Zach Hughes: Gold Star

Pete sent a test signal down the New Earth range toward the home planet, with programmed termination at a selected beacon far away. Each of the beacons which he tested had relayed the Blinkstat intended for Rimfire. He punched other instructions and found that the beacon nearest him had relayed the stat on to the beacon at his home station, and that beacon, too, had relayed. Pete was beginning to have a creepy feeling. There was no way that the newest and most glamorous ship in the service of Exploration and Alien Search could have passed the Stranden 47's station. Not unless X&A and the service had come up with something so new that all of the old rules were out. He didn't think it possible that such a development had been made. Even before she was ready to go into space the U.P.S. Rimfire had been a famous ship. She had been undergoing final outfitting at the time Pete and Jan left Tigian to begin their tour. The media had been full of her. She was the first X&A ship with true intergalactic capability. She was the finest and most expensive ship ever built. According to Tigian Tri-D, not always dependable, considering the Tigian temperament, Rimfire's skipper was to be given the order to take the Rimfire toward the fringe stars, to the last established blink beacon, and turn left. There was no way she could be out there beyond the 47's station. Pete punched in the buttons for home, felt the leap, and the old 47 was back within fractions of an inch of her original position at the junction of four lonely blink routes leading from nowhere to nothing. The homebase blink beacon had dutifully recorded the Blinkstat for Rimfire and relayed it. Pete was glumly silent for a long time. «Hungry?» Jan asked. «Not very.» «Bowl of kanji fruit?» «Sounds good.» She started to rise, and the tone of his voice stopped her. She settled back. «What we're gonna hear, and pretty soon, is an all-points alert on Rimfire.» he said. «Oh, no,» Jan said. «Let's eat,» he said. «It'll take a while.» It took twelve hours. The Blinkstat came from New Earth, and it was a blockbuster, carrying the preliminary code which indicated that it was being sent simultaneously along all established blink routes. The general transmission, in itself, was a tipoff to the seriousness of the situation, even if the wording was not. The message was merely a formal request to all ships in space, all stations, all fleet installations to report any knowledge of U.P.S. Rimfire. It was when the stat gave Rimfire's last known position that Pete began to dream. Rimfire's arrival had been recorded at blink beacon 7C3X99-34R-NE793. Her next jump should have been recorded at blink beacon 7C3X99-34R-NE794. «NE794,» Pete muttered. «That's where we went,» Jan said. «She arrived at NE793.» Now he was beginning to regret that he hadn't had more courage, that he had not jumped on downrange to NE793. «She's lost,» he said. She was the most expensive ship ever built. She had every piece of equipment known to man. She could chart new routes in space, discover new planets; she had on board the equipment to analyze every aspect of that new planet and, in the unlikely event of life, hostile life, she was armed with weapons which could reduce a world to charred cinders in seconds. Pete couldn't even estimate her worth, but he had a glowing feeling as his dream grew. The crew's share of a salvage on Rimfire would be the single biggest haul ever made. He started punching buttons. He wouldn't reveal the dream to Jan. Not yet. No use raising her hopes until he had a more solid handle on the situation. But Rimfire was lost. Out there between the 47 and the first beacon down the New Earth range were a few parsecs of empty space. Past that one, NE 794, a few more parsecs, and Rimfire's last known position near NE793. «Jan,» he said, «send a stat to Stranden on Tigian. Keep it simple. Just say Stranden 47 asks permission begin search Rimfire.» Jan had learned fast. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. The tiny amount of energy required to send a signal allowed almost instantaneous relay down the Tigian range. The answer was clicking off the printer within a minute. «They say hold,» Jan said. «Must confirm Rimfire in trouble.» Pete used one of his infrequent profanities, then shook his head. «If she wasn't in trouble she wouldn't have disappeared.» If it was simple trouble, such as merely falling out of blink drive before arriving at NE 794, somewhere in those parsecs of empty space between beacons, her communications generator was enough to send a call for help. Pete knew the space regulations. No skipper would be silent if his ship was in trouble. If he had a way to yell for help, he'd be yelling loud and clear. If anyone was alive on Rimfire and if the communications equipment was working, there'd be a call going both ways down the New Earth range. The blink was a relatively safe way to travel, but when man depends on hardware and electronics, he is vulnerable. Hardware and electronics fail. The results, to a blink ship, are not always tragic, or fatal. Sometimes a generator just lost power for one reason or another and dropped the ship out of subspace, or wherever a ship went when blinking, back into normal space a long, long way from anywhere. There were no mysteries in space travel. When a ship failed to arrive, and didn't report, a search always found her. There'd been a few times when the search found a dead ship, gutted by internal explosion, but even the dead ships were found. There were some old stories from the last war, a thousand years old, about ships disappearing, but that was war. It's difficult to find the disassembled atoms of a ship which has been caught in the full blast of a rebinder beam. Pete's guess was that whatever had happened to Rimfire, it was damned serious. It saddened him. He'd never seen her, but he'd seen pictures of her, and she was one beautiful hunk of stuff. «Jan, she's lost all power. If she had auxiliary power we'd be hearing from her. She's out there somewhere between 794 and 793.» He didn't add that there might be people still alive on her, people who were waiting and praying for a tug. He made up his mind. «Send this to Stranden. Stranden 47 blinking NE794 to begin search.» He didn't bother to wait for an answer. The 47 ceased to exist and reexisted near the beacon from which he'd taken the tape reading twelve hours previously. He activated the optics and detections instruments and read the straight-line route toward New Earth as far as his instruments could penetrate. Emptiness. Parsecs of space lay ahead between NE794 and NE793. The search pattern would be tedious, tiring. He started it. A short leap, just to the point where the 47's detection instruments could read backward and forward and, in a large number of short, jerky blinks, search every mile, every inch, every light-year of the long, long parsecs of that long, long jump out near the rim of the galaxy. He put the computer to work to figure out how long it would take, and his heart sank when he had the answer. He didn't communicate his doubt to Jan. The generator was building charge constantly now, and it was possible to make jumps within seconds of emerging, giving the instruments only time to search the cold emptiness before pushing the button. When the generator was drained completely by the multiple small jumps, a longer period of waiting was necessary. Lord, Lord, he thought, if we can find her. If he found her and locked onto her and took her back to New Earth with the crew dead or alive, oh, Lord. The way she was built, the way she was equipped, she had cost billions. Even after the owners of the 47 took the lion's share of the salvage percentage there'd be, hell, millions. There'd be enough to make Mr. and Mrs. Peter Jaynes very, very wealthy. It made him feel queasy in the stomach to think of the Rimfire's crew being dead. He dreamed a dream as the long hours went by and he snatched sleep while the generator was building charge. He'd see a blip on the instruments and take a visual and blink up beside the huge, sleek, beautiful ship. She'd be lying dead in space, but everyone on her would be alive, praying and waiting for a good old Mule to come blinking up beside her. He'd shoot a cable over and it would plunk against the big, sleek ship and attach and he'd use the cable to communicate, since Rimfire had no power. «Captain,» he'd say, «you look lonely.» «Glad to see you, sir,» the captain of the Rimfire would say. «You've made excellent time in finding us.» «My pleasure,» he'd say. And then the biggie. Then the question every tug skipper dreams of asking. «Captain,» he'd say, «do you agree to a Lloyd's contract?» «Well, sir,» the Rimfire's captain would say, having no other choice, «I do agree to a Lloyd's contract.» The phrasing, Pete thought, might not be historic, «"but the effect was. He wasn't sure the company that gave its name to the salvage agreement still existed, for the tradition went far, far back into the history of old Earth, long before the age of space, when transport and cargo moved on Earth's oceans and seagoing tugs searched out ships in trouble. Then, as now, maritime law outlined the procedure. If a vessel could not proceed to the nearest port under its own power and was assisted by another vessel, a certain percentage of the value of ship and cargo would be paid to the rescuing vessel by the victim's insurance company. It was only necessary to confirm in advance with the skipper of the vessel in trouble that he was giving his ship over to the rescue vessel. That old Earth insurance company was Lloyd's of London. Thus the phrase, «Captain, do you agree to a Lloyd's contract?» In any area occupied by the United Planets, the insuring company, to Pete's knowledge, had never been named Lloyd's of London, or even Lloyd's of Selbelle IV or something, but the phrase was still the same, and recognized as a legal agreement in space courts. And he was going to be asking that question of an Academy hotshot, the pride of the service. «Captain, do you agree to a Lloyd's contract?» Through the hours, through the emptiness, the Stranden 47 blinked, searched, built power, and blinked again. Pete explained to Jan that they might be at it for days, and trained her carefully to read the detection instruments. For the first time since they were married they slept at different times. Jan protested when Pete said they'd work shifts of eight hours for Pete, four for Jan. «Be a good girl,» he said with a tired grin, «and I'll buy you a Tigian art generator.» «Sure,» she said. The Tigian machine, which was used to create permanent three-dimensional scenes, cost hundreds of thousands. «And a few Martian emeralds.» Pete grinned. «The strain, sir, is getting to you,» Jan said. He started to tell her how much it would be worth to them when they found Rimfire, but reconsidered at the last moment. Others would be searching. To build up her hopes and then have them dashed would be cruel. But he could dream. He did a lot of it as the ship blinked in and out and the instruments gave the same readings: nothing. Chapter Two Captain Dean J. Richards, United Planets Space Service, commanding the United Planets Ship Rimfire, took his ship slowly away from the New Earth mooring base confidently. He'd commanded the ship during her trials. He could feel the life of her all around him. She was a technological triumph, the crowning achievement of a millennium in space. She was his. Richards would have liked nothing better than to take Rimfire immediately into the first phase of her mission, which was mind-bogglingly simple. All that was expected of Rimfire was to circumnavigate the galaxy. First, however, she had to chart a route to the periphery, moving out along the established New Earth range to blink beacon NE 795, then onto the outward range which dead-ended at a small mining planet about six parsecs from the last outpost of stars on the edge of the great intergalactic emptiness. Richards was proud to be the first to look outward. For hundreds of years man had been looking inward toward the galactic core. The theory was that habitable planets would be in greater numbers where the starfields were dense, crowded, where worlds basked or burned in the light of multiple suns. There in the heavy radiation fields life-zone planets had proved to be rare, and so over the past hundred years the search had turned outward. It made sense to Richards. After all, old Earth and the original United Planets were not core planets, but were located in a thinly starred area out toward the periphery. Richards' formative years as a junior officer had been spent in the dense starfields toward the core. On his first command he'd gained permission to head outward, and he had, to his credit, a sweet little life-zone planet, parsecs from the nearest U.P. planet, livable, a paradise to accept a few of the billions of people whose growth was the United Planets' greatest challenge. On the same trip which had produced a life-zone planet, Richards had charted three others, rich in metals. For some reason the outer stars produced planets and asteroids richer in those heavy metals, such as gold, which were still demanded by man's technology. Richards longed to forget the continuing tests of Rimfire's complicated systems and shoot for the rim. In space travel it was not distance which offered the prime challenge, at least not directly. The distance which could be covered in one blink, one jump into subspace by use of old Billy Bob Blink's generator, was in theory infinite. In practicality, the length of a blink was limited by known coordinates. There was one simple reason for the problem. A ship could not blink through a solid object, such as a star or a planet. The gravitational field of an object as large as a star or a planet extended into that unknown subspace where a ship existed during the timeless moment of a blink. Thus arose the best-known contradiction of space travel. Man had the ability and the power to leap across the universe, but the catch was that someone had to go first, at sublight speeds, to establish a safe exit area, a place to emerge from a blink at a particular point in space. For a thousand years ships had been inching their way through the galaxy, exploring unknown territory with blinks limited to the detection ability of optics and other detection equipment, leaving behind them an ever-growing network of blink beacons. A ship traveling one of the marked blink routes had only to punch in the coordinates of a known blink beacon to be there. To lay a blink route, an X&A ship had to creep along at sublight speed with short blinks. Some five hundred years in the past an impetuous X&A captain had decided that he would speed up the laying of a blink route. He got away with one, then two unsurveyed blinks. His third unsurveyed blink merged the ship with an iron-and-stone asteroid. Those who saw it said that it was a regular work of art, a sculpture to rival the best of the Tigian masters. The unexplained forces of the blink had changed the molecular structure of both ship and asteroid, blending the whole into a uniform smoothness of mixed metal and stone. The stern and bow of the X&A ship protruded tastefully from the mass of the asteroid. Captain Dean Richards was not an impulsive man. He had nothing to prove. His record was the best, and he'd been selected over a thousand other men, many with more seniority, to command the Rimfire. A circumnavigation of the galaxy wouldn't change the universe, but it would, Richards suspected, rate at least a footnote in the history books. On the initial blinks outward from New Earth, the Rimfire's crew tested detection and navigation equipment. Rimfire had already undergone extensive testing, first by X&A Development crews, then by her permanent crew, but she was being tested further as he moved her away from the base, headed for the periphery to turn left and use Rimfire's new, far-reaching detection capability to make enormous, parsec-consuming blinks in the emptiness outside the body of the galaxy. It seemed almost ironic that by traveling the unthinkable distances around the outskirts of the galaxy a ship, once Rimfire had put out beacons, could reach the far side of the galaxy, and many points near the rim, in less time than it took to travel the much shorter direct routes. Richards liked to be in the power room while the generator was building charge. He made it a point to inspect all of the probe equipment. He personally tested the weapons. He sampled the food in the crew's mess. He looked over the medical and scientific facilities. Rimfire was built to spend indefinite periods in space. She was totally self-sustaining. She reclaimed every molecule of oxygen and water. She recycled all biological matter. She grew her own food. In an emergency, she could synthesize carbohydrate edibles and unbind oxygen from solid rock. She was quite a ship, and she was huge, and expensive, and Dean Richards knew that she was all his. As Rimfire leaped outward, Richards gradually built the generator charge to three-quarters capacity. The generator was somewhat of an innovation in that it was bigger and more powerful than any other generator ever built. Since a blink generator had no moving parts, it seemed that it would last forever. In actuality, the sheer stress of holding so much power seemed to induce a kind of fatigue in certain electronic elements, requiring frequent replacement of entire segments of the generator's complicated circuitry. Stress damage was more severe on generators which always had to be charged to full power. So Rimfire's generator was a monster, and had the capability of moving the ship on any length of blink at 50 percent power and up. In tests Rimfire had been leaped eleven times with the generator at full charge. There'd been no abnormalities. Richards didn't envision a time when it would be necessary to use full generator power, but he believed in knowing all there was to know about a system upon which his life depended. The galaxy was big, and they were going all the way around, with possible sidetrips to points of interest along the rim. He ordered full charge and drained it with a movement of his finger and felt his insides slide. They seemed to move out of his body through his navel and dangle there for an eternity. «Sir,» said a rating at the control panel, «I don't know what that was, but—» The ship was back in normal space. The blink had lasted for a thousand years and less than an instant. «Systems check,» Richards ordered. Machines, computers, men, women, all began to check Rimfire's vital signs. «Normal, normal, normal,» came the reports. Meanwhile, the generator was doing its magic act, pulling energy, that eerie combination of gravitational and radiation forces, from the nearest stars. Richards let it build to full power. He went over all reports carefully, one at a.time as they were flashed on his screen. «Normal, hell,» he muttered. He went back to the test reports. Not once during the eleven blinks at full power had there been any reported abnormality. There was no mention of a rather disturbing feeling that one's organs and tubings had exited through the navel and hung around outside the body. He called in his brain trust, his senior officers, three of them. Rimfire was a huge ship. She had to be to house all of the equipment she carried, plus the monster generator. She was, however, sparse on crew. A total of thirty people were aboard. Each individual was a specialist in his field. Each had overcome severe competition to be selected to serve on X&A's newest hotshot vessel. Pat and Paul Victor arrived in the captain's cabin first, then came Evan Waters. Pat, officer and ship's doctor, looked at Richards questioningly. «Did you call us for the reason I think you called us?» Pat asked. «If you think I called you for the reason I called you, you're right,» Dean said, deadpan. Pat Victor was a big, bawdy-looking woman, and Richards liked her. He liked her husband, Paul, too. Paul Victor knew more about the insides and outsides of a blink generator than any man since Billy Bob Blink. «What happened?» Evan Waters asked. He was second in command. The service was his life. He was a good officer, an all-around officer capable of command. He had dark good looks, and a flair for the dramatic word. «I assume, then, that you all felt something unusual,» Richards said. Pat Victor said, «I felt as if I were having a baby without pain and that all my guts came out with it.» «Don't you just love that doctor talk?» Paul asked. «You, Evan?» Richards asked. «I don't know how it feels to have a baby,» Evan said. «I felt something. My stomach seemed to sink down into a mass and slide and twist around.» «Mine was something like that,» Paul Victor said. «I was in the power room. I checked instruments while it was going on. Then I checked the tape. There was nothing abnormal.» The door opened and a control-room rating looked in. She had a tray in her hands. «Coffee?» «Fine,» Richards said. «I felt this peculiar feeling in my knees,» the rating said. «Thank you,» Richards said, taking coffee. He'd have to speak to that young lady. He'd tell her to knock first, and speak, during an officer's conference, only when asked to do so. «Paul,» Richards said, «any opinions? We all know that we were on full power when we made that leap.» Paul mused for a moment. «I don't have to tell you that there's a lot we don't really understand about what goes on during a blink. As far as we know, the amount of power used during a blink is determined only by the requirement of activation of the generator. We know how much power it takes to activate, based on generator size, not ship size. If there isn't enough power the thing won't work. It's as simple as that. The same process of activation occurs when there is an oversupply of power. There's some question about what happens to the surplus power.» «I love that engineering talk,» Pat said. «All those technical terms.» «I'm considering a portion of my audience,» Paul said, grinning at his wife. «Let me put it this way. Here's what I'm getting at. All the work is done, all the energy expended, at the moment of activation. It is the opinion of most that no energy is being expended as the ship actually travels through subspace. Therefore, in theory, using an oversupply of power should have no effect at all on the ship after activation of the generator. Apparently, the surplus energy is just expended back into space.» «Thank you, Paul,» Richards said. «There's a blink leg out past Dyneb where you go just within the outer fringe of the gravitational influence of a blue giant,» First Officer Evan Waters said. «There's a particular little tug you feel when you make that leap.» «That's worth checking,» Richards said. «Perhaps it's a peculiarity of this particular leg.» Evan moved to the computer console and began to print instructions. The others looked at the well-tailored back of his uniform jacket, and at each other. Evan had the results within a minute. «There's not much travel out here,» he said, «but the Central Data Bank has no record of anything peculiar going on in this sector.» «How about an asteroid drifting into the lane?» Pat asked. There just were not many objects of significant size drifting free in deep space. Richards shook his head. To check for a relatively small object along the line of the last blink would be the work of months. He pushed a button on the communicator and asked for a report on generator charge. «We're at full power again,» he said. «Gulp,» Pat said. They stood in control as the captain checked instruments. The rating who had brought coffee without knocking was at the console. «Are you locked onto the next beacon, Miss Rainbow?» Richards asked. «Yes, sir.» «Then drain her, Miss Rainbow,» Richards said, bracing himself mentally. It was there again, that sliding of his intestines, and it went on for another eternity until it stopped. «Definitely not peculiar to one blink leg,» Paul Victor said. «Okay,» Richards said. «We want to know why, of course.» After the next few blinks it didn't seem so bad. That funny feeling inside, that feeling that the blink was going to last forever, became a part of them. When the generator was backed off to 80 percent or less the blink was normal, with the same old familiar feeling which some of them had experienced thousands of times. But above 80 percent, wow. And still there were no abnormalities, no clues, no nothing but that feeling that time had stopped. The Rimfire was moving farther and farther away from the traveled blink routes, leaping light-years at a time toward the rim of the galaxy where the stars were scattered and the blinks long. They rested, and allowed the generator to rebuild charge, within visual and audio contact of a bluntly built Fleet Class tug. They exchanged conversation with the lonely crew of the tug, four of them. The tug's crew had been on post for over two years and were looking forward to R&R on Tigian. «Captain,» Paul Victor said, «all we have to do is cut power back to 80 percent or less. Even when we use just 80 percent we're draining more power than has ever been used before, about twice the power of a Mule's Читать дальше