Zach Hughes - Mother Lode

Mop was still barking frantically, but in a different tone, as if he were thoroughly excited. «All right,» she said. «That's enough.» The dog paid no attention. In fact, the pitch of his bark rose. «Who?» she asked, after pressing the button that activated the talk-through. «Miss Kenner?» «Yes, who are you?» «I'm Denton Gale. I'm a friend of your father's.» She opened the door, letting the X&A saffer hang down by her side in plain view. Mop rushed toward the visitor, yapping happily. «Hey, Moppy,» Gale said, bending to rub the dog's head. Mop's stubby tail was doing overtime in circles. The young man picked him up and rubbed him, then looked at Erin. His eyes widened when he saw the weapon. «You won't need that, « he said. «I hope not,» she said. «Look, if you'd feel more comfortable if I come back during the day—» On the hardpad she saw an aircar, sleek, silver. «I apologize for my caution,» she said. «I suppose if my little buddy there knows you—» «I work at the port,» Gale said. «I rebuilt the computer on the Mother Lode for your dad.» «Run that by again?» she said. «Look.» When he smiled he looked very young. «You're letting all the warm air out and, quite frankly, I'm freezing.» «Come in.» «I heard that you had come home,» he said, as she closed the door. «I would have been here in daylight, but I had an emergency call.» She stood in the center of the room, the saffer held behind her. «Gale?» «Denton Gale.» «And you work on computers?» «Yes.» «And you did some work for my father?» «On the Mother Lode,» he said. «You won't saff me if I sit down?» She laughed. «Sit. I've been gone for six years. The last letter I had from my father was almost a year ago. What is a Mother Lode?» «A Mule Class space-going tug.» «Good God,» she said, sitting down weakly. «You didn't know?» Gale asked. He had deep, dark brown eyes, a regular, pleasant face, a mouth that smiled easily and attractively. «I've had a lot of surprises lately.» «He bought it just under a year ago. She's in good shape. Really. She was on service with the Trans-Zede Corporation. She was one of the last Mules to be built, as a matter of fact.» «What in hell did my father want with a Mule?» she asked. Gale shrugged. «I didn't ask.» «What does an antiquated space-going tug cost?» He named a figure that was within a few thousand credits of the face value of the mortgage she'd found in her father's desk. «The reason I came over tonight,» Denton said, «is because the pad rent is due on the Lode. The port's government operated, you know—» «No, I didn't.» «Well, it is. And they get pretty damned sticky if the pad rent is late.» «How much?» «A hundred and fifty credits for the month.» «Fine.» That, along with the current power bill, would clean out her father's checkbook. «If you like, I can take the check with me,» Gale said. «I'd appreciate that.» She went into the office, wrote the amount. «How do I make it out?» she called. «Canadian County Spaceport Authority,» he answered. «You're sure that's not you?» she asked, coming out of the office waving the check. He laughed. «Nope. I'm 'The Computerman, the Century Series a Specialty.' « «Antiques,» she said. The Century Series of computers was two generations older than the Unicloud computers on Rimfire and all current X&A ships. «But solid,» he said. «Look, my office is at the end of the main administration building. I'll be glad to show the Lode to you any time.» «Can you help me sell her?» «I guess so,» he said. «If the weather isn't too bad, I'll come over tomorrow.» «Fine.» «Give you a cup of coffee before you go?» She didn't know him, but he had a nice smile and the house seemed so empty with only the little dog for company. «I really do need to run. I've got a rush job on a freighter that's scheduled to lift for the Tigian planets tomorrow.» «Thank you for coming by.» He smiled, and for the first time his eyes showed that he had noticed that she was a girl. «My pleasure.» She watched his aircar lift off and zoom up and away. The snow was heavier. The ground was turning white. Mop had followed them out. He lifted one leg and left a liquid message on a bush and then ran to wait for her at the door. She went to the library and pulled down a reference book. Mule Class tugs had been in deep space for almost fifty years. Thousands of them had been built on Trojan during the last half-century. A Mule was a stocky looking brute, knobby and squarish. She was overpowered, built with a blink generator that could take her on half a dozen jumps without recharging, hefty enough to enclose the largest ship within her fields and jump with her in an electronic embrace. Spaceships, after all, were just electronics and mechanics. Electronic things and mechanical things had not changed since some Old One on Old Earth invented the wheel. Machines broke down. Electronic circuits failed. And if enough of them broke down or failed at the same time, a ship carrying a crew and a valuable cargo or a ship with a load of passengers was stranded in space. That's where the Mules came in. Some space tugs were government owned. Most, however, were free enterprise. At specified sites on every blink route space tugs were stationed. There was fierce bidding for the more traveled routes, for the salvage money that came to a space tug and its owners when a big ship had to be piggybacked to a repair yard by a squat, dwarfed Mule made fortunes. Although the Mule was hailed all over the civilized galaxy as the most dependable ship ever put into space, she had been replaced over the past ten years by the newer, larger, more comfortable Fleet Class tug, built by the same Trojan shipyards that had produced the Mules. Erin first saw her Mule on a day when snowdrifts were piling up against the side of the port buildings. She had drifted over in her father's aircar, Mop sitting beside her, tongue lolling in excitement at being able to go. She was given a landing spot at least two hundred yards from the administration building. After a few doubtful steps in the snow, Mop decided that it was frisky time. He dashed back and forth, made mock attacks on her legs, bit at the falling flakes. Sure enough there was a sign over a door that said THE COMPUTERMAN, The Century Series a Specialty. She entered without knocking. Denton Gale sat with his feet up on his desk. He dropped his boots to the floor and stood, smiling. Mop jumped into his chair and demanded attention. Denton rubbed the dog's head as he said, «I didn't think you'd come today.» «Well, I couldn't wait to see my inheritance,» she said with a wry smile. «Let me get my coat.» The Mother Lode sat squatly on a pad another two hundred yards away through snow and icy wind. Denton punched a code into the airlock. «Mother's birthday,» Erin said. «This is a pretty secure port,» Denton said. «Even if someone figured out the code you wouldn't have to worry.» Ship's smell. A hint of silicon lubes, that almost intangible scent produced by banks of electronics at work, the odd tang to the recycled air that meant a Blink generator was in operation. The Mother Lode was on standby. Her automatic monitoring systems purred and hummed. The control bridge had been freshly painted. The command chair was newly upholstered in synthetic leather. «He had her completely overhauled,» Denton said. «She's ready. You could take her anywhere.» «I've just been there,» Erin said, for the hatch had closed behind him and she was closed in, encapsulated once more in metal, and although it was the cold, winter air of New Earth outside instead of the harsh vacuum of space, she suddenly felt lonely. «Still want to sell her, huh?» «Yes.» «I just wish I had the money to buy her,» he said. «I wish you did, too.» «I haven't had a chance to ask around. If you want me to, I will.» «Please do.» He touched buttons on the console. An electronic hiss accompanied the brightening of the computer screen. «Know anything about the Century?» «We had one at the Academy in my first year, then it was replaced with a first generation Unicloud.» «The Century will do everything a Unicloud will do.» «But slower,» she said. «True. But how vital are a few nanoseconds?» «Most of the time, not vital,» she said. «There was some senility in the cloud chambers when I first began work on her,» Denton said. «Nothing serious. Required recharging the Verbolt fields. Reloading. You'll find that she's as crisp as new.» «I don't really anticipate—» A beeper at Gale's waist buzzed. He put the instrument to his lips, identified himself. Erin, examining the controls of the Mule, didn't hear the communication. «I have to run over to the office,» he said. «Someone wants to give me some money and I find that to be one of the more rewarding aspects of having my own business. If you'll wait here, I'll be back in a few minutes and I'll show you the rest of the layout.» Erin nodded. In a careful search of the house she had turned up nothing to indicate why a retired spaceman— who had said repeatedly that if he never had to breath recycled air again he would be happy—would put his entire assets into a spaceship. She went into the Mule's living quarters. Crews of two had spent long months in the large and luxurious private cabins aboard the Lode when she was on space duty. On the Mother Lode one cabin had been converted into a control room for mining equipment attached to the ship's squarish hull. The remaining cabin was equipped with a terminal to give access to the ship's library. She returned to the bridge, turned on the computer terminal, punched information up idly, saw that the Lode was stocked with a rather magnificent library of books and visuals. «My boy,» she told Mop, who had jumped up onto the bed, «I think Mr. John was planning to be in space for a long time. Now the question is, why?» Mop cocked his head as if to echo her question. «Why would he name the ship the Mother Lode? That's a mining term. My father? Going mining?» She shook her head, turned off the terminal, continued her search. In the engine room the huge blink generator was a solid bulk. Even in repose it emanated a force that lifted the short hairs on her neck. The gym contained the usual exercise equipment. The galley was stocked with enough concentrates to feed a dozen men for a year. She went back to the control bridge and reactivated the computer. She was checking files when Denton Gale returned. «Ah, so you decided to get acquainted, after all,» he said. She shrugged. «Denton, why did my dad buy this ship?» «He didn't say and I didn't ask.» «Come on. You worked with him. He must have given you some hint.» «Only her name.» She nodded. «That has occurred to me, but I can't really see John Kenner going off into deep space to prospect for gold.» He laughed. «He was a nice fellow.» «Yep,» she said, and suddenly she missed him like crazy. She turned back to the computer. «Not many files.» «Nope. The star charts and navigation tables are in the root directory. Internal operations and monitors, ditto. Library is in a separate sub-file.» «I saw that. There's nothing personal listed in the directories. Nothing that my dad put in himself.» «No.» «You've looked?» He grinned. She was not unaware that Denton Gale was a well-constructed, smooth-muscled young man of considerable masculine appeal. He had sun-smiles at the corners of his eyes to match her space squint lines. The way he looked at her told her that he was not unimpressed by an ash blonde woman in spacer's blue. «Damn,» she said. «What?» She shook her head. She'd been joining Denton in the mating dance of the juveniles, and she wasn't in the mood for games of that sort. «I've forgotten how to check hidden files on a Century,» she said. «Unless you have the entry code there's no way to do it short of cooking the X&A black box.» The black box, required equipment on any space-going computer, held everything that went into the Century whether from the ship's automatic recordings of position and direction or by manual feed from an operator, kept it secure from meddling, under seal, available for official examination should it ever become necessary. Accidents in space were rare, but when the inevitable happened the black box, destructible only by atomics or by being tossed into a sun, gave the reasons. The black box was sacred. To tamper with it was a felony serious enough to lose a man his license and his liberty. X&A was jealous of its police powers in space. «Did you try Mother's birth date?» He smiled and nodded. «And your dad's birth date and his Service serial number.» «If you have something to do, Dent, I think I'll stay here and tinker with this old crock for a while.» «There is some paperwork. I'll be in the office.» «Thanks for what you've done.» «No problem,» he said. She punched in an order for coffee. It was a thick, heady brew, her father's favorite, made from Delos beans and rich, synthetic cream. Mop indicated that he'd been on board the ship before by going to a service area that had obviously been installed for a person of just his height to paw a little red button that delivered a Mop-sized milk bone. «Well, aren't you the spoiled one,» she teased, as he crawled under the command chair and began to consume the tidbit with unhurried satisfaction. She began to punch codes into the computer. Her own birthday. The day of her mother's death. The date of her graduation. The date of her father's retirement. When she ran out of numbers, she began on names. Erin. Elizabeth. John. Kenner. Mop. Nire, which was Erin backward. Htebazile, hers and her mother's middle name spelled backward. The computer clicked and hummed, hissed in electronic satisfaction, displayed a typed letter. The letter began, «Dear Erin.» «Oh, Moppy,» she moaned, as she read. «He went senile.» It was a long letter. It told of a visit from an old shipmate who had come to New Earth specifically to see John Kenner. And then she knew why her father had mortgaged his retirement retreat to put everything he had and could raise into an antiquated space tug. The old shipmate had been a member of a prospecting party that stumbled onto a belt of space debris orbiting around a dim and distant sun, debris so rich in heavy metals, including gold and the platinum family, metals so vital to the new age of exploration that one trip to the belt would make a man rich. «Oh, Dad,» she whispered. The old shipmate had died, leaving the space coordinates that would lead his friend, John Kenner, to the rich belt of ores. There it was, a star chart. She had to check references to orient the relatively small area shown on the chart with the United Planets zone. The distances involved could best be measured in thousands of parsecs. If, indeed, John Kenner's old shipmate had gone there, deep, deep into the hazardous, star-crowded heart of the galaxy past the mysterious Dead Worlds, he had traveled far. Past the Dead Worlds the blink routes extended only a few light-years. «Mop, he was going to go off the established routes,» she said. «What do you think of that?» Mop thought it was time for a little loving. He licked his chops, leapt into her lap, and threw himself onto his back so that she could rub his chest. «What are we going to do?» she asked. «What do you think?» «Wurf,» Mop said contentedly. «You're a helluva lot of help,» she said. «Here we are, owners of a Mule equipped for deep space mining, in possession of a treasure map and enough food to last us for three or four years and that's it, buddy. The old home place is mortgaged to the hilt. If we could sell this mother—» She was using that element of the tug's name in another context, and that set the ship's personality in her mind, «—for enough to pay off the mortgage, we'd be damned lucky.» She had saved most of her salary during the years of deep space probing aboard Rimfire, but a fleet lieutenant didn't earn enough, even in six years, to become rich. She might be able to unload the Mother, redeem the old homestead, and squeak by for a few years on what she had saved. «The question is, Mr. Mop, do I want to? What about you? Would you rather stay at home or go—» One ear came to attention, for «go» was one of his favorite words. «—Blinking and creaking off into the unknown?» «Wurf,» Mop said, waiting for her to say «go» again. Two days later Denton Gale came to the house with an offer on the Mother. «I hate to tell you how much they said they'd pay,» he said. «In that case I don't want to hear,» she said. «It's less than your dad put into her.» «Mother jumping—» She caught herself. «How much less?» He named a figure thousands of credits below the amount owed on the mortgage. «Tell them eff them and the horse they rode in on,» she said. Inheritance laws were simple on New Earth. Racial guilt for the spoliation of the planet settled by the only people to escape the Destruction sent U.P. money in great sums to the government. Tax loads were light on New Earth's citizens. There was no governmental bite into John Kenner's estate. The Mother Lode and the mortgage encumbered family home were transferred to Erin's name without undue red tape and an offer to buy came not for the Mule but for the Kenner house and lands. The snow had melted quickly, leaving the clay-rich earth puddled and muddy. Until she'd had to visit her father's attorney's office, Erin had not been out of the house since the first day she'd gone aboard what she was coming to think of as that Mother, John Kenner's Folly. «So you see, Miss Kenner,» the attorney who had settled her father's estate said smoothly, «it is quite a generous offer. You would realize some five thousand credits over and above the payoff of the mortgage and legal fees.» «Legal fees, if any, will be paid by the buyer, if any,» Erin said in a steely tone, her sea green eyes squinting. «Perhaps that could be arranged,» the attorney said doubtfully. «I must tell you, however, that my client is quite eager to settle on New Earth and is examining other properties.» «Bless his little heart,» Erin said. The lawyer raised his eyebrows. «Don't try to con me, my friend. I've been screwed by experts.» She rose to leave his office. «You may tell your client that I am considering his offer, but that I would consider it more strongly if he added five thousand credits to the price.» «I'm afraid that's out of the question.» «Tough titty, then,» Erin said. She didn't ordinarily use spacer vulgarities, but there were times when she found a bit of shock to be useful, or, at worst, satisfying. «He's the one who seems to be eager.» She found herself on the approach to the aircar pads of the port, cleared herself for landing, said to the Mop dog, «Now why the hell are we here, partner?» Mop didn't say. He ran ahead of her to greet Denton Gale at the door to Gale's office. Dent had seen John Kenner's old aircar come in and was waiting. He opened the door, lifted Mop, rubbed his chest, winked at Erin. «The weather is a bit nicer than it was when you were here before.» She pushed past him into the office. He put Mop on his desk where the little dog curled himself into a ball and took a little practice nap. «Dent, did you talk with that old shipmate of my father's who came to him with this tale about a gold mine?» «Once or twice. He came by here with John a couple of times when they were shopping for the Lode, asking me about computers and electronics. He was an older fellow. At the time I thought he was a bit fragile to be planning to go back into space.» «Obviously you were right,» she said. He sat on the edge of the desk, motioned her to take his chair. She sat, crossed her legs. She'd dug into a trunk at the house to find cold weather slacks and had been quite pleased to find that other than a bit of rather becoming tightness in the seat, she fit well into clothing she had not worn since she was eighteen. «Any particular reason why you ask?» «Ummm,» she said. His face was haloed by backlighting from the windows. He was smiling. He was one handsome son-of-a-bitch. She felt that sliding, melting feeling and answered his smile. «Not thinking of going out there to take a look, are you?» He looked upward, making the standard physical reference to space. «What do you think?» That often used phrase caused Mop to lift his good ear. «I think, Erin, that you are the most beautiful girl I've ever seen.» «Now where did that come from?» she asked disgustedly. «Here,» he said, touching his chest. Her reaction was out of proportion to his infraction. She used a couple of choice spacer expressions on the way out of the office and was in the aircar jerking it aloft and toward the house before she realized why she was so angry. It had not been Dent's compliment that had sent her fleeing from his office but her reaction to it. Once before when she'd been lonely she'd turned to casual male arms for comfort and she had never forgotten the stomach-sinking feeling of self-loathing when the brief spasms without love were over. Now she was lonely again, and she'd seriously entertained the idea, at least for a moment, of seeking solace in Denton Gale's arms. Her decision was made by the time she found the attorney's com-number. A secretary answered. «Yes, Miss Kenner. As a matter of fact, Mr. Atherton has been trying to reach you.» «Glad you called, Erin,» the lawyer said. «I relayed your message to my client and I was rather surprised to find that he is willing to go an extra five thousand for occupancy within thirty days.» «So? I should have asked for ten, huh?» Atherton cleared his throat. «He is quite eager to take occupancy.» «Throw in another five for the furnishings and a used aircar and he can have it right now.» «I'll get back to you within the hour,» Atherton said. The sale was closed before the end of business next day. She left the only home she remembered, taking with her nothing more than books, pictures, holo-tapes, a few music capsules that brought back youthful memories, and the Mop's bed. Her savings and the equity from the property had been converted into universal credits to be drawn on at any bank in the U.P. She spent a day checking and double-checking Mother's store of goodies. Her father had stocked the ship well. Her only purchase was several cases of Tigian wine and a few cases of liver flavored nibbles for the Mop. Once she saw Denton Gale come out of his office and look over toward the Mother, but he did not put in an appearance. She lifted ship without saying good-bye to the only person on New Earth other than a lawyer whom she knew by name. Once out of the planet's gravity well she set multiple blinks into the Mule's big and powerful generator and within a half hour Mother had traversed the most traveled routes within U.P. territory, putting parsecs behind her. Each time the ship blinked, making for that funny little feeling in the stomach, Mop looked up, lifted one ear, and yawned. During recharging, when there was nothing to do but wait while old Mr. Blink's miracle accumulated energy from the stars, she slept, read, sampled the holo-pictures, and wondered if, after all, her mother had had any children that lived. «You,» she said accusingly to the Mop dog. «It's all your fault. You're always so damned eager to go. « Mop's good ear lifted. His tongue came out and he panted excitedly as if to say, «Where, where, go where?» CHAPTER THREE Dressed in athletic shorts and shirt, breasts bound to prevent soreness from bouncing, Erin ran down a New Earth country lane between rows of flowering trees. The sun was warm on her back. The sky overhead was pellucid blue. She'd done half a mile, had a mile and a half to go. Beside the moving track a long-haired little dog sat watching with puzzled interest. He rose, yawned, and stretched, went to lift one leg against a roadside tree. «No, no,» Erin said. The dog was confused. The holo images looked real, but when he tried to go into the woods to find bigger and better trees to irrigate, he bumped into the wall. He came back to cock his head and look up at Erin as she ran lightly on the moving belt. He apparently decided that it looked like fun and jumped onto the belt, lost his footing, and went rolling back past Erin's feet. «You just have to get the hang of it,» Erin said. She slowed the belt, picked Mop up, put him directly in front of her. The belt carried him backward, but he began running, fell back between Erin's legs and almost tripped her. He finally got the hang of it and, as she increased the speed of the exercise track, ran ahead of her, looking back over his shoulder once with his tongue lolling out. After a few more humiliations such as running into the far wall of the gym when he decided to dash ahead, and being tossed tail over head off the moving belt, he got the swing of it. Within a week he was leaping on and off the belt as he saw fit, could pace himself to the speed of it, and, looking quite proud, Erin thought, could even double back, running with the belt, to make a mock attack on her pumping legs. «This is one thing I hate, hate, hate about space,» she told Mop, as she toweled off after a shower. «Exercise for the sake of exercise is—» She paused. «Your young ears should not hear what I was thinking.» She let the shower stall finish drying her with a gentle zephyr of soft, desert air. «And so,» she said, «here I am, halfway to hell-and-gone, half bonkers, talking to a hairy little pooch.» Mop cocked his head charmingly and said, «Wurf.» «And now, sir, it is inspection time. Shall we go?» The magic word. Mop leapt up, did a horizontal 360, a complete turn in the air, and scampered toward the door. The human body's bio-clock adjusted itself to the axial rotation of two planets so much alike that their days differed by mere seconds. On board the Mother Lode ship's clocks measured New Earth hours. Each day at a specific hour Erin made a complete round of Mother, checking all systems and all structural features. Mother was a sound ship, but, space being the most unforgiving environment faced by man, one could not be too careful. In the big empty a particularly swift and unpleasant death lay just beyond a few inches of hull. A pinpoint penetration of that hull by some speeding particle of debris, if not repaired immediately, could bleed the air away. Not even the technology aboard the most advanced of ships, such as Rimfire, could create oxygen out of nothing. Mother had only the air she'd carried with her from New Earth. So once every twenty-four hours the ship's captain and first mate, Erin and Moppy the Dog, strolled the corridors, poked heads into cargo and engineering spaces, scanned the sealed food and water storage chambers, gazed meaningfully at the bolt heads that held the multilayered hull together, pored over the autologs that recorded the ever-mysterious workings of the generator, punched test buttons on various electronic circuits, and in general went over the Mother from her square stern to her square bow. The inspections were made during the periods when Mother floated motionless in the blackness, less than a mote among the ever more dense fields of stars. After a charge things were a bit more interesting as Erin programmed blinks into the computer and punched them in one by one until the huge generator's charge was depleted. The little ship hurled itself down the star lanes toward the fiery heart of the galaxy. There came a time when the blinks were shorter, when the course became a zigzag made necessary by the density of the stellar population. Actual travel was instantaneous, but preparation for that travel began to take more and more time so that weeks became months. She had leisure during the charging periods for exploring the contents of the library, and for getting to know her companion. «You are, sir,» she said, as Moppy offered his right paw for shaking, «a rather remarkable fellow. You don't snore. You don't take up much of the bed. You know that your duty is to keep my feet warm at night and that all you're expected to do during the day is guard against boogers and to get a smile on your face and keep your big mouth shut. Men could learn a lot from you.» Moppy rolled over and said, «Uhhhhh,» which was his way of saying, «That's nice, Erin. Rub my stomach.» She was quite rapidly running out of charts. Winds of radiation swept past Mother as she floated in the hard, hard light of the crowded star fields. After each jump she was reminded of the difference between the Century Series of computers and the state-of-the art Unicloud aboard Rimfire. With millions of points of reference the old Century chuckled to itself for minutes before confirming position. There were times when Erin was tempted to cut the process short. She was, after all, still on established blink routes. However, from her first year at the Academy she had been taught to check and double-check. There was only one recorded case of it happening, but if some natural force, say the gravitational pull of an errant comet, had moved a blink beacon a substantial distance from its surveyed location, a ship using the coordinates of the beacon on which to base a blink might end up inside the atomic furnace of a star or become blended atom to atom with some small, dark body. As she moved ever deeper toward the star-packed core she began to develop a claustrophobic feeling of being hemmed in by stars: orange stars, red stars, blue-white stars; M stars and K stars; visual binaries and eclipsing binaries; variable stars—Cepheids and RR Lyrae stars, SS Cygni stars and R Corona Borealis stars; large stars and medium stars and blue giants and old, tired, dark, shrunken stars dead by nova in a time so remote that it was meaningless to a mere woman of New Earth who had the life expectancy promised to the men of Old Earth in the one surviving piece of Old Earth literature, the Bible. «The life span of man shall be a hundred and twenty years.» Genesis 6:3. She was just over one-quarter through her allotted time, if, indeed, she proved to be average; but as she jumped Mother carefully toward a dense cluster of New York type stars it seemed that time had slowed, that she would use up too much of her ration of years before Mother reached her destination. The New York cluster blocked a straight-line blink route into an area of space, less crowded among the harshness. The blink routes took her around the cluster and, the generator depleted, Mother was motionless in space within optic range of a small grouping of stars that were huddled together as if for company in a sort of cul-de-sac in space surrounded by glittering oceans of old, huge, central core monsters. The sac stars had families. One member of the planetary grouping of the star nearest her came onto her view screen when she punched orders into the computer. The world was one of several that had given mankind the shivers for centuries. Planets were not common enough to be ignored. Planets among the dense star fields near the core, some 10,000 light-years from the U.P. sector, were even more rare. Any ship coming into the sac would take a close look at the world known as D.W. One, and would see one principal reason why man had constructed huge fleets of ships and had armed them with the most deadly weapons that technology could supply. D.W. One, the first of the Dead Worlds to be encountered by a ship coming in from the periphery, had been killed with a totality that belied the difficulty of the feat. Man could denude a planet of forests, eliminate thousands of animal species, poison the atmosphere and the oceans with his wastes, but it was pretty damned difficult to kill a planet and leave it intact. A planet buster could fragment a world and leave nothing more than a belt of asteroids, but what had been done to the Dead Worlds was even more impressive, for D.W. One and several of her sister planets in the sac were dead from the inside out. Although she was old, she should have had a molten core. That she did not was one of the mysteries that had kept astrophysicists guessing and caused all U.P. exploration ships to go armed. If the planet killers ever came sweeping in from the vastness of space, man, so fragile in his frame of bones, tendons, cartilage, and flesh, would need protection. Thus, on Rimfire and on all other major ships of the X&A fleet there were weapons that could fragment a world if necessary. Once the planets in the sac had lived. Although there were no clues to the identity of the race or races that had peopled the Dead Worlds, unidentifiable rubble on the ravaged surface of D.W. One proved that there had been a technological civilization there. Now even the top soil was gone. The ground up nonbiodegradable debris of a technological civilization was scattered over a surface that was nothing more than inert rock. And into a flat, continent-sized area of the rock the killers, the race that had destroyed twenty living planets, had carved a warning. The message was not in words, but in symbols. An eye. A world, a stylized building and other, more obscure images. There was disagreement as to the exact words intended, but all of the experts agreed that the message carved into the bones of a continent was a warning: «Look at this world and tremble. Build not, for we will return.» Erin turned off the optics, shivered. Then, perversely, as if to prove to the vast emptiness around her that she wasn't really spooked by the mystery of twenty dead worlds, she checked the library index and watched a docu-history that told of the initial discovery of the worlds in the sac, and ended with the account of the last licensed scientific expedition to the sac by six graduate students aboard the Paulus, under Laconius of Tigian. The Paulus had disappeared, had vanished as completely as the race that had lived on the Dead Worlds. Every holo-drama fan could name the six students who had disappeared with Paulus. Of course, ships did evaporate into the nothingness of space from time to time, but the fact that the Paulus had disappeared while on a trip to the Dead Worlds had inspired writers, good and bad, to go into spasms of speculative creativity. Aside from the Dead Worlds docu-history, the Mother's library contained no less than three holo-dramas based on the loss of the Paulus. Erin watched two of them while waiting for the generator to charge and then, before the big power source was fully ready, she blinked onward and past the sac into the star fields and to the end of the line, as far as established blink beacons were concerned. From there on she had only the star chart in Mother's computer, a chart compiled by her father's old shipmate who, she felt, may or may not have known a black hole from his own dusky posterior orifice. She wanted a fully charged generator. She watched the third holo-drama about the Dead Worlds in which a rather sick minded writer presented the theory that giant lava beetles had hatched deep down in the fiery magma of the interior of the planets and had eaten the life from within before, in desperate hunger, they had emerged to crumble into tiny, unidentifiable bits everything they didn't eat. To get the taste of that one out of her mind, she selected the documentary version of the X&A expedition to the colliding galaxies in Cygnus and the finding of the Miaree manuscripts written in the language of the second alien race, the Artonuee, of which U.P. explorers had found evidence. She told herself that she'd had enough thinking about aliens, about planet killers and the Cygnus races who joined each other in death. She had spent her time of awe and wonder as an undergraduate, speculating with others on the nature of the female ruled Artonuee and the very masculine Delanians, and about the nature and the source of power for those who had devastated the Dead Worlds. But back in college on New Earth she'd been a long way from either the colliding galaxies in Cygnus or from the twenty worlds in the sac. Out here, alone except for a polite, gentle little dog, surrounded by the eternal glow of the core worlds, the possibility of coming face to face with the planet killers was a bit more real. Look on this world and tremble. Build not, for we shall return. With a fully charged generator she double-checked the visuals, ran a deep-search with all available ship's instruments, and, holding her breath, took the first blink from coordinates on the star chart drawn by her father's old shipmate. She and the ship arrived. As she prepared for the next jump, Mop came to her and politely asked to be held. She took him into her lap. «You're nervous, too?» she asked. He licked her thumb. Just once. «Don't blame you, little buddy,» she said. «But hang in there, huh?» She poised her finger over the button. «Heeeeeere we go.» After the little wrench to the system that is standard with a blink, sheЧитать дальше