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She walked with him to the door. "When you read your orders, you'll see that they leave you quite a bit of latitude."

He looked at her, waiting.

"Yes, I do envy you. You can choose to blink in any direction, into any one of millions of unexamined systems, but if you choose to take the Erin Kenner to a certain point on Rimfire's route and strike off into the interior, you'll be serving two purposes."

She was giving him not only permission to search for the two ships that had carried four members of his family into the unknown, she was indicating that she thought it was desirable.

"I'm grateful, Admiral," he said.

"Well, Josh, I can accept the unexplained disappearance of a gentleman amateur at space navigation, but when a man like your brother David goes unreported after blinking off into the same area I think it's time to try to find out why."

"Yes, sir, I feel the same way."

"To warn you to be careful would be insulting to your standing," she said.

"I don't mind at all," he said with a grin, "and you can be assured, Admiral, that I'll be very damned careful."

* * *

Josh did a little dance around his office, brandishing the ship's commission paper. Angela stood, arms crossed, her face serious, watching him.

"Why the sad face?" he asked.

"When will you leave?"

"That's not the right question."

"What do you mean?"

"The question is, when do we leave?"

Her face relaxed into a beaming smile. "We?"

"If you think you can hack a couple of years in space, Lieutenant."

"I can."

He winked. "Well, then, why aren't you packed?"

"Give me five minutes."

"There's one thing, Angela."

She was immediately apprehensive.

"The Erin Kenner is a small, tight ship. We'll be a part of a rather closely confined and varied group of people. You are familiar, I assume, with the rule of service decorum regarding male-female relationships aboard ship. On a big craft, where the crew numbers in the dozens or into three figures, there's a certain latitude. On a small ship one's personal life impacts more intimately on others. To avoid complications one sleeps in one's own bed."

She smiled. "Surely there will be times when—"

"You will not try to seduce the captain into improper behavior, wench."

"Well, I can stand it if you can," she said.

He took her into his arms, looked down at her face. "There is a solution to what would become, I fear, a matter of some frustration."

"Yes?"

"If a ship's captain and one of his officers are man and wife, their bed can be the same."

"That's a proposal?"

"Yes."

"And what if, in the future, our orders put us on different ships?"

"We'll face that when it comes," he said. "Will you marry me?"

"Oh, hell, I guess so," she said teasingly. "I hate sleeping alone."

As he was kissing her, a vivid image of his younger sister was so real in his mind that he opened his eyes, startled, wanting to reassure himself that it was Angela and not Sheba in his arms.

* * *

The Erin Kenner lay in her cradle, long and sleek, one hundred fifty feet of gleaming, silvery metal. One had to look closely to see the seams of air locks, of weapons bays and sensor ports. At her bow, high, twin viewports were open, protective covers rolled back into their slots in the hull. Like opposed eyes, the viewports gave the ship a pixieish personality. In space the ports would seldom be opened. The Erin Kenner's eyes would be electronic and optic, for the fragile men and women who would be enclosed in her durametal hull needed the protection of her density against the cold and the radiations of open space.

The crew were lined up at attention along the length of the ship when Josh and Angela stepped down from an aircar to the brassy blare of a service band. Two junior officers, selected by Josh after a search of personnel records, had already joined the ship. One of them called the men to attention. Josh answered his salute and, with First Mate Angela Webster at his side, walked slowly past for a formal inspection. The second mate and the navigator were male. Of the ten-man crew five were female.

Josh had examined the service records of each member, and he was pleased. The admiral had assigned only top personnel to the new ship.

"No speeches," he said, when the second mate bellowed out an order to the crew to stand at rest.

"None of us here is on his first cruise. You can expect from me that the Erin Kenner will be run by the book. I expect from you that you'll do your duties as efficiently as your records show that you have performed them in the past."

He looked up and down the row of young faces. "I know that you're curious about where we'll be blinking. We'll be following Rimfire's extragalactic routes in a counter rotation direction to a point which the navigator will be happy to show you on the charts, and then we'll be laying new blink routes into the interior. Not incidentally, we will be trying to locate two private exploration vessels which have gone unreported in the area. First, however, while we get acquainted with Miss Erin Kenner and she with us, we'll have a little pleasure cruise a few parsecs toward the core. As you know, it's standard procedure to keep a ship's shakedown cruise on well traveled blink routes. Our destination will be one of the new wilderness planets in the Diomedes Sector. From there we will return to Eban's Forge for final provisioning and any needed repairs or alterations before going extragalactic."

For two days Josh directed his officers and crew in dry runs of ship's operation. Only when he was certain that each man knew his station and his duty did he activate the flux drive. The Erin Kenner lifted smoothly from her construction cradle. She wafted upward through atmosphere, accelerating, and then the black of space claimed her. There, in her element, with the latest model of blink generator humming smoothly, she lay poised while captain and crew ran dozens of final checks.

On an order from Josh the navigator engaged the drive. The ship blinked out of existence to materialize light-years away near a beacon marking the lanes toward the galactic core. For some time the routes were well traveled. As the mass of the core brightened on the optic viewers, as the big emptiness that was space became relatively more crowded, the blink beacons were closer together, the blink lanes less traveled. The last few jumps, before the Erin Kenner fluxed down to a newly constructed spaceport on the wilderness world where Sheba Webster's holofilm company was at work, were marked by temporary exploration beacons that had not yet been replaced by permanent fixtures.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sarah Webster de Conde was a small-boned, petite woman. She wore her shoulder length hair in a ponytail because there simply were not enough hours in the day for visits to the salons. For everyday matters she favored a conservative but elegant simplicity of dress. For the monthly meeting of the Parents' Panel of the Tigian City Educational Oversight Board she had selected a classic little business suit in pale mauve Selbelese silk. When she was recognized by the chairman she stood, ran her hands over her small but shapely rump to make her skirt hang properly, donned her black-rimmed reading glasses and confidently stepped to the speaker's stand with the notes for her speech in her hand.

Her voice was strong, and so were her opinions. Her subject was the lack of discipline in the Tigian City school system. "I am Sarah de Conde," she began modestly, although she knew that everyone there was aware of her identity, and not just because her husband, Pete, was a member of the T-Town Board of Governors and a man of substance in the business community.

"I'm afraid that I'm as guilty as the rest of you," she said, looking not at the members of the Board but at the parents and teachers in the audience.

"We went to sleep, you and I, during the last election. Things had been going so well that we were lulled into complacency."

Several members of the Board were glaring at Sarah.