"When a man is in a restricted area, and he runsfrom the police, he is taking his chances." Thesecurity man gave Pat a sloppy salute. "Well, goodnight, sir. I understand you're leaving at dawn."
"Right."
"Have a pleasant trip. I hope that you won't letthis incident keep you from making a return tripto our planet soon."
"The trading is good," Pat said.
He closed the airlock, waited for decontamination. A suspicion hit him. The hatch had been openall the time he was out there with the securityman. Had the whole incident been staged in orderto steal his cargo of gems? He ran to the cargoarea, opened one small case after the other. All thegems were there.
He sat in the command seat, a cup of coffeesteaming in his hand. Well, Pat, he told himself.Thinking time. The old man had wanted off theplanet very badly, badly enough to offer him halfof a fabulous diamond which might or might nothave existed. Now the old man was dead. May he rest in peace. And there was a small bag thrust upinto the tube of a portside flux thruster. Suddenlyhis hands shook. What if it was a bomb? What ifMurphy had fooled hell out of him, acting the part of the underdog to get his sympathy in order to get close enough to theSkimmer to blow her open andget back the gems?
He had a burning urge to go outside and checkthat damned bag. But the police had been able tospot Murphy in the midst of an ashfall. That meantthey had detection instruments which were notfoiled by the ash. If he went out now and got thebag and they were watching he'd have more toexplain than he wanted.
Twenty minutes before his passenger was due toarrive. He activated the computer, began his pretakeoff countdown. He decided he wouldn't wait until dawn if, indeed, his passenger arrived at fivea.m.
TheSkimmer checked out beautifully. She eventold him that there was a foreign object in the number three port thruster. The computer, fresh after a nice rest, hummed and was brisk and efficient when he programmed the blink which wouldtake him away from Taratwo into orbital position.He was ready. Five minutes to wait. He had aleather bag containing only God knew what in athruster. A man had been killed before his eyes.
The flux thruster would blow the bag out, disintegrating it, when he activated the engines. Unlessthe bag contained an explosive triggered to ignitewith the thruster.
The motion detector buzzed. A ground car. Theair outside was becoming more clear of ash. Hepicked up the vehicle at fifty yards, followed it to astop near the ramp, saw a small man in a baggywhite one-piece get out and walk unhurriedly toward the hatch. A quick, rather severe tremorcaused the man to stumble, andSkimmer's gyroscomplained as the ship rocked. No police. No glaring lights. No other motion detected. Pat opened the hatch, watched on the monitor as his passenger entered the hatch carrying one small, expensive-looking bag. The ground vehicle leaped into motionand disappeared while the hatch was closing. Patwaited until the decontaminator had cleared thelock of ash and any odd and assorted bugs indigenous to Taratwo. Then he activated the radio and called, "Ground Control, Skimmer. I'm booked for a six a.m. take off. Any problem if I leave a bit early?"
He had to wait, picturing the controller checking with a higher authority. "No problem,Skimmer."
"I'll be back with you for clearance as soon as Imake an outside visual," Pat said.
That was how he was going to find out what oldMurphy had hidden in the thruster. Making awalkaround visual inspection of a ship before takeoff had long since ceased to be standard practice.A pilot, after all, was an inferior instrument compared to the ship's sensors, but there were enoughtraditionalists left to make a visual inspectionmerely eccentric, not unusual. He nodded to thepassenger in the airlock, told the small man towait up front. The man still wore his breather,face hidden behind the mask and a floppy hat.
He left the number three portside thruster untillast, jerked the bag out, tucked it under his arm. Itwas heavy enough to contain a bomb. He pausedin the airlock, left the hatch open after setting the emergency-close mech. If the bag contained something unpleasant he would toss it out the hatchand push the emergency-close button while it wasstill in the air and then pray thatSkimmer's hullplates were strong enough.
There was no possibility, however, of throwingthe bag out once he had opened it gingerly to finda solid object wrapped in a soiled piece of velvet.He had to use both hands to lift the object out ofthe bag.
It was ovate, almost egg-shaped. He hefted itand estimated it at plus three pounds in weight. Itwas, even in the rough, a thing of incredible beauty.
He was holding in his hands the single largest diamond in history, a diamond, if his weight estimate was anywhere near right, at least half a poundlarger than the Capella Glory. He had checked the size of the Capella Glory in the library during his wait, and he knew that it was over eight thousandcarats. The old man's stone would go over ninethousand. A man could name his own price forthat stone, millions, perhaps even a billion.
And Murphy had died for it.
THREE
For a long moment, Pat Howe stood in the airlock,the hatch still open, stunned, his eyes hypnotizedby the fiery depths of the diamond. Finally, hepushed the button to close the hatch and began to think again. The stone was not his. He consideredhis alternatives. He could call the hard-eyed security man and try to explain how the stone hadcome into his possession. Or he could get the hell off Taratwo and from a safe distance worry aboutfinding the rightful owner of what just might bethe most valuable single object in the civilizedgalaxy.
That was no choice at all. He was beginning tobe just a little bit spooked. He'd been involved inmore than one hairy situation during his relativelybrief career in free enterprise. Once he'd played a deadly game of hide-and-seek on an airless moonwith his air running out and two men intent onkilling him. Once he'd had to run for his life afterhe'd lifted the ransom loot from a Hogg Moonspirate, the kidnap victim clinging to him, slowinghim down. And the total amount of money at stakein both those incidents wouldn't buy a cuttingchip from the diamond he held in his hands. Menhad killed for a tiny fraction of the worth of thatdiamond, and even a man who had never entertained a criminal thought might be tempted toward murder by something so valuable.
He left the diamond, in its bag, with the othergems in cargo, ran to the bridge, and wonderedwhat had happened to his passenger. The passenger would be housed in the spare cabin. It was crowded, for he used it to store items used onlyoccasionally, but the bed was as large and as comfortable as his own. He jerked the door open tofind the room empty.
There were not many places aboardSkimmerwhere a man could hide. He didn't like the idea ofhis passenger wandering around down in the engine room, so he decided to check his own quarters first. The lock on the door had gone bad onthe trip out and he hadn't bothered to fix it. Hethrew the door open.
She stood beside his bed, the white one-piece ather feet, breather and hat removed to show a fallof lustrous auburn hair, slightly mussed but stillglorious. Her skin was the pale hue of old china. She wore only a tight, brief silken camiknicker,blue.
"Sorry," he said, starting to close the door. Theshock was slow to penetrate. A woman. And not just any woman. It was as if the holographic image had come to life, full-sized and breathing, in his cabin.
She reached for a garment she'd removed fromher bag, not in haste or modesty. "I assumed this would be my cabin," she said, with a smile whichmatched the blaze of her hair. "I also assumedthat you would knock before entering."
Corinne Tower. His passenger was Corinne Tower,the film star from Zede II, and she was not at all discomfited as she stood there in a silken piece ofunderwear which emphasized her perfect figure.She seemed to flow into a wraparound which closedoff the view of womanly curves. Her smile hadfaded into a musing expression.
Pat was paralyzed until the buzz of an alarmjerked his head around, and then he was on therun, the redheaded woman following him moreslowly. Four police vehicles were approaching atdifferent angles to surround the ship. There was,as yet, no light of dawn. The ashfall had diminished almost to nothing. The night-vision camerasshowed clearly that the police vehicles had uncovered their weapons. Pat's hand slapped switches, buttons. Shield up, weapons ready. The lead vehicle mounted a respectable laser cannon with along, graceful barrel. Up close, it could punch ahole inSkimmer's shieldand hull.
"Should we be worried about this?" he askedthe girl.
She was taut, her mouth open, eyes narrowed."I'm not sure."
"Did the Man know you planned to leave?" Hereyes instantly shifted away from his.
"Quickly," he said, his voice urgent. "I'm goingto have to rely on your knowledge and judgment. Idon't want to do anything drastic unlessit'snecessary."
She seemed doubtful. "He was in the outback.Not due back until tomorrow."
The lead vehicle had come to a halt, cannonpointed towardSkimmer's weakest point, the mainentry hatch. The same tall, efficient security manwho had visited him only a short time before wasstanding behind the laser cannon. Pat activatedthe outside pickups.
"You have just ten seconds to open, Captain,and then we'll blast you open."
He couldn't wait for more information from thegirl. "Wake up, old man," he told the computer.The blink was already programmed, but it wascustomary for a ship to lift from the surface onflux. It was possible to blink away from a planet'ssurface, but decidedly unsafe for anything nearenough to the ship to be affected by the field of theblink generator.
The policeman was counting,"...six, five . . ."
"Let's go, baby," Pat said, hitting the buttonwhich activated the drive circuits.
"...three, two . . ."
There was a brief, uneasy slide into nothingness.On the screen Pat saw three of the police vehicles tumbling in free space. They'd been too near the ship. They'd been enclosed inSkimmer's powerfulfield, and now men were dying of explosive decompression in the vacuum of space. A body, bursting as he watched, separated itself from a vehicleand spun slowly, eerie things happening to frailflesh and blood. It was the security officer.
"Oh, my God," Corinne Tower whispered as analarm screamed, sending Pat into motion. Two Taratwo light cruisers were closing rapidly. His screen was up. He jerked the fire-control helmetonto his head, wondering how the hell the cruisershad known to be there. True, a blinking ship sends a signal ahead of itself into space, pointing to the emergence site, but the cruisers would have had to be ready to blink instantly, would have had to bewatching him in order to detect that preblink signal.
Gun ports began to flare on the closing warships. Lasers. Two sleek and deadly ship-to-shipmissiles swam out as if in slow motion from thelead cruiser and then accelerated with slashes of light. Range seven miles. Seconds. No time toprogram a blink. The lead missile was growing rapidly on the screen as the ship buzzed and screamedwarnings.
"Alert, alert," the computer chanted, losing, forthe moment, its reluctance for audio communication.
"I hear you," Pat said, forgetting the presence ofthe tense, silent girl.
He had only one advantage. He couldn't hope to match shields and armaments with two new cruisers, but he had power to spare, power built into theold space tug, power to latch on to and haul the biggest space liner ever built, the generator built oversize, huge enough to store power for multipleblinks without draining the charge. He had usedonly a small portion of the charge in blinking up from the surface of Taratwo.
No time to select known coordinates. No time totrust a cranky, aging computer to obey a vocal order to select a registered blink beacon at random and put it in B for boogie. The old boy mightdecide to take a full survey of all blink beaconswithin range.
He acted on his only choice.
In spite of what Jeanny Thompson, and others,might have thought, Pat Howe was not like some old-fashioned mercenaries, imbued with a secret death wish, seeking danger for the thrill of riskingit, courting the final solution, death, as ordinarymen court women. Pat valued his freedom, and hevalued his life. He did what he had to do to preserve that life with two homing missiles inchesaway from his thrusters, heading in, and two light cruisers ticklingSkimmer's shield with laser cannon. Either of the cruisers could best him in aclose-in fight, and there was no question in hismind that their intent was to blast him out ofspace.