tumbling objects rolled by, obscuring
sections of the out-of-focus celestial sphere as it whirled in its
orbit. Timing it, he waited for the box to complete another revolution.
Just before it arrived the third time, he pushed off.

As he closed in on the crate, he knew his timing had been correct. He
intercepted it directly above the hatch and clung clumsily to a hand
ring as its greater mass swept him along in an altered orbit. A quick
blast from his propulsor eliminated the rotation he had imparted to the
object and he reoriented himself with respect to the ship. Spotting the
ruptured sideplate where the cargo had burst through the hull, he
steered his catch toward the hole with short bursts of power.

[Illustration]

The bent plate made a natural ramp down which he slid the crate onto the
gravity-fluxed deck. Inside, he degravitated the chamber, floated the
box into position and double-lashed it to the deck.

Pushing away from the ship again, he checked the length of the stellar
grid streaks. They were still approximately ten degrees long. It looked
hopeful. He might have time to collect all the orbiting cargo before he
got dangerously close to spillthrough. Then he'd see about pushing on
up-arc until the fuzzy streaks stretched to forty or fifty
degrees--perhaps even ninety, if he could allow himself the luxury of
wishful thinking. There he'd be at quartercrest and would have time to
rest before worrying about being drawn down the arc again toward normal
space.

While he jockeyed the fourth crate into the hold, a huge shadow suddenly
blotched out part of the star lines off to the port side. It was the
Cluster Queen pursuing a crate not in orbit around the Fleury. Brad
shrugged; he'd be unable to pick up the ones that far out anyway.

But his head jerked upright in the helmet suddenly. If Altman was after
a free box, he realized, the Cluster Queen _could not_ appear in sharp
outline to an observer in the Fleury system! The Fleury, sliding down
the hyperspatial arc with its orbiting crates, would be moving slowly
toward normal space in response to the interdimensional pull exerted by
its warp flux rectifier, hidden inaccessibly in the bowels of the pile,
as it was on most outdated ships. But the free boxes, in another
time-space system with the Cluster Queen, would be stationary on the arc
and would appear increasingly fuzzy as the planal displacement between
the two systems became greater.

The truth, Brad r