Zach Hughes: Gold Star

Greson himself was long dead. His book was a standard on the subject of the blink field, and it was over three hundred years old. The work traced the development of the generator from its beginning, and much of the experimentation done by Greson had been termed useless. Endless experimentation had proved that only one configuration of magnetic field produced the blink effect. Only one configuration would cause an object, or a man, to cease to exist and exist almost simultaneously in another spot. Change the field and you had an expensive, powerful magnet capable of doing nothing but moving ions inside the cloud chamber. But there was something there, something which kept nagging at Pete. He turned off the reader, sighed. «Jan, I know I'm not much, but will you take a gamble with me?» «Don't you talk about my man like that,» she said, rising to go to him, to press against his shoulder and sooth her hand over his rumpled hair. «But I'll take any gamble with you.» «It's just money,» he said. «A good chunk out of our pay for this tour.» «You do what you need to do,» she said. He swiveled to the communications panel and activated the Blinkstater. It took a half hour to perform what could have been considered a minor miracle. He was connected to a computer long, long parsecs away on old Earth. All Academy cadets visited Earth at least once. The plebe class took their first outing on Earth. It would always be a high spot in Pete Jaynes' life. There he'd seen the museums, the preserved city, the vast, hundred-acre tract of original wilderness. The air had been cleaned over the centuries of its pre-space-age pollution. The streams ran clear and sweet. It had been like coming home. No one ever visited old Earth without that feeling, because from that small, blue planet man had struggled up over a thousand years ago, had flexed his wings on flying bombs, on combustion rockets. He'd walked on Earth's satellite in a miracle of dangerous engineering with those old fire-breathing dragons. He'd been crowded in his billions there on the good, blue planet, and he'd come close to possible termination of the race with his nuclear weapons. He'd actually detonated nuclear bombs in the clean, sweet air, oblivious to the poison of radioactivity. And then a TV repairman started fiddling with a compressed magnetic field and sent an egg ten feet across his workshop. Old Earth. «I'm going to take you there,» he promised Jan, as the Earthside Space Information computer flashed a set fee figure on the screen to cause him to gulp. The price had gone up. Man, had it ever. Well, you couldn't have every ship in space and every computer on the United Planets digging into old Earth's store of information. The computers there, complete as they were, wouldn't stand the traffic. He punched in his order and waited. The ship's computer accepted the blinked information with blinking lights and a low hum, and then it was over in seconds and he'd spent more money at one time than he'd ever spent in his life. They'd have enough left, after the advances were deducted from their tour pay and bonus, after paying for that few seconds of Earth computer time, to spend maybe one week on Tigian before shipping out again. He had to find the Rimfire now. He just had to. And he was frightened. There he was, a man with a hole in his head, a man who had lost his power of deductive reason, thinking he could discover something that millions of scientists had overlooked. He gulped coffee and punched buttons. The information he'd purchased from the museum computer on old Earth came up on the tape, and he fiddled with sound. First there was a copy of the first recording of a pre-blink signal, taken from the original machine built by Billy Bob Blink. Then, at one-hundred-year intervals, there were the sounds of pre-blink signals taken from ships which represented the state of the generator art at the time. «Pete, what is it?» Jan asked, when he froze, turned, stared at her with eyes wider than usual. «Just bear with me, kid,» he said. «Maybe I haven't blown our money in vain.» He punched information into the computer, worked for three solid hours, not at all sleepy, and then he sat back and listened, and there were the comparisons. He grinned at Jan in triumph. «Lock us in on NE793 and leap,» he said. «I'll tell you about it when we get there.» Jan obeyed. Before she pushed the blink button she said, «There's a ship between us and 793.» «Yeah,» Pete said. «That would be the Fleet Class tug from downrange toward New Earth. It doesn't matter.» He'd been doing some thinking about that Fleet Class tug during the long days of search. She had the same information he had, that Rimfire had last been reported at NE793 on the New Earth range. Her crew would be doing exactly what he was doing, taking short blinks, searching the blink lane, coming to meet the 47 somewhere between the two beacons. He had been praying all along that if Rimfire had dropped out of subspace, without power, somewhere in that parsecs-long blink she'd be closer to the 47's end of the range than to the Fleet Class tug's end. He didn't like the odds. There'd be four men on board the fancy tug, and they'd be working as hard and as fast as they could, with better detection gear, meaning that they could take longer blinks and still search the empty space. Ships could pass along the same blink route in subspace. It was as if neither ship existed. Well, let the other tug do the drudgery of searching the blink lane. The old Academy kick-out without deductive reasoning had something to try. It might not work, but at the moment it made sense. What he'd determined, without needing deductive reasoning, was so elementary that it would take someone like him to see it. It was too simple for a man with brains to waste time on. The basic design and function of the blink generator had never changed, but it had been made lighter and smaller with advances in electronics. As the centuries had passed, the generators had been refined to store the charge in smaller chambers, to compress the magnetic field ever denser. Pete was risking his and Jan's chance at a good future on the sounds he'd heard on the tape from an old Earth museum computer. It scared hell out of him. «Let's go, honey,» he said, and then he was looking visual at the last known point of Rimfire's voyage, NE793 on the New Earth range. Chapter Four «Honey,» Pete said, «what I plan to do is against all the rules.» «I won't tell if you won't,» Jan said. «If it goes wrong we'll never get a job in space again.» She thought a moment. «I don't think they'd take you on at the Spacer's Rest.» It was a healthy element in their relationship that they could joke about something that once had made both of them uncomfortable, her tour of duty in the spacer's playhouse. «Is it going to be dangerous, Pete?» she asked, after a moment of silence. He hesitated before answering. His impulse was to lie to her. On consideration, however, he decided he owed it to her to tell her everything. «It could be,» he said. «I'm going to be doing some things that could probably get my license lifted if the service ever heard about it. I don't think there's any possibility of blowing up the ship. Nothing like that. It's just that I'm going to be doing things that have never been done before.» «I see,» she said. «It's all your fault,» he said, with a grin. «You're the one who messed around with the tape and turned that disturbed area into the sound of a pre-blink signal.» «I don't understand.» «Well, it's really simple. So simple that even I thought of it.» She interrupted. «If it's so simple, why haven't others thought of it?» «Because it's too simple, I guess,» he said. «A simple man like me believes there's a reason for everything, you know? I mean, I'm not one of the most pious fellows, as you well know, but I believe that something out there looks after the universe.» He shrugged. «You see, a scientist will beat his brains out for a lifetime trying, for example, to find out why the pre-blink signal goes ahead of a ship by microseconds. I'm so simple I just accept it. It's there, and there's a reason why it's there, and maybe God put it there for a reason.» «Ah,» she said. «You said something about the pre-blink signal's being a guide for the ship.» «Well, it could be. I don't know. I know this. When I was messing around with the pre-blink signals recorded over the centuries, the ones we paid through the nose for, I matched your signal, the one on the tape from NE794, with a signal from a ship of the line which went out from old Earth almost one thousand years ago.» «But the basic design of the generator has never changed.» «No. I wanted to see the tapes on NE793 before I talked to you about this idea of mine. That's what I've been doing. Listen to this.» He played the pre-blink signal of Rimfire, the one which had been recorded on the tape of the last beacon she'd contacted. To Jan it sounded the same as any pre-blink signal, loud and clear, speaking of the vast power of Rimfire's generator. She shrugged. «Okay, now I'm tuning it, the way you tuned your brief little signal.» The new sound matched Jan's signal exactly. «What she was doing, Jan, was sending a split signal. There's no word, yet, for the difference. But one of them, when converted to sound, is different. It has the same sound characteristics as that old ship of the line a thousand years ago. I think maybe it has to do with the fact that Rimfire's generator is the biggest and most powerful one built yet. I don't know how to put it, but maybe all that power created a, well, for lack of a better word, a harmonic.» «I'm listening, but I still don't understand,» Jan said. «Well, just suppose that the ship, in whatever state it exists in subspace, does ride the pathway laid down by the pre-blink signal. Suppose Rimfire's new generator was putting out two pre-blink signals, each one different. The destination of a ship is determined by computer, and the computer places the order inside the generator's computer, as determined by the coordinates punched in. Suppose that harmonic, or whatever that second signal is, overrode the pre-blink signal determined by the chosen coordinates.» «I think I understand,» Jan said. «Then she'd go off like on a tangent. She could be anywhere.» «Or nowhere,» Pete said. «Or in the core of a sun.» «I take it that you think you can do something to our generator to make it put out a pre-blink signal to match that harmonic on Rimfire's signal?» «The computer says I can,» he said. «It's possible because this old generator on the 47 is such a horse. We can leap with a fraction of a full charge, so I think I can reduce the intensity of the magnetic field in the chamber. It'll be trial and error. When we get a sound-tone match with the harmonic then we'll try sending a stat on that power. If Rimfire went off somewhere on that harmonic maybe we can contact her.» «Sounds logical to me,» Jan said. «And you're the man who thinks he can't figure things out?» She kissed him. When he first issued the instructions to the computer a red light flashed and words appeared on the screen. «Your order not within test specifications,» the computer told him. He punched in instructions to override test specifications. His fingers tended to slip on the keys, because he was nervous, and the perspiration was popping out on his finger pads. «Unusual action to be recorded,» the computer told him. He punched in a program. Inside the generator the dense, compact magnetic field began to expand. He had begun with the generator on one-quarter of full charge. The ship's servomechanisms hummed, clicked, whined. As the magnetic field became less dense, and expanded, the quarter charge expanded accordingly, almost filling the available charge-storage chambers. «Well, honey, wanta change your mind and tell me to forget it?» «You promised me Martian emeralds,» Jan said. She sat in her command chair, tense, but trying not to show it. «Here goes.» He punched the button. They lived. Things were normal. There was a slightly different feel to the blink, but they were back in normal space a short distance from the beacon. He checked the sound generated by the pre-blink signal, compared it to the sound he was trying to duplicate. He hit the exact tone of the Rimfire's harmonic signal on the fifth try. The blink had taken them back to NE793. He double-checked, then swiveled to the communications panel. «Rimfire, this is Stranden 47.» he sent, using the harmonic, and the ship's instruments saw the Blinkstat message go out, but not toward any of the established blink beacons on the range. The signal left the 47 on an angle pointing out toward the rim, into a sac of empty space, a black, huge hole in the starfields. The instruments looked through the blackness, saw only the intergalactic void beyond. Twice more he sent the message. Then they waited. If Rimfire's generator had malfunctioned and sent the ship out into that black void, she could be far, far outside the galaxy, so far that she would be lost forever. The direction taken by the Blinkstat led to infinity, with, perhaps, another island universe somewhere out there so far away that the ship's optics could not even detect it. «Well,» he said, after a quarter hour during which there was nothing, «it was a good try.» «That's it?» Jan asked. «That's all we're going to do?» «That's it,» he said. She keyed the message for transmission one more time, worked with the communications bank, turned the signal detector to full power so that there was a noise of space static on the speakers. Nothing. «Wait,» Pete said, as she started to turn down the volume. «Send that message one more time.» He leaped to the communications bank, his fingers flying, adjusting, turning, cutting out the space static. Jan sent the stat and heard it come back instantly, faint, distorted. Pete wheeled to check the tape, amplified the tape, enhanced it, ran it through an electronic maze to purify it, strengthen it. It was, when he played it back, 47's own message. «Rimfire, this is Stranden 47.» «She's out there, Jan,» he whispered. «Oh, Lord, she's out there.» «How do you know?» «That was an echo off a Blinkstat receiver. It couldn't be anything else. Our stat went into Rimfire's receiver.» He worked with the panel. «Look, it works like this.» He sent the Blinkstat message downrange toward a distant beacon, the communications equipment still on high volume. The echo which bounced back from the receiving beacon was louder than the weak echo from the black sac of space. «See what I mean? There's only one thing that will bounce back an echo, and that's a stat receiver. There's only one possible stat receiver that could be out there in that empty space, and that's Rimfire's.» He did a little dance. He pranced around the control room and swept Jan from her chair and held her close. «We've got her, honey. We've got her. Martian emeralds? I'll put so many on you you'll have to walk slowly, there'll be so much weight. Hell, we can buy a planet. We can do anything. We'll be free.» She was laughing. She loved seeing him so happy. She kissed him, swiftly, hard, a wet little peck, and he sobered and kissed her hard and held her. Then he pushed her away. «Let's get with the program,» he said. First he calibrated the distance represented by the returned echo. His face lost its happy grin when he had the results. He couldn't believe the distance involved. A jump of parsecs, two or three, was a long jump. The echo came from over six parsecs away, an impossible distance. And yet it was there, repeated tests showed that it was there, and he had to trust his equipment. He had the computer figure coordinates which would put him within visual of the stat receiver which had sent back the echo, and then he prayed silently. «Jan, we don't have to do this.» She looked at him seriously. «I think we do.» «If it were just me—» «You can't get rid of me.» She put her arms around him. «What was I without you? What would I be now if you hadn't been so damned persistent? I go where you go, buddy.» He postponed it. He ordered a full meal from food preparation's servomechanisms, and they ate in the little dining room, the lights turned low, a scene from old Earth on the decopanel, a scene of white beaches and blue water and white, flying birds. Then he made love to her, and she began to be frightened, because he was so serious about it, as if it might be the last time. «You're worried,» she said, as they went into the control room. «A little.» «Don't be. It'll be all right. We'll find the Rimfire and bring her back and—» «That's what we're going to do,» he said. «Want me to do it?» she asked, as his hand hesitated over the blink button. He had returned the generator to its test-specification condition, the magnetic field compact, the charge full. He had allowed a considerable leeway when he figured the coordinates for the jump. «Hold it,» he said, moving his hand, putting the safety over the blink button. «Lord,» Jan said, «I was all ready for it.» «We owe this much to the company,» he said. «We need to tell them what we're going to do.» «They might give us orders not to do it.» He considered. He compromised. He put it all into Blinkstat form, sent it the short distance to the NE 793 beacon with instructions to hold for transmission until further orders or seventy-two hours later, whichever came first. He took the action for a couple of reasons. First, he owed some loyalty to his company. After all, it was the Stranden Corporation which had made it possible for him to be with Jan. Second, if something went wrong they'd know where to look for him and for Rimfire. It was, in the end, Jan who pushed the button. She wanted to. He let her. The 47 emerged into the total blackness of empty space. The viewports showed nothing, no tiny glint of star, no spread of the galaxy. Pete manipulated the instruments. The mass of the galaxy was behind them. It glowed, a soft, warm-looking light in the blackness. He ran a star search. A few rim stars were within detection distance, lying behind them. And there was something else. Something nearby. His heart leaped. He activated all instruments, and the object was only a short ten-thousand-mile hop away. That was the distance he'd allowed for safety when he'd programmed the blink. «Ah ha,» he said, figuring coordinates. «That's her.» He blinked and his hands trembled with the thought of the riches that would be his as he adjusted the opticals. He pushed the button to activate the search screen, expected to see Rimfire, huge, majestic. He saw, instead, a tiny metallic object alone in that deep, black space, and it took only a few tests to find out that it was a blink beacon. He moved the ship closer. It was a beacon unlike any he'd ever seen. The configuration was all wrong, and yet it was there. It had a strange lack of grace about it. It was a studded square. It gleamed in the searchlight of the 47. He sent out a cable. The contents of the beacon's tape made only a small disturbance on the surface of the 47's tape. The same kind of disturbance as that brief little signal Jan had discovered. He tinkered with it, found that it responded to the same frequencies as the thousand-year-old pre-blink signal, and then he was digesting some startling figures. Just under one thousand years in the past, a fleet had passed the lonely beacon so far out into the darkness beyond the periphery. And then for a thousand years there was nothing until loud and clear, there came a pre-blink signal which was recorded to indicate that the blinking ship had skipped past the beacon, flying through subspace outward toward the total blackness. Jan looked outward toward emptiness and shivered. Pete fingered his skull. «She went past,» Jan said. «Out there.» He felt a great sadness. There was no way of knowing where the wild harmonic in Rimfire's generator had taken her. She might still be going. But there was another intriguing question. What was this ancient blink beacon doing out here? And if there was one, was there another, farther out? He put the detecting instruments on full power. Out there, in total emptiness, in intergalactic space, there was a single star. The star was at a distance which made it undetectable except on the highest radiotelescope amplification. But with that information came new hope. The presence of the blink beacon indicated that once a great fleet of ships had journeyed outward into the darkness. He sent stats, got an answering echo from another blink beacon near that dim, distant star. Once again the 47 blinked outward toward nothing. When Pete checked the optics he saw a glowing sun. Difficult to believe that a sun, a sun very much like old Earth's Sol, could have been lost in the vastness of that empty space outside the galaxy, so far from any populated areas that not even man's most powerful instruments could ever detect its presence. Things were getting interesting. Chapter Five The Ramco Lady Sandy had a crew of four, all male. She was a Fleet Class tug, half again as large as one of the old Mules. Her crew's quarters rivaled a Tigian resort hotel in luxury. She had the latest in equipment, including search and detection instruments which, during the race to cover the distance between blink beacons NE794 and 93, gave her a distinct advantage. Her crew knew that. They knew that the Lady Sandy could cover roughly two-thirds of the distance before the Mule coming from the other end met them. Brad Fuller and Jarvis Smith were the senior team of the Lady Sandy, with Fuller the designated captain. They'd been in space together for a lot of years. They'd helped take the Lady Sandy out of the Argos shipyard when she was gleaming new. They were over two years into their third three-year tour on the Lady. Before Rimfire's disappearance, things had been getting a little sticky on the Lady. Brad and Jarvis were breaking in a new team, first tour on a tug, and one of them was getting a little weird. The man was a drinker. His name was Buck King, he was in his late thirties, and he'd consumed his own personal alcohol ration within the first six months. He'd held it well, however, so Fuller simply told him that when his stock was gone, that was it. There was food aplenty, but the company allowed just enough alcoholic spirits to make a man remember, with an occasional after-dinner drink, that such things existed. Jarvis Smith had caught Buck King trying to break into his personal liquor locker, and there'd been a fight. Fuller and King's partner, Tom Asher, had intervened, but not before the more bulky Smith had pretty well closed one of King's eyes. And there was almost a year to go. Brad Fuller couldn't understand how a fine ship like the Lady Sandy had gotten stuck with a post on the New Earth range. There wasn't a chance in hell of getting a Lloyd's on that route. Four ships per year had passed them, and that on the ranges crossing the New Earth range. He wondered if he and Jarvis had drawn such a nonprofit post because of that fight Jarvis had started back on Tigian during the last planetside R&R. «Dammit, man, you've got to quit being such a hothead,» Fuller growled at his partner when he finally got Smith separated from Buck King. «He tried to steal my booze,» Jarvis said, still wanting to do damage to Buck King's face. «Stealing a man's booze is the lowest.» The situation had calmed into a wary truce. Asher and King kept to themselves, doors closed when they were off duty in their quarters. When it became evident that something had happened to the big new X&A ship, Fuller wasted no time. He was already blinking to Rimfire's last reported position when he called up the off-duty crew from sleep for a conference. «I want you to listen and listen good,» he told them, returning Buck King's glower. He laid it out for them. He was in position to begin the search in normal space. «First guy that goofs off, starts trouble, he answers to me,» he told them. «Our end of a Lloyd's on this baby will make it easy living for the rest of our lives. We're gonna find her. We're gonna run this ship service-style. If you've read your contract and the service regulations you know that during times when a ship is in danger the skipper of a tug has service status. In case you don't know what that means, it means this ain't no democracy, gentlemen. It means that I'm the man. It means that if I think someone is jeopardizing the mission I have the right to punish.» He patted the holster which he'd put on. It contained an APSAF. The initials stood for Anti-Personnel Small Arms Fatal. It was called a saffer. But all of them, even Buck King, got excited thinking about the salvage value of the U.P.S. Rimfire. They fell to, working six on, six off in teams, one man ready at the end of a blink to scan the normal space while the other began the charge for the next blink. Brad Fuller and Jarvis Smith were on duty when the ship's signal bong went off and the reading was a blinking ship coming downrange and passing them. Fuller delayed the next blink. He knew there was a Stranden Mule out there working its way toward them. Now that Mule had leaped past them back to NE793. Fuller didn't like it. It was SOP to search the area as they were searching it. It was obvious that the Mule had not found Rimfire, and he was operating under the same rules. Why had he abandoned the search and leaped back to NE793? «Maybe he knows something we don't know,» Jar-vis Smith suggested. Jarvis had grown a full black beard. Brad Fuller sometimes called him the Woolly Bugger. Fuller knew that there'd been no further information from New Earth. If any message had come up the range the Lady would have received it, too. And yet it worried him. He sent a stat, limited it to two beacons. «Stranden 47.» he sent, «note you abandon search. Are you in trouble?» There was no answer. «He knows something,» Jarvis growled. It was the code for Stranden 47 to answer. A man could get his license lifted for not answering a stat addressed to his ship. «We're going back,» Fuller said, making up his mind suddenly. He could almost taste that contract money. He wasn't about to let some wreck of an old Mule beat him to a fortune. He recorded the Lady's position so that they could blink back to the exact spot and resume the search. Then the Lady was at NE793, all alone. «Maybe their communications went out,» Jarvis said, «and they're blinking in for repair.» «They'd be heading down the Tigian range if that was it,» Fuller said, scratching the stubble on his chin. «No, something's up. Get a cable onto that beacon and take a read on the tape.» They had the information within minutes. Fuller studied it, handed the readout to Smith. Smith whistled, looked up toward the viewer. They could see the blackness out there. «I don't know, Brad,» Smith said. «It sounds crazy as all hell to me, messing around with the generator field.» «I figure a Lloyd's on the Rimfire would be worth maybe two million each,» Fuller said. Smith sighed. «I guess we'd better call Asher and that King bastard.» «Reckon so,» Fuller agreed. He briefed Asher and King. «I said this ain't a democracy,» he said, «but this is a little different. I guess we'd better take a vote on it.» «Smith,» Tom Asher said, «you're the power-room engineer. What do you think will happen if you start fooling around with the field the way Pete Jaynes did?» «Well,» Jarvis said, «we're not doing anything critical. Jaynes tells us exactly how to do it. It must have worked for him.» «We don't know it did,» King said. «We know he's gone,» Fuller said. «And we know he's off the range.» «Yeah,» King said, «and he could be dead out there.» He looked at the viewport and shuddered visibly. There was something just a little spooky about looking into space and not seeing a single point of a star. «All right,» Fuller said. «Jarvis says he can tune the generator to follow the Mule. It makes sense to me to think that Jaynes knows something. I know the guy's reputation. He's a good tugboater. He wouldn't be risking his ship unless he had a pretty good idea the Rimfire is out there somewhere. I say that if three of us say go, we go.» «I think it should be unanimous,» Tom Asher said. «Majority,» Jarvis growled. «Okay, okay,» Asher said. «I say we give it try.» «That makes three,» Fuller said. «I don't even get to vote?» Buck King asked, leaping to his feet. «Vote any way you damned well please,» Jarvis said. «I'm in,» King said. «Good for you,» Jarvis told him. It took Jarvis Smith longer to find the correct size of the magnetic field than it had taken Pete Jaynes. Then there was more time spent while they discovered that there was a faint echo from a blink beacon from out in that empty area of space. They arrived at the beacon, read its tapes, saw the passage of a fleet of ships a thousand years in the past, saw the passing signal of a ship, probably Rimfire, and saw that the Stranden Mule had been at the beacon. They blinked out into normal space near a Sol-type sun. There was nothing nearby. Fuller immediately began to run a search for a ship, either the Stranden Mule or the Rimfire or both. Tom Asher stood beside his partner near the viewport, looking back toward the edge-on disc of the galaxy. It looked to Asher like an illustration in an astronomy book. It looked damned beautiful. «Man, that's something,» Asher said. King didn't answer. «What's the matter?» Asher asked. King put up a hand and wiped his forehead. His hand was shaking. «It's too far,» King said. There was a tremble in his voice. «It's too far, Tom. We're too far from home. We ain't never gonna get back.» «Don't talk crazy,» Asher said. «We're two blinks from the New Earth range, that's all.» «Too far,» King said. In spite of himself, Asher felt a little chill go up his back. Chapter Six One small star had strayed from the fold. One little sun existed all alone, so far from the rim of the galaxy that it would have taken a planet-size radiotelescope to see it. Stranden 47 was not an exploration ship. She did not have the instrumentation to run an analysis on the star, but a spacer sees a lot of suns, and to Pete's experienced eyes the sun gave some of its secrets. He knew that it was a relatively small sun, and that it fell generally into type G, much like old Sol. The 47 began to move at sublight speed toward the sun, and although Pete had been awake for twenty-four hours, he was not sleepy. Jan was with him, of course. She operated the detection equipment. It was she who located the blink beacon. The beacon was located one old astronomical unit from the sun. It was identical to the beacon they'd examined back there in space. Its tape was identical, too. This time Pete, whistling to hide his nervous excitement, checked current readings first and found something which stopped his whistle and sent his hopes flying away into the emptiness out beyond the isolated sun. There was a signal. It was a passing signal, just as there'd been a recent passing signal on the last beacon. If that signal had been left by Rimfire the X&A ship had blinked on past the beacon and the lonely sun out into nothingness. Pete checked and double-checked. The tape recorded the passage of a vast fleet a thousand years ago. Between that passage and the passing signal of the Rimfire there was nothing. He sat down, fingers on his scalp. It had all been for nothing. Rimfire had not dropped back into normal space. Jan, meanwhile, had been using the detection instruments. «Hey,» she yelled. She'd turned the optical scope outward, searching toward intergalactic space. «Pete! Pete!» He leaped to her side, made adjustments. «There,» she said. There was something millions of miles away. He began to move the ship at its maximum sublight speed, a speed which was not inconsiderable. The image on the optics was resolved after a few hours' running. The sun was not alone. Far away, at a distance which seemed impossible, a small, icy planet circled her. That was all he needed. An ice planet. But Jan was excited. He squeezed her. «We'll call it Jan's Sun,» he said. «And you can pick a name for the planet.» «Can we name them, really?» «Maybe. We'll have to check the Galactic Atlas. Someone was out here a thousand years ago. They may be named already.» «Oh, shoot,» she said. He busied himself with the atlas. It was something to do. He started with the area of the New Earth range and zeroed in on the big, black hole and there was nothing. «You've got yourself a planet,» he said. «I want to see it close up.» What the hell. As they moved toward the planet at sublight speed he searched the surrounding space for Rimfire. Then they were orbiting the ball of ice. Their limited instrumentation and their optic instruments showed the planet to be Pluto-size, solid ice, with, perhaps, a metallic core. She was so far from her sun that she swam in eternal darkness. She would become a tiny footnote in the Galactic Atlas. «Pete,» Jan asked, «isn't it unusual for a sun to have just one planet?» «Unusual,» he agreed. «Not unknown.» «But usually where there's one there are others.» «Most of the time.» He, too, had allowed himself one crazy moment of wild hope when the 47 emerged near a sun. Every spaceman dreams of discovering a new planet, a life-zone planet. He'd searched the life zone first thing when the 47 first emerged. «Honey?» She lifted her eyes from the optics. «We've lost,» he said. «We haven't looked much.» «She's not here. She went on past.» There was one more thing to do. He sent random stats off into the blackness, searched for an echo. Nothing. «We haven't lost. We've found a new sun, a new planet.» «Yeah. We'll get a letter of congratulations from X&A.» «Well, that's more than most people get,» she said. «It's time to go back, honey,» he said. «We need to get back to the range and report.» «Can't we stay just for a while?» «Why? Nothing here. We've seen it all.» «Well, I at least want a good look at my sun,» she said. He humored her. He went to the larder and came back with two drinks, sat moodily, eyes downcast, drinking his while Jan studied the distant sun, and the 47, having been turned, moved at sublight speed back toward the sun. «It's beautiful,» Jan said. «If you've seen one sun you've seen them all,» Pete said. «But this is ours.» Big deal, he was thinking, as he mentally kissed goodbye to all his dreams. With the salvage money from Rimfire they could have bought their own tug. They could have gone out to one of the new planets and bought thousands of acres of virgin wilderness, built a private empire. Or if they'd chosen to, they could simply have picked a nice planet and lived in luxury and leisure for the rest of their lives. Now it was all gone. He'd spent a good portion of the remaining bonus money to get the information from the old Earth computer. They'd have a few days on Tigian and then they'd be back on a Mule at some remote junction of blink routes. He grinned. Hell, what was so bad about that? He leaped up and hugged Jan, laughing. She turned in his arms. «What's so funny?» «Me,» he said. «Stupid me. Here I am with my lower lip hanging because we didn't find Rimfire, thinking that all is lost. But, babe, we have each other.» «Yes, we do,» she said, kissing him. «And it's all right, Pete. It was a nice dream. But let me tell you this, buster. I've been happier on this damned old tug than I've ever been in my life, and I'm ready to sign on for about two hundred years of duty with you.» His eyes glistened, formed tears. «Why, Peter Jaynes,» she whispered, kissing one of the tears away. «God, I'm so lucky to have you,» he said, his voice choked. The universe was in his arms, all he ever needed. He could feel sorrow for Rimfire's crew, but not for himself. He was a happy man. «Take as long as you like to look at your sun,» he said. She went back to the optics. She could see the flares shooting up from the disc of the sun. She was fascinated. The 47 moved at sublight speed at an angle which would bring her to within one astronomical unit of the sun in passing. Behind them, Jan's ice planet was moving in its solitary orbit in the opposite direction. The second planet had been on the opposite side of the sun. Even after it cleared the intervening mass of the star, the light of the sun hid it from the optics and from Jan's eyes. Pete had the generator on charge, building for the two blinks back to the New Earth range. They had taken time out to eat. Jan went back to the optic viewer for one last look at Jan's Star, and when she'd finished looking she made one more, just one more sweep, searching, searching. Her cry was a near-scream. It made Pete's hair stand on end. He leaped to her side. She couldn't get the words out. «L—l—l—look,» she stammered, pointing. The planet swam there in space, almost a precise astronomical unit from the sun. The ship's motion past the sun had altered the viewpoint so that the planet was no longer hidden from them by the glare of radiated energy. Even at that distance there was a definite disc shape. Pete punched up the image, enhanced it electronically. The enhancement caused his breath to catch in his throat. The distant planet, definitely in the sun's life zone, showed the blue-and-white colors of a water world. Too impatient to wait for sublight speed to get them closer, Pete took readings, found a satellite of the planet, picked a clear area, had the computer figure coordinates, and blinked. The 47 came into normal space at a distance of a quarter of a million miles from the planet. She was a beautiful sight. They were just out beyond the orbit of the planet's moon. The moon was visible out of the starboard viewer. But it was the planet which held their attention. One of Pete's favorite decopanel scenes was old Earth viewed from space, a good, blue planet, a planet which screamed life to the eyes. And there, in his optical viewer, was another Earth, Earth-sized, blue-and-white. Water. Out of infinite combinations of distance, sun size, combination of elements, another water world had been formed. The odds against it were astronomical. Yet, there it was. A beautiful, blue planet. He put the image on maximum magnification and enhancement and they could see the swirl of a weather system, white clouds, the unmistakable blue of an ocean, snow-covered poles. Jan was beside herself, jumping up and down in her excitement. «Closer,» she yelled. «Let's go closer.» Pete turned the optics to the planet's moon. He saw a lifeless, cratered surface. He turned back to the planet. His fingers were toying with the hole in his head. He was remembering that fleet of ships which had passed two blink beacons a thousand years ago. And there were questions. Why was this sun, this life-zone planet, not listed in the Galactic Atlas? Obviously, men in blink ships had visited her a thousand years ago. How had the knowledge of her become lost? He felt the ship move. Jan was at the controls, moving the 47 closer to the planet at sublight speed. He kept his eyes on the optics. He used the few instruments he had. His equipment had been designed to spot a ship in space, a ship with lots of metals. The planet gave him a huge metallic reading, of course. She'd have metals at her core and in her crust. He could not even guess, short of going so near that the optics could pick up surface details, if there were people on the planet. There wasn't a life-zone planet known to the U.P. that was unpopulated. Life-zone planets were so rare that a wave of settlement began immediately when one was discovered. There was something strange about the situation. There'd been ship traffic here a thousand years ago. There could still be people down there. If so, they'd been cut off from civilization for a millennium. «Jan,» he said, «I want you to be ready. Punch in the coordinates of the midpoint blink beacon. If I tell you, hit the button and don't ask questions, okay?» «Okay,» she said. The sublight flux drive edged the 47 closer. Continents began to be defined on the planet below. They were now inside the moon's orbit. Pete was scanning the planet's surface eagerly, but was still too far away to see detail. The startling tone of the communications gong jerked her head around. It was a weak, incomplete gong. He recognized it immediately. It was the same ghostly almost-gong that had started the whole thing. Pete leaped to the computer and began punching instructions. He knew what to do this time. The program was already in the computer, so it took just seconds to alter the field of the generator, a few more seconds, as the communications gong began to sound, to see the stat message begin to emerge in print and to hear a metallic voice intoning words which sent Pete into even more frenzied action. «You are in peril, identify. You are in peril, identify.» Pete punched quickly. «U.P.S. Stranden 47.» He sent it. The metallic voice ceased. The communications gong went silent. «Stranden 47 requests communication,» Pete sent. The answer was silence. «Who are you?» Pete sent. Silence. He kept trying. There were people down there. Once again their hopes had been dashed, because the monetary reward for the discovery of a life-zone planet made the salvage money on Rimfire seem insignificant. But there were people there and they'd been cut off from the United Planets for a thousand years. That alone was a discovery. That alone kept Pete at the communications board, begging for contact. «Pete,» Jan said, in a strained voice, «you'd better have a look at this.» They had been moving ever closer to the planet. Neither of them had seen the long streaks of fire which arced up from both the northern and southern continents of the planet. But the time Jan looked and adjusted focus the shapes were there, long, sleek, antique. They trailed tails of fire. «Holy jumping—» Pete was mesmerized. It was like something out of a period piece, a space thriller. He watched the antique rockets reaching up for them, the Stranden 47 herself helping to close the distance with her forward speed. He put the instruments on them, and they were metal and something else. Radiation is every spacer's enemy. Every ship is equipped to detect and measure it. There had not been nuclear reactors onboard spaceships for hundreds of years, but there is radiation in space, fields of it, and some, suns give off some of the more deadly varieties, so the 47 could sense the nuclear warheads on the tips of the oncoming missiles. Pete took one last, fascinated look. No man alive had seen such a sight. Real rockets. Real antiques. Tails of fire and heads of death. Then he leaped for the control panel and, with the lead missiles getting too close for comfort, forgot that he had the generator in the altered mode. He felt his insides slide. They seemed to come out of his navel and hang there for an eternity. Then the ship was back in normal space near the midpoint blink beacon. He breathed a sign of relief, but it was premature. Jan, at the viewers, gasped. «Two of them came with us,» she said. He could see them clearly. They came side by side, only hundreds of yards apart, more deadly than he'd imagined. They were equipped with small blink generators. It was absolutely anachronistic, rockets with blink capability. He had to do something fast. If he blinked again he'd emerge into normal space with the two nuclear-tipped rockets in the same relative position on his tail. His fingers flew. The rockets came closer, closer. They were so near that if they went up the 47 might go with them, or at least be bathed in the radiation of the nuclear explosion. He had it right, selected coordinates at random for a spot a few thousand miles away, but in the mode of the test specifications of the 47's generator. He hit the button just as the lead rocket, exploded by proximity, began to blossom into nuclear fire, then he was in the clear and the optics showed no rockets. Off there, toward the midpoint blink beacon, a new sun flared briefly and then was gone. They'd have to avoid that area. The 47's hull was radiation-resistant, but not to the extent of blocking out all of the products of nuclear fission. «Systems check,» he said. He'd blinked the 47 in the altered mode, and he wanted to see he hadn't done any damage. Jan started the check. He took the communications bank. «They are not very friendly,» Jan said. «I think it's time we went back on station,» Pete said. «We'll report in and let the fleet handle that little planet back there.» He was reading tapes, high-speed search. He had to shift back and forth, because he'd made two blinks, one on test-specification mode, the other on the thousand-year-old mode. It was on the old mode that he found the information which made him change his mind about going back on station. The instruments had been searching while he punched in the altered mode and during the time he was on it, back there when the rockets were coming and during the time the signal gong had been sounding because of the warning message from the planet. But the signal gong had also been ringing because the instruments had spotted a ship. The readings showed it was a ship of some size, recorded its shape. The ship lay dead in space at a distance of about half a million miles from the hostile but beautiful planet. The configuration meant only one thing. They had found the Rimfire. She was stationary. The instruments recorded a total lack of power emanations from her. She was dead in space, helpless. She was too near a planet which shot out nuclear missiles to be safe. Pete had no idea of the penetration of that planet's detection instruments, but if they should spot Rimfire out there a half million miles into space and send rockets after her, Rimfire would be destroyed. He didn't want to go back. He'd had enough of being scared out of his skin. But he had no choice. He obtained Rimfire's coordinates from the instruments, punched in, blinked. There's a limit even to excitement. He'd known exaltation when he first thought he had the answer and had Rimfire within his grasp, even greater excitement thinking about the reward, the share of development, when he felt they'd discovered a new life-zone planet. Now Rimfire was clearly visible on his optics and he was closing on her and instead of excitement he felt a gnawing little doubt. He kept his detection instruments pointed toward the distant planet. Even as he closed on Rimfire Jan said, «Five of them, Pete.» He took a look. They had cleared the planetglow and were pinpoints of light with tiny tails. And he'd led them right to Rimfire. His fingers scratched his skull, digging, trying to force his brain to work. First thing he had to do was lead them away from Rimfire. There was time, however. He eased the 47 closer. The sleek and beautiful X&A ship was now only a hundred yards off the 47's bow. He tried the communicators. Nothing. And it was puzzling, very puzzling, when a Blinkstat seemed to go directly through Rimfire with no echo. He was near enough now to send out a cable. He sent it snaking out, waited for it to connect. The distance was in feet, then inches, and he was forming his words. His voice would go down the cable, go through Rimfire 's hull to become audible sound waves inside. He tried to think of something historic to say. The best he could come up with was, «Hello, Rimfire, you look as if you could use some help.» And then he'd say, «Captain, do you accept a Lloyd's contract?» He was forming the words, savoring them, when the cable touched Rimfire's hull. And kept going. The cable went through Rimfire as if she hadn't been there, reached the limit of its length. He hauled it in, tried once again. The rockets coming from the unfriendly planet were still there, main engines cut off, streaming silently through space, reaching for them. But there was still time. He circled Rimfire, trying to make his mind work. When Rimfire came between them and the sun there was no shadow cast by the ship. Looking at her he could see the sun through her. The Rimfire was a ghost. She lay there, dead in space, three-dimensional, real and yet unreal. «Like a hologram,» Jan said. Pete didn't understand, and he didn't have time to worry. He had five rockets to worry about. They were still a long way off. He sent the ship at maximum nonblink speed toward them, angling across in front of them. He didn't know whether a nuclear explosion would damage the ghostly Rimfire, but he didn't want to take a chance. The guidance systems of the rockets locked onto the 47, fire spurted in guidance engines, and the five deadly missiles followed the 47. When Pete had them well diverted from Rimfire, when they were breathing down his tail, he blinked in a normal mode and left them to cruise forever into the blackness of intergalactic space. Then he had a little time to think. «They detect power emission,» he said. «If not, they'd have sent missiles after Rimfire before.» To test it, he approached the planet again. «You are in peril, identify,» the metallic voice said. «We are friends,» Pete sent. «You are in peril, identify.» They came again, arching up from the two continents, and he led that batch, too, off into outer blackness. At a distance which prevented detection from the planet, Pete halted the 47 and tried to reason it out. The problem was that Rimfire was there and yet she wasn't there. The goal was to get Rimfire safely away, take her back to U.P. yards. The problems there were multifold. First, each time he approached Rimfire the planetside detectors would fire missiles, possibly endangering Rimfire. Second, he had no idea how to pull Rimfire into reality. «It has something to do with the blink process,» he said, fingering his skull. «Something to do with blinking in that old mode.» «I think you're right in saying that Rimfire's generator developed a harmonic and she followed it in to get here,» Jan said. «Yes. And maybe they wouldn't have known what was happening.» «It's almost as if she's caught between space and subspace somehow,» Jan said. He scratched his skull. «I wonder what would happen if we programmed a jump in normal mode and made the leap in the old mode.» «I'm not sure I want to find out,» Jan said. «Not if what happened to Rimfire is going to happen to us.» There had to be a way. He thought Jan had touched on the problem. Rimfire's computer had ordered a blink on the standard mode and the harmonic had taken over and Rimfire had gone leaping off into dark space, perhaps influenced by a reflection from one of the ancient beacons. «The program for the jump tells a ship were to come out,» he said, the words coming slowly. «But if the order is shunted into another mode—» He tried to picture it in his mind, that instantaneous exchange of information between elements of the Rimfire's computers. «We don't know what happens during a blink, but we know that there has to be an order to tell the ship when to come back into normal space. If the order is never received, the order to emerge—» «She'd be hung up between space and subspace,» Jan said. Pete went to work on the computer. He found a way. He assumed that the blink order was in two parts. The first part activated the generator, sending the ship into subspace. The second part told the generator when to stop, and ordered the ship into normal space at a designated point. He was able, with a rather ingenious program, even if he did think so himself, to give orders to the computer to separate the blink order into two parts, delaying the second half, the emergence order, for a split second. He leaped the ship and there was that sliding feeling in his stomach and for an eternity he looked at Jan's frozen face and could not move or blink his eyes. She smiled. «You've done it.» They were back in normal space after the passage of eons. «My God,» he whispered. «They're caught in that, Jan.» «We've got to help them,» she said. He still didn't know exactly how. And there was the planet which sent nuclear-tipped missiles toward any ship approaching under power. First he had to get through to those crazy people down there planetside that he was merely a tugboater on a rescue mission. He didn't want to find a way to pull Rimfire back into normal space only to have both ships blown up by a nuclear explosion. «Well,» he said, «let's go talk to our friends down there.» Chapter Seven The Stranden 47 orbited Jan's planet. Pete was at the controls. He had worked a program on the computer which required only one instruction to alter the blink mode. He took careful note of the launch points of the nuclear missiles. He was in very close, inside the moon's orbit, near enough for his optics to see distinguishing surface features, forests, lakes, the larger rivers. He was looking for signs of population, for city centers. It was a beautiful planet. In one hemisphere there were two rather large continents separated by perhaps five hundred miles of ocean. In the opposite hemisphere one huge continent balanced out the surface stress of the planet's crust. The oceans were huge, joined in ice at both poles. In the south polar areas was one large ice island which reflected gleaming sunlight. He saw no sign of man. He saw only the flash of launch as the missiles began their reach for the 47. The missile sites were either too well hidden or too small to be seen on optics at that distance. The antique but deadly weapons came up from both of the continents in what Pete thought of as the western hemisphere, his mind comparing the two-continent configuration to the western hemisphere of old Earth, and, as the 47 orbited, from the single large continent in the east. He could not count the numbers. They came up in a flock, a firefly hoard of things with glowing tails. «They're really giving it to us with both barrels,» he said, as the missiles converged and pointed toward the tug. He'd timed the fuel supply of the missiles during earlier attacks. He put the 47 into motion, leading the missiles out toward the blackness of space. They followed dutifully, little spurts of fire marking the firing of course-correction rockets. When the lead missiles got too close he blinked in the old mode, and saw that approximately half of the missiles had blink capability. Then he blinked in the test-configuration mode and checked to be sure that the missiles were continuing their course outward into intergalactic space. He was getting set to do the same thing again when the communications gong sounded and the signal for voice transmission came. He punched buttons and said, «This is Stranden 47.» «Stranden 47, this is the Ramco Lady Sandy. What the hell is going on here?» «Lady Sandy, what's your position?» There was a silence, as if the Lady Sandy was thinking. Then the human voice said, «Stranden 47, we're about a half million miles off the planet toward the blink beacon at one astronomical unit.» «They pulled the information from NE793 and used it to follow us,» Pete told Jan, making a wry face. Then, into the transmitter, «Lady Sandy , you will soon be under attack by nuclear rockets. Do you read?» «I read. What the hell is this?» «I'd advise you,» Pete said, «to allow the rockets to home in on you. Then set a sublight course which will direct the rockets away from the galaxy before using the test-specification mode to blink.» Aboard the Lady Sandy Jarvis Smith whispered, «He's up to something, Brad.» «You get on the instruments and let me know if anything comes at us from the planet,» Fuller said. Almost immediately Jarvis yelled, «Brad, there's a half-dozen vehicles coming at us.» Fuller examined the instruments, nodded. «He wasn't lying about rockets.» He shook his head. «Rockets?» He led the rockets in a long curving turn. They were getting too close for comfort when he blinked and nothing followed him. Back in normal space he contacted Stranden 47. «Have you located Rimfire?» Brad Fuller asked. «Brad, listen,» Jarvis was saying. «Maybe they've got armed ships down there. If they send up ships—» «Pete Jaynes has been here longer than we have,» Fuller said. «If they had ships they'd have sent them after him. I think he's got it figured right. It has something to do with the blink mode. Those rockets didn't follow us on a normal mode. Next time I'll try the altered mode and see if he's lying about that.» Meanwhile, he was waiting for Jaynes' answer to his question, and it took a while in coming. It took a while because, although Pete had been expecting it, he hadn't decided how to answer it. «We can't tell him where Rimfire is,» Jan said. Pete was thinking with his fingers. He was gradually acquiring information about the planet. First, the computer said that the voice which warned them, «You are in peril, identify,» was not human, was formed by the mechanics of a computer. Second, he, too, had wondered why the planet didn't send up ships with weapons. Third, he'd been unable to spot any signs of human habitation down on the planet's surface. Fourth, repeated attempts to open communications with the planet resulted only in that cryptic warning. In short, he was beginning to wonder if there were any people on the planet. If there were, they were all underground, or in very small groups. What Pete had intended to do, before the arrival of the Lady Sandy, was to keep drawing missile fire until, if possible, the missile batteries were exhausted. He'd already led a herd of them off into space. There couldn't be too many more. Rockets had been phased out over a thousand years ago. A thousand years ago no planet would have had infinite resources. The number of rockets had to be limited. He had discarded immediately the possibility that he and Jan had done what all of the probes and voyages of X&A had failed to do for a thousand years, find alien life. The voice which warned them, even if it was not human, spoke English, the language which had almost caused a nuclear war on old Earth before it was designated the official language of space. «I repeat, Stranden 47, do you know Rimfire's location?» «No,» Pete said. It was not a total lie. He knew where a shadow was, a shadow which looked very much like Rimfire. He did not know where the Rimfire of solidity was. «Lady Sandy, I propose that we cooperate. Do you agree?» «Cooperate in what?» Brad Fuller asked. «First, let me say,» Pete sent, speaking slowly and clearly, «that I have duly, and in accordance with Space Service regulations, recorded the sighting of a life-zone planet onto our permanent tapes, with confirmed date and hour settings. Should the planet below us turn out to be unoccupied, I have filed claim to it in the name of Peter and Janice Jaynes. Do you read?» «Loud and clear,» Brad Fuller said. He was a little confused. The guy was talking about an unoccupied planet while the bastards down there were shooting nukes at them. However, he wasn't going to underestimate this Pete Jaynes again. Pete had figured out that mess with altering the blink field. Maybe, again, he knew something that the Lady Sandy's crew didn't know. «What we need to do,» Pete said, «is draw off all the missiles that can be thrown at us, until there are no more. Will you cooperate?» «What's in it for us?» Jarvis Smith growled. «With what purpose?» Fuller asked. So there it was. They were right back to Rimfire. «You want us to risk our necks to help you clear a planet which you've claimed, is that it?» Fuller asked. «Lady Sandy.» Pete said, speaking slowly and clearly, checking lights to be sure the conversation was going onto the permanent tapes, «it is my opinion that U.P.S Rimfire is in the area of the planet. My intentions are this: To clear the hostile weapons from the area so that we may conduct a safe search.» «He knows where she is,» Jarvis Smith hissed. «She's around here somewhere. Let's let him play with his missiles while we find her.» Fuller was thinking. He keyed the mike and said, «Stranden 47, you've got yourself a planet. I will agree to cooperate with you on one condition, that Rimfire is ours. Do you agree?» «Pete, he has no right to ask that,» Jan said. He held up one hand to hush her. His fingers worked on his scalp. He had no idea how long it would take to clear the missiles, or even if he could. They might always hold some in reserve, to come streaking out to catch them when they were hooked onto Rimfire. He wasn't sure the plane was theirs. If there were only a few men, if there was only one man down there, it would be classed as an occupied planet. «Lady Sandy.» he said, «no deal. You take your chances. However, if Rimfire is near this planet and you lead missiles to her, she could be destroyed.» «He's trying to fake us out,» Jarvis Smith said to Fuller. «We'll be in touch,» Fuller said, breaking the broadcast link. «What are we going to do?» Jarvis Smith asked. «Find Rimfire,» Fuller said grimly. «Go wake up Asher and King.» A tug man can sleep through anything. Jarvis had to shake both men hard before they roused, and then they were all in control with Fuller briefing them. After he'd heard the latest developments, Buck King said, «Fuller, you're talking chicken feed.» «I don't call a couple of million each chicken feed,» Fuller said. «They got a whole planet,» Tom Asher said. «And they've recorded the find on the ship's tapes.» «What if those tapes never got read?» King asked. Fuller frowned. He'd thought the same thing, himself. «Number one, you're talking murder. If we could find some way, without weapons, to destroy that old Mule, it would be murder.» King spread his hands. «And,» Fuller said, «how do we know he hasn't blinked his claim back?» He'd been thinking about that, too. Jarvis Smith had been doing some thinking. If he did, he'd have to use the altered mode, send it through those two beacons we passed. It would be on NE793's tapes in the altered mode. «Along with instructions how to read it,» Fuller said. «What if we got back in time to destroy the tape?» King asked. «What if we didn't?» Fuller countered. «It's too risky.» «If we got up close alongside and turned our flux exhaust on him it would mess up his electronics,» King said. «King,» Fuller said, «I haven't made up my mind whether I'd kill two people for a planet. I'm not sure. Maybe, if things were just right, I would. But they ain't just right. I don't want to spend the rest of my life in the mines out in the asteroids. No. We're going to take what we can get. We're going to look for Rimfire.» Fuller divided the space near the solitary sun into a grid and began the slow search process. At least twice during the next few hours, while the Stranden 47 orbited the planet, drawing missiles upward to be led out into space, the Lady Sandy was within instrument range of the shadowy form of the Rimfire. However, Brad Fuller was making his search on test-specification mode. Chapter Eight Pete held the 47 in orbit just outside the atmosphere of the planet. For two days, with necessary time out for sleep, he'd been playing chase with nuclear missiles. Each time the number dwindled, and at last the 47 had made two full orbits of the planet without drawing fire. «The computer says they fired over three thousand,» Jan told him. «What a waste,» he said. «I've been doing some reading,» Jan said. «Good for you.» He was tired. He'd been under more strain then he had thought. It seemed safe enough to draw the missiles up, lead them in the right direction, and blink away on test-specification mode, but they were, after all, nuclear weapons, old, mean, scary. «They used rockets with limited blink capacity in the war against Zede II, almost a thousand years ago,» Jan said. Man's last war. It seemed incredible to think that with a universe to explore man had ever wasted his life and his resources to kill his fellows. But the ancient history of the race was full of war. Before the space age there'd been constant war on old Earth, and almost a final war. The nuclear weapons were ready and primed on both sides when the government of the old United States made the most significant diplomatic move in man's history and shared the secret of the blink drive with its enemies. After that, for a couple of hundred years, everyone was too busy playing with the new toy, exploring space, claiming new planets in the name of some old Earth government, to fight. «The history books say that they used the old rockets because there wasn't enough gold to build that many blink generators,» Jan said. «It was pretty wasteful. All that gold going up in radioactive cinders.» It was slightly ironic, when you thought about it. The crying need was living room, a vent for old Earth's teeming billions of people, and the first blink space efforts were mining efforts, men going out to find gold on airless planets and asteroids so that more blink generators could be built to send more ships out to search for more gold, but, at last, the supply had met demand and the settlement ships began to blink outward to the life-zone planets discovered during the gold rush. There were over two hundred populated planets at the time of the last war. Nationalism had been, after all, taken into deep space, and the planets of the Zede II group were, for some reason, low in gold. The planets of the U.P. group, made up, roughly, of settlers from the English-speaking portions of old Earth, had plenty of gold. And so the last war was fought for that yellow metal which had been the reason for much of man's strife on the home planet. A war for planets of gold. A war which saw the destruction of five U.P. worlds before an aroused civilization rose up, reached far down to the bottom of its reserves, and brought fiery death to twelve worlds, six billion people. It was not something any man could speak of with pride. The winners—there were no losers alive—said it was justified and necessary. After all, it was the Zede II group of worlds which had developed the first planet buster, and had used it. For one last time man met death with overwhelming, devastating, total death, and then it was over and for a thousand years English had been the official language of space. And it was English which Pete heard as he sent the old 47 streaking fire through the atmosphere, bringing her down to thirty thousand feet at the maximum atmospheric speed. As he had thought, there were secondary batteries of surface-to-air missiles. They came streaking up on solid-fuel trails of fire to follow the speeding 47 harmlessly off into near space. He had no way of controlling, of leading, those short-range surface missiles. They had enough power to break out of the gravity well, but near space around the planet would be littered with them. It became more and more apparent to Pete that no living intelligence was behind the array of weapons. The short-range rockets came in salvos, emerging from buried silos at only four points on the three continents. Each of those points, recorded on his visuals, was a fortified emplacement ringed with vacant silos for the huge, spacegoing missiles and for the smaller, short-range missiles. Pete's stomach was acid after a few hours of playing tag with death which traveled with the speed of exploding combustibles. He took a breath. He tried to raise the Lady Sandy on the voice communicator and got no answer. He figured they were off looking for Rimfire. Well, it was safe now. «Maybe we ought to go out and get her,» he said to Jan. «It should be safe now.» It was obvious that the short-range missiles remaining could not threaten Rimfire at half a million miles out in space. He decided to make one more sweep through the atmosphere. He sent the 47 blasting down, down, leveled off at twenty thousand feet., He was recording as he flew directly toward a fortified emplacement on the large continent. «No rockets,» Jan said. «We've cleaned them out.» He was busy with the 47. She wasn't designed to be an atmospheric yacht. She was buffeting and leaping in the disturbed air. «Looks like concrete and metal,» he said, as the fortified equipment came into view. This particular emplacement was in desert country. It squatted low to the rocky, red ground, a dark, shadowy solidity below them, magnified on the viewers to show— «Good Lord,» he yelped, as the dark spots on the side of the fortification nearest them glowed white-hot. He jerked the 47 up, added power although she was beginning to glow with the heat of her passage through air. He felt her rock, bounce, leap. «Laser cannon,» he said. The 47 was gaining altitude fast when the beam caught her stern and almost sent her tumbling. Pete regained control and yelled, «Damage check, Jan.» He knew she was hurt. Hell, the 47 wasn't a warship. Why hadn't he done as he should have done, gone on after the Rimfire? What had he done? «Hull damage,» Jan said, her voice high and frightened. «We're losing pressure.» She was hurt badly. The flux drive was sputtering, and she was threatening to fall off on her side and start tumbling. His fingers flew over the keys as he punched in blink coordinates for the nearest blink beacon. The airtight hatches would close automatically. Once he was safely out in space he could see about the damage, maybe repair it, at least send out a Mayday to the Lady Sandy. He'd really blown it this time. He punched the button and the 47 kept on straining. «Jan, quick, systems check on the generator.» Her hands were shaking as she punched buttons and then, «Electrical outage, Pete. Generator controls are not functional.» The 47 strained and grunted on the damaged flux drive, and she was losing altitude. Her speed had carried her out of range of the laser cannon on the fortification, but she was going down. They were losing air fast, and one of the airtight hatches was jammed near the generator room. «Honey, we're going to have to land,» he said, even as he felt the ship begin to lose altitude. He had to fight her down, using all the skill he had. He hadn't flown manual in atmosphere since cadet days, and he was sweating, his stomach churning, as the red sand of the desert came up to meet them at a frightening speed. He read the flux power gauge. It was falling. He let the 47 continue to go down fast, then, at the last moment, gave the flux drive all the power it had left, and the 47 settled, in clouds of blown sand, to make a landing which Jan couldn't even feel. The 47's air testers reported Earth standard minus a few tiny points. The air out there was good, breathable. But Pete wasn't ready to go outside. He killed the flux and grabbed an instrument-tool kit and opened the hatch going back to the power room. She'd been hit aft of the generator, thank God. The hull had a hole about two feet in diameter. The generator was intact. The reason for the lack of response to Pete's blink order was evident—the main control cable housing had been burned by the laser beam which had holed the hull. Now and then a stray rock holed a ship. Each ship had some hull-patching material on board. The hole could be fixed. He examined the control cable. The cable's housing was burned through, and half a dozen wires had been charred. Insulation had been burned off three or four. The air coming in through the hull was sweet, fresh. They were breathing it. There was a slight risk of some airborne germ or virus, but it was only slight. Man seemed to carry his own germs with him to new planets, not find new germs waiting for him. «How bad is it?» Jan asked. «Bad enough, but I think I can fix it in a couple of days.» He led her back into the control room, and hit the communicator. « Lady Sandy, Lady Sandy.» he said. «This is a Mayday. Come in, Lady Sandy.» When he received no answer to his voice communications signal, he sent Blinkstat Maydays vectoring out to cover the area of space visible from their location. There was no answer. «They must be on the opposite side of the planet,» he said. «I want you to keep sending, Jan, while I go to work. It'll take me a couple of days by myself. If we had Lady Sandy's help we'd be flying again in less than half the time.» He was welding the first seal on the hull patch when Jan called him on the ship's internal communications. «You'd better come up here, Pete.» A small cloud of dust was moving toward them. It came from the direction of the fortification. Pete turned the ship's visuals on it, and it leaped into the screen. It was a tracked, armored vehicle, and it was moving toward them at almost fifty miles per hour. Pete turned off the visuals, his fingers going crazy on his skull. It seemed to Jan that he made a quick decision, for he ran to the captain's safe, twirled the combination dial, and reached in. His hand came out filled with a weapon. «I think we'd better get off the ship,» he said. The APSAF which he held in his hand would be, against an armored vehicle, about as effective as throwing rocks. He took Jan's hand, and they ran, keeping the ship between them and the approaching vehicle, to an outcrop of rock about fifty yards away. They did not have long to wait. The sound of an internal-combustion engine, the squeaking of unoiled treads, came clearly to them, and the dust cloud rose high from just beyond the 47. Pete held his breath. He expected the vehicle to open fire, expected to see the 47 either fly apart or start melting in the blaze of a laser cannon. Instead, he saw the rusted, pockmarked nose of the armored vehicle coming slowly around the 47's stern. There was a look of extreme age about the armored vehicle. As it circled the 47, twin muzzles swiveled to remain trained on the ship. It repeated the maneuver twice without firing, came around the stern for the third time, weapons swiveling. And then it stopped. The grunting, popping internal-combustion engine coughed, and was still. The squeaking of the treads ceased. The dust settled. The muzzles of the weapons did not move. The vehicle was between them and the 47. It sat there with its rusty, pockmarked armor, silent, deadly. The sun was hot in the desert. Pete estimated a temperature of at least 110 degrees. They couldn't stay there forever. The armored vehicle could. It had been around for a thousand years. Pete risked a movement, and nothing happened. He picked up a small rock and threw it off to one side. It hit other rocks and bounced. The vehicle did not move. He threw another rock, this time to bounce off the vehicle's top. Nothing. «Stay here,» he whispered. «If anything happens, just lie low.» He left the rocks in a crouch, ready to dive for cover if the weapons swiveled toward him. The armored vehicle was lifeless. He yelled. He threw rocks. Then, with a shrug and a heart which was beating too fast, he walked toward the vehicle. He put his hand on the sun-heated metal. Up close the ravages of a thousand years of weather were evident. He climbed up onto the treads, his hands smarting with the heat. He made his way atop, seized the handle of a hatch, and pulled. He held his breath as he looked inside. There were two seats, fabric partly rotted, and a control panel which didn't look too complicated. «It's all right, Jan,» he yelled. «I'm going inside to take a look.» Jan stood up, her mouth open as if to yell. He lowered himself into the vehicle. The instruments were labeled in English. There was a tab which read: autocontrol—manual. He flipped the switch. Nothing happened. He heard a sound, and then Jan's head was peering over the edge of the hatch. «Come on in,» he said. He helped her down. She tried to dust off the seat, and the fabric came apart under her hand. She made a face and sat down. «How'd you like to fight a war on one of these things?» he asked. She shook her head violently, no. «Funny things, the old combustion engines,» he said. «Used fossil fuel, refined from petroleum oil.» The controls of the armored thing were basic, simple. He toyed with switches. One switch was stuck. He forced it and it went into place with a click. A needle moved on a gauge which said, auxiliary two. «I think it just ran out of fuel,» he said. He pressed the starter button. The old engine coughed into life. «I'll be damned,» he said. «Let's get back to the ship,» Jan said. «Just a minute.» He worked the foot pedals and the mechanical shift. The machine growled into motion, going straight for the 47, and he turned the steering wheel wildly until it straightened out. «Hey, this might be sort of fun,» he said. He wheeled the machine to face the rock outcrop. There was a red light over a button which he suspected might be the firing button for the weapons. He found a little set of controls which made the muzzles of the weapons move, trained them on a rock, and pushed the button. Twin beams streaked out. The rock disintegrated and melted in the blaze of the laser cannon. Okay. So it was fun to play with an old machine of war. There might be others on the way, and they might be better-directed. He left the thing pointed away from the 47, killed the engine, and turned off the ignition switches. Back on the 47 they still could not raise the Lady Sandy. Pete went back to work. He worked through without sleep. It seemed that in the past few days he'd learned how to live without sleep. When the hull was patched, and held, he repressurized the ship and went to work on the control cable. It was a simple job. He had that part of it done in a few hours, and then he was in control to activate and test all systems one by one. Jan was on watch. One by one the systems were back on line. The generator's field was fine. It was just a matter of time waiting for a charge, and it would be a longer wait than usual because in order to repair the cable Pete had had to drain all charge. It would be three full hours before he had enough juice to blink her up. He didn't want to trust the ailing flux drive. There was nothing to do but wait, and watch. There were still two hours to go when a new dust cloud appeared off in the direction of the fortification. This time there were two of the armored vehicles, traveling side by side. They were coming at fifty miles an hour, and there was not enough charge in the generator to activate it. Pete turned on the flux. The 47 rose a couple of feet and dropped like a stone, jarring his teeth. The flux drive was completely out. The two oncoming armored vehicles were about half a mile away and coming fast. He didn't even have time to finger his skull. Wherever they went, they'd go together. It was as simple as that. He was more sure than ever that the planet was unpeopled now, and he wasn't content to let a bunch of computer-directed machines do him out of being rich. «Come on,» he said, grabbing Jan by the hand. They were in the old war tank when the oncoming vehicles began to circle the 47. They came at the stern side by side. Pete had been experimenting with laser controls, and he had it down pat. Each of the oncoming vehicles had a laser muzzle aimed at it head-on when Pete pushed the fire button. A wild burst of laser fire came from one tank as it began to melt. A searing blast of heat washed over Pete's vehicle as the 47 blazed and crumpled, and then there was only the sizzle of Pete's weapons as the two armored vehicles puddled into a mass of useless, steaming metal. Poor old girl. She was a sad sight. Her entire side had been burned, melted. The housing of the blink drive was exposed. She'd never fly again. Jan was weeping silently. They stood on the hot sand and looked at her, and Pete felt like weeping, too. His hands were at his side as he thought. He didn't even think about rubbing his head. They plundered her. They put as much food and liquids into the old armored vehicle as there was room. Pete drove away from the poor old 47 without looking back. She was useless, flux drive gone, blink drive disabled, all communications melted away in the blast of laser cannon. He followed the tracks which led back toward the fortified emplacement. He'd seen the extent of that red, sandy desert from the air. He knew that they'd never make it to the more moderate zones south and north of the desert. There was only one place to go. The treads of the vehicle whined and screeched for oil. The old internal-combustion engine coughed and jerked and snorted. The air conditioner worked sporadically, sending a blast of hot air one minute and a chill breeze the next. Pete held the speed to twenty-five until he had the feel of the thing, then accelerated to fifty. The vehicle burst up over a sandy dune and Jan let out a yelp. They were less than two hundred yards from the concrete-and-metal face of the fortification. Chapter Nine Aboard the Lady Sandy, Buck King and Tom Asher were on watch when the Stranden 47 began to send out her Maydays. At the first voice transmission King looked at Asher and grinned. «Got himself into trouble.» «Too bad,» Asher said. «Guess we'd better call Fuller.» «Why?» King asked. «Because that Mayday is recorded on the ship's tapes, that's why. Because it's the mines for ignoring a Mayday.» King sulked until all four of the crew were in control. The Mayday signals had switched to stat. The Lady received two of them. «Okay,» Fuller said. «Let's go.» The Lady went into the planet's atmosphere carefully. Nothing happened. Detection had the 47 located in the middle of a desert, a good distance from the nearest fortification. Fuller turned on the visuals at ninety thousand feet and the Lady lowered to see the laser-gun battle, to see one armored vehicle creak off toward the fortification. To see the 47 in ruins. «They've had it,» Buck King said. «Just hold on,» Fuller told him. He was thinking hard. If the crew of the 47 were dead he could complete the job on the ship's tapes, destroy them. Then they'd have a planet. He had come to the same conclusion that Pete had reached, that there was nothing but a bunch of computer-directed machines running around down there. First, however, he had to be sure the Jaynes couple were dead. He waited until the vehicle had disappeared and lowered the Lady carefully, left her, himself, in a suit. He didn't trust the ship's instruments, which said the air was okay. He found the 47 empty. The laser cannon had done a beautiful job on the communications bank. The area where the permanent tapes had been stored was a congealing puddle of cooling metal. There'd be no way anyone would salvage any information out of that. He took the good news back to the men aboard the Lady Sandy. There was just one thing that bothered him. There were no bodies on or around the Stranden 47. «Maybe that thing got them,» Jarvis said. «We have to be sure,» Fuller said. He dictated a report into the permanent tapes, all about how the Lady had arrived too late. He filed a claim to the planet in the name of all four crew members. To hell with the Rimfire. She was small stuff compared to a life-zone planet. And this one was a beauty. She was all virgin, virgin forests and plains and beautiful, clear lakes and oceans. She was the finest, a real priority planet. Hell, the settlers would fall all over themselves getting out to her. And all that stood between him and being a very, very wealthy man were a few old machines. Brad Fuller wished for just one ship-to-ship weapon, just one blaster, even an old laser cannon. But all he had was the saffer. «You guys know the stakes,» he said. His three companions nodded grimly. «You willing to take a few risks?» «Why not?» King asked. The other two nodded. «All right,» Fuller said. «We know that the fortified emplacements have laser cannon. Apparently Jaynes lured off all their missiles. We got nothing but a tug.» «We can throw rocks at them,» King said sarcastically. Fuller scowled, started to speak, then broke out in a grin. «You know, Buck, if you weren't so stupid, you'd be smart.» He went out over the desert, holding the Lady Sandy at a couple of hundred feet until he found what he wanted, a freestanding boulder some thirty feet in diameter. He touched the belly of the Lady down onto the Читать дальше