THE TIME TRAWLERS
Burt Filer
Galaxy, August 1968

Kearney sat up in Orestes' bow, one eye on his net, the other on the stars. He was a big kid with quiet eyes, hard arms and the knack. The fishing boat rocked beneath him as fishing boats have done for millennia, but with differences. For the tang of fish in salt air was substituted for the thin reek of warm insulation; for the lap of waves and gull cries there was the white star-hiss of quiet headphones and the sixty-cycle hum of machinery.

The ship herself was as homely as her task, a symmetrical cucumber all lumpy with warts. Each of these carried a net and its netman, except one large blister on the port side that was the bridge. Orestes dragged her skein through space behind her, flapping empty since they'd so far caught nothing.

The net that Kearney plied so skillfully was a strange thing; a ribbon of light that wasn't light at all, but the shimmering boundary between present and future. For Orestes was a time trawler. She fished thirty gigayears into the future for raw materials to feed the hungry galaxy of the present. Kearney hadn't had netwatch by himself until this trip; he'd just recently been qualified. But only the rulebook had held him back this long because, as everyone knew, he had the knack. Something behind those dark eyes could read the stars. Computers were all right for the ordinary netman, but nothing beat the knack if you had it, and Kearney had it in spades.

How did he know where a star was going to be in thirty billion years? Or more exactly thirty one point 976,034,762, which was their present trawling depth? Well, he looked at them, talked to them a little. In a way he wooed them, loved them, asked them where they were going and couldn't he come along? After sitting there an hour or two, watching their slow, syncopated dance, he got an idea of things. Gavotte, twist, sometimes a just free ballet, all for grace. Kearney followed the dance.

Old ones went nova, and he knew there'd be a space there pretty soon, deep in time or shallower, depending on their size. So they wouldn't pull their little trains of followers or get in the way of others, after a while.

Kearney could even pick out those which danced awkwardly, encumbered by a system of planets, an even more valuable part of his knack. The trawlers called these the big ones, because the smallest planet was worth more commercially than the largest sun.

It's hard to tell if Kearney thought of the stars as stars. It's more likely he regarded them as birds or ghosts. Bodecs, down in centcomm, said he sometimes heard the kid humming to himself, talking to them, even answering, "Hey little jobber, where the hell have you been?" and stuff like that. He said, "Yes," a lot too, which was weirder still.

But whatever Bodecs or the rest of them thought, they kept it to themselves, even the skipper. Kearney had the knack, and that was enough. They'd go home with a fat catch because of it. It was only a matter of time before the kid tracked down a biggy and earned them all a bonus.

So Kearney sat up in the bow bubble and talked to the stars. He spun his nets down in the future and sang to himself. He knew where they'd be, the biggies, and he systematically avoided them . Nobody knew that, of course.

His problem, if you want to call it that, was scruples. Big ones were valuable because of their planets. While the raw energy of stars had to be processed down to matter, planets were matter to begin with. The processing was ten times easier and cheaper, so the trawlers got ten times the normal price for them at Port Pluto. But planets often had the unsettling property of supporting life, and processing them down to raw materials was a little rough on the natives. Which turned Kearney completely off.

It would only have been a matter of time before his otherwise bountiful net would become conspicuous for its lack of big ones; but that time never came because something else happened first.

Kearney was probing when he felt the vibes.

He locked on. Something down there. To centcomm he said, "Bodecs? Hey Bodecs, I've got something. Little but heavy."

"Need help?"

"No, my net'll take it. But wake up the winch crew."

Seen from a few miles off, the Orestes netlifting operations were slow and unspectacular. A few lights went on, making odd blotches beneath her translucent skin. All the other nets flickered off so as not to foul Kearney's, and to leave more power for the winch. Kearney's beam grew more intense, and the veins of blue began to writhe in its milky light. The fishing ship herself swung around to tug the net in along the line of her keel. For almost an hour, nothing else happened. They towed their catch up through the thirty-billion-year quarantined layer.

The reason for the layer was obvious. You didn't want to deplete the near future to feed the present. You might end up hurting yourself, in a sense killing your grandson so that your son could be born.

The layer was more than an inconvenience, since the deepest a good net would go was only thirty-two gigayears. So fishermen were restricted to skimming a very thin layer of the future, which made for maximum work and competition, minimum profit.

Up it came, Kearney's catch. It bobbed into the visible portion of his net beam and stayed there, shimmering. It was a starship.

Kearney let out his breath until there was no more air and then wrung his lungs out even further. He'd done it; he'd put the Orestes on the track of a biggy. The mother system of that little round ship was lying down on the bottom somewhere nearby. He sat there and quietly hated himself. In his earphones, there was jubilation. The skipper told Kearney to swing his catch back along their ship to where the grappling beams could stuff it into the skein, and he did what he was told. Even as he worked, half a dozen netbeams swept down-time near where his prize had emerged.

They got it. Six fat nets locked on, intensified, veined and pulled. In the earphones came a babble of orders and cheers and a mild congratulation from the skipper himself. Well done! Then more orders. It would take time. It was a Sol-sized star with four planets. One was a neo-Venus, obviously the home of the starship. Some one calculated that she'd bring a three-thou bonus to every man aboard. Hey-y-y's came in a chorus, with more verbal pats on the back for Kearney.

Kearney switched off his net, slumped in the bubble and ran thoughtful fingers through his adolescent beard. Then, moving slowly so as not to draw a conspicuous amount of power, he swivelled his netgun's focus to the throat of the busy nets outside. He fingered power mode to repulsion, and waited. It would wreck six beam generators, maybe the ship, cost a million solars and his own life -- but baby, that was going to be the big one that got away.

As the edge of their neo-Sol broke surface, Kearney triggered his netbeam and gave the power knob a vicious twist. His beam flared for a fraction of a second and went out. He'd overdone it, and the circuit breaker had blown. Even so, the six-beam net that meshed around the big one grew duller, then brighter in a series of power oscillations that rocked the Orestes. Bedlam sounded in the phones.

"What was that? . . . Damned if I know. . Do you suppose the natives . . . Naww . . . power failure? . . . Engine room, how's the secondary? . . . Four-oh, Skipper, I swear it. There was this big surge and . . ."

So nobody knew. Kearney was prepared to blow his skin for success, but not failure. He swung his netbeam back to where it belonged, moded for normal power, reset the breaker, and left the bubble.

The passageways were dark, all power going to the nets. He fumbled along, aided only by his pocket torch, found the crew's wardroom, and drew some blacko. The first cup shook in his hand. The second didn't, and he could think again. He'd been foolish to think they wouldn't find out. A rerun of the engineering logs -- after they were done with the hectic routine of reeling in the nets -- would surely give him away.

It didn't even take that long. The wardroom was a large space and, except for Kearney, empty. It echoed when the PA went on and the skipper's voice boomed, "Netman Joseph Kearney, to my cabin, on the double."

The skipper's cabin was a square room with hologram murals of Tennessee hills on two walls. It was brightly lit even now, well furnished, greenly carpeted, and the oxygen was at full earth pressure, not the gaspy eighteen-six of the crew's quarters. Except for the furious little man behind the desk, it was a very nice place indeed. Skipper Macklin had a strip of logtape in his hand, and he shook it in Kearney's face.

"Just what in hell is this all about?"

"I tried to cut the nets."

Macklin's jaw dropped, then shut to form a wince that came with lemon sucking. "Why?"

"The natives."

"I don't believe it!" There was a long pause, ending with a sigh. "Yes, I do. Damn shame, too. You were good." Macklin stared disgustedly up at him, then got to his feet.

"Okay, out. If I see that baby face of yours for the rest of the cruise, I'll put a foot in it. Stay off the nets, you're through."

"Yes, sir."

"And Kearney."

"Yes?"

"You're lucky you're such a kid. Otherwise, I'd kill you."

Kearney reeled back to crew's quarters in a daze. For perhaps twenty minutes he felt lucky to be alive. But for the rest of the cruise he felt rotten, and they were out the full four months.

He spent a lot of time staring out the stern bubble at the skein. Though they caught several planetoids and one neo-Uranus-sized free planet, Kearney's biggy dwarfed them all, tugging the skeinbeams tight around her. There was even a little fear on board that she'd burst the skein, which was tantamount to having a fusion bomb go off on the back porch. But it held.

The big one had been netted up intact, with even her rotation and energy balance preserved. It was likely the natives were still alive, possibly even unaware that they traveled in a temporal pocket thirty billion years in the past.

Kearney gazed on. Men had overrun the galaxy or there would not have been any time trawlers in the first place. Quadrillions of human beings scattered among the near stars, running out of food, metal, everything. The future opened before them like a tantalizing cornucopia. If the nets reached deeper, they could catch enough other material to toss back the big ones. But as it stood, the planets were altogether necessary, even inhabited ones.

That was the problem, and there wasn't any answer. When the Orestes finally anchored half a dozen parsecs off Port Pluto, Kearney went below and stayed. He didn't want to see the processing. He didn't want to see the awful explosion when Orestes dropped her shield and the neo-Venus found herself thirty gigayears displaced in time, her sun slowly going out, her orbit wavering, her floods, her freezing, her loss of air. But most of all, Kearney didn't want to see the planet rent and ground to elements by the mining beams, or the endless line of space trucks that bore off the fragments like titanic hearses.

It was about this time that Kearney had a thought. It was a good thought, and he decided to devote the rest of his life to it.

He'd aged twenty years. The beard was fuller, the hair on his head thinner. Kearney still carried himself well, and though the springy grace of youth had gone, it had been replaced by the ponderous strength of a shot-putter. What few friends he had admired him.

But at thirty-eight Kearney had very few friends indeed. It was bad enough to trawl for a living, but he seemed to trawl for pleasure as well. He hadn't seen earth for six years, and only went into Port Pluto to sell his fish. Kearney was a loner.

After old Macklin had fired him, things had been difficult. He'd been blackballed. Fortunately the reputation of his knack went along with his reputation as a maverick, and commercial fishermen were a practical lot. He found work. In the course of four years on the boats out of Pluto he'd only turned up one more biggy. Lots of asteroids and suns, but only one biggy.

Then he'd bought his own boat, a leaky old smack with her name stenciled on the stern: Limper. Somewhere along the line a crank had switched the final t to an r, and none of her long string of owners had since seen fit to change it.

It was then that Kearney began his project. Alone on the Limper, he changed his tactics from avoiding the big ones to seeking them out. With his knack it wasn't difficult, either; he could have been a rich man. Yet the wholesalers to whom Kearney sold his catch had yet to record his bringing in a big one.

The biggy kicking in his nets right now was his fortieth. As he locked in the winch beams, Kearney hummed in self-congratulation: forty in sixteen years. Leaving the Limper to finish hauling in by herself, he crawled out of the bubble and into his cramped combined bridge and cabin.

Out came the thick notebook, of which thirty-nine pages were littered with notes, dates, calculations. It was quite like an anthropologist's fieldbook: thirty families of monkeys in their wild habitats. Discovered at different times. Habits noted. Notes of later visits. Each family had been given a toy -- or was it a tool? -- on an early visit, and their use of it observed on subsequent dates. There were gigayears between observations, sometimes. Some pages had stars, some x's, at least fifteen were crossed out blackly, failures for one reason or another. Nine were blank because there had been no monkeys at all.

Kearney flipped to a blank page and put (40) in the upper left corner. Then:

Big one Forty. Spatial location 790 X 328 X 237 Temporal location: September 11, 3181 -- plus 31.089,468,973.

Then he dropped the pen into the crotch of the binding to mark his place and went over to the locker. He got out his diving suit, then sat down where he could see the netbeam reeling its catch up through the millennia, and waited.

It bobbed to the surface an hour later: small, high intensity sun ringed by no less than seventeen planets. He took readings and immediately wrote off the first six and the last four as uninhabitable. Of the middle seven, the fifth looked most inviting, and he decided to hit her first. Kearney went aft to where the diving sled rested in her davits, sealed his helmet and shut the pressure lock behind him. A few minutes later the port opened and he aimed the little skiff out into space.

There was a saying that old sailors got used to the sensation of time-diving, and Kearney was an old sailor. Going from the near-perfect vacuum of space, through the side of the netbeam and into the absolute vacuum of non-time was hardly noticeable at first. But after thirty or forty seconds inside, your nose and kneecaps began to wander all over your body. A torrent of false sensations played over you like colors running through an acid head. Two minutes of it would have been unbearable, but it was usually all over in one. Kearney had long since found out that old sailors were liars.

He filtered back into real -- although future -- time and found himself orbiting Forty's sun in roughly the same orbit as her fifth planet. He wheeled the sled into the smaller body's gravity well and let her pull it down, saving power, another trick only a man with a knack would dare. As he broke through the clouds and got his first good look, it was obvious that he'd guessed correctly.

Forty-dash-Five was a water-world, the driest areas just sandy marshes full of brilliantly blue weeds. With a symmetry that only intelligence could produce, canals mazed through them. Tetrahedral domes of jelly lined the canals.

Kearney picked the largest dome in view and landed next to it. Inside, four heads each with an eye and nine arms, stared hostilely out at him. Each arm held a spear. Kearney fought the urge to vomit, deciding then and there that he'd make no attempt to communicate.

He put the wheel and crossbow, plus a dozen other mind-benders into the hatch and ejected them. Next, a barrel-sized sphere of stainless steel went out. In it was a world of information -- including his own biography and a promise to return.

When he took off again, some two dozen spears glanced off his hull. If he came back in a hundred years they'd be bullets, he hoped. But judging by their present state of evolution, he made a mental note to hold off for at least a few hundred thousand.

Kearney found life on none of the other six planets. About average, he sighed. Quite tired now, he headed back toward the apex of the net beam, and Limper. The last thing he did before turning in was to set up a rep shield around Forty.

A few months later, Kearney headed into Port Pluto to drop his catch and pick up some fuel and supplies. The Limper towed laboriously at her skeinful of fish. Actually, she didn't tow them: her skeinbeams displaced their spatial coordinates of the future with those of the present. But this took energy -- of which Limper had little -- and she moved slowly.

Kearney anchored out at the processing station and cut the skein field. The displaced hydrogen of real space parted with a bang to accept two suns and an asteroid out of the future, and for a few seconds the fireworks were quite impressive. The wholesaler Androsias cheated him as usual, and as usual Kearney didn't stop to haggle. He left Limper at the piers and took a shuttle into Pluto. He needed supplies, and a night off.

The city was built on the inside surface of the hollowed-out planet. She was spun by external means -- ion beams up on her frozen outside surface -- and centrifugal force kept things attached to the inside shell with about half their normal weight. In essence it was an inside-out little place, quite unsettling until you got used to looking up and seeing down on the other side of the world, beyond the bluish artificial sun that was hung right in the middle by guywires.

Like most of the other buildings there, Pulaski's Bar was a hole in the ground. Kearney descended the widening spiral of steps that ran down the cone-shaped walls from above, then walked across thirty feet of flat floor to the circular bar in the middle.

Pulaski was alone. When he glanced out from under his hologlasses he merely said, "Oh, howsa."

"Okay. What's on?"

"Nothin' much. News." He took off the glasses, blinked. "Anverse?"

"If it's fresh." It wasn't, but Kearney sipped the murky euphoric and stared into the holomurals. Pulaski put his glasses back on and returned to his slouch against the back of the bar. The Alps and the Pacific were superimposed to give old earth a grander scene than she was ever mother of; that was one segment of the mural. On the other was a scene from the docks of New Orleans, circa 1890. Wherever did they dig these up. The Anverse began its work, and Kearney built a lifedream around the high-breasted crinoline creature in the foreground.

Customers came and went, one or two at a time, but Kearney dreamed on. He had a second glass and considered re-dreaming the same thing with slight changes, decided against it and ordered an anti. He was almost unbent again when Bobby Macklin and his crew rolled in. They weren't on anverse. Alky and plenty of it was what they ordered, and obviously had been ordering for some time.

Bobby Macklin was Skipper Macklin's son. When the old skipper died, Bobby had taken over. Kearney knew the man slightly and avoided him. It was not out of malice to the father, either, but simply because the son was an unpleasant sort, not worth the time.

Bobby, however, avoided no one. Peering across Pulaski's thin shoulder, he muttered a question thickly to one of his mates. Then, eyes widening, he answered the question himself. "Damn! It's him!" The fleshy finger pointed, and Kearney found himself looking into four pairs of slightly incredulous but very hostile eyes. As a man, the quartet got up and came around to take seats beside him.

"Hello, Bobby."

Thick hand on his shoulder, thick breath in his face. "Why, hi there old buddy. How's the sabotaging business, these days?" Feeling Kearney's muscles tighten under his hand, Bobby removed it quickly, sat up, went on in a louder voice. "Guess what the boys and I found out in the Grand Banks last month?"

"I couldn't."

"Well, we found a little old radiobuoy that was signaling 'J. S. Kearney, FGS Limper, No. Eleven.' So, I say to the boys, gee-whiz but our old buddy Kearney has staked himself a claim over there, and maybe there's others nearby. Because everybody knows what a knack old Kearney's got. That's what I said, right guys?"

Murmurs, nods, leers. Two customers started down the stairs, took one look at what was shaping up and fled.

"So you came over to raid my claim," Kearney said evenly. Like every other time trawler, he had claim buoys all over space, marking catches that were inconvenient to haul in or else so low in yield they might not pay their own way in skein energy. But Kearney had some others, too, special ones, forty of them.

Bobby ignored the accusation. "Anyway, we were fishing close by when guess what?"

Yes, it had been one of the forty, Kearney decided. "You fouled your nets?" he said, dropping his foot from the rung of the barstool to the floor.

"Fouled?" the gross man shouted. "Fouled? Burnt to a crisp! Blew two beamguns right off my ship, punctured two lazarettes. And I said, that's just like Kearney. He did it to my old man and he'd do it to anyone. Sabotaging a buoy. A repulsor shield, a goddamn repulsor shield!"

Kearney rose to his feet, his chin inches from Bobby's upraised face. "People who don't steal don't get into trouble." Bobby had his back to the bar, and Kearney pressed him against it lightly with the palm of his right hand, chucked him mockingly under the chin with the other. The fat man's cheeks went as red as his eyes and he was literally speechless. The pulpy mouth opened and for a second all that came out was a stammering hiss. But it ended. "Get him!"

Kearney pushed hard, sending Bobby careening over the bar. At the same time, he swung his head down and to the left, pivoting out of the clinch on his left foot. A bottle and the edge of a knuckly hand whistled through the air where his head bad been and crashed on the table.

But the third of Macklin's netmen stayed with him, and before Kearney could straighten up from the dodge he felt hands in his beard and saw a knee coming up toward his face. All he had time to do was turn his head, and the sledgehammer hit his ear. He exploded backward from the force of it, so hard that his opponent was left holding two handfuls of whiskers.

Pain brings fury to some men. One must be careful when beating such a man not to hurt without maiming. Hair tearing, unfortunately, imparts maximum pain, does minimum damage. When Kearney got back on his feet, he was so incensed be wasn't even human.

He was back at his antagonist in one step. Planting his left foot, he executed a perfect punt on the other's chin with the right. It made a messy sound and left the man with loose gravel for teeth.

The first two were right behind, and one grabbed Kearney's foot, twisted and heaved. Kearney cartwheeled across the room and smashed into the wall. Half a breath later, Bobby's man came at him head down in a ram rush designed to spread Kearney's guts all over the flint glass mural screen. Kearney sidestepped. Bash! The man groaned when he hit; but, just to make sure, Kearney chopped twice at the thick neck before he hit the floor.

There was one left. Kearney came at him in a storm of knuckles. The man made a high sound in the back of his throat and fled. Kearney chased him halfway up the stairs, ran out of breath, and came dizzily down. He'd had it; that first headblow was getting to him.

Pulaski's hands appeared over the edge of the bar, followed by the upper half of his apprehensive face, a perfect Kilroy. Then they disappeared and when he re-emerged, Pulaski was hauling a still windknocked Bobby Macklin to his feet.

"You broke four bottles," he said accusingly to Kearney, pointing to a mess of stains and broken glass on Bobby's backside.

"I'll pay. Got any water?" He dragged Bobby back on the customer's side of the bar and propped him up on a stool. Kearney took a long gulp from the glass Pulaski offered and threw the rest in Bobby's face.

"So you raided my buoy. What'd you do with the fish?"

"Nothing, we couldn't bring her in."

"You know what I'd have done if you had?" Kearney rapped him ungently on the windpipe.

"I can guess," he wheezed.

Kearney fought an urge to beat the man systematically to jelly. But he went over and retrieved what was left of his torn jacket from where it had come off near the wall. Then he paid Pulaski and went out.

Forty minutes later, Kearney had ordered a shuttle load of supplies and was on his way out to the Limper. No telling what Bobby had done to biggy Eleven when he'd dropped his nets on it. Wailing in protest at the throttle Kearney fed her, Limper was on her way to the Grand Banks within the hour.

Not surprisingly, the buoy had been destroyed, but there was considerable debris floating nearby to mark the place. Kearney grinned. He anchored and reached down the notebook.

Inhabited system Eleven. Spatial location 473 X 492 X 845. Temporal location: August 14, 3169 -- plus 31.085,672,909. G-type, probably from Westover's Galaxy. One planet, two satellites, forty-hour day, twenty-seven month year. Natives semi-aquatic, scaled quadrupeds. IQ's around twenty. Left a complete set of plans. Give them about a quarter gigayear for development, and they should be ready.

Kearney made another entry describing Bobby's raid. Then he coded off the rep shield that had saved his fish from Bobby and went about trawling for her himself. In two hours he was in the sled, riding his terminal orbit around Eleven-dash-one.

Although the last time he'd been there was by local reckoning three hundred million years earlier, most of the landscape was fairly familiar. By landscape one meant topography; the scenery itself was vastly different. Eleven-one had gone from prehistoric ferns to solid city. She was just as crowded as the planets of Kearney's own time.

The largest city in view had a peculiar geometry. Some powerful planner had laid a mile-broad letter K on the countryside and built his roads to suit it. True, the interplaited cross streets were rarely symmetrical, but it had a certain beauty. Kearney felt godlike. At the intersection of the K was a park, wide green, waterlaced. A swamp, in fact. He drifted the sled for it, hit somewhere near the middle.

The woman -- or so he judged her -- who met him was greenish and reptilian, but rather pretty. Six or seven newts clustered fearfully around her as Kearney's sled settled into the tall grass, not twenty yards from their picnic table. Kearney stepped out, prepared to go through the take-me-to-your-leader bit; but she shortstopped the whole thing with four words.

"By Kearney," she whispered. "It's Kearney."

The ride through town to Super's palace gave him a chance to see what he'd wrought. Obviously he'd induced terrestrial evolution on what was basically an aquatic species, but they seemed none the worse for it. Doorknobs for webbed hands were the size of footballs and softly textured. Perambulators for newtlets were water filled. But everyone had the look of well-being that only a sophisticated use of science and democratic philosophy could bring about. So somehow he felt he hadn't left them too bad a legacy, three gigs earlier.

Super had the tall careful awkwardness of a Lincoln. He was worn-scaled and gray-green, the lighter shade apparently owing to age. And like the rest of them, his completely smooth body gave no reason for him to have been other than unclad. Behind his wide wooden desk lay the shell of a seed Kearney had shown three gigayears earlier.

"Kearney. So you're not a legend after all."

"Oh, I'm real."

"Well, thanks for this," Super said, waving a webbed hand at the steel capsule. "We've used it all. We've even got time trawlers of our own, now."

"You're welcome. Ready to pay for it?"

Super looked startled. "Pay?"

"Look, I came across your system by time trawling myself. You could easily have been reeled back to my own time and reduced to raw materials. As a matter of fact you still can."

Moisture glistened around Super's gill slits. "Extortion, Kearney?"

"Mildly, yes. I want a promise. Now you're time trawling yourself. You have the same power over future systems that I've had over you. I want you to promise to treat them as I've treated you. In other words, throw back the big ones. And educate them."

Super looked relieved.

"In addition," Kearney began --

Sunlight through the tall window faded, grew to double brilliance, then settled back to normal. Super cried, "What?" Kearney, smacking his forehead with a palm, said, "Murder! It must be Bobby."

After Kearney had left him in the debris of Pulaski's bottles and his own crewmen, Bobby Macklin was a frightened man. But back on his own ship he got braver. Orestes was twenty times the size of Limper, and could eat the little ship and spit out the bones before Kearney knew what hit him. That was Bobby's plan. He was quite sure Kearney would go out to that pet biggy of his and check on things. So, not two hours after Kearney left, Bobby was hot behind him.

"I've got him on visual, Skipper. Looks like he's got that biggy up the surface."

"Good, he's saved us the trouble. Anchor, and get him on the Y band. Bobby settled contentedly back in the skipper's couch and leered out the port at Kearney's defenseless ship.

"Can't raise him -- oh, wait, his autopilot's putting out a Standard Three. He's left the ship and gone diving down in the biggy."

Bobby grinned. "And that's where he'll stay. Send a crew over and transfer the fish from his net to ours. And have them bring back his diving phone. I want to say good-bye to dear old Kearney."

Down on Eleven-one, Kearney and Super sat in the latter's office.

"You're sure he'll call?" the green man asked.

"Yes, soon. It'd be his style to gloat. The blink in the sunlight was caused by his shifting us from one net to the other. Which means -- "

"Which means, if I may quote, we're in the fire."

"Where'd you get that expression?"

"From the same encyclopedia that you both blessed and burdened us with willy-nilly three gigs ago."

"Come on, Super. Until now you were grateful."

"Until now. Agreed, you're the best of your type, Kearney; but men are a race of exploiters, pure and simple. Your friend would just as soon process us as -- "

"My what? Now look, I have told you how this was supposed to work out. Bobby's just -- "

"Hey, Kearney," tinned a voice inside his helmet.

"Yeah, Bobby, hello."

"Got you now, baby." There was a nasty snicker. "When they run you through the processor you'll probably come out looking like -- "

"Okay, okay. Look, I want to buy my way out."

"With what? I've already got your ship. And this biggy."

"Peanuts. I can give you twice that."

"From where?"

"Let me up, and I'll tell you."

The snicker expanded to a laugh. "Squirm, baby. You're never getting out." Bobby clicked off.

"What now?" Super asked hopelessly. Even as they spoke the sun blinked again, indicating that their captor had shifted them to his skein.

Kearney shrugged. "We've got -- let's see -- probably ten of your days to come up with something."

Bobby Macklin called down into the skein in hopes of pulling a few more legs off his flies, but the flies wouldn't give him that satisfaction. He had the growing suspicion that something was brewing down there, and so he had ordered Orestes back to Port Pluto as fast as she could tow her load. The sooner he'd reduced Kearney to a handful of minerals, the better. But he wasn't quick enough. They were still four days off Pluto when his after netman called in.

"Skipper, there's something going on out in the skein."

Macklin rushed aft and peered out the stern bubble. There certainly was something going on. The sack of woven energy squirmed like the belly of a pregnant mare. It became bloated. Through its translucent walls Bobby and his crew saw now only one big one with her planet and moons, but four other stars.

"Quick, try and get Kearney." He was handed the phone. "Hey, Kearney. what gives?"

"Your skein, if you don't drop us."

"Where're you getting . . ."

"The future, our future. Sixty-five gigs from you. Listen, fathead, drop us or else. You know what a burst skein'll do to your ship."

"Yeah, louse," he clicked off. "Cut the skein. He's got us."

The beams flickered out, and Kearney, Super biggy Eleven's entire system and baggage dropped down through the eons to its own time.

Bobby Macklin rebuilt the skein, then headed disgustedly back to the Grand Banks for four months of fishing, legitimate, this time. Consequently, when he returned to Port Pluto he found himself one of the last to hear.

Kearney had headed for Port Pluto as soon as he'd gotten back to his ship. He'd gone to Galcouncil with a weird looking alien in tow, and made his pitch.

It was quite simple. What one did was throw back the big ones and teach them to time trawl themselves. For this the fishermen received two percent of the big one's own catch.

In a sense, Super had been right. Kearney's was a race of exploiters. But it took an honestly humane man like Kearney to dream up a cycle of exploitation where nobody lost. Under his plan the future did indeed open like an infinite cornucopia -- of both raw materials and manpower -- a huge cone whose base lay gigagigayears in the future. Each layer had only to go out and educate the next, then take their nominal two percent. But two percent of infinity is infinity, and each layer had more than enough supporters on the next to sustain it. Not only was it infinitely easier all around, but no big ones would ever have to be processed.

Bobby Macklin, returning from his four-month cruise, was among the last to know. The law had been in effect just about three days when he brought in the catch of his career and had it processed. A big one, his first and his last. Anyone's last.