Zach Hughes: Gold Star

generator. Let's face it. It's just something that goes with the territory. It'll keep the desk pounders back at base busy for years trying to figure it out. We've got power to burn at 80 percent. We're not sacrificing any safety factor.» Richards mused for a moment, thinking of the distance which would be between them and any possible help once they were in intergalactic space. «As I see it, Dean,» Paul said, «you have two choices. One, you take her back home and let the slide-rule boys go to work. Two, we go on and perform our assigned mission.» There was no possibility in Richards' mind of going back, not unless he discovered that the unexplained feeling during a full-power blink represented a clear danger to the ship. The two officers were standing in the control room. Julie Rainbow was on duty at the console. She was looking at Richards as he thought, and he caught her eyes, smiled. He'd taken time to explain to her that tech ratings knocked before entering the captain's cabin, and that ratings spoke to officers when spoken to. Julie Rainbow had the most beautiful, big, brown eyes. Sometimes Dean Richards felt that Pat and Paul had the only viable solution for staying in the Space Service. That solution was to get married, to another spacer. The service gave married couples favorable consideration for posts together. If the couple had it together together, as Pat and Paul had, it was a fine arrangement. Neither X&A nor the service deliberately picked crews of approximately 50-50 sexual distribution, at least not according to the official manuals. However, no one questioned it when it turned out that way. Ships stayed in space a long time, and men were men and women were women and old Mother Nature had designed the race to be two and two. If you were the captain, and if you weren't married— Oh, well, he thought, as Julie Rainbow looked up at him with those big brown eyes. He'd handled similar situations with pretty young female ratings and officers before. A woman had to pass an emotional-stability test to get space duty. There were few weepers on board X&A ships. He put his mind back on the problem. «Paul, there's nothing between us and the rim except one Mule Class tug. When we pass her and go on out we'll be on our own. Before we get too far past that Mule, I want you to wring this baby out. Every jump full-power and then some. If she's going to break, I want her to break where we can hitch a quick ride home.» Paul nodded. «I want to run a few more tests before we leap again.» Dean Richards was left alone with Julie Rainbow. She smiled and he smiled back. They were, he thought, making them more beautiful these days. She was all woman, with long legs. He decided that the fashion designers who had concocted the new casual uniform, shorts and hosiery for women, had had Julie Rainbow in mind. «Permission to speak, sir?» Julie asked, with a smile which had the potential to outradiate a small sun. He nodded. «You are very impressive when you're being businesslike.» «Thank you,» he said, but he was thinking, Well, this one may be a bit more difficult to handle than some of the others. Nothing broke, but the feeling of vast time and eerie internal sensations was still there when the ship blinked at full power. Richards was about ready to admit that the thing was just the nature of the beast and go on about his mission, using no more than 80 percent power. But there was a fine jump coming up, one of the longer ones of the entire system. It was not just light-years, but parsecs. He'd give the generator one more test at full power on that long blink, and then he'd make his final decision. After the next blink, it would be go or no go. He would either call back and report the strange sensations to the scientists at X&A Headquarters, or he'd head for the emptiness out beyond the periphery. The blink was made during Julie Rainbow's shift at the control panel. «Full charge, sir,» she said. «Leave us leap, Miss Rainbow,» Richards said. The last syllable, «bow,» lingered in his ears as time stopped and that eerie feeling in his stomach came to be a part of him forever, and forever, and forever. He could feel himself moving, could see his extended hand. He knew that his hand was in the process of moving, because his brain had sent the messages for movement. His hand was coming from rest on the arm of his command chair with the intention of brushing back his hair from his forehead. His hand was moving, but it was moving so slowly that he couldn't see the movement. It was moving so slowly that it would take eons for that hand to reach his forehead. His hand would be moving for immeasurable time, lifting, and in that eon Julie Rainbow's hand would be lifting from the switch which had activated the generator. He knew the feeling of timelessness would end. It had ended before. There was no panic. His mind worked at normal speed, or at what seemed to him to be normal speed, and he could see the instruments and Julie and he couldn't order his hand to stop moving toward his forehead because his brain had ordered the movement and the neural pathways were clogged with that order. He could feel the impulse, the order, that tiny charge of electrical energy which was journeying from his brain to his hand. He could do nothing to stop the flow of that order. He could not blink his eyes. He tried to move his eyes, and felt the order go out and felt the infinitesimal beginning of movement and in thousands and thousands of years he'd be able to see the clock, on the port side of control. He realized, then, that it was going to go on and on. He sent the order to his vocal cords and was sad, because he knew that someday, eons away, when the universe as he knew it was altered, when the old Earth and the United Planets had long been consumed by their respective suns, the order would reach his throat and then over the next few eons the words would come thundering out. «My God.» He could think, and that added to the horror, to be aware. He was, for all practical purposes, alone. He could see Julie Rainbow, and there was a vast emptiness in him, for he knew that close as he was to her, he'd never, never be able to kiss those full lips, he would not even be able to communicate with her. He'd be alone forever with that sliding feeling in his guts. Ships had been lost, but only a few. Space travel was the safest, statistically, of all forms of travel. You were safer on a spaceship than in your living room in a major city on a highly civilized planet. He searched his memory. Yes, ships had disappeared, mostly during the war of a thousand years past. It gave him something to think about. In the tensions of action had fleet captains built generators to full power needlessly? Were there other ships caught in time and space like Rimfire? Were there men and women, thought to be long dead, alive, watching the slow eons crawl past with unblinking eyes, with that sliding, twisting eeriness in their bellies? He prayed. He prayed for others caught in the same web. He prayed for the crew and for Rimfire. He knew that he'd have plenty of time to say all the prayers he could remember and all that he could compose himself. He thought of the old Bible, that ancient book of odd, strange, and strangely beautiful language, the language of a young race. «Our father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.» He would be mad, of course. His active mind was imprisoned inside a frozen body. He could feel and sense the working mechanisms inside him. He would not age. Julie Rainbow would not age. He would be a raving madman inside a timeless prison. He passed time by exploring his own body. There was a strange freedom for his mind to roam, to feel things he'd never felt before. When he discovered that he could do something which men had tried to do for thousands of years, he knew that he would not go insane for a long time. He could unlock the doors to that vast and little-known portion of his mind, the unconscious, and he knew with certainty that the theorists were right.