World Of Ptavvs   ::   Нивен Ларри

Earth had retaliated in kind.

Now the Belt had stopped using codes, but Earth had not.

Did the coded messages contain vital information? Almost certainly not, Lit would have guessed. Certain messages decoded at random bore him out. But the Belt couldn't be sure, which, of course, was the whole point.

And Belt ships were searched at Earth's ports, with insulting thoroughness.

This mistrust had to be stopped now. Lit gritted his teeth and continued writing.

The message started to repeat, and Lloyd switched it off with a decisive click.

"She felt him die," said Luke. "She didn't know it, but she felt him die."

His thoughts ran on without???… She'd felt him die. What was it that let some people know things they couldn't possibly know? There seemed to be more and more of them lately Luke had never been remotely psychic, and he'd envied the lucky few who could find lost rings or lost criminals without the slightest effort, with no more explanation than, "I thought you might have dropped it in the mayonnaise," or, "I had a hunch he was hiding in the subway, living off the tenth-mark peanut machines." Parapsychologists with their special cards had proven that psy powers exist; and had gone no further than that, in close to two hundred years, except for psionics devices like the contact machine. "Psionics," to Luke, meant "I don't know how the damn thing works."

How did Judy know that the Golden Circle had crashed? You couldn't know the answer, so you hung a tag on it. Telepathy.

"And even then," said Luke, not knowing that he spoke. "she managed to fool herself. Marvelous!"

"Did she?"

Luke's head jerked up and around. Lloyd was scared and not trying to hide it. He said, "The Golden Circle was a tough ship. Her drive was in her belly, remember? Her belly was built to stand fusion heat. And the explosion was below her."

Luke felt his own nerves thrill in sympathetic fear.

"We'll find out right now," he said, and touched the control panel. "All ships, listen in. Anderson, what do you know about the Golden Circle ?"

"Yeah, I heard it too. It could be; it just could be. The people who built the honeymooners knew damn well that one accident or one breakdown could ruin a billion-mark business. They built the ships to stand up to anything. The Golden Circle 's life system is smaller in proportion than the life system of any ship here, just because they put so much extra weight in the walls and in the failsafe systems."

In a dull voice, Smoky said, "And we're out of it.