanked from him, then that ship was there for no good purpose. Somehow, the undetectable ship was tied in with the disappearance of the shuttle and the blink test vehicle and, consequently, with the disappearances of all the ships lost between Earth and Centauri. There were no access ports to the inner workings of the ship. It had not been designed for human repair. Still there was a way. In the well- stocked tool bin of the ship were torches, meters, handtools. He had long since been aware of their presence and was, at first, puzzled until he realized that they were duplicates of tools that had been carried on the old Pride. Perhaps those who had put him aboard the ship had considered his tools to be on a par with his library, something to make him more comfortable, or to amuse him. At any rate they were there, and with the help of Hara and Heath, he transported the necessary items to the proper area of the ship and very carefully cut into the covering, exposing the detection circuits. Then, one by one, using scrap materials from his tool bin, they began to replace the self- repairing circuits in one side of the system. It was necessary, due to the crudeness of their materials, to sacrifice some of the efficiency, some of the range. However, as testing followed the insertion of each man-made substitute, the thing worked. Since each circuit was a part of himself, Plank could know its function and could
direct his mobile extension and the others to jury-rig a substitute. It was a tedious, time-consuming process that went on and on through circuit after circuit until Hara began to sag with fatigue. «One more, then we'll take a break,» Plank said, although he intended to continue working through his mobile form. The circuit was bypassed, then replaced. A test was run. The sensitive system was no longer perfect. There was distortion and noise, but there was something else. It was near, very near, arrogantly near. The black ship sat, dead silent in space, a mere 40 kilometers from them. Slowly, carefully, Plank moved weapons to bear on the ship. His first thought was to blast it out of space. Then he reconsidered. He kept the weapons ready. He opened a port, sent his mobile form out in the small vehicle and was ready at any moment to activate weapons which would be swift enough to destroy the dark ship should it begin to build power to blink away. He was alongside within minutes. The ship was much like his own. He searched for a port, found it, locked the small vehicle to the dark globe and found entry surprisingly easy. He flowed into the dark ship, found it to be mechanically the same as his own, and he possessed it. There was no directing brain, only an additional bank of circuits in the computer. Quick analysis of that bank told him its purpose; it was sending information even as he destroyed it with a surge of power that burned both primary and backup systems. Repair would take time, time enough for him to find a way to cut that bank completely away from the computer, time to investigate the ship and see its curious layout. No luxury quarters here. The ship was functional, strictly mechanical. In size and contour, it was the same as his. The interior, however, was given over to one huge bay cut into tiny cubicles, each containing a bed, sanitary facilities and a small store of water and a substance that,
