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CHAPTER II

The episode had begun a couple of weeks earlier, and nearly two hundred light-years away.

All aglisten in fashionable tunic and culottes, boots polished to bedazzlement, Davis Bertram vaulted up the steps of the Coordination Service building. The morning sparkled around him and the raw ugliness of a new city on a new planet seemed only a boisterous good cheer. The door opened for him; he patted it kindly and strode into the lobby. His soles clashed on the floor and his whistling resounded in the corridors.

Smith Hilary was making feeble attempts to get information from the desk robot. He gave Davis a bloodshot look and said something about mutants with lead-lined stomachs and no soul at all.

"Merely virtuous living, and high thinking," said Davis Bertram. "Have you tried aneurine?"

"I've tried every pain killer known to human and nonhuman science," groaned Smith. "But after last night—what were we drinking?"

Davis warbled a popular song in reply.

"I hope the gobblies get you," said Smith. With a bleary malice: "Are you sure you can stand a month in space all by yourself?"

"No," admitted Davis blandly. "But then, I don't expect to. I expect to discover a planet full of beautiful women and stay for years. Is the Cosmic All at home?"

"The office opened an hour ago," said Smith. "If he didn't arrive on the dot, there must have been a supernova to stop him. Go away. I hope he eats you."

Davis threw him his beret and went on down the hall. A thousand light-years from Sol, on the edge of the known and settled by humans for barely two generations, Nerthus was the local Cordy headquarters, and you had to get clearance from them. A stellagraphic voyage meant the chief's personal okay.

The door identified him and opened. Coordinator Yamagata Tetsuo occupied a large office, with a full-wall transparency to show him the spires of Stellamont and the plains beyond. He nodded curtly, a man grown bleak in a lifetime's war against the universe. "Sit down, Citizen," he invited. "You're two days overdue."

"I was in bed all the time. Quite a high temperature."

Yamagata gave him a sharp look. There was always the danger of a new disease on a new planet. "What diagnosis?" he snapped.

"Nothing reportable, sir," said Davis meekly. As a matter of fact, the organism responsible was 1.6 meters tall, with blue eyes and a high center of gravity, but he saw no reason to mention that.

"Well . . ." The gaunt face remained expressionless. Yamagata pressed a stud and asked the infomaster for the Davis file. The machine grumbled to itself and spat the papers up onto the desk. The Coordinator riffled them with thin fingers while Davis fidgeted.

"Yes, I remember now. You were educated on Earth." The old man's eyes went outward, toward the sky, as if he would pierce its blinding blue and look across a thousand light-years to an unforgotten home. "Moved to Thunderhouse for astronautical training. Why?"

A flush crossed Davis' lean, somewhat too sharp features. He was a tall blond young man—a rare sight these days—with an athletic slenderness of which he was well aware. "I wanted to, uh, see a different planet. I'd only been in two systems, Sigma Hominis Volantis where I was born and then Sol. Variety—stimulus . . ."

"Hm. The Earth academy is the strictest in the known Galaxy, and Thunderhouse's is notoriously slack. Well, I'm afraid that's technically none of my business. You have just been licensed for independent operation and you want to make a survey based on Nerthus. Your own spaceship, I see."

Davis shrugged. Even nowadays, a personal fortune meant something. A chap whose father had made a good thing of it wasn't necessarily a wastrel, was he? Davis had never liked Earth much; he considered it a stodgy planet. Too bad Earth dominated the Union.

"I have no right to stop you," said Yamagata in a sour voice. "Not on the basis of this file. But a one-man expedition into deep space—one man with almost no practical experience— Look, there's a stellagraphic survey planned for the Fishbowl Cluster. Leaves in three weeks. Excellent crew, and the skipper is Hamilton himself. I could probably get you a berth."

"No, thanks," said Davis.

"But why do you want to go to Delta Wolf's Head? Of all the lunatic . . . You know there's a vortex in that area. That's precisely why it's never been visited."

The eagerness burst from Davis: "Then anything might be in there!"

"Including your own death. We can't send rescue parties, you know. Space is too big—they'd never find you. Nor do we have personnel to throw away."

"I've got a Mark XX cruiser, sir. Armed, robotic, it does everything but think."

"That's supposed to be your function."

"I know why you're worried, sir," said Davis. "You don't like these unsupervised expeditions because they're apt to be bad for any natives. If you look at my psychograph, you will see a high goodwill quotient. I'm not going to rob or murder anybody."

Yamagata shook his head impatiently. "All right, all right. Let's discuss your orbital plan."

It was simple. The vortex, an unusually big one, had made a region fifty light-years across unsafe for as long as men had been around here: almost six decades now. It was finally withdrawing from the area of the star Delta Capitis Lupi. The Service intended to explore that double sun in another two or three decades, when there would be no chance of disaster. They ran enough risks in the ordinary line of work without taking on even the smallest additional hazard. But as of this moment, the star could probably be reached. Davis planned to go there, make the standard preliminary survey of its planets, and return.

If there were intelligent natives, or an uninhabited world suitable for colonization, Davis' Star would become a very proud blazon in the Pilot's Manual. If not, he had only lost a few weeks.

Looking at the young man across the desk, Yamagata sighed and wondered if Columbus had been such a headlong idiot.

"Very well," he snapped. "If you do not return, Citizen Davis, we'll have to assume the vortex got you after all."

"Or the natives."

"Doubtful. We know very well there is no race with atomic energy in that system. Our neutrino detectors would have spotted it long ago if there were. I presume you can handle primitives, and know the rules against getting too rough with them."

Davis nodded, a little sulkily. He had had vague notions about being the great white god to a grateful folk with tails and antennae . . . adolescent daydreams, of course; culture patterns deserved protection, could not be upset overnight without grave damage.

It would be enough to make the trip. If he did find an important planet—there was that girl over in the Jupiter Valley, and the glamor of a discoverer . . .

Yamagata stood up. "Good luck, Citizen," he said formally.

Davis bowed and went out. Yamagata heard him whistling as soon as he was in the corridor.

Presently Smith entered, to make a routine inquiry. He was a strictly interplanetary freightman, dealing with Hertha, the next world sunward. Yamagata stopped him. "You know that fellow Davis," he said. It was not a question.

"Yes. Uh, matter of fact, Coordinator, I was out on the town with him last night."

"Rich man's son." Yamagata stared through the wall. "Odd how things happen all over again on the frontier, isn't it? Phenomena like cities and private ostentation, that Earth outgrew a long time ago. Sometimes I wish only Solarians could be licensed to pilot spacecraft. The people who emigrated were those who didn't like the restraints of being civilized."

Smith waited, awkwardly.

"What do you think the boy's chances are?" asked Yamagata.

"Eh? Oh . . . pretty fair, I'd say. He's a natural-born pilot, has a good mind when he cares to use it. And he's got a fireball of a ship."

"He'll have to have a lot knocked out of him," said Yamagata. "I hope the process isn't fatal."

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