He started from the original and began to adjust and tinker with the various sophisticated adjustments which were designed to enhance, refine, delete certain overtones, and he had to get help from the computer to arrive at the same sound Jan had found by accident. But it was there. First of all that disturbed area of tape was converted to a level of sound so low that it had to be amplified thousands of times and then the gadgets began twisting and enhancing and then it was there, not just a ghostly beginning but a good beginning to a pre-blink signal. He pulled a complete pre-blink signal from the 47's permanent tapes and did the same tricks with it. He could alter the tone of it, tune it, at will, once he programmed the process into the computer. But it still meant nothing, for all he was doing was altering the tone of sound. He was not changing the basic pre-blink signal in the slightest, only the byproduct of that signal after the unique emission had been converted into audible waves. He shrugged and put the tapes away and concentrated on the search as the hours crawled by slowly. With two hours to go before he woke Jan he began to think about the tapes again. Pre-blink signals were all the same. There was no such thing as different frequencies. The pre-blink signal had no wavelength. It was different, as different as light from sound. It could not be tuned, or altered, in any way. Could it? He shook his head. At least not by an Academy kick-out with a hole in his head. But there was a thought somewhere, or at least a near thought, which haunted him as he went about the familiar routine of search. He pounded his head with his fist. It was not the first time he had silently cursed his inability to form an elusive thought, to break through the barrier that seemed to block him off from a part of his thinking ability. «Damn, damn, damn,» he muttered. He was slumped in his chair, fingering the dent in his head, when Jan, fresh from sleep, awake a bit early, came in with the coffee. Her heart went out to him as she saw the look of intensity on his face, saw the fingers moving in a little frenzy of motion over the little depression in his skull. She occasionally tired of wearing the simple silken singlet. She'd dressed in a frilly little frock which was suitable for nothing much but entertaining at the Spacer's Rest and for making her husband forget any problems. He broke into a wide smile when he saw her, and then the coffee was good, and the talk good. The dress reminded him of the time when he was talking his head off trying to persuade her to marry him, and he was thinking seriously about letting the damned generator sit on full charge for a while. There were sweeter things to do than search endlessly for a ship that might or might not have been blown to nothing. «I think we deserve a little time off,» he grinned at her. «You're the skipper,» she said. He rose, bent to kiss her. «Race you to the bedroom.» «No fair,» she said. «My legs are shorter than yours.» «I'll give you a head start.» «That sounds fair,» she said, reaching up to kiss him. Oh, God, she was beautiful. She deserved all the best things that the galaxy had to offer her, not the isolation of life on board a Mule. She deserved much more than life had handed her, a tour of duty in a whorehouse, a broken-down tugboat loser. And he had a way to give it to her. All he had to do was find Rimfire. It blazed into his mind like a runaway comet. «The pre-blink signal guides the ship,» he said, straightening suddenly. «That, sir, is an abrupt change of subject,» Jan said. «Jan, that's what it's for. It has to be. All these centuries we've been looking on it as just something which was there, and we've even looked for ways to get rid of it because in times of war an enemy ship could have advance warning because of it. But it has to be there.» «I'm lost,» Jan admitted. «Don't you see?» He bent over her, his hands on the arms of her chair, his face near hers. «Look, we talk about locking onto the next blink beacon, right? It's standard procedure. An officer says, 'Lock onto blink beacon so-and-so.' But there's nothing to lock onto, because a blink beacon doesn't broadcast a signal or anything. It's just there. It has relay and recording equipment. But we 'lock onto' a beacon by inserting a predetermined coordinate into the navigation computer. We can even pick a coordinate at random and leap out into an area where there's no blink beacon, if we want to risk it.» «I agree,» Jan said. «But I don't see where you're going with this.» «We don't know a helluva lot about what goes on when a ship is in subspace.» He fingered his skull. «What if subspace is dimensionless and infinite? Some say it is. We dump a ship into it by the power of a generator. That ship has no motion, Jan. It can be sitting absolutely stationary when a blink begins and it's absolutely stationary when the blink ends. And yet there's movement in subspace, movement of some kind. That ship has to know where to go in subspace in order to emerge at a particular point in real space.» «So?» she asked. «So the pre-blink signal points the way.» He was pacing now, his fingers actually scratching at the dent. «Or maybe the pre-blink is the ship, and it arrives in the subspace form in the form of the pre-blink and—» He halted. «Damn, damn, damn.» She recognized the symptom. He'd come up against a blank wall in his thinking. «You're doing pretty good for a guy with a hole in his head,» she said encouragingly. «Go on.» «It's silly,» he said. «Not at all. You're making sense.» «Yeah, old Peter Jaynes figures out things that the scientists have been working on for centuries.» «Why not?» she asked. «Billy Bob Blink was a TV repairman.» Lord, she had faith in him, and he was stupid, stupid, unable to think. He paced. «The basic design of the blink generator hasn't changed in a thousand years,» he said. He was just blowing smoke. He knew it. He was just acting as if he could think to earn the admiration of the person who was his life. «No reason to change it,» he said. «You can't improve on the perfect machine.» «But you're saying that it could be changed?» she asked. «Oh, sure. Well, it has been changed. The first one had just enough power to blink an egg ten feet across Billy Bob's workshop, and it was ten by ten feet itself and tied into a computer the size of this ship. They've made them smaller.» He envisioned a generator. The heart of it was amazingly simple, an electronically shaped magnetic field in a cloud chamber, highly compressed. Most of the bulk of a generator was made up of the computer, which was necessary to make the multi-billion calculations required to shape the magnetic charge, and by the ionized chambers in which the charge was stored. «Pete, maybe you'd better sleep on it,» Jan suggested. «You'll have a fresh perspective on whatever it is you're working toward when you're rested.» «There's a body of research,» he muttered, speaking to himself. He pounded the thumb end of his fist onto his forehead. Jan could hear the sound of it, thump, thump, thump. She cringed, almost rose to stop him, then sighed and sat back. «Now who the hell was it?» he asked. «Larson. Parson.» Thump, thump. «You're going to beat your brains out,» she said. «What's left of them?» He paced. «Person. Lewson.» He snapped his fingers. «Geson. Jan, punch up Alex Geson on the library viewer. What I want is something about the field mechanics of a blink generator.» She had it within seconds. «Alex J. Greson,» she said. «A Definitive Study of Blink Field Mechanics.» «That's it.» He sat and started rolling the film. To Jan, it was a mishmash of complicated formulae, of incomprehensible scientific jargon. It took Pete back to second-year theory classes at the Academy. He skipped, read, fingered his skull, drank the coffee which Jan poured him. After two hours he was flipping back and forth between an analysis of the field in the first blink generators and what was, at the time of Greson's work, a modern generator.
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