tated her business, and very quickly had a copy of the port's log showing that the Mother Lode, Erin Kenner's ship, had paid two visits to Haven, one that had been terminated quickly after a brief stay only weeks previously. East Havenport wasn't the busiest place in the U.P. sector by any means. Two full years of recorded comings and goings were recorded on one Compuleaf so that when Ursy fed the data into the ship's Unicloud it took only three or four «page turnings» to check every ship that had been in Haven's sector in that length of time. Julie Roberts joined Ursy in the computer room and nodded as Ursy pointed out the two visits of Erin's Mule to Haven. «You'll note, Cap'n, that she did not file a flight plan in either instance,» Ursy said. «Not all that unusual,» Julie said. It was prudent for a ship's captain to file a complete plan of his intended blink routes with the control tower at his point of departure, but since it was, after all, a free galaxy, such practical wisdom could not be mandated by law. «She wasn't the only one who didn't file a flight plan,» Ursy said. «This private yacht that left right behind her the last time didn't register her destination, either.» Julie took note of the name of the yacht, Murdoch's Plough. «It seems, ma'am, that she would have waited,» Ursy ventured. «Yes, it does.» «Unless she expected us to make for the blink beacon from which she sent the message,» Ursy said. «That's way to hell and gone toward the core,» Julie said. «A few blinks.» «Start making them, Lieutenant,» Julie said. «And her reasons for this had better be good. If she's jacking us around on a wild goose chase, I'll boot her ass right up between her shoulder blades.» Ursy smiled to herself. It was seldom that Captain Roberts resorted to spacehand vulgarity. That she had done so indicated that she was more than a little bit: 1. Angry. 2. Concerned. 3. Tired. Maybe just a little bit of all three, Ursy thought, as she went to the control bridge and gave orders to the navigation team. CHAPTER FOURTEEN The history of man was in the process of being rewritten. New and often humbling discoveries were being made on the planet where the race had originated. Some called Old Earth Man's Graveyard, for billions of the Old Ones had perished there in a cataclysm of nuclear fire. With the Old Ones had died their cities and a way of life—one hesitated to call it a civilization or a culture in view of its end—that had covered a world which had once had more habitable land area than any planet in the U.P. sector. There were acrimonious debates among scientists and historians about the length of time that had passed following the holocaust before an Old Earth Healer named Rack used the substance and life of a Power Giver to travel to Earth's moon in search of clean, breathable air. There were those who said the mutations that produced the New Ones in their several varieties, Healer, Power Giver, Far Seer, and Keeper, would have required millions of years. In opposition to this view were those who practiced the prevalent religion of the United Planets sector, a creed based on the one piece of Old Earth literature that had survived the Exodus. The mutants, said these later scholars, had developed as a result of divine intervention within no more than four generations. As proof they cited Old Earth's poisoned ecosphere. Only mutants could have survived the radiation that enveloped the Earth following the war; so God, they said, preserved that which He had created in His own image by making rapid changes in the race. By the time that Rack the Healer made his epic biopowered voyage from Earth to the Moon, Earth's atmosphere had become so toxic and, with the death of the microorganisms in the seas, so depleted of oxygen, that not even the mutated New Ones could have survived had they not been removed to more suitable planets after an X&A ship found Rack the Healer dying on the Moon, holding his love in his scaly arms. The Post-Holocaust history of Old Earth resided in the fleshy data banks of the idiot savant Keepers, accessible only to the Far Seer who had cared for his Keeper since her birth. The Pre-Holocaust record of mankind was a poisoned layer of crust on a devastated planet with the evidence consisting of scraps of stone, metal, and the artifacts of an advanced technological culture. The history of Modern Man, man of the United Planets, began on Terra II, called New Earth. There were men and women who specialized in each area of man's history, and a few who tried to assimilate the three separate branches into a logical whole. The most favored overall view was that man had evolved very slowly on Old Earth, sharing ancestors with a variety of other life-forms known to U.P. science from the scanty fossil records that had been accumulated since the reunion of the two racial branches. U.P. man, in his copious numbers, traced his ancestry to a very few men and women, perhaps less than a hundred, who survived a decades-long space voyage in a primitive sub-light, rocket-propelled spaceship to make a disastrous crash landing on New Earth. The colonists, most historians agreed, escaped Old Earth just before the final fury of war left billions dead. There was also agreement that the Exodus had been poorly planned, for, apparently, the accumulated wisdom of mankind had been contained in the bowels of a computer aboard the spaceship, to be lost completely when the crash destroyed all means of providing electrical power. There had been only one book aboard, an ornate presentation copy of The King James Bible, the Old and New Testaments. Fortunately for the future of the race, scientists aboard the ship were able to use the ship's laboratory to produce test-tube specimens of the domestic animals upon which mankind depended so heavily, for man was to find that while Old Earth had been a teeming stew of life, with life-forms filling all available niches in the ecosphere, animal life on even the most fertile of planets other than Old Earth was severely limited. The Tigian planets had their grass eaters and one carnivore, the Tigian tiger. Other than the Tigian varieties of life, man had encountered a few reptiles and some birds. Thus, from the beginning of U.P. history, it had been up to man, himself, to seed his newly discovered planets with life. On New Earth and—when the race struggled back into space on the spoils of yet another fruitful planet—throughout the inhabited worlds, one found food animals, cattle, and domestic fowl. Man the practical had provided the frozen seeds of milk cows and herd bulls which produced beef animals, for egg laying chickens and for ducks to be roasted. He had brought with him from Old Earth hundreds of varieties of plant seeds, fruits, vegetables, trees for lumber, shade, and shelter, crops of the fields, and the rose and other flowering things whose only purpose was to add beauty. Space-going man could have his wheaten cereal with milk and sugar, could sear a steak over charcoal briquettes made from an Old Earth oak, could start his day with a ham and egg breakfast. Man had his bread and his beer, and he marveled at how little things had changed during the thousands of years since the Few had left Old Earth on a roaring column of fire. For scientists wearing hot suits and breathing bottled air dug from the ruins of a vast museum on Old Earth ancient clay tablets that spoke of bread and beer; and on a scorched desert where once a mighty river had run they found, near one of Old Earth's greatest enigmas—a series of vast pyramids constructed of huge stones—drawings preserved in underground rooms that showed oddly dressed men hunting ducks with hand weapons, men harvesting grain, men herding long-horned cattle. Yes, practical man had sent the colony ship into space with her storage bins filled with the fruits of the Earth and the frozen seed of Earth's useful animals. But then man had always been efficient and ingenious. That he was not a creature of cold logic only, however, was illustrated by the fact that from New Earth there spread throughout the growing U.P. sector dozens of breeds of dogs and cats, for man had ceased being practical when faced with living without his pets. He had brought with him poodles and St. Bernards, greyhounds and terriers, sheep dogs and hounds, working breeds and miniature breeds in all their amusing varieties; and a few misguided masochists had insisted on bringing along Persian and Maltese and Siamese and Abyssinian and tabby and calico and plain old alley—cats. When self-styled philosophers and those who were called social scientists—social theorists would have been more accurate—dwelt on man's character, his ability to destroy himself and Old Earth with nuclear war was balanced by his love affair with his dog. A race that could form so perfect a symbiosis with what most said was a lesser species—although an argument could be joined there—could not be all bad. A race of people who could weep bitter tears over one dead dog lying in the dust while accepting the destruction of entire planets in the Zede war was rather puzzling, but then no one had ever accused man of having understandable motivations. Man told himself, well, by God, we really can't be all bad when our dogs are so devoted to us. The dog. He is content to pattern his entire existence around his human. He has long since sacrificed his native survival instincts and when he is lost or abandoned he is helpless, for in giving his total devotion to his human he has left himself totally dependent. He lives for the sound of his human's voice, the touch of his human's hand. He makes his human chuckle with his enthusiasm as he treats a hundred foot walk to the mailbox with the same excited anticipation as a hunt in the meadow or a walk on the beach. He asks little. Food and water, attention and affection. He will forgive the crudest of treatment. And when he is heartbroken, he is one of the most pitiable things in the universe. Mr. Mop was heartbroken. He was a little dog, but not as small, at seven pounds, as some of his breed, the Yorkshire terrier. He was of the drop-ear variety, or at least mostly of that sort, since neither John Kenner, his original human, nor Erin Kenner, whom he adopted after John Kenner's death, trimmed the abundant hair that weighted his ears and left him able to lift the left one only in moments of great excitement, such as when his human said, «Let's go.» He had a sharp muzzle and a fine beard that shaded down into gray from the long, blond hair on top of his head. He was a silverback, the hair on his back lustrous and silver-gray, and the sweeping fall of hair that touched the floor all around, except under his chin, was golden brown. His stub of a tail trailed a long tendril of hair as it pointed proudly upward and blended in with the hair of his body when he was feeling sorry for himself, as he now was all the time, every day, every waking minute. He had been abandoned. He had been forgotten. He was being ignored. His humans, Erin and Dent, were there, and a Mule wasn't that big inside. There were times when Mop had to scoot away to keep from being stepped on as his humans went about their work. They were there, but they weren't there. Mop didn't go hungry, although he was a little off his feed. All he had to do for food and water was to push buttons that had been designed for his feet, but he couldn't push a button and make Dent say, «Hey, Mop, what's up?» He couldn't push a button to make Erin stoop down to pick him up and cradle him in the crook of her arm and rub his chest and belly. He couldn't even make them talk to him, couldn't elicit one word from either of them. They just worked and worked and paid absolutely no attention to a lonely little dog. He had tried everything. Time and again he had approached Erin, put his head on the deck between his front paws, hoisted his rear into the air in his look-at-me-I'm-charming pose, wiggled his tailbone in a frantic circle, and made pleading little noises. Time and again he had used his special little growl that had always paid off in attention from Dent. They didn't even speak to tell him to get out of the way. They just swept him aside with an arm or a foot, and it was breaking his heart. Any decent, dog-loving human being would have felt a stab of empathy for the little dog as he moped around with his usually ebullient tail tucked between his legs. He was a portrait of dejection, a canine magnet for maudlin sympathy. He was man's best friend betrayed, a subject for poets, a source for fountains of sentimental tears. Mankind, because his relationship with his dogs went back beyond the parameters of recorded time, would have looked at little Mop the Dog and said, «Shame, shame,» to his humans, for they looked quite normal as they worked almost around the clock to construct a maze of electronic webs and connectors and generating fields in the cabin that had once housed the mining equipment. At that time no one, not even Erin Kenner, who, at times, was closer to Mop the Dog than Mop could suspect, would have had any inkling that the fate of man, the race, the swarming billions, rested with one hairy little dog who pouted under the control room chair wondering why his humans were mad at him. CHAPTER FIFTEEN Murdoch Plough had not bothered to be stealthy in bringing his yacht into laser range of the Mother Lode. Once he had assured himself that the Kenner woman had, indeed, brought him to the source of her gold it didn't matter whether or not she and her friend knew that they were not alone in the belt. Neither of them was going to live long enough to be a problem. The Plough was threading her way among the drifting asteroids in the open, so there was no reason why the Mother Lode's sensors had not spotted her. Plough ordered readiness on the laser canon but held off giving the order to fire. He had a question or two for Erin Kenner. He activated the radio and said, «Mother Lode, I have you on visual. Come in.» The background sound of a deep space communicator was not exactly static, was not even noticeably audible. It was more a subconscious awareness of unfathomed distance and blank nothingness. Not even a man like Murdoch Plough was immune to the penetrating loneliness that was embodied in the hissing silence. He said, «Erin Kenner, I want to talk to you.» He knew that unless things had gone totally awry aboard the Mule the computer's monitor systems would alert Kenner and Gale to a radio call. «Now come on, Miss Kenner,» Plough said. «I've got a pair of fleet standard lasers trained on you. I want some answers.» * * * Mop the dog heard little bells and responded excitedly, running to the room where Erin and Denton were working to tell them, «Hey, someone's coming.» Mop's reaction to the call-incoming alert was conditioned by the fact that John Kenner, while overhauling the Lode, had made the radio alert the same as the doorbell in his home. Before John Kenner died, Mop had come to know a few friends such as Denton Gale and the sound of the doorbell meant either that one of his friends was paying a visit, in which case he'd get a cheerful greeting and some pats and rubs, or that there was a stranger at the door against whom John had to be warned. John had programmed the doorbell sound into the computer's alert system so that each time someone hailed the Lode by radio Mop would have a little excitement. And, although Mop was an exceptional little dog, handsome, personable, considerate, and highly intelligent, he never got over wondering why, when the doorbell rang aboard ship, no one ever came in. It really didn't matter, however, that the Mother Lode was way to hell and gone out in deep space, the bell had rung and it was Mop's duty to tell his humans that something important was happening. The problem was that they ignored him. He ran around in circles, barking, his stub of a tail going at flank speed, but Erin and Dent kept their heads down over some piece of equipment that was growing like a cancer in what had been Mother's mining control. He ran up to Erin and pressed his nose against the calf of her leg, a signal he used often to say, «Hey, I'm down here.» She didn't even glance down. Frustrated, Mop ran to stand on his hind legs and put his forepaws on Dent's knee. Dent's head remained bent over his work. She had to look into the female's mind to understand why the dog was exhibiting behavior she had not witnessed before. «Someone is calling us on the radio,» Erin said, not in words but in thought. She let her senses burst out of the body, through the metal hulls, and there was a thrill of elation. Ever since leaving the planet of men, Haven, she'd been regretting not having brought along a su