A gnawing doubt began to eat at his mind. Was that enough? Perhaps it would be wise to construct a timepiece. How? He racked his memory trying to recall the various clocks of the ancients. A mechanical clock was out of the question. He simply hadn't the skill or the materials necessary for its construction. The episode with the watch proved that all too well. An hour glass then? A careful search of the ship was unrewarding. There was nothing that could be made into an hour glass, nor any way to calibrate such a device even if he could make one. A water clock, perhaps? The same objections. And his own lack of know-how. Malenson was no scientist or hobbyist. He was first and last a man of business. Still he did not want to give up easily. A candle clock. Immediately he recognized that idea as impractical.
He didn't have the technical understanding of his ship necessary to use its speed for the computation of time. In fact the only thing he knew about the ship was that it traveled faster than light. How much faster, he had never found out. It had been enough for his purposes to know that it travelled faster or as fast as any type of vessel in the Confederation. And even if he had known how to make the necessary calculations, what was needed was something that would divide twelve or fifteen years into days, hours, minutes.
Radio reception was out. Each of the colonized worlds had an Earth-type atmosphere ... complete with Heavyside Layer. And the radar beams that could pierce the layer would be swarming with freighters, liners and ... Patrol ships. Malenson was certain that by now every patrolman in the known cosmos was alerted for the appearance of a ship of Malenson's type. And detention meant an end to a dream of wealth. Prison.
What was the answer, then?
The answer was ... no answer.
Malenson, possessed of the finest machine ever devised by the mind of man, and the greatest hoard of wealth in recent times ... was reduced to keeping track of time by the movements of his digestive tract and a series of scratches on the wall of the control room.
At the time he could see the irony of it. He even laughed ... then.
Time dragged on sluggishly. What might have been weeks passed by in a seemingly endless cycle of sleeps and meals. Every time he awoke Malenson would cut the drive and check his position. And always, the bright beacon stars stared back at him, little changed.
Slowly, the line of scratches on the control room wall grew. Malenson lived in a timeless limbo amidst the vast, unchanging emptiness of the galactic periphery. For weeks and months at a time, he would lose himself in the sparsely starred outer marches. Then he would find his position again, an agonizingly short distance from the last fix given him by star-chart and analyzer. Lethargically, the ship crawled across parsecs of space, a hollow shell of life amid the cosmic desolation of the great edge.
A year passed. Two. Malenson knew he was safe now. No patrol ship could follow his aimless wanderings. But the ten year statute of limitations remained uppermost in his mind. He realized that he was assigning an arbitrary value to his days and months, thus he decided that he must stay in space for the full time allowed by his supplies. He could not risk a miscalculation.