Closed System Read online

  He had dosed himself heavily with radiation pre­ventatives, and had the after-exposure doses readyon the bridge to take when he returned.Skimmer was on her own, in the care of the old man. He lefther with the out hatch open, the inner hatch of the airlock closed. He pushed off, and the movementgave him a slow tumbling motion which he counteracted with the control jets. Then he was oneman alone, a tiny mote in the glare of those claus­trophobic star fields, one side of his suit beingcooled by frantically working units, the other sidebeing warmed until he was out ofSkimmer's shadowand the full impact of the solar winds from thethousands of stars hit him, sending the counter clattering.

  Skimmerwas parked in a matching orbit lessthan a hundred yards from the ancient, giant colo­nization ship. Pat looked back, just once. The shiplooked dearly familiar, warm, inviting. There wasa great urge in him to go back, run for the airlock, close the hatch behind him, and seek safety withinSkimmer's friendly confines.

  But somehow, the woman he loved, or had loved,had obtained the access codes to the computer's restricted chambers. The Zede connection had tobe the answer—the "businessmen." He guessed thatif an investigation could plow through to the heartof the matter there'd be a traceable link betweenCorinne's "film producers" and Century Subatom­ics. Simple enough for the right people to get theaccess codes from company records. Which meant,of course, that they had had to have the serialnumber of the computer onSkimmer. Had theycome up with the computer number and the ac­cess codes and then come to seek him out, or hadthey found him, then obtained the access codes?

  None of that really mattered, except as a ques­tion of curiosity. What mattered was Corinne's motivation.

  Jetting carefully toward the big ship, he had time to wonder just what significance the shiphad. Obviously, it had been the destination of Co­rinne's solo trip. What had been on the ship whichwas important enough to make her drug him andtake a long, tiresome trip into the area near thegalactic core? If she had taken something from that ancient derelict it had been small, for she'dleft the ship with only her one bag, and a good bitof the storage area inside the bag had been taken up by Murphy's Stone.

  He eased himself up to the hull of the old shipnear a large, gaping hatch, pulled himself along to the hatch using magnetic clingers, moved his headto shine his helmet light into the dark interior.The inner hatch of the lock was also open. That part of the big ship, at least, was open to space,cold, dead. According to the information he hadfromSkimmer's library, such ships had carriedfour to six space launches. There were tiedowns for such a launch in the lock which he entered, using the suit's jets to swim clear of the discoloredbulkheads and decking.

  The airlock was empty, any speck or mote ofloose dust sucked into the insatiable maw of space's vacuum long ago.

  Fighting an urge to keep looking over his shoul­der, he floated into a corridor, his way lit only by the helmet light. The corridor was as bare as thelock. Brackets on the bulkheads showed that somekind of equipment, perhaps spacesuits or safetygear, had been removed.

  He contacted the computer onSkimmer. "Giveme the shortest route to the control areas," he said.

  The computer, checking Pat's oral reports againstthe plans for similar ships fromSkimmer's infor­mation store, sent Pat on a route which took himtoward the core of the ship, heading for a point onthe opposite side where the control bridge perchedon the outside circumference of the huge sphere.

  Since he was near, he detoured into the engineareas.

  It became quickly obvious to him that the shiphad not met with some totally damaging disaster,but had been abandoned, and not in panic. Theship had been thoroughly cannibalized. All mov­able equipment and gear had been removed, andthe gold shielding of the almost unbelievably hugeand antique blink drive had been removed. It had been necessary, in the technology of a thousandyears past, to use a lot of gold for shielding. It wasall gone, and the more accessible parts of the gen­erator itself had been removed.

  He passed through an area of living quarters tofind the same conditions. In places, even the divid­ing bulkheads had been ripped out, presumably forreclamation of the lightweight metals therein.

  Far down in the guts of the ship, alone in asilence which caused a continuous reaction in hisinner ears, a vacuous, almost unrealized hissingwhich was the psychological reaction to the totalabsence of sound, he could hear his own heartbeating, could sense the song of his blood as it waspumped through his veins.

  He whirled once, swiftly, panic causing his heartto race, for there in the closeness of the engineering spaces his fully alerted senses had given him a false signal of movement where there was onlyvacuum, and space-discolored bulkheads andstripped-down machinery.

  "Whoa, Pat," he said. "No ghosts here. Theydidn't die here. They left the ship."

  Although he sent the words aloud to the oldman, the computer made no reply. It was not pro­grammed for small talk.

  He found the instrument and computer sectionsbefore he reached the bridge. Computers had beenquite large when the ship was built. They werestill using microchips then, but the microchipshad all been removed. He'd been hoping to find afew in place. He could have rigged the old man to read them, if indeed, information had lasted for athousand years. But even the light-metal accessdoors had been removed.

  The viewports on the control bridge were open.Radiation had clouded the plastic of the ports, sothat it now acted as an inefficient filter for thestorm of particles which swirled constantly aroundthe ship.

  And on the bridge, as elsewhere, all instruments,anything movable, had been removed. There was not so much as a scrap of paper, a mote of dust, asmall personal item left behind to give him a clue.

  He found the reason for the ship's abandonmentin the guidance and navigational section. Therehad been a severe explosion, and a resulting fire. That he could tell by twisted shards of metal andscorch marks, but the people of the ship had gut­ted that section, too.

  "Old man," he said, "do you think it would beworthwhile to search the ship? I mean every com­partment, every nook and cranny?"

  "Such a course would give the most availableinformation," the computer said.

  Pat felt a little shiver. The damned ship was big.He'd have to make several trips back toSkimmer to recharge the suit's life-support gear. It wouldtake days. And each time he stuck his head into a new hole, the beam of light from his helmet doingnot the world's best job of dispelling the totaldarkness, he felt that shiver come again. He per­sisted, however, until he had located the ship'slibrary. There'd been a fire there, too, for the li­brary, although there was no direct connection,backed the section which had taken the full forceof the explosion. The fire must have been fed by anoxygen-rich mixture, for in the library area, identifiable by the twisted, ruined, gutted pans whichhad once held computer tapes, even light metals had been consumed.

  He was within thirty minutes of having to go on reserve on the suit's life-support system. There wasone more thing he wanted to check. He found asmall exit hatch open near the control areas anddid the checking from space, jetting around theglobe of the ancient ship to locate all six of the airlocks where once the space launches had beenstored. All were empty. All the launches had beenused.

  For what? There was but one answer. For some reason the old colony ship had chosen to explore toward the core, and, following a slow and erraticcourse, dodging stars, had found a planet. It wasnot much of a planet. It loomed over Pat's head ashe jetted back towardSkimmer, colorful, true, withred and orange pigments in the barren areas, butpoor as planets go. So the ship had found the planet,before the explosion had destroyed its abil­ity to maneuver, and the people had left the dis­abled ship on the space launches. The launches werenot lifeboats. If there'd been a full complement ofcolonists aboard, enough to people those warrensof quarters, the launches would have had to makeseveral trips. There was only one place which couldhave been a destination for such back-and-forth ferrying. The planet.

  He'd set the computer to analyzing the planetduring his absence. He checke
d over the information while he was taking the multiple doses ofafter-exposure drugs, washing them down with cof­fee. There was a viable atmosphere, surprisinglyrich in oxygen. There was a bit of surface water,much of it frozen into thin icecaps at the poles,some of it in the greenbelt around the equator. The deep basins which once had been oceans werearid. The tall mountains were eroded only slightlyin areas, showing that they'd been formed late inthe planet's wet period, before something happenedto stop the rains, and the water which had filled

  the vast ocean spaces had disappeared, evaporat­ing into space, or sinking into porous rock.

  There was enough carbon dioxide in the atmo­sphere to block out most of the harmful radiationfrom the suns which surrounded the small area ofopen space occupied by the planet and its small star.

  In spite of the fact thatSkimmer's state-of-the-art sensors and instruments showed no evidence oflife on the scrubby planet, Pat made his prepara­tions for a low-level scouting run with care.Skimmerlowered through atmosphere on her flux thrusters,leveled off at ten thousand feet with all her eyesand ears on full amplification, her shield up, herskipper wearing the fire-control helmet, the com­puter humming and purring as it digested and correlated the flood of data.

  It was pretty good down there. Good air. Water just under the surface, close enough so that several species of vegetation existed. The greenest areaswere on low ground, at the lowest points of what had once been ocean beds.

  It didn't occur to Pat until he had takenSkimmer halfway around the circumference of the planet atthe equator, passing through the night zone intosunlight, that he might have himself a planet. Hewouldn't own all of it. There were too few habit­able planets to allow one man or a small group ofmen to claim an entire world by right of discov­ery, but there was a well-established reward sys­tem. To qualify for right of discovery he'd have toprove that the planet was unrecorded on X&Acharts, and that it was uninhabited.

  He didn't know, for a moment, whether to hopeto find descendants of the survivors of the big colonization ship or to hope that there was no intelligent life down there. He didn't have too longto muse over it, however, because the computerwas sending him a shrill little warning from oneparticular instrument which worked only when aship was very close to a particular form of lifewhich emanated the faint results of oxygen-basedmetabolism.

  "Oh ho," Pat said. There were, after all, people,or at least animal forms, down there.

  He saw the village on the optics screen just afterthe computer had alerted him. He putSkimmer onhover and let the ship's instruments and sensors work, but he could see himself that there wereartifacts of man there, log cabins with thatched roofs, cultivated fields. He ordered the computerto try contact on all known wavelengths. He didn'treally expect an answer, because there were noenergy emanations, just the detection of combus­tion, wood smoke, coming from the chimneys ofseveral of the cabins.

  The village was connected, he saw, as he liftedSkimmerfor an overall view of the area ahead, toother villages by a network of roads. The roadswere not paved. There was no evidence of grading,for there was no need for it in that rainless climate. The roads showed an overall pattern which intrigued him. He movedSkimmer again and hov­ered over a large stone building, low, walls high,apparently thick, and sloping slightly upwardtoward a roof which was paved with light metals inslabs, slabs taken from the partitions which hadbeen removed from the abandoned colony ship inorbit around the planet.

  OK. So he wasn't going to get discovery rights to a planet. It was, obviously, populated, and by the descendants of the people who had come onthe big ship.

  From the stone building, the roads radiated outlike the spokes of a wheel to the outlying villages. Obviously, the stone building was the center ofthings. The ship's sensors were picking up life em­anations in quantity in the villages and in thecentral area, where the same style of rude cabinslined the streets radiating out from the stonebuilding.

  Pat decided not to land at the heart of that littlecommunity of villages, not because he was afraidfor himself, but for the safety of the people downthere. It was obvious that they'd reverted to primi­tivismand had shown little advancement in thethousand or so years they'd been on the planet. Notelling what they remembered about the civiliza­ tion which had sent them forth. They might seeSkimmeras a threat and attack, and Pat didn'twant to have to use modern weapons, even inself-defense, against people armed, perhaps, withbows and arrows.

  He picked a rather isolated hut near the out­skirts of one of the outlying villages. He lowered the ship on flux, saw, as the ground neared, thatthere were two men, yes, men, standard model,unmutated, two arms, two legs, one head, workingin a field near the isolated cabin.

  They heard the whispering thunder ofSkimmer's flux thrusters, dropped their tools, and stood, faces upturned, as the ship blew dust and lowered tosquat about a hundred yards from them. Theycontinued to stare as Pat opened the hatch.

  Man knew little about his origins. History esti­mated that only a small number of people, per­haps less than one million, left Old Earth beforenuclear war devastated the planet, riding outwardfrom that small, isolated sun on ships far more primitive than the old colony ship which circledthis world.

  The people from Old Earth had settled, it wasfelt, only four or five planets in the original wave of colonization from Old Earth. Various portions ofthe UP claimed to have been the original points of settlement, including the older planets of the Zedesystem. In all cases, the small groups of settlerswere unable to maintain, on virgin planets, thelevel of technology which had sent them into space.In fact, the best estimates of historians were thatit had taken between ten and thirty thousand yearsfor the space children of Old Earth to soar backout among the stars.

  It was felt that one Old Earth "country," or,perhaps, a small group of "countries," had beenresponsible for sending the starships up, for therewas a surprising singularity of racial types in the entire race of UP man. Earth history was nothingmore than semimyth, or legend, but the old talessaid that on Old Earth, there had been red menand yellow men, black men and brown men, andlight-skinned men like modern man. And legend/myth said that each different type of man on OldEarth had had his own language. Some historianssaid that that fact alone would have accounted forEarth's constant warfare which led to the final conflagration.

  Only a specialist, such as ex-professor Pat Howe,understood the concept of different languages.There'd been a brief flurry of interest in the popu­lar media when an expedition brought back fromthe colliding galaxies in Cygnus a book in an alientongue, but that flurry faded quickly. Pat, ex-occupier of the one seat of language study atXanthos University, knew of the extensive archeo­logicalwork on Old Earth which had begun imme­diately when man accidentally stumbled onto theplanet of his origin. Through the bravery and thedream of one of the mutated humans who had survived Earth's nuclear agony, this work had beensteadily adding to modern man's store of phrases, words, and some fragmented works of literature inthe various languages of Old Earth.

  It was not surprising, then, to Pat, to see, as thetwo men approachedSkimmer, that they were ofthe usual racial type, two fine specimens, as amatter of fact, and that they seemed not in theleast awed by the landing of a spaceship. Theywalked boldly, with longbows—yep, bows and ar­rows, Pat thought—in one hand, quivers with ar­rows slung over their left shoulders. They pausedat a distance of about a hundred feet and looked athim in silence.

  "I am a friend," Pat said, raising his right handin salute. The two men shifted their longbows totheir left hands, raised their right hands in return salute, and one of them spoke in a harsh, gutturallanguage.

  Pat's old interest in languages soared. This wouldknock the socks off the ivory-tower eggheads backat Xanthos U.

  But it would, he soon realized, be an immediate problem for him. If these people had evolved alanguage of their own during their thousand ormore years of isolation, it might cause quite aproblem in communications.Skimmer's computerdidn't have the kind of philology programmingwhich, long yea
rs ago, had enabled translation ofthe Artunee manuscript.

  Pat waved, saying, "Come closer. Friend. Comecloser."

  The two men came to within a few feet, lookedup at him from guileless blue eyes, smiled, madethat salute with the right hand again.

  "I come from the United Planets," Pat said. "Icome as a friend."

  "Ichsighgorben,"one of the blue-eyed men said.

  They were dressed lightly for the warm climate.Their strong legs extended below a short, girdledskirt, chests were bare, feet semiwrapped in a typeof sandal. The material of the skirts was rough,most probably woven from plant fiber.

  "My name is Pat Howe," Pat said, punchinghimself in the chest.

  "Ichsighgorben,"was the answer, the man, too,punching himself in the chest.

  Bells began to ring in Pat's head. He'd beengood in his field when he was a professor of philol­ogy, and one of his last big research projects had been to compile a grammar for one particular Old Earth language from the fragments of books and inscriptions unearthed in a dig on the fringe of thelargest continental mass of Old Earth.

  "Ah," he said, pointing to the man who hadspoken. "Gorben."

  The man nodded and spoke. Pat tried to identifythe words he'd helped translate with the soundscoming from the blue-eyed man. It took a while.He came down out of the lock and squatted, invit­ing the two to join him. They hunkered down, stillholding their longbows. He encouraged them totalk, nodding, smiling, putting it all together until he thought he had it. Of course, some rough rulesof pronunciation can be compiled from the writtenlanguage, but theyare rough, and when he firstspoke the two men cocked their heads in puzzle­ment.

  It got easier. There were certain gutturals whichgave Pat some trouble, but he soon mastered them,and then he said, "You speak an ancient tongue,friend, a language called German."

  The man called Gorben looked startled. "Howdo you know that?"

  Pat smiled and tapped one finger to his temple,saying in English, "Smart, smart joker."