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 after 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.