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  He was waiting for her with a hot cup of coffeejust the way she liked it, with plenty of low-calsweetener. He told her about the drug and then he showed her the self-diagnosis printout, let her hearCorinne's voice giving the illegal orders.

  "Looks as if we can throw you in jail for beinggullible, Audrey," she said.

  He started to say it, but didn't, letting it pass.He'd had time to check the coordinates Corinne had used. They went right off any known chartinto a region of crowded stars toward the galacticcore. You didn't go too close to the core. The starswere dense there, and the chaos of interconnectedmagnetic and gravitational fields made naviga­tion, and even survival, a nightmare. The massed stars put out storms of hot radiation which could cook anything living within the hull of a ship inseconds. But Corinne had gone toward that chaos, directly toward the heart of the galaxy, where that huge, fiery engine at the core gave off incredible energies.

  Pat didn't tell Jeanny that he'd already checked the coordinates. Nor did he, for some reason, tellher about Murphy's Stone.

  "I'd say that if we can find residue of that drugin your system, Pat, you have a good case for being reinstated," Jeanny said.

  He was burning inside. His entire body was vibrating, coffee nerves, a caffeine rush. And more.He was burning to find out where she'd taken theship, what was out there toward the core stars.

  "What are you waiting for?" Jeanny asked. "Let'sget over to the clinic."

  Pat lay on a cold metal table, separated from thecold metal by a thin sheet. A monster of a ma­chine lowered, buzzed. The results were in withinminutes. There was superficial damage to livercells. The damage was healing nicely. The damage was consistent with several known causes, amongthem an overdose of at least three separate drugs.Meanwhile, the analysis of his body fluids hadbeen completed. A technician came into the room where Pat, dressed again, sat drinking coffee withJeanny.

  "Captain," the technician said, "I'd advise youto cut down on your intake of coffee. Your urine is discolored and I've never seen a higher caffeinelevel."

  "Yeah, thanks," Pat said, putting down his cup.

  "You do drugs often?" the technician asked.

  "I do drugs never," Pat said.

  The technician glanced at Jeanny with a know­ing smile. "Sometime during the past few weeksyou've taken a rather massive overdose of a littlegoodie which the druggies call heat, technical name dexiapherzede. I thought we'd just about done awaywith that one. We'd be interested in knowing, Cap­tain, just where you got your hands on it."

  "I'd like that report in writing in my office withinthe next hour," Jeanny said, rising.

  Pat was merely a ship's captain. Jeanny Thomp­son was a captain in X&A. When she gave an orderto a technician, that order was obeyed. In her office, the report in hand, she looked atPat with her eyes squinted. "All right, Audrey—"

  "Don't call me Audrey," he said.

  "—you're cleared. I've filed your reinstatementon the computer. If you leave Xanthos by shipwithin the next twenty-four hours you might haveto have Central check with me. It takes a whileto counteract something as serious as having your license lifted."

  "Jeanny, when I get back, the best dinner foryou, and a nice little gift."

  "So you are going?"

  "Wouldn't you?"

  "I don't know. I might just write off my lossesand forget it. You were playing in the big time onthat trip to Taratwo, Pat. Maybe out of your class. You're alive, and our scan on your affairs showed that you made a bundle out of the trip. Why don't you just stay here, get the overhaul completed onSkimmer?"

  To that point she'd been all business. Now herfacial expression softened. "I have two weeks ofvacation

  coming up. If you'd like some companywhen you take the ship out for a check ride afterthe overhaul—"

  "Jeanny, that sounds great," he said. "Hold thatvacation until I get back, OK?"

  She shrugged. "Have yourself a ball," she said,standing, making it clear that she was dismissinghim.

  FIVE

  Skimmerlifted into space with her hull still show­ing the dullness of the thousand-parsec syndrome.Pat had taken time only to restock the food sup­plies and pick out a few new movies. The first partof the trip was routine, along well-maintained blinkroutes, and he was able to program several blinksat one time, then let the old man do the work. Thelong oral sessions with the computer seemed tohave had an invigorating effect. There was, at first,no indication of the sluggishness associated withionization of the memory chambers.

  Pat didn't have a cup of coffee for three days. Heused the time to try to make estimates, a difficulttask, of just how far toward the core of the galaxyCorinne's route would take him.

  He passed within a few light-years of Zede II,then began to retrace the routeSkimmer had fol­lowed in taking Corinne home. It was difficult notto think of her. X&A had made some preliminaryinquiries, based on the solid evidence in the oldman's self-diagnosis chamber, and had run head-oninto a gaggle of space lawyers who said that Co­rinne Tower, the famous Zedeian holo star, hadnot been off Zede II in over five years, and thatany half-baked space mercenary who said that shehad was risking a libel suit.

  Well, it was X&A's baby now. Since there wasno record of Corinne Tower holding a space li­cense there was little X&A could do, even if itsinvestigators did wade through the banks of law­yers. Pat guessed that they'd file the informationand forget it. That was all right with him. Hecouldn't bring himself to want to see Corinne pun­ished. Not while he was there alone on the ship, re­membering how she looked when she first awoke inthe morning and came out of the mate's cabin forbreakfast.

  As the days passed and the nightmares began to fade, he began to rationalize her actions. All right,so she was a professional actress. So her tender­ness, that one time that he'd kissed her, couldhave been sheer acting. Certainly she'd double-crossed him. She'd stolen his diamond, or at least his half of the diamond. It was sort of pleasant to think of what he could have done with half of thevalue of Murphy's Stone, but what would he dowith himself if he were fabulously wealthy? Hedidn't take on sometimes dangerous assignmentsjust for the thrill of it. He did it for money, but didhe really want the things that megamillions couldbuy?

  Hell, yes. The newest and best in space yachts,manor houses on the most pleasant planets, some of those beautiful and awesome light-brush paint­ ings by Anleian of Selbelle III which brought mil­lions at auction. Hell, yes. But what the hell.What he wanted most was what he couldn't evenhope to have. He could hope for another big strike.He'd made one, in Murphy's Stone, so he could makeanother and have the yacht and the houses and the paintings. What he couldn't have was Corinne, andit was, he realized, that loss which was sendinghim out and away from UP space into uncharted space. If he couldn't have her he had to know why.He couldn't believe, down in his heart, that shecould have acted that scene when he kissed her,when the quiet tears came as she fought againstthe desires of her own body.

  The first part of the trip, reversing the coursethey'd traveled together, was preliminary. The bigshow got underway after he'd reached the firstblink beacon they'd found after those lovely daysof being lost and alone in space. He punched in thecoordinates of the first jump Corinne had takenalone and held his breath. Three jumps later theold man was going bananas, because Pat wouldn'tgive him time to make those time-consuming360-degree scans for points of identification.

  The star patterns were entirely different. Themassive glow of the Milky Way was before them,growing dense. The blinks were becoming shorterbecause of increasing star population, and all thestars were alone, bright solitaires in space, with­out a comforting family of planets. That's the way it was in toward the core, and that was the mainreason why all of X&A's exploration efforts weredirected toward less densely starred areas outtoward the periphery.

  The only suns with planets which were knownto be tucked away amid that glaring, hard chaosof stars toward the core were nowhere near Pat'sroute, but off at a bearing of about 45 degrees to his port. He'd been there. Once af
ter he'd finisheda particularly profitable trip he'd taken a sweetyoung girl from Xanthos University, a former student, not that much younger than himself, to cruiseslowly by a dozen worlds which had, at some timein the distant past, been sterilized by some unimag­inable weapon. The Dead Worlds. Hundreds of ex­peditions had searched for their secret. The rubblepiled over bedrock showed, in minutes bits andpieces, that once a thriving civilization had ex­isted there on each of the closely packed planets ofan odd grouping of a family of interrelated stars.And because of that rubble, because of that total destruction of a dozen worlds, X&A ships wentarmed with weapons of war which had not been used in a thousand years. For any race which couldpulverize a dozen civilizations had to have potentweapons, and on each X&A expedition there were two hopes among the crew. One, that they'd find asweet, beautiful water planet with livable condi­tions and, possibly, an intelligent race with whomman could exchange ideas and information, no longer alone in a big, big universe. Two, that they would not encounter the beings who had reducedthe Dead Worlds to rubble lying loosely atopbedrock.

  Space, to a man alone, engenders a variety ofthoughts. Pat thought of the Dead Worlds, andwondered if he'd find anything like that up ahead, where the stars were densely packed and a confu­sion of solar winds from that vast population ofsuns sent radiation counters clattering. He thoughtmostly of Corinne, just a little about a two-week vacation with Jeanny, and scolded himself because he couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the latter.And he remembered his drug-induced nightmares, tried to sort them, identify them as spinoffs ofchildhood horrors, things he'd heard, things he'dread. After all, the unconscious can't create. Itmerely stores, like a computer, and distorts storedinformation in seemingly random patterns.

  It was interesting to analyze his nightmares. Hecould identify three or four childhood dreams,dreams which were fairly common. He had flownin his illness, soaring, pumping his legs against airto gain altitude—that, of course, a distortion bythe unconscious of the act of swimming upward toward the surface of a pool after diving deep. Hehad fled unseen terror fighting against clinging, molasses-like resistance. He couldn't trace that one back to any known influence. He had gnashed histeeth in his fever, feeling them crumble and fallout in pieces. That, of course, went back to child­hood and the first traumatic loss of baby teeth, or,perhaps, to adult visits to the dentist.

  Monsters he could remember from his night­mares during that time were really not so mon­strous. Upon analysis, they became nothing morethan composites from horror movies, legends,stories.

  There was one thing, however, that he could not trace back. His memory of the entire episode washazy, dredged up with difficulty and little clarity,but twice during the trip outward from Xanthoshe had seen in his dream a huge, centuries-oldstarship, hull marked and battered, floating alonein space, dead, silent. He supposed that his uncon­scious mind had composed the ship from space-opera stories or movies, but still that memoryseemed to have a solidity that the others from thefevered period lacked.

  Skimmer'sgenerator had no difficulty chargingwhen he had emptied it with the multiple blinkswhich led him even closer to the core, ever deeper,by zig and zag past blue giants and white dwarfs,all the various types of stars, some of them very, very old, some of them surprisingly young.

  There was a school of astrophysics which theo­rized that stars were continually being createdthere in the inaccessible heart, in the core heat of the galaxy. Pat chose not to believe that. He be­lieved in a single act of creation and, although hewas not pious or devout, in a single creator. WhenPat's God said, "Let there be light," there waslight,the Big Bang, a light never seen before orsince. Faced with an act of creation, he had toaccept a creator, and that rather pleased him. Hecouldn't accept the orthodox opinion that God spenthis time watching sparrows fall and listening toevery prayer by the pious. He imagined God to bea bit too busy for that, but there, nevertheless.

  Deep and shallow thoughts while alone. The oldman chuckling and complaining because the shipwas hopelessly lost, except for Corinne's series ofblink coordinates, the ship functioning perfectly, Pat back on coffee. No blink beacons. And yet it was impossible for a ship to have established the route by random blinks. One random blink there near the core and the ship would never emerge,having merged forever with the molten subatomic particles of the sun. No. Someone, in some ship, atsome time, had had to feel his way along thatroute, perhaps at sublight speeds, although that was farfetched, because a ship traveling at sublightspeeds would have taken not just one generationbut several to chart that route and leave blink coordinates. More likely the course was charted as X&A ships now charted new blink routes, makingblinks to the safe extent of their optical and sensorscouting ability, covering short, short distances in an instant, then taking hours to determine how farthe next blink can take them without contact witha solid body.

  Even with the X&A method it would have takenyears, decades, to chart the route.Skimmer's trackon the chart being constructed by the computerextended backward far and away in that zigzaggingline out toward the areas where the stars werethinner.

  It was hard work. Corinne had made the tripthere and back in seven and a half days. At the endof three days, with only a few catnaps while thedepleted generator drew on the energies of thestars themselves for its charge, he had just one more blink to make to be at the end of Corinne'scourse. He forced himself to wait for a full genera­tor charge. He wanted to have all the power hecould when he blinked out at the end of his jour­ney. He had no idea what he'd find there and if ithad teeth, he'd have to rely on that brute of agenerator inSkimmer's engine room to make moremultiple blinks than whatever it was that hadteeth. He had two hours' sleep, awoke, ate. Co­rinne looked almost frail, but she'd been toughenough to go without sleep in more than two-hour segments for at least six days and look fresh andbeautiful when he came out of his drugged condition.

  "OK, old man," he said, when the generator wascharged to a capacity which so energized the wholeof Skimmer that the hairs on his arms and hands tingled. "Here we go."

  Tensed, he waited for the alarms to start whin­ing, clanging, shouting. A calm computer told himthat he was one quarter of an astronomical unit from a planet about the size of ancient Mars in theSolar System, and that the planet emanated noenergies other than the natural reflections of thesolar winds of a weak yellow star which was onlya small disk in the distance.

  He gave it some time. He scanned the planet. Itwas a planet of rock and sand, barren, and yet itshowed an atmosphere. Men had settled worse plan­ets, drawing the subterranean water upward tothe surface, altering the climate with importedplant life.

  Nothing happened. All sensors working showed no danger, no manmade emanations. He putSkim­mer on flux and made his approach. When he coulddistinguish surface features on the planet he saw barren mountain ranges, deep chasms. Once theplanet had lived, had built mountains, had shothot lava and rock into the air, had possessed sur­face water to cut those massive gorges.

  The planet hung over him now, theSkimmer inorbit, all sensors and instruments at work. Theonly change in readings was a hint of water in anarrow belt around the equator. That was onlymildly interesting. The optics picked up hints of green in that belt. More interesting. And it becameeven more interesting when a half-dozen alarms clanged and whistled and whined at the same timeand the old man broke his sulky silence.

  "Alert, alert. Unidentified vessel."

  She came swimming toward theSkimmer in aslightly higher orbit, clearing the curve of the planet with stately, slow, majestic movement, a huge ship.

  Pat jerked on the arms-control helmet, went intoaction. The alarms were quieted. The computer spat out information. There was no radiation ofany kind coming from the huge ship. There wereno overt signs of hostile intent.

  The ship looked very familiar to Pat. It took himonly seconds to realize that the ship which movedslowly and majestically toward him in an orbit which would bring it almost directly over theSkimmerwas the ship of his nightmares.

 
He threw the optics on highest magnification.The ship expanded on his screen. The hull showedmultiples of the effects of the thousand-parsec syn­drome. Pat waited. She was almost spherical inshape, a design from the past, and she had a feel­ ing, a sense of age. She was close enough now sothat he could see the closed ports which, in allprobability, housed weapons. There was no sign oflife, no emanations detectable by theSkimmer'sarray of instruments.

  When she was directly overhead he could see the exit ports. They were open. The ship was dead in space, open to space, silent, deserted, eerie.

  When she had disappeared behind the curve ofthe planet, her discolored hull sending back onegleaming flash of reflected sunlight from the weakyellow sun, he went to the computer and punchedup a tape on spaceship design and history.

  The ship which was in a high, stable orbit aroundthis barren planet in an area where there shouldnot even

  be a planet, so near the core that thehuge, fiery monsters, the crowded stars, seemed topush down, to overwhelm, was of a type whichhad not been built for a thousand years. She wasan ancient colonization ship, a ship of the typeused in the days of early expansion outward from the core of the UP, a ship whose only purpose wasto carry masses of people, with their possessions,to a new home among the stars.

  SIX

  There are few things in existence which attaininfinite perfection. The universe itself is flawed,for it is not eternal. All of it, all that small portionknown to man and that vast unknown portion, ison a minutely slow slide to nothing, expendingenergies which cannot, short of another creation,be replaced. Someday it will all be cold, and mo­ tionless, and sterile. An orchid approaches perfec­tion, but nevertheless is subject to mutation,environmental damage, and swift decay.

  Of all the things that approach perfection, PatHowe thought, as he exitedSkimmer's airlock, space comes closest in quality to the absolute perfectionof loneliness. No man is ever more alone than aman in self-contained space gear outside the frail protection of the hull of his ship.