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Star Light

Arthur Trent heard thery 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 ill blow you out of space'

Trent sht In far less than two hours the ship would h hyperspace and they would never find hih 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 Brenn 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 Brennht in half a day'

'Not,' said Brennh 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 oldexcitehborhood 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 inal planet-Earth, they had called it-in prehistoric tiroup had known only the area i itself

'If we make the Jump at random,' Brennht-years away, and there would be noa 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'

Brenns 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

Brennn 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 autohborhood 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 ; you'll be a er'

'When you Jump at random, you can end inside a star'

'Not one chance in a hundred trillion, Trent We ht also land so far fro to ht find we've juht-year or two and the police are still on our trail The chances of that are sht die of a heart attack at the her'