attend the theater. I have made friends.
And I live without remorse. To be sure, Lancelot will never receive credit for time travel. Someday when time travel is discovered again, the name of Lancelot Stebbins will rest in Stygian darkness, unrecognized.
But then, I told him that whatever his plans, he would end without the credit. If I hadn't killed him, something else would have spoiled things, and then he would have killed me.
No, I live without remorse.
In fact, I have forgiven Lancelot everything, everything but that moment when he spat at me. So it is rather ironic that he did have one happy moment before he died, for he was given a gift few could have, and he, above all men, savored it.
Despite his cry, when he spat at me, Lancelot managed to read his own obituary.
Star Light
Arthur Trent heard them quite clearly. The tense, angry words shot out of his receiver.
Trent! You can't get away. We will intersect your orbit in two hours and if you try to resist we will blow you out of space.'
Trent smiled and said nothing. He had no weapons and no need to fight. In far less than two hours the ship would make its Jump through hyperspace and they would never find him. He would have with him nearly a kilogram of Krillium, enough for the construction of the brain-paths of thousands of robots and worth some ten million credits on any world in the Galaxy-and no questions asked.
Old Brennmeyer had planned the whole thing. He had planned it for thirty years and more. It had been his life's work.
'It's the getaway, young man,' he had said. 'That's why I need you. You can lift a ship off the ground and out into space. I can't.'
'Getting it into space is no good, Mr. Brennmeyer,' Trent said. 'We'll be caught in half a day.'
'Not,' said Brennmeyer craftily, 'if we make the Jump. Not if we flash through hyperspace and end up light-years away.'
'It would take half a day to plot the Jump and even if we could take the time, the police would alert all stellar systems.'
'No, Trent, no.' The old man's hand fell on his, clutching it in trembling excitement. 'Not all stellar systems; only the dozen in our neighborhood. The Galaxy is big and the colonists of the last fifty thousand years have lost touch with each other.'
He talked avidly, painting the picture. The Galaxy was now like the surface of man's original planet-Earth, they had called it-in prehistoric times. Man had been scattered over all the continents but each group had known only the area immediately surrounding itself.
'If we make the Jump at random,' Brennmeyer said, 'we would be anywhere, even fifty thousand light-years away, and there would be no more chance of finding us than of finding a pebble in a meteor swarm.'
Trent shook his head. 'And we don't find ourselves, either. We wouldn't have the foggiest way of getting to an inhabited planet.'
Brennmeyer's quick-moving eyes inspected the surroundings. No one was near him, but his voice sank to a whisper anyway. 'I've spent thirty years collecting data on every habitable planet in the Galaxy. I've searched all the old records. I've traveled thousands of light-years, farther than any space pilot. And the location of every habitable planet - the memory story of the best computer in the Trent lifted his eyebrows politely.
Brennmeyer said, 'I design computers and I have the best. I've also plotted the exact location of every luminous star in the Galaxy, every star of spectral class of F, B, A, and O, and put that into the memory store. Once we've made the Jump the computer will scan the heavens spectroscopically and compare the results with the map of the Galaxy it contains. Once it finds the proper match, and sooner or later it will, the ship is located in space and it is then automatically guided through a second Jump to the neighborhood of the nearest inhabited planet.'
'Sounds too complicated.'
'It can't miss. All these years I've worked on it and it can't miss. I'll have ten years left yet to be a millionaire. But you're young; you'll be a millionaire much longer.'
'When you Jump at random, you can end inside a star.'
'Not one chance in a hundred trillion, Trent. We might also land so far from any luminous star that the computer can't find anything to match up against its program. We might find we've jumped only a light-year or two and the police are still