"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.
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.