Broohnin shook his head as he watched the two bland, weak-looking figures walk into the darkness, looking like so much fresh meat for anyone hungry for a bite. Pity the jumper who landed on those two.
On an impulse, he decided to follow them. What did Flinters do in their spare time? Where did they live? He was not long in finding out. Kanya and Josef entered a low-rent apartment building not far from the warehouse district. He watched for a while, saw a third floor window on the east wall fill with light before it was opaqued. Fantasizing for a moment, he idly wondered if weaponry and combat were as much a part of their sex play as the rest of their daily life. He cut off further elaboration on the theme when he noticed a standard size flitter lift off from the roof of the apartment building. As it banked to the right, he could see two figures within, neither one identifiable, but definitely a pair. He wondered…
With no flitter at his disposal, Broohnin was forced to stand helplessly and watch them go. They were probably off to pick up that new device for the next Robin Hood heist. He would have liked to have seen how they smuggled things onto Throne so easily. It was a technique that could prove useful to him some time in the future. As it was, he was stuck here on the street. It was all LaNague's fault, as usual. He should have seen to it that they were all provided with their own personal flitters. But no. Broohnin wasn't allowed to have one because Broohnin was on the dole and, as far as the records showed, could not afford a personal flitter. To be seen riding around in one all the time would attract unwanted attention.
One thing he could do, though, was go into the apartment building and see if Kanya and Josef were still there. He crossed the street, entered, and took the float-chute up to the third floor. From where he had seen the lighted window earlier, he deduced the location of their apartment. Steeling himself, he approached the door and pressed the entry panel. The indicator remained dark, meaning either that no one was within, or that whoever was in did not want to be disturbed.
With a sigh of relief, he turned away and headed for the float-chute. An unanswered door was hardly evidence that Kanya and Josef had been in that flitter, but at least it didn't negate the possibility. The next thing to do was to go up to the flitter pad on the roof and wait. If they returned tonight, perhaps he could get some idea as to where they had been. What he intended to do with the information, he didn't know. Nothing, most likely. But he had no place to go, no one waiting for him anywhere, no one he wanted to be with, and knew no one who wanted to be with him. He might as well spend the night here on the roof as within the four walls of his room on the other side of town.
The wait was not a long one. He had found himself a comfortable huddling place in the corner of the roof behind the building's own solar batteries, discharging now to light the apartment below, and had just settled in for his vigil when landing lights lit the roof pad from above. It was the flitter he had seen earlier, and after it had locked into its slot, the figures of two familiar middle-aged men emerged.
The first one looked carefully around him. Satisfied that there was no one else on the roof, he nodded to the other and they removed two boxes from their craft, one large and rectangular, the other small and cubical. Carrying the larger box between them with the smaller resting atop it, they pushed through the door to the drop-chute and disappeared.
And that was that. Broohnin sat and bitterly questioned what in the name of the Core he was doing there alone on a roof watching two disguised Flinters unload a couple of boxes from their flitter. He knew no more now about their smuggling procedure than he did before. Bored and disgusted, he waited until he was sure the Flinters were safely behind the door to their apartment, then took the drop-chute directly to street level and headed for the nearest monorail stop.
THE WRACKING TOTAL-BODY PARASTHESIA that enveloped him during the lift into real space as his nervous system was assaulted from all sides was an almost welcome sensation. Vincen Stafford had made the first long jump in his probe ship. The nausea that usually attended entering and leaving subspace passed unnoticed, smothered by a wave of exultation. He was alive again. He was free. He was master of reality itself.
After a few moments of silent revelry, he shook himself and got to work, taking his readings, preparing the beacon to be released and activated. It would send out an oscillating subspace laser pulse in the direction of the radio sources in the Perseus arm; in real space it would send a measured radio beep. Stafford considered the latter mode useless since his subspace jumps would take him far ahead of the radio pulses, but if that was the way the people running the brand-new Imperial Bureau of Interstellar Exploration and Alien Contact wanted it, that's the way they would get it.
The subspace laser beacon was a good idea, however. If the target radio sources really did belong to another interstellar race, and that race was advanced enough to have developed subspace technology, the beacons he and his fellow probe pilots would be dropping off in a predictable zigzag pattern would blaze an unmistakable trail through the heavens for anyone with the equipment to follow. Hopefully, some member of that race would plot out the course of one of the probes and send a welcoming party to wait for it when it lifted into real space at the end of one of the jumps.
Stafford thought about that. If the aliens happened to choose his ship to contact, the responsibility would be awesome. The entire future of the relationship between humankind and the aliens could be marred or permanently estranged by some inadvertent bungle on the part of a hapless probe pilot. He didn't want to be that pilot. He could do without the glory of first contact. All he wanted was to do his job, do it well, and get back to Throne and Salli in one piece.
In one piece. That was the crux of the matter. He would be making a lot of jumps…far more in the following months than he would during years as a navigator on the grain runs. Warping down was always a hazard, even for the most experienced spacer. He was tearing open the very fabric of reality, accentuating the natural curve of space to an acute angle, and leaping across the foreshortened interval, reappearing again light years away from his starting point. Probe ships were small, fragile. Sometimes they didn't come out of subspace; sometimes they became lost under the curve of space, trapped forever in featureless, two-dimensional grayness.
Stafford shuddered. That wouldn't happen to him. Other probes had traveled out here between the arms and not come back. But he would. He had to. Salli was waiting.
“THE OLD ‘LITTLE BLACK BOX’ ploy, ay?” Doc Zack said from the corner seat that had become unofficially his whenever they met in the warehouse office.
“Yes,” said LaNague, smiling, “but like no little black box you've ever seen.”
“What's it do?” Sayers asked.
“It's a time machine.”
“Now just a minute,” Zack said. “The Barsky experiments proved time travel impossible!”
“Not impossible-impractical. Barsky and his associates found they could send things back in time, but they couldn't correct for planetary motion in the cosmos. Therefore, the object displaced past-ward invariably wound up somewhere else in space.”