"Holy—" Jeanny said unbelievingly, as the fourrandom blinks outbound from Taratwo showed onthe star map which the computer was laying outon the screen. "What in the holy hell were youdoing, Pat? Four random blinks?"
"I had two hostile light cruisers with all thelatest armament on my tail," Pat said. "There's nolaw against random blinks."
"There should be a law against stupidity," shesaid.
The map built smoothly to record the coursechanges Pat had made on flux and on the blinkSkimmer had made to get back onto an establishedblink route.
"Coming up," Jeanny said.
You had to be watching closely. The map showedthe next blink down the range toward UP space,but there was, before that blink, just a tiny glitch,a sort of instantaneous glimmer on the screen. Patbacked up
the tape and ran it again.
"That's where the delete button was pushed," Jeanny said.
"Jeanny, if I'd wanted to erase a portion of thetape I wouldn't have left such obvious tracks."
"That's why I'm here. That's why I haven't turnedthe case over to the action section."
"That I appreciate," Pat said. "Look, honey, Ineed a little time. I know this old bird here. Iknow him like
a friend, inside out. I need to have along, long talk with him."
"I just can't allow you to be alone on board,"Jeanny said, "and I have work to do back at theoffice."
"Come on, Jeanny."
She shook her head. "Pat, dammit, if you get meinto trouble—"
"You know better than that."
"All right, look. I can hold up notifying actionsection until tomorrow afternoon at the latest. Idon't think you're going to find anything morethan our techs found, but I'm willing to give youthe chance. On one condition. I want to knowwhat the hell you were up to out there and who itis you suspect might have tampered with yourcomputer."
"Later," he said. He didn't think he could talkabout Corinne without displaying emotion. Jeannyknew him too well. He didn't want to have toadmit to her that he had been suckered in by abunch of city slickers from Zede II and made tolook like a complete fool by a redheaded film star.
"Now," Jeanny said.
"I had a passenger. That was my main gig goingto Taratwo, to pick up a woman—"
"Ah," Jeanny said.
"—and take her back to Zede II. What they didn'ttell me was that the Man, Brenden, didn't wantthe woman to leave his comfortable bed." Andeven as he said it a fist closed over his heart. But after what she'd done, what else could he believe?One lie almost guaranteed others. And she'd notonly stolen Murphy's Stone, she'd fooled aroundwith the computer while he was ill.
"Do you think she erased the tape?"
"That's not the only possibility," Pat said. "There'sthis. The ship went nowhere except the places which are recorded on tape. Once the computer locatedour position, I blinked onto the route and then wewent straight down the route to Zede II. The computer had been cranky. Maybe that glitch there, which indicates that the delete button was pushedafter going through half a dozen fail-safe's is acomputer glitch. If so, maybe I can reproduce it."
"What are the other possibilities?" Jeanny asked.
"I was off the ship for a night on Zede II," he said. "Zede City Port is a big one, with all themodern equipment. Someone might have used somepretty sophisticated gear to bypass my securitysystem, get on board, get into the computer."
"Why?"
"Why? I don't know. It's just a possibility."
"I still think the best bet is the passenger," Jeannysaid.
"I don't think she had enough computer trainingto be able to do it," Pat said. "She'd have had todo it by oral order, and the old man was, and is,cranky, fancying himself to be hard of hearing."
"So you think you'd have heard her talking, evenif you were asleep at the time?"
"Yeah," Pat said. Now why didn't he just tellJeanny that he'd come down with the mindheatfever? He'd been out for days. Corinne had hadplenty of time to carry on lengthy conversationswith the old man.
"OK, Audrey," she said, and he didn't even bother to tell her not to call him Audrey. "You have about twenty-four hours."
He had the servo make coffee, pulled himself upto the computer console, settled in. First he told the old man to run a comprehensive check of allfunctions during the time period beginning withthe first blink after the ship was lost in space.There was a mass of material, because the computer monitored all functions of all the ship's sys tems. He couldn't afford to skip over any of it, noteven the inventory of stores in the nutrition servos. An unskilled computer operator might justhave had to hunt and seek for a successful way toget the old man to erase, or at least push thedelete button on the trip log.
Nothing is ever wasted, he felt, after he'd spentfour hours checking the boring, seemingly endlesscatalog of ship's functions, because that minuteexamination told him just how wellSkimmer functioned. He was proud of her. As for the computer,those automatic functions were carried out assmoothly as if the machine had been fresh off theassembly line.
The fact was that the ship could not have goneanywhere not recorded on the tape because he'dbeen lost in delirium and fever for seven and a halfdays. When he tabulated the time he was shocked.As he remembered it—and he couldn't be sure of his memory, when he'd asked Corinne how longhe'd been
out he was still pretty weak—she'd toldhim that he'd been ill five days.
That was when he first began to think that maybethe ship had been moved and that maybe the tapehad been erased. She'd said five days. The computer showed a seven-and-a-half-day period of nutrition-servo operation between the first blinkonto the route and the next leap down the route toward Zede II.
"All right, old man, let's check that," he said,typing orders rapidly. He was looking at the engine-room log now, beginning with the first blink afterbeing lost. Nothing to it. Smooth as silk, the record of charges and discharges in the generator appeared. But just for kicks he decided to comparetime—that missing seven and a half days—betweenthe nutrition-servo record and the engine-room record. He opposed the two sets of information.
It came out wrong.
It came out very, very wrong.
The measure of elapsed time on the engine-roomrecord between the first blink onto the route and the next was exactly zero. In short, the recordshowed that the two blinks had been made withno elapsed time between. On the engine-room tape someone had done a very skillful job of alteration, taking out seven and a half days of routine monitoringsby the computer.
Or were they seven and a half days of routine?
"Old man," he said, "you're not going to likethis, but it's necessary." He flipped to oral mode."Someone has been messing around in your innards," he said to the computer. "It would be nice if you could just tell me who."
"I'm sorry, you'll have to speak more distinctly,"the computer said.
"Now, look, buddy," Pat said, "I know you'retired. You've got ionized contamination in yourmemory chambers, and you have to work harderto get a job done in some areas, but this is vital. IfI don't find out what happened out there they'regoing to take the ship and you'll probably be carvedup for scrap."
A computer had no emotion. He had not askedfor a response and there was none. He was talkingto himself as much as to the old man.
"Do you have any record of someone other thanthe captain using your facilities?" he asked. It wasa stab in the dark. The computer was not programmed to make such a distinction.
"There are no such records," the old man said.
He'd been hoping, since the old man was getting cranky and independent, that he'd taken it on himself to make a note of the tampering.
"Is there recorded, anywhere in your memory, any information regarding an order to delete material from any portion of your memory?"
"Wait one," the computer said, and went to work.