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Around the orbit of Mars, when he was sure that a glimpse of sunlight would not blind him, he instructed the computer to give him a full view. The walls of the spherical control room seemed to disappear; the sky blazed around him. There were no planets nearby. All he saw of the sky was myriads of brilliant pinpoints, mostly white, some showing traces of color. But there was more to see. Fusing hydrogen made a ghostly ring of light around his ship.
It would grow stronger. So far his thrust was low, somewhat more than enough to balance the thin pull of the sun.
He started his turn around the orbit of Jupiter by adjusting the fields to cha
This was not according to plan. Originally he had intended to be halfway to Van Maanan's Star before he changed course. That would have given him fifteen years' head start, in case he was wrong, in case the State could do something to stop him even now.
That would have been wise; but he couldn't do it. Pierce might die in thirty years. Pierce might never know what Corbell had done-and that thought was intolerable.
His thrust dropped to almost nothing in the outer reaches of the system. Protons were thin out here. But there were enough to push his velocity steadily higher, and that was what counted. The faster he went, the greater the proton flux. He was on his way.
He was beyond Neptune when the voice of Pierce the checker came to him, saying, "This is Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State. Answer, Corbell. Do you have a malfunction? Can we help? We ca
Corbell smiled tightly. Peerssa? The checker's name had changed pronunciation in two hundred years. Pierce had slipped back to an old habit, RNA lessons forgotten. He must be upset about something.
Corbell spent twenty minutes finding the moon base with his signal laser. The beam was too narrow to permit sloppy handling. When he had it adjusted he said, "This is Corbel for himself, Corbell for himself. I'm fine. How are you?"
He spent more time at the computer. One thing had been bothering him: the return to Sol system. He pla
It was a problem, he found. If he could reach the Moon on his remaining fuel (no emergencies, remember), he could reach the Earth's atmosphere. The ship was durable; it would stand a meteoric re-entry. But his attitude jets would not land him, properly speaking.
Unless he could cut away part of the ship. The ram-field generators would no longer be needed then... . Well, he would work it out somehow. Plenty of time. Plenty of time.
The answer from the Moon took nine hours. "Peerssa for the State. Corbell, we don't understand. You are far off course. Your first target was to be Van Maanan's Star. Instead you seem to be curving around toward Sagittarius. There is no known Earthlike world in that direction. What the bleep do you think you're doing? Repeating. Peerssa for the State, Peerssa-"
Corbell tried to switch it off. The teaching chair hadn't told him about an off switch. Finally, and it should have been sooner, he told the computer to switch the receiver off.
Somewhat later, he located the lunar base with his signal laser and began transmission.
"This is Corbel for himself, Corbell for himself. I'm getting sick and tired of having to find you every damn time I want to say something. So I'll give you this all at once.
"I'm not going to any of the stars on your list.
"It's occurred to me that the relativity equations work better for me the faster I go. If I stop every fifteen light-years to launch a probe, the way you want me to, I could spend two hundred years at it and never get anywhere. Whereas if I just aim the ship in one direction and keep it going, I can build up a ferocious Tau factor.
"It works out that I can reach the galactic hub in twenty-one years, ship's time, if I hold myself down to one gravity acceleration. And, Pierce, I just can't resist the idea. You were the one who called me a born tourist, remember? Well, the stars in the galactic hub aren't like the stars in the arms. And they're packed a quarter to a half light-year apart, according to your own theories. It must be passing strange in there.
"So I'll! go exploring on my own. Maybe I'll find some of your reducing-atmosphere planets and drop the probes there. Maybe I won't. I'll see you in about seventy thousand years, your time. By then your precious State may have withered away, or you'll have colonies on the seeded planets and some of them may have broken loose from you. I'll join one of them. Or-"
Corbell thought it through, rubbing the straight, sharp line of his nose. "I'll have to check it out on the computer," he said. "But if I don't like any of your worlds when I get back, there are always the Clouds of Magellan. I'll bet they aren't more than twenty-five years away, ship's time."
The Alibi Machine
McAllister left the party around eight o'clock.
"Out of tobacco," he told his host apologetically. The police, if they got that far, would discover that that had been a little white lie. There were other parties in Greenwich Village on a Saturday night, and he would be attending one in about, he estimated, twenty minutes.
He took the elevator down. There was a displacement booth in the lobby. He dropped a coin in the slot, smiling fleetingly at himself—he had almost forgotten to take coins— and dialed. A moment later he was outside his own penthouse door in Queens.
He had saved himself the time to let himself in, by leaving his briefcase under a potted plant earlier this evening. He tipped the pot, picked up the briefcase and stepped back into the booth. His conservative paper business suit made him look as if he had just come from work, and the briefcase completed the picture nicely.
He dialed three times. The first number took him to Ke
It was five o'clock here, and the summer sun was still high. McAllister found himself gasping as he left the booth. Why would Anderson want to live at eight thousand feet?
For the view, he supposed; and because Anderson, a freelance writer, did not have to leave his home as often as normal people did. But there was also his love of privacy— and distrust of people.
He rang the bell.
Anderson's look was more surprised than welcoming. "It was tomorrow. After lunch, remember?"
"I know, but—" McAllister hefted the briefcase. "Your royalty accounts arrived this afternoon. A day earlier than we expected. I got to thinking, why not have it out now? Why let you go on thinking you've been cheated a day longer than—"
"Uh huh." Anderson had an imposing scowl. He gave no indication that he was ready to change his mind—and McAllister had nothing to change it with anyway. Publishing companies had always fudged a little on their royalty statements. Sometimes they took a bit too much, and then a writer might rear back on his hind legs and demand an audit.