» Pete pushed buttons. Since the incoming-signal light was not on he had not checked the tape for the sleeptime period. He put the audio on high-speed search and there was a whirr of sound and a hum of motion and then a little click and there it was. The sound was weak and incomplete. The tone, however, was that of the warning gong. The sound lasted a fraction of a second and then was gone. He played it back four times, then did a high-speed search of the entire four hours of tape. There was only the momentary hint of sound, almost a ghost of a sound. He turned the problem over to the computer and had an analysis in seconds. The sound had the tonal qualities of the communications warning gong. It lasted microseconds. The signal which had activated the gong for that brief moment, so brief it had not reached standard volume, had come from that section of the detection equipment which searched for the pre-arrival signal of a blinking ship. «Just a glitch,» Jan said. «A ghost.» «It came from Number One,» Pete said. For brevity, they had numbered the four intersecting blink routes so that in referring to them they would not have to use the full, lengthy chart designations. It worried him. A tiny microsecond signal had come through the far reaches of empty space which stretched back and away down the blink ranges toward home. Only one thing in the universe was known to be faster than the instantaneous travel of a blinking ship. Perhaps more research had been done on that phenomenon than on any other aspect of the blink mystery. A blinking ship sends a signal ahead of itself. The signal is unlike any known emission. As far as man knew, that particular signal, that flash sent toward the emergence point at the moment of generator activation, had not existed prior to the first use of Billy Bob Blink's machine. The pre-arrival signal could be detected along the entire length of the projected jump. The pre-arrival signal worried some. The space services spent millions each year trying to determine the cause of it, trying to find a way to eliminate it, for, although microseconds were involved, the pre-arrival signal gave electronic equipment time to prepare for the actual arrival of the ship. There hadn't been a war for almost a thousand years, but to the military mind that warning that a ship was on its way was, potentially, a dangerous situation. «Just a glitch,» Jan said. «Let's go back to bed.» «You go along. I'll be there in a few minutes.» She didn't have to use words to let him know that she was not going without him. They had been together for three years. In that three years the longest period of separation had been two hours, when she was taking her physical for tug duty. Even then Pete had tried to go into the examination room with her. He had just found her, then, and he was afraid of losing her. When Pete Jaynes worried, his left hand went to his head. If he was wearing a cap at the time the fingers of his left hand would slip under the cap, tilting it, until the pads of his index and large fingers were on the depression in his skull just over his left ear. If he was not wearing a cap the motion seemed less unconscious. Jan saw his hand go up, begin to toy with the dent in his skull. «Pete, it was a false signal. There's no need to worry.» Pete knew that Jan had not spent almost a full year of two-hour-a-day classes studying shipboard communications equipment. Jan could not know that what had happened was impossible, that the signal of a blinking ship could not emerge out of empty space. The signal had been recorded. Weak as it was, momentary as it was, it was there. It had been automatically transcribed from the communicator tape to the master tape. At the end of the tour that master tape would have three full years of ship's functions recorded on it, and it would be run routinely through the Stranden Corporation's statistical information center. Any operator could review any category of information with the press of a button. Stranden was, of course, under the jurisdiction of the Space Service, and any Space Service statistician had access to Stranden's records, could press a button and review, for example, all of the incoming jump signals on the tape within seconds. The weak, momentary signal was there on tape. For the skipper of any spacegoing ship to ignore such a signal, which without a doubt indicated something abnormal, was, at the least, grounds for losing one's license. The master tape of the Stranden 47 would be easy to review, because Pete had deliberately chosen an isolated, seldom-visited outpost in nowhere. There wouldn't be many signals of any sort in the three years of their duty there. Pete liked tug duty. At first he'd been concerned about Jan's reaction to prolonged isolation. Theirs, as the trite old saying went, was not exactly a marriage made in heaven. He had had one hell of a time persuading her to marry him. The first time he saw her in the Spacer's Rest on Tigian she'd called him a loser. He didn't deny it, but he did have enough self-image to go back. He paid the usual exorbitant prices charged by such places as the Spacer's Rest just to spend time with her. What he did with that time surprised Jan. He used the time for talking. That was not what she was usually paid to do. The Spacer's Rest, tastefully furnished, serving the finest foods from a hundred planets, was not a place for rest and relaxation. It was a whorehouse. Pete looked back on those nights in the Spacer's Rest now and then with a certain nostalgia. There they were, one loser with a hole in his head, a dent in his skull, some brain cells forever destroyed by the injury, just enough to ruin hell out of Peter Jaynes deductive reasoning. Without that ability, passing the exams in his last year at the Academy was impossible. The Academy was sorry as all hell, for, after all, the injury to Pete's brain had come as the result of school activity. An escape hatch had blown on the training ship, and the resulting explosive decompression had sent Cadet Jaynes into space, with a quick blow to the head as he passed through the hatch. They said he was lucky. He was in space with air leaking from his ruptured helmet. Well, perhaps, he admitted, he was lucky to be alive, to have been picked up before the pressure inside the suit was low enough to boil his blood. And everyone was sorry as hell that the Service demanded that a
space officer have all his brains. You just didn't fly a sleek fleet liner, or a fleet freighter, much less an X&A Explorer Class or a ship of the line if a little chunk of brain didn't function. But there was another loser at the Spacer's Rest. She was a tall, blond, female loser, a New Earther a long way from home. She had worked hard to save the fare out to Tigian in order to study art on that planet most famous for its artists. She had butted nose-on into Tigian snobbery. To a Tigian, there was no such thing as a non-Tigian artist. A work permit? Sorry, it just wasn't done. Non-Tigians were not issued work permits. A way home? Sorry. The fleet had just been put under a new directive. There would be no more casuals aboard ship. Too many fleet officers had been taking advantage of the system, which had allowed working passage to selected individuals. Most of the selected individuals were, it seemed, rather attractive girls, many of them on holiday from such places as the Spacer's Rest on Tigian. It wasn't good for morale for the officers to have their own private women on board. All fleet employees, even casual, had to have at least two years of space training at an accredited institution. So what does a girl do when she's light-years from home, broke, unable to get a job to earn passage back to New Earth? Does she just give up, lie down, and starve? No. She lies down, but not to starve. «At least,» Jan had told Peter Jaynes, after about four nights of his nonstop attempt to convince her that tug duty was not all bad, «they've eradicated all the things that used to be called social diseases.
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