Closed System

by Zach Hughes

  He had a burning urge to go outside and checkthat damned bag. But the police had been able tospot Murphy in the midst of an ashfall. That meantthey had detection instruments which were notfoiled by the ash. If he went out now and got thebag and they were watching he'd have more toexplain than he wanted.

  Twenty minutes before his passenger was due toarrive. He activated the computer, began his pre­takeoff countdown. He decided he wouldn't wait until dawn if, indeed, his passenger arrived at fivea.m.

  TheSkimmer checked out beautifully. She eventold him that there was a foreign object in the number three port thruster. The computer, fresh after a nice rest, hummed and was brisk and effi­cient when he programmed the blink which wouldtake him away from Taratwo into orbital position.He was ready. Five minutes to wait. He had aleather bag containing only God knew what in athruster. A man had been killed before his eyes.

  The flux thruster would blow the bag out, disin­tegrating it, when he activated the engines. Unlessthe bag contained an explosive triggered to ignitewith the thruster.

  The motion detector buzzed. A ground car. Theair outside was becoming more clear of ash. Hepicked up the vehicle at fifty yards, followed it to astop near the ramp, saw a small man in a baggywhite one-piece get out and walk unhurriedly to­ward the hatch. A quick, rather severe tremorcaused the man to stumble, andSkimmer's gyroscomplained as the ship rocked. No police. No glar­ing lights. No other motion detected. Pat opened the hatch, watched on the monitor as his passen­ger entered the hatch carrying one small, expensive-looking bag. The ground vehicle leaped into motionand disappeared while the hatch was closing. Patwaited until the decontaminator had cleared thelock of ash and any odd and assorted bugs indige­nous to Taratwo. Then he activated the radio and called, "Ground Control, Skimmer. I'm booked for a six a.m. take off. Any problem if I leave a bit early?"

  He had to wait, picturing the controller check­ing with a higher authority. "No problem,Skim­mer."

  "I'll be back with you for clearance as soon as Imake an outside visual," Pat said.

  That was how he was going to find out what oldMurphy had hidden in the thruster. Making awalkaround visual inspection of a ship before take­off had long since ceased to be standard practice.A pilot, after all, was an inferior instrument com­pared to the ship's sensors, but there were enoughtraditionalists left to make a visual inspectionmerely eccentric, not unusual. He nodded to thepassenger in the airlock, told the small man towait up front. The man still wore his breather,face hidden behind the mask and a floppy hat.

  He left the number three portside thruster untillast, jerked the bag out, tucked it under his arm. Itwas heavy enough to contain a bomb. He pausedin the airlock, left the hatch open after setting the emergency-close mech. If the bag contained some­thing unpleasant he would toss it out the hatchand push the emergency-close button while it wasstill in the air and then pray thatSkimmer's hullplates were strong enough.

  There was no possibility, however, of throwingthe bag out once he had opened it gingerly to finda solid object wrapped in a soiled piece of velvet.He had to use both hands to lift the object out ofthe bag.

  It was ovate, almost egg-shaped. He hefted itand estimated it at plus three pounds in weight. Itwas, even in the rough, a thing of incredible beauty.

  He was holding in his hands the single largest diamond in history, a diamond, if his weight esti­mate was anywhere near right, at least half a poundlarger than the Capella Glory. He had checked the size of the Capella Glory in the library during his wait, and he knew that it was over eight thousandcarats. The old man's stone would 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 enter­tained 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 wascustoma
ry 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, leaped into motion to close the range.Pat had to stay ahead of them. It was obvious nowthat they were equipped with the new multiblinkgenerators. There were so many missiles comingthat he didn't have enough AMMs to stop them.His fingers jabbed figures off the top of his headinto the computer.

  The children of Old Earth had brought into spacewith them the legend of a deadly, ancient gameplayed

  with an antique projectile weapon with six chambers for explosive-driven bullets. Pat's gamewas like that ancient one. He had pulled thetrigger once and the firing pin had fallen on anempty chamber. He pulled the trigger a secondtime, held his breath through the blink slide, lived,and the two cruisers were right behind him.

  He fired his own missiles, hating to do it. Thedamned things were the latest Zedeian technologyand they cost a mint, but it would give him sec­onds while the cruisers put out their own AMMs towipe out his total missile armament. Surely, con­sidering the value of space aboard a ship of theline, the cruisers wouldn't be able to follow stillanother multiblink without recharging. But he'dwon a deadly gamble twice. He didn't dare try it a third time. With the few seconds he'd bought with his six missiles, he told the computer to pick thenearest blink beacon and go.

  "Arrrr," he growled, the sound becoming amoan as the old man began to make a total surveyof all blink beacons within ten parsecs. An alarmscreamed, telling him that the shield had taken a direct laser hit. The screen gave off an odd aromaof strain and heat. He'd had that scent in his nose only once before, when he was playing dodge-'emwith that pirate ship out near the Hogg Moons.His instruments told him that the power of theshield was already down, expended in absorbingthe close, direct blaze of the cannon.

  So, with a silent prayer, he pulled the triggerand came out close to a blazing sun, a very nearthing, and now more alarms clanged, telling himof too much heat, too much radiation in the solarwind from the star which filled his viewscreens.He considered kicking in the flux drive, but thatwould take too long. By the time he gained safedistance from the star the entire hull would beradioactive. He punched in a very, very short blink,a relatively safe blink, just to the limit of his opti­cal scanners, and he disappeared just as the twocruisers emerged. This time he had empty spacearound him, after his fourth random blink, the lastone less risky than the first three. He put theSkimmeron flux to get him away from the point ofemergence. The fact that the two Taratwo cruisers hadn't followed immediately indicated that they'dhave to charge their generators before blinkingagain, and by that time the flux drive would haveput him beyond the range of their sensors. Hecould take his time finding a blink beacon and make one more leap before he had to rechargeSkimmer'sgenerator. He wasn't about to try for afifth empty chamber in the gun.

  Corinne Tower had stood quietly by. From thetense look on her face he guessed that she hadrealized the danger of the random blinks. He setthe computer to work. This time the old boy hadreason to begin a 360-degree map. Pat didn't see a single familiar feature anywhere in space. The veryshape of the disk of the galaxy had rotated, alter­ing the appearance of the dense star clouds toward the core.

  Random blinks are dangerous in more ways thanone. There is no theoretical limit to the distance covered by a blinking ship. The only limitation tothe length of a blink is a known, straight-line dis­tance between two previously determined points,the distance being free of solid objects. In punch­ing in random numbers, Pat had chosen numbersin the range of known blink coordinates, but thatdidn't guarantee anything. He could be anywherewithin ten parsecs or a thousand parsecs of Taratwo.Or, if his fingers had picked a rather funny number in his haste,Skimmer could be drifting alongsilently on the flux drive in an entirely different galaxy.

  He left the computer to do its valiant duty andturned to face the woman. He wiped perspirationfrom his forehead.
/>   "Four random blinks?" she asked. He noddedgrimly.

  "Bad computer?"

  "Not bad," he said. "Just cranky and slow."

  "So you have no idea where we are," she said.

  "Not a clue."

  She sighed. "Is there anything I can do?"

  Suddenly he was very tired. He checked the com­puter. The old man was muttering to himself, build­ing the maps steadily, cross-checking against all the charts of the galaxy.

  "Yes," Pat said. "You can move your things outof my quarters. Put them in the mate's quarters."He pointed to the door. "And then I think you andI had better have a talk." He wanted to hit thesack, rest, sink into sleep while the computerputtered over the maps. It might take hours if theywere far from known blink routes.

  At first an odd expression had crossed her face,then she smiled. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn'tnotice that the alarms and remotes were in that cabin."

  He could have explained that, instead of merelyordering her out of his quarters, but he wasn't in avery polite mood.

  "And," she said, "I guess I owe you that talk."She turned gracefully, started toward his cabin.The garment showed the litheness of her legs, therounded perfection of her. He sat down in thecommand chair, punched up coffee. She emergedcarrying her bag, put it in the mate's cabin, cameto sit on the bench facing him.

  "How do you take it?" he asked, pointing hismug at her.

  "Strong and black," she said with a smile. Inreal life her smile was even more impressive thanin holograph. He felt the anger and tension beginto fade out of him.