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   Gold Star by Zach Hughes
                           Chapter One

   Peter Jaynes came from deep sleep into instant alertness. He lay on his
back, his eyes looking upward toward the planetside landscape which Jan
had programmed into the decopanel on the bulkhead over the bed. The
subconscious memory of a sound was just beyond his reach. He lifted his
head from the pillow, was very still. The only thing he heard was Jan's
deep, even breathing. He sighed, let his neck relax, and put out his hand to
the heated softness of a rounded hip.

   He decided that he'd dreamed a sound. He turned and put one arm
across Jan. She slept in the same garment she'd been wearing during the
last wake period, a silken singlet. There was no need for formality on a
deep-space tug crewed by man and wife.

   The tantalizing near-memory of having been awakened by something
continued to nag at him. He closed his eyes but did not feel sleepy. He
turned onto his back again. The landscape overhead had changed to show
a Tigian sky over hard, red, rocky hills. It had rained and a rainbow arced
the dome of blue. He was not going to be able to get back to sleep.

   "Come on, legs," he said aloud. Legs heard and obeyed, swung off the
bed. Jan stirred, but did not awaken. He checked the wall chronometer.
He was only halfway through the sleep period, which accounted for his
slight feeling of grogginess.

   He stepped into the shower. Cold, stinging, refreshing water penetrated
the singlet he wore. He shook his head and sent droplets flying, cut off the
water, stood with his eyes closed as a warm breeze from an ecologically
pure desert dried him.
   The Stranden 47, Mule Class space tug, registered out of New Earth,
was over two hundred light-years from the nearest populated planet. You
didn't just ignore sounds, sounds so unusual that they woke you up, when
you were that far from nowhere.

   A deep-space blink ship of any class was no place for odd sounds.
Aboard any blinker things hummed, purred, clicked, bleeped, whistled,
but each sound indicated perfect order, perfectly functioning hardware.
An unusual sound usually meant that something had gone wrong in one of
a couple of hundred thousand servomechanisms. A Mule Class tug had
backup systems for backup systems, but the loss of any one system was a
potentially serious threat which, if unattended, could make it doubtful
that you'd ever get back to anywhere to collect deep-space bonus pay.

   Peter examined his face in the mirror as he brushed his hair. He saw a
regular, not exactly ugly fellow who stood compactly just under six feet,
with a strong neck, a thick chest, and well-muscled arms and torso. He
was beginning to feel good. He'd run ship's gravity up to Earth Standard
plus 0.1 because Jan had gained three pounds in the past thirty days. The
extra exertion required by the additional 0.1 gravity would use up enough
calories to trim her down.

   The logical place to start an inspection tour was the power room. The
generator was on full charge with all readings normal. The power of the
generator field made the blond hair stand up on his head and try to
separate into individual strands. It was not a bad feeling. It was a healthy,
reassuring tingle. There under the circular shield was the thing which
gave deep-space wings to man, the blink generator. The Stranden 47's
generator was a real horse, hefty enough to send the relatively small tug
several galaxies away in one blink if the coordinates had been available,
powerful enough to allow the 47 to latch onto the largest liner or freighter
and blink her to the nearest repair base.

   No one really knew the potential power which was stored in even the
smallest blink generator. It had been said that not even Billy Bob Blink,
the Texan who had developed the blink generator, fully understood what
happened when the energy accumulated in a blink generator was released.
The practical result was that anything attached to the generator's vehicle
or within the generated field ceased to exist in one location and came to
exist in another.

  Pete worked his way through a checklist. There was nothing amiss. The
generator was always held at full charge so that the 47 was ready to blink
on a moment's notice in the event of a distress call. Such a call could come
from the four directions of the blink routes which intersected at the 47's
station.

   There wasn't all that much more to inspect once he had finished the
power-room checklist. The generator took up a full half of the ship's
150-foot length.

   The compact control room, one wall taken up by the communications
equipment, was located next to the power room. Aside from a tool and
supply storage area the remaining space inside Stranden 4Ta rectangular,
rounded-cornered hull was living area for a four-man crew. With only two
people aboard, the living area was ample to luxurious. Into that space,
roughly seventy-five by fifty feet, the Stranden designers had packed the
food-preparation and dining areas, a small swimming pool which served
as storage for the bulk of the ship's constantly recycled water, an exercise
room, two lounge rooms, and two bedrooms. The Mule Class was designed
to house a crew of four. Each time a Mule put out into deep space she was
stocked with food and supplies for four. Pete and Jan Jaynes had food and
some luxuries to last for twice the period of their contracted tour, because
it was often difficult to find even two crewmen to man a deep-space tug. It
was lonely work.

   Pete checked instruments in the control room. The 47 was in a good
mood. She hummed at him and blinked reassuring little lights at him, and
her computer gave him a quick readout which said "great" for all systems.
He was becoming more and more convinced that he'd dreamed the sound.
Not only were all primary systems great, all backup systems and secondary
backup systems were great. A Mule Class tug stayed in space for a long
time.

  At times of emergency, great demands were made on a tug. A Mule was
known to be the most dependable vessel ever sent into space.

  Pete had saved the communications board for last. There were only two
possible communications signals which would have activated any
sound-producing mechanism on the 47. He pushed the self-examination
button on the communications board and watched as the ship's computer
showed blinking green after blinking green.

  There was a gong mounted in each separate ship's area, a gong which
went bonkers upon activation by the communications board. When the
gongs echoed throughout the ship it meant one of two things: Either a
Blinkstat directed to the 47 was coming in or the detection equipment had
sensed the pre-arrival signal of a blinking ship. If either of those things
had happened the gongs would still have been bonging.

   The signal-indicator light was off. No Blinkstat, no call, no pre-arrival
signal had come into the big bank of electronics.

   Pete sat down in the padded command chair and stared at nothing. He
felt, rather than heard, Jan come into control. They were that close. He
sensed her presence, turned, winked at her.

  "It's the middle of the night," she said sleepily.

   Lord, Lord, he thought. Just seeing her was a pleasure of which he
would never tire. She was so beautiful, so rounded in the right places. She
looked to him more the Tri-D star than a crewman on a tug. The silken
singlet molded itself to her. She came to lean her hip against his shoulder.
He felt the warmth of her, allowed himself the luxury of a touch, smoothed
his hand over the silkiness.

  "Coming back to bed?" she asked.

  "I don't know. I guess."

  "What woke you?"

  "I don't know. A dream."

   She sat down in the other command chair, turned it on its swivels to
face him. "Was your dream something like a signal gong going of!?" Her
steel-gray eyes were on his.

  He felt a little shiver go up his back. "You heard something, too?"

  "I'm not sure. I'm like you. I could have dreamed it."

  "Honey, I love you, but when we start to dream the same dreams at the
same time I'm going to wonder if such closeness is possible."

  Pete pushed buttons. Since the incoming-signal light was not on he had
not checked the tape for the sleeptime period. He put the audio on
high-speed search and there was a whirr of sound and a hum of motion
and then a little click and there it was.

   The sound was weak and incomplete. The tone, however, was that of
the warning gong. The sound lasted a fraction of a second and then was
gone. He played it back four times, then did a high-speed search of the
entire four hours of tape.

   There was only the momentary hint of sound, almost a ghost of a
sound. He turned the problem over to the computer and had an analysis in
seconds. The sound had the tonal qualities of the communications
warning gong. It lasted microseconds. The signal which had activated the
gong for that brief moment, so brief it had not reached standard volume,
had come from that section of the detection equipment which searched
for the pre-arrival signal of a blinking ship.

  "Just a glitch," Jan said. "A ghost."

   "It came from Number One," Pete said. For brevity, they had numbered
the four intersecting blink routes so that in referring to them they would
not have to use the full, lengthy chart designations.

   It worried him. A tiny microsecond signal had come through the far
reaches of empty space which stretched back and away down the blink
ranges toward home.

   Only one thing in the universe was known to be faster than the
instantaneous travel of a blinking ship. Perhaps more research had been
done on that phenomenon than on any other aspect of the blink mystery.
A blinking ship sends a signal ahead of itself. The signal is unlike any
known emission. As far as man knew, that particular signal, that flash sent
toward the emergence point at the moment of generator activation, had
not existed prior to the first use of Billy Bob Blink's machine. The
pre-arrival signal could be detected along the entire length of the
projected jump.

   The pre-arrival signal worried some. The space services spent millions
each year trying to determine the cause of it, trying to find a way to
eliminate it, for, although microseconds were involved, the pre-arrival
signal gave electronic equipment time to prepare for the actual arrival of
the ship. There hadn't been a war for almost a thousand years, but to the
military mind that warning that a ship was on its way was, potentially, a
dangerous situation.

  "Just a glitch," Jan said. "Let's go back to bed."

  "You go along. I'll be there in a few minutes."

   She didn't have to use words to let him know that she was not going
without him. They had been together for three years. In that three years
the longest period of separation had been two hours, when she was taking
her physical for tug duty. Even then Pete had tried to go into the
examination room with her. He had just found her, then, and he was
afraid of losing her.

   When Pete Jaynes worried, his left hand went to his head. If he was
wearing a cap at the time the fingers of his left hand would slip under the
cap, tilting it, until the pads of his index and large fingers were on the
depression in his skull just over his left ear. If he was not wearing a cap
the motion seemed less unconscious. Jan saw his hand go up, begin to toy
with the dent in his skull.

  "Pete, it was a false signal. There's no need to worry."

   Pete knew that Jan had not spent almost a full year of two-hour-a-day
classes studying shipboard communications equipment. Jan could not
know that what had happened was impossible, that the signal of a
blinking ship could not emerge out of empty space. The signal had been
recorded. Weak as it was, momentary as it was, it was there. It had been
automatically transcribed from the communicator tape to the master
tape. At the end of the tour that master tape would have three full years of
ship's functions recorded on it, and it would be run routinely through the
Stranden Corporation's statistical information center. Any operator could
review any category of information with the press of a button. Stranden
was, of course, under the jurisdiction of the Space Service, and any Space
Service statistician had access to Stranden's records, could press a button
and review, for example, all of the incoming jump signals on the tape
within seconds.

  The weak, momentary signal was there on tape. For the skipper of any
spacegoing ship to ignore such a signal, which without a doubt indicated
something abnormal, was, at the least, grounds for losing one's license.

  The master tape of the Stranden 47 would be easy to review, because
Pete had deliberately chosen an isolated, seldom-visited outpost in
nowhere. There wouldn't be many signals of any sort in the three years of
their duty there.

   Pete liked tug duty. At first he'd been concerned about Jan's reaction to
prolonged isolation. Theirs, as the trite old saying went, was not exactly a
marriage made in heaven. He had had one hell of a time persuading her to
marry him. The first time he saw her in the Spacer's Rest on Tigian she'd
called him a loser. He didn't deny it, but he did have enough self-image to
go back. He paid the usual exorbitant prices charged by such places as the
Spacer's Rest just to spend time with her. What he did with that time
surprised Jan. He used the time for talking. That was not what she was
usually paid to do. The Spacer's Rest, tastefully furnished, serving the
finest foods from a hundred planets, was not a place for rest and
relaxation. It was a whorehouse.

   Pete looked back on those nights in the Spacer's Rest now and then
with a certain nostalgia. There they were, one loser with a hole in his head,
a dent in his skull, some brain cells forever destroyed by the injury, just
enough to ruin hell out of Peter Jaynes deductive reasoning. Without that
ability, passing the exams in his last year at the Academy was impossible.
The Academy was sorry as all hell, for, after all, the injury to Pete's brain
had come as the result of school activity. An escape hatch had blown on
the training ship, and the resulting explosive decompression had sent
Cadet Jaynes into space, with a quick blow to the head as he passed
through the hatch. They said he was lucky. He was in space with air
leaking from his ruptured helmet.

    Well, perhaps, he admitted, he was lucky to be alive, to have been
picked up before the pressure inside the suit was low enough to boil his
blood. And everyone was sorry as hell that the Service demanded that a
space officer have all his brains. You just didn't fly a sleek fleet liner, or a
fleet freighter, much less an X&A Explorer Class or a ship of the line if a
little chunk of brain didn't function.

   But there was another loser at the Spacer's Rest. She was a tall, blond,
female loser, a New Earther a long way from home. She had worked hard
to save the fare out to Tigian in order to study art on that planet most
famous for its artists. She had butted nose-on into Tigian snobbery. To a
Tigian, there was no such thing as a non-Tigian artist.

   A work permit? Sorry, it just wasn't done. Non-Tigians were not issued
work permits. A way home? Sorry. The fleet had just been put under a new
directive. There would be no more casuals aboard ship. Too many fleet
officers had been taking advantage of the system, which had allowed
working passage to selected individuals. Most of the selected individuals
were, it seemed, rather attractive girls, many of them on holiday from
such places as the Spacer's Rest on Tigian. It wasn't good for morale for
the officers to have their own private women on board. All fleet employees,
even casual, had to have at least two years of space training at an
accredited institution.

   So what does a girl do when she's light-years from home, broke, unable
to get a job to earn passage back to New Earth? Does she just give up, lie
down, and starve? No. She lies down, but not to starve.

   "At least," Jan had told Peter Jaynes, after about four nights of his
nonstop attempt to convince her that tug duty was not all bad, "they've
eradicated all the things that used to be called social diseases."

  Tigian was an odd planet. Tigians were artists, and, therefore, a bit
more liberal than most. On Tigian, whores were often invited to the best
parties. It was a good living, and she was meeting some interesting people.

  Before Pete could get her to marry him he had to remind her of her
New Earth upbringing, of the morality with which she'd been instilled as a
young girl. He had to make her weep.

   They were together. Jan, being fairly new at her occupation, didn't
know much about spacers. She knew only that they seemed to have money
to burn when they were at the Spacer's Rest. She didn't know that in
wooing her, Pete had spent most of the earnings from his last tour on a
tug. She didn't know that the fine, spacious apartment where they
honeymooned had been rented with an advance on Pete's next tour. When
Pete came in with a one way ticket for one to New Earth she wept for the
second time since she'd known him.

  "It's the only way, honey," he'd told her.

   "You're asking me to go back to New Earth and wait? Wait for three
years?"

  "I have to go back to work. We're broke. There's enough to get you
home and give you living money until I can have the company send you
more."

   Pete had learned, then, the sort of woman he'd married. "I will not
allow you to leave me," she'd said. "You will not dump me somewhere for
three years, damn you, just when I'm getting to like being with you."

   At that time there were things about Jan that Pete didn't know. He
didn't know that she'd come to dislike all men. Her idea of heaven was to
be alone, totally alone, forever alone, never to be touched, never to hear a
man's voice.

   She had joined with a loser for one reason—to get out of the Spacer's
Rest. She'd agreed to marry Pete because, in her mind, having just one
man touch her was preferable, but only slightly, to being touched by any
man with the money in his pocket. Then she fell in love with this loser, and
loved being touched by him, and he was going to ship her light-years away
and go light-years away in the other direction and leave her alone for three
years.

  "They take female crew on tugs," she said. "I know they do. I've met
women who work tugs."

   The problem was that she had no experience. She had only a
liberal-arts degree. She had been in space just once, the jump from New
Earth to Tigian. Her technical ability was limited to knowing how to turn
on the lights and music in the rented apartment. Pete didn't have much
hope, but he liked the idea. If she thought she dreaded being away from
him for three years, she should have been able to get inside his head and
see the bleak, painful darkness which was growing there with just the
thought of having to say goodbye to her.

   He found his personal heaven in the office of the procurement officer of
the Stranden Corporation. Stranden was one of several tug companies
operating off Tigian. It was not one of the leading companies. All tug men
knew companies like Stranden, and, if they had a choice, worked for the
big, glamour companies that furnished deep-space tug service along the
most-traveled routes. All stations on all blink routes were allocated by bid,
and the big companies could afford to bid high for the highly traveled
routes because more traffic meant more ship breakdowns and more
salvage money.

  Stranden Corporation's salvage record was terrible, because it was a
low bidder on routes and stations so isolated, so little traveled, that the
chance of a tug's getting a Lloyd's contract on a disabled ship were near
zero. The big, prosperous companies didn't even bother to bid on stations
such as the one occupied by the Stranden 47, or if they did, they bid so
high that there wasn't a chance of getting the station.

   Most men went into tug service for two reasons— steady money and the
hope, the chance, for big money. Tugs were free enterprise. The system
was a holdover from thousands of years into the past of old Earth. Because
of the long tours and the smallness of the tugs, because Space Service fleet
ships were huge and luxurious and put into port often, the service got the
cream of the spacegoing crop from each planet. Like the system itself, tug
men were throwbacks.

    Tug men were often independent, not fond of taking orders. Some
drank, lived for the months between tours. They earned good money, even
if they didn't get to participate in a rescue or salvage operation, and they
spent it in one continuous spree of drinking and women. Some tug men
were rejects.

  Peter Jaynes fell into that category. To a smartly dressed member of the
Space Service, freshly off a luxurious fleet liner, all tug men were weird.
The weirdest of them signed three-year contracts with the fringe
companies such as Stranden.

   Stranden's Mule Class tugs were safe, dependable, serviceable. They
were old, however. Many of the Stranden's tugs had been phased out by
the companies that could afford the new equipment, could afford to bid
low enough to get the highly traveled stations.

   Those men and women who made careers of spending years at a time
on a stationary ship at some designated pinpoint deep in space could pick
and choose. They chose the companies with the best equipment and the
best chance of salvage-money bonuses. Most companies, for example, had
home-planet transmission of entertainment programs aboard their tugs.
Stranden had only a film library.

   The quality of the entertainment didn't concern two losers. They had
found each other. When Pete and Jan were dropped off to relieve the
two-man crew of the Stranden 47, they spent the first six months just
getting acquainted. Pete was glad it was an inactive post. He had gone
into tug work with the idea that maybe he'd luck out and get a crewman's
share of a big Lloyd's contract, maybe a freighter loaded with diamonds.
He'd been aboard one tug which blinked a disabled, antique training ship
back to the repair shops, and his share of the salvage money had been
almost a quarter of his salary for the two-year tour, but he'd never hit the
jackpot. Now he didn't care. He had all the treasure he would ever want.
He had the universe in his arms each night.

   Pete was pleased in many ways. Stranden 47 was his first command.
He took orders from no one. He was pleased when, in the first year, the
total traffic handled by the 47 was one Blinkstat to be forwarded from a
distant X&A ship toward New Earth Headquarters. He was more than
content to have the 47 sit there in her designated spot, close by a blink
beacon, for the rest of the tour. He had Jan. Two losers had won big. Two
lonely people had discovered each other, and had found, in each other, the
key element needed for individual personal completion.

   Rather spoiled by the inactivity, Pete resented the intrusion of the
unexplained, weak, ghostly signal. He fingered the dent in his skull and
worried about it. He looked forward to many more tours with Jan. But the
tape had recorded a signal, a blink signal. It had come from down the New
Earth range.

  "It's all right," he told Jan, with a wry grin, when she told him to quit
worrying. "I've lost my power of deductive reason, so I can't worry as
deeply as most men can."

  "That's not true," she said.

  "It's impossible," he said.

  "It was a glitch."

  "It is impossible for the signal to be on the tape," he said slowly,
"unless, one, a ship sent it, or two, something happened to a ship at the
beginning of a blink."

  "Or three," she said, "unless the equipment just hiccuped."

   Pete had the training to repair non-major malfunctions. He began to
review in his mind the procedure for testing the communications bank. It
was a massive undertaking for one man. He'd be finished with it, maybe,
just in time for the relief crew. In the event of a malfunction which he was
unable to repair, he was required to report via Blinkstat to the home office
on Tigian. A tug without communications is useless. If he reported the
signal, and still couldn't account for its origin, they might have to take the
ship back to Tigian before the end of his tour. In that case, there'd be
financial penalties. They would lose all accrued bonus pay.

   There had been cases when a crew, with dissension aboard, would
deliberately sabotage a vital piece of equipment so that a relief tug would
be sent out and the unhappy crew could take their tug back to planetside.
All such events were investigated thoroughly.

   So, Pete was thinking, what if he called home and they said bring her in
for an overhaul and some smart joker at Stranden decided that there'd
been no malfunction, or if there had been that a crew not composed of
losers such as an Academy kick-out and an ex-hooker could have repaired
it? What if Stranden decided that the man-wife team of Pete and Jan
Jaynes couldn't cut it on a tug?

   Now that was something to worry about. Even if he could find another
tug job, that would be the end of heaven. He would not risk losing the
coming years of the joy of being alone with her without exploring all
possibilities. This was a trial tour for the Jayneses, and he wasn't going to
blow it because of some glitch in an electronic system.

   And yet he worried. His woman stood beside him, her hip against his
shoulder, and she hurt inside to see the pained look on his face. She'd told
him time and time again that there wasn't a thing wrong with his mind,
not with his deductive reasoning or anything else. But he knew. He was
the one who had failed the tests during his last year at the Academy. He
was the one who had begged the people at Stranden to take on an
inexperienced woman.

   "Pete," she whispered, putting her hand atop his to stop his fingers
from their continuous examination of the dent in his skull. "Pete, now you
stop it."

  "You're right," he said.

  "I'm always right," she said, with a little smile.

  "It's time to stop worrying and start doing something."
  "What?"

   He didn't answer. He swiveled his chair to the control panel, punched
up the blink beacon guide on the screen, and made his selection, his
fingers flying over the keyboard.

  "Hang on, honey," he said.

   Moving a Mule Class tug was a joy. There was power to waste. Blinks
came fast and easy. Not even a fleet liner could build charge for a blink as
fast as that huge power plant down there on one end of the 47's
rectangular hull.

   As Pete activated the brute power of the generator there was a feeling
of displacement, a tingling unlike anything ever experienced, a wrenching
feeling of movement which was not movement and ended almost before it
began.

   The hardware blinked, clicked, hummed, sensing a new starfleld
around the ship, orienting the ship instantly and giving exact coordinates.
Pete put the viewer on telescopic scan and located the blink beacon which
had been his target. It had been a long jump. The blink beacon on the New
Earth range was the nearest beacon to the 47's permanent station.

   Even without deductive reasoning, Pete had guessed that if the signal
which was worrying him had been genuine, and not just a glitch in the
equipment aboard his ship, it might also be recorded on the permanent
tape of the New Earth range beacons.

   There was a new feeling inside the 47. The generator was reaching out,
building charge, and the result was that special feeling of tingling power.
There near the fringe of the galaxy the distance between beacons was
great, measured not in light-years but in parsecs. The star fields were thin,
scattered. The blink had taken power, and now the generator was drawing
on the stars to rebuild.

   Pete ran a check, got a "great" reading from the computer. The blink
beacon, within optical distance, sent out its steady, perpetual target
signal. He punched instructions into the keyboard which activated a
system and pulled the readings from the beacon's tapes. The action
recorded the 47's name, the time, the date on the beacon's tape.
   He saw that the beacon's tape had not been monitored in the past five
years, a testimony to the remoteness of the range. He started a fast search
of the tape. Two ships had passed the beacon in five years and then the
reading was up-to-date, and, at the precise time recorded by the 47's
computer there was, on the beacon's tape, that same ghostly signal. The
computer analyzed and said the two readings were identical. Weak,
incomplete, but the signal definitely was the beginning of that signal
which a blinking ship sends ahead of itself through the continuum.

   He ran stress and wave analysis a second time, and the results were the
same. His ship's communications bank and the blink beacon had recorded
the signal at the same time.

   Jan's face had gone serious. She sat in her command chair and watched
Pete play with the computer, running the two signals through for
comparison again and again. She was silent. She knew him well now, and
she knew that when he was doing serious thinking he didn't like to be
distracted.

   He punched instructions, and the two tapes played together. Then he
began to slow the speed of play, and the sound changed tones, but began
to be stretched out. They both heard the difference in the two tapes at the
same time when Pete had the momentary sound stretched out for a full
ten seconds.

   The tape of the blink beacon had recorded something which was not
on Stranden 47's tape. That additional something was not signal. It was
more a distortion of the coating of the tape.

  "Defect in manufacture?" Pete muttered, running the two sounds
again. "No," he said, in answer to his own question.

  He had Jan dig out a technical manual and bent over it for a few
minutes.

  "Find anything?" Jan asked when he looked up.

  "I don't know," he said. "It may have been an emission of a kind of
energy which the tape was not designed to print."

  "So?" she asked.
  "I'd like to check the next beacon down the New Earth range."

   "Ummm," she said. It was not up to her to remind him that he'd defied
company and Space Service policy by leaving station without first
Blink-stating his intentions to the home office. She knew that he was
taking a chance that there would be no traffic through their remote
junction of space routes during the few minutes it took to blink out and
check the blink beacon's tape and then blink back home.

   The generator's charge was building to a power which caused Jan's hair
to tend to stand out straight. Her skin tingled. She had a thought which
sent a smile to warm her face. Making love during a generator charge was,
well, it was just wow.

   Pete began to punch the coordinates for the jump back to the station.
He'd decided that it was too risky to blink farther away from his assigned
place to check another beacon's tape. He was about ready to call the home
office and lay it all in their laps. He jerked with surprise, and Jan gave a
small cry, when the communicator began to blink lights at them and the
golden tone of the gong filled the control room.

   Pete whirled his chair to the communications bank and monitored. The
nearby blink beacon was relaying a Blinkstat. The coded signal came into
the ship's communications bank and from there was transcribed into the
odd, mechanical voice of the ship's computer. At the same time a printer
was working with a chatter.

  "X&A, New Earth, to U.P.S. Rimfire. Order: immediate contact."

  That was it. The message was from Exploration and Alien Search
Headquarters, New Earth.

   Blinkstats, which were possible through the same power that lifted a
ship from one point to another instantaneously, followed a line of
pre-established blink beacons. Blinkstats were expensive. When the ship
for which a Blinkstat was intended received the message, the expensive
transmission was terminated by automatics at the next blink beacon past
the ship's position.

   Even a man without deductive reasoning could figure out that the
U.P.S. Rimfire was thought by X&A to be on the New Earth range leading
toward the Stranden 47's station. Since the message had arrived at the
blink beacon near the 47's present location, Rimfire had to be somewhere
between that blink beacon and the next one downrange toward New
Earth.

   Pete sent a test signal down the New Earth range toward the home
planet, with programmed termination at a selected beacon far away. Each
of the beacons which he tested had relayed the Blinkstat intended for
Rimfire. He punched other instructions and found that the beacon nearest
him had relayed the stat on to the beacon at his home station, and that
beacon, too, had relayed.

   Pete was beginning to have a creepy feeling. There was no way that the
newest and most glamorous ship in the service of Exploration and Alien
Search could have passed the Stranden 47's station. Not unless X&A and
the service had come up with something so new that all of the old rules
were out. He didn't think it possible that such a development had been
made.

   Even before she was ready to go into space the U.P.S. Rimfire had been
a famous ship. She had been undergoing final outfitting at the time Pete
and Jan left Tigian to begin their tour. The media had been full of her. She
was the first X&A ship with true intergalactic capability. She was the
finest and most expensive ship ever built. According to Tigian Tri-D, not
always dependable, considering the Tigian temperament, Rimfire's
skipper was to be given the order to take the Rimfire toward the fringe
stars, to the last established blink beacon, and turn left.

  There was no way she could be out there beyond the 47's station.

    Pete punched in the buttons for home, felt the leap, and the old 47 was
back within fractions of an inch of her original position at the junction of
four lonely blink routes leading from nowhere to nothing. The homebase
blink beacon had dutifully recorded the Blinkstat for Rimfire and relayed
it.

  Pete was glumly silent for a long time.

  "Hungry?" Jan asked.

  "Not very."

  "Bowl of kanji fruit?"
   "Sounds good."

  She started to rise, and the tone of his voice stopped her. She settled
back.

  "What we're gonna hear, and pretty soon, is an all-points alert on
Rimfire." he said.

   "Oh, no," Jan said.

   "Let's eat," he said. "It'll take a while."

    It took twelve hours. The Blinkstat came from New Earth, and it was a
blockbuster, carrying the preliminary code which indicated that it was
being sent simultaneously along all established blink routes. The general
transmission, in itself, was a tipoff to the seriousness of the situation, even
if the wording was not. The message was merely a formal request to all
ships in space, all stations, all fleet installations to report any knowledge
of U.P.S. Rimfire.

   It was when the stat gave Rimfire's last known position that Pete began
to dream. Rimfire's arrival had been recorded at blink beacon
7C3X99-34R-NE793. Her next jump should have been recorded at blink
beacon 7C3X99-34R-NE794.

   "NE794," Pete muttered.

   "That's where we went," Jan said.

  "She arrived at NE793." Now he was beginning to regret that he hadn't
had more courage, that he had not jumped on downrange to NE793.

   "She's lost," he said.

   She was the most expensive ship ever built. She had every piece of
equipment known to man. She could chart new routes in space, discover
new planets; she had on board the equipment to analyze every aspect of
that new planet and, in the unlikely event of life, hostile life, she was
armed with weapons which could reduce a world to charred cinders in
seconds.

   Pete couldn't even estimate her worth, but he had a glowing feeling as
his dream grew. The crew's share of a salvage on Rimfire would be the
single biggest haul ever made. He started punching buttons. He wouldn't
reveal the dream to Jan. Not yet. No use raising her hopes until he had a
more solid handle on the situation.

  But Rimfire was lost. Out there between the 47 and the first beacon
down the New Earth range were a few parsecs of empty space. Past that
one, NE 794, a few more parsecs, and Rimfire's last known position near
NE793.

   "Jan," he said, "send a stat to Stranden on Tigian. Keep it simple. Just
say Stranden 47 asks permission begin search Rimfire."

   Jan had learned fast. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. The tiny
amount of energy required to send a signal allowed almost instantaneous
relay down the Tigian range. The answer was clicking off the printer
within a minute.

  "They say hold," Jan said. "Must confirm Rimfire in trouble."

  Pete used one of his infrequent profanities, then shook his head. "If she
wasn't in trouble she wouldn't have disappeared."

   If it was simple trouble, such as merely falling out of blink drive before
arriving at NE 794, somewhere in those parsecs of empty space between
beacons, her communications generator was enough to send a call for
help. Pete knew the space regulations. No skipper would be silent if his
ship was in trouble. If he had a way to yell for help, he'd be yelling loud
and clear. If anyone was alive on Rimfire and if the communications
equipment was working, there'd be a call going both ways down the New
Earth range.

   The blink was a relatively safe way to travel, but when man depends on
hardware and electronics, he is vulnerable. Hardware and electronics fail.
The results, to a blink ship, are not always tragic, or fatal. Sometimes a
generator just lost power for one reason or another and dropped the ship
out of subspace, or wherever a ship went when blinking, back into normal
space a long, long way from anywhere.

  There were no mysteries in space travel. When a ship failed to arrive,
and didn't report, a search always found her. There'd been a few times
when the search found a dead ship, gutted by internal explosion, but even
the dead ships were found. There were some old stories from the last war,
a thousand years old, about ships disappearing, but that was war. It's
difficult to find the disassembled atoms of a ship which has been caught
in the full blast of a rebinder beam.

   Pete's guess was that whatever had happened to Rimfire, it was
damned serious. It saddened him. He'd never seen her, but he'd seen
pictures of her, and she was one beautiful hunk of stuff.

   "Jan, she's lost all power. If she had auxiliary power we'd be hearing
from her. She's out there somewhere between 794 and 793." He didn't add
that there might be people still alive on her, people who were waiting and
praying for a tug.

  He made up his mind. "Send this to Stranden. Stranden 47 blinking
NE794 to begin search."

   He didn't bother to wait for an answer. The 47 ceased to exist and
reexisted near the beacon from which he'd taken the tape reading twelve
hours previously. He activated the optics and detections instruments and
read the straight-line route toward New Earth as far as his instruments
could penetrate. Emptiness.

   Parsecs of space lay ahead between NE794 and NE793. The search
pattern would be tedious, tiring. He started it. A short leap, just to the
point where the 47's detection instruments could read backward and
forward and, in a large number of short, jerky blinks, search every mile,
every inch, every light-year of the long, long parsecs of that long, long
jump out near the rim of the galaxy.

   He put the computer to work to figure out how long it would take, and
his heart sank when he had the answer. He didn't communicate his doubt
to Jan.

   The generator was building charge constantly now, and it was possible
to make jumps within seconds of emerging, giving the instruments only
time to search the cold emptiness before pushing the button. When the
generator was drained completely by the multiple small jumps, a longer
period of waiting was necessary.

  Lord, Lord, he thought, if we can find her.
   If he found her and locked onto her and took her back to New Earth
with the crew dead or alive, oh, Lord. The way she was built, the way she
was equipped, she had cost billions. Even after the owners of the 47 took
the lion's share of the salvage percentage there'd be, hell, millions. There'd
be enough to make Mr. and Mrs. Peter Jaynes very, very wealthy.

   It made him feel queasy in the stomach to think of the Rimfire's crew
being dead. He dreamed a dream as the long hours went by and he
snatched sleep while the generator was building charge. He'd see a blip on
the instruments and take a visual and blink up beside the huge, sleek,
beautiful ship. She'd be lying dead in space, but everyone on her would be
alive, praying and waiting for a good old Mule to come blinking up beside
her.

  He'd shoot a cable over and it would plunk against the big, sleek ship
and attach and he'd use the cable to communicate, since Rimfire had no
power.

   "Captain," he'd say, "you look lonely."

  "Glad to see you, sir," the captain of the Rimfire would say. "You've
made excellent time in finding us."

   "My pleasure," he'd say. And then the biggie. Then the question every
tug skipper dreams of asking.

   "Captain," he'd say, "do you agree to a Lloyd's contract?"

   "Well, sir," the Rimfire's captain would say, having no other choice, "I
do agree to a Lloyd's contract."

    The phrasing, Pete thought, might not be historic, ""but the effect was.
He wasn't sure the company that gave its name to the salvage agreement
still existed, for the tradition went far, far back into the history of old
Earth, long before the age of space, when transport and cargo moved on
Earth's oceans and seagoing tugs searched out ships in trouble. Then, as
now, maritime law outlined the procedure. If a vessel could not proceed to
the nearest port under its own power and was assisted by another vessel, a
certain percentage of the value of ship and cargo would be paid to the
rescuing vessel by the victim's insurance company. It was only necessary
to confirm in advance with the skipper of the vessel in trouble that he was
giving his ship over to the rescue vessel.
  That old Earth insurance company was Lloyd's of London. Thus the
phrase, "Captain, do you agree to a Lloyd's contract?"

   In any area occupied by the United Planets, the insuring company, to
Pete's knowledge, had never been named Lloyd's of London, or even Lloyd's
of Selbelle IV or something, but the phrase was still the same, and
recognized as a legal agreement in space courts.

   And he was going to be asking that question of an Academy hotshot,
the pride of the service. "Captain, do you agree to a Lloyd's contract?"

   Through the hours, through the emptiness, the Stranden 47 blinked,
searched, built power, and blinked again. Pete explained to Jan that they
might be at it for days, and trained her carefully to read the detection
instruments. For the first time since they were married they slept at
different times. Jan protested when Pete said they'd work shifts of eight
hours for Pete, four for Jan.

  "Be a good girl," he said with a tired grin, "and I'll buy you a Tigian art
generator."

   "Sure," she said. The Tigian machine, which was used to create
permanent three-dimensional scenes, cost hundreds of thousands.

  "And a few Martian emeralds." Pete grinned.

  "The strain, sir, is getting to you," Jan said.

   He started to tell her how much it would be worth to them when they
found Rimfire, but reconsidered at the last moment. Others would be
searching. To build up her hopes and then have them dashed would be
cruel.

   But he could dream. He did a lot of it as the ship blinked in and out and
the instruments gave the same readings: nothing.


                           Chapter Two

   Captain Dean J. Richards, United Planets Space Service, commanding
the United Planets Ship Rimfire, took his ship slowly away from the New
Earth mooring base confidently. He'd commanded the ship during her
trials. He could feel the life of her all around him. She was a technological
triumph, the crowning achievement of a millennium in space. She was his.

   Richards would have liked nothing better than to take Rimfire
immediately into the first phase of her mission, which was
mind-bogglingly simple. All that was expected of Rimfire was to
circumnavigate the galaxy.

   First, however, she had to chart a route to the periphery, moving out
along the established New Earth range to blink beacon NE 795, then onto
the outward range which dead-ended at a small mining planet about six
parsecs from the last outpost of stars on the edge of the great intergalactic
emptiness.

  Richards was proud to be the first to look outward.

    For hundreds of years man had been looking inward toward the
galactic core. The theory was that habitable planets would be in greater
numbers where the starfields were dense, crowded, where worlds basked
or burned in the light of multiple suns. There in the heavy radiation fields
life-zone planets had proved to be rare, and so over the past hundred years
the search had turned outward.

   It made sense to Richards. After all, old Earth and the original United
Planets were not core planets, but were located in a thinly starred area out
toward the periphery.

    Richards' formative years as a junior officer had been spent in the
dense starfields toward the core. On his first command he'd gained
permission to head outward, and he had, to his credit, a sweet little
life-zone planet, parsecs from the nearest U.P. planet, livable, a paradise to
accept a few of the billions of people whose growth was the United Planets'
greatest challenge.

   On the same trip which had produced a life-zone planet, Richards had
charted three others, rich in metals. For some reason the outer stars
produced planets and asteroids richer in those heavy metals, such as gold,
which were still demanded by man's technology.

   Richards longed to forget the continuing tests of Rimfire's complicated
systems and shoot for the rim. In space travel it was not distance which
offered the prime challenge, at least not directly. The distance which could
be covered in one blink, one jump into subspace by use of old Billy Bob
Blink's generator, was in theory infinite. In practicality, the length of a
blink was limited by known coordinates. There was one simple reason for
the problem. A ship could not blink through a solid object, such as a star
or a planet. The gravitational field of an object as large as a star or a
planet extended into that unknown subspace where a ship existed during
the timeless moment of a blink.

   Thus arose the best-known contradiction of space travel. Man had the
ability and the power to leap across the universe, but the catch was that
someone had to go first, at sublight speeds, to establish a safe exit area, a
place to emerge from a blink at a particular point in space.

   For a thousand years ships had been inching their way through the
galaxy, exploring unknown territory with blinks limited to the detection
ability of optics and other detection equipment, leaving behind them an
ever-growing network of blink beacons. A ship traveling one of the marked
blink routes had only to punch in the coordinates of a known blink beacon
to be there. To lay a blink route, an X&A ship had to creep along at
sublight speed with short blinks.

   Some five hundred years in the past an impetuous X&A captain had
decided that he would speed up the laying of a blink route. He got away
with one, then two unsurveyed blinks. His third unsurveyed blink merged
the ship with an iron-and-stone asteroid. Those who saw it said that it
was a regular work of art, a sculpture to rival the best of the Tigian
masters. The unexplained forces of the blink had changed the molecular
structure of both ship and asteroid, blending the whole into a uniform
smoothness of mixed metal and stone. The stern and bow of the X&A ship
protruded tastefully from the mass of the asteroid.

   Captain Dean Richards was not an impulsive man. He had nothing to
prove. His record was the best, and he'd been selected over a thousand
other men, many with more seniority, to command the Rimfire. A
circumnavigation of the galaxy wouldn't change the universe, but it would,
Richards suspected, rate at least a footnote in the history books.

   On the initial blinks outward from New Earth, the Rimfire's crew
tested detection and navigation equipment. Rimfire had already
undergone extensive testing, first by X&A Development crews, then by her
permanent crew, but she was being tested further as he moved her away
from the base, headed for the periphery to turn left and use Rimfire's new,
far-reaching detection capability to make enormous, parsec-consuming
blinks in the emptiness outside the body of the galaxy. It seemed almost
ironic that by traveling the unthinkable distances around the outskirts of
the galaxy a ship, once Rimfire had put out beacons, could reach the far
side of the galaxy, and many points near the rim, in less time than it took
to travel the much shorter direct routes.

  Richards liked to be in the power room while the generator was
building charge. He made it a point to inspect all of the probe equipment.
He personally tested the weapons. He sampled the food in the crew's mess.
He looked over the medical and scientific facilities.

   Rimfire was built to spend indefinite periods in space. She was totally
self-sustaining. She reclaimed every molecule of oxygen and water. She
recycled all biological matter. She grew her own food. In an emergency,
she could synthesize carbohydrate edibles and unbind oxygen from solid
rock. She was quite a ship, and she was huge, and expensive, and Dean
Richards knew that she was all his.

   As Rimfire leaped outward, Richards gradually built the generator
charge to three-quarters capacity. The generator was somewhat of an
innovation in that it was bigger and more powerful than any other
generator ever built. Since a blink generator had no moving parts, it
seemed that it would last forever. In actuality, the sheer stress of holding
so much power seemed to induce a kind of fatigue in certain electronic
elements, requiring frequent replacement of entire segments of the
generator's complicated circuitry. Stress damage was more severe on
generators which always had to be charged to full power. So Rimfire's
generator was a monster, and had the capability of moving the ship on
any length of blink at 50 percent power and up.

   In tests Rimfire had been leaped eleven times with the generator at full
charge. There'd been no abnormalities. Richards didn't envision a time
when it would be necessary to use full generator power, but he believed in
knowing all there was to know about a system upon which his life
depended. The galaxy was big, and they were going all the way around,
with possible sidetrips to points of interest along the rim. He ordered full
charge and drained it with a movement of his finger and felt his insides
slide. They seemed to move out of his body through his navel and dangle
there for an eternity.
  "Sir," said a rating at the control panel, "I don't know what that was,
but—"

   The ship was back in normal space. The blink had lasted for a thousand
years and less than an instant.

   "Systems check," Richards ordered.

   Machines, computers, men, women, all began to check Rimfire's vital
signs. "Normal, normal, normal," came the reports.

   Meanwhile, the generator was doing its magic act, pulling energy, that
eerie combination of gravitational and radiation forces, from the nearest
stars. Richards let it build to full power. He went over all reports carefully,
one at a.time as they were flashed on his screen. "Normal, hell," he
muttered.

   He went back to the test reports. Not once during the eleven blinks at
full power had there been any reported abnormality. There was no
mention of a rather disturbing feeling that one's organs and tubings had
exited through the navel and hung around outside the body. He called in
his brain trust, his senior officers, three of them.

   Rimfire was a huge ship. She had to be to house all of the equipment
she carried, plus the monster generator. She was, however, sparse on crew.
A total of thirty people were aboard. Each individual was a specialist in
his field. Each had overcome severe competition to be selected to serve on
X&A's newest hotshot vessel.

  Pat and Paul Victor arrived in the captain's cabin first, then came Evan
Waters. Pat, officer and ship's doctor, looked at Richards questioningly.

   "Did you call us for the reason I think you called us?" Pat asked.

   "If you think I called you for the reason I called you, you're right," Dean
said, deadpan.

  Pat Victor was a big, bawdy-looking woman, and Richards liked her.
He liked her husband, Paul, too. Paul Victor knew more about the insides
and outsides of a blink generator than any man since Billy Bob Blink.

   "What happened?" Evan Waters asked. He was second in command.
The service was his life. He was a good officer, an all-around officer
capable of command. He had dark good looks, and a flair for the dramatic
word.

  "I assume, then, that you all felt something unusual," Richards said.

    Pat Victor said, "I felt as if I were having a baby without pain and that
all my guts came out with it."

  "Don't you just love that doctor talk?" Paul asked.

  "You, Evan?" Richards asked.

  "I don't know how it feels to have a baby," Evan said. "I felt something.
My stomach seemed to sink down into a mass and slide and twist around."

   "Mine was something like that," Paul Victor said. "I was in the power
room. I checked instruments while it was going on. Then I checked the
tape. There was nothing abnormal."

   The door opened and a control-room rating looked in. She had a tray in
her hands. "Coffee?"

  "Fine," Richards said.

  "I felt this peculiar feeling in my knees," the rating said.

  "Thank you," Richards said, taking coffee. He'd have to speak to that
young lady. He'd tell her to knock first, and speak, during an officer's
conference, only when asked to do so.

  "Paul," Richards said, "any opinions? We all know that we were on full
power when we made that leap."

   Paul mused for a moment. "I don't have to tell you that there's a lot we
don't really understand about what goes on during a blink. As far as we
know, the amount of power used during a blink is determined only by the
requirement of activation of the generator. We know how much power it
takes to activate, based on generator size, not ship size. If there isn't
enough power the thing won't work. It's as simple as that. The same
process of activation occurs when there is an oversupply of power. There's
some question about what happens to the surplus power."
  "I love that engineering talk," Pat said. "All those technical terms."

   "I'm considering a portion of my audience," Paul said, grinning at his
wife. "Let me put it this way. Here's what I'm getting at. All the work is
done, all the energy expended, at the moment of activation. It is the
opinion of most that no energy is being expended as the ship actually
travels through subspace. Therefore, in theory, using an oversupply of
power should have no effect at all on the ship after activation of the
generator. Apparently, the surplus energy is just expended back into
space."

  "Thank you, Paul," Richards said.

   "There's a blink leg out past Dyneb where you go just within the outer
fringe of the gravitational influence of a blue giant," First Officer Evan
Waters said. "There's a particular little tug you feel when you make that
leap."

   "That's worth checking," Richards said. "Perhaps it's a peculiarity of
this particular leg."

   Evan moved to the computer console and began to print instructions.
The others looked at the well-tailored back of his uniform jacket, and at
each other. Evan had the results within a minute.

  "There's not much travel out here," he said, "but the Central Data Bank
has no record of anything peculiar going on in this sector."

  "How about an asteroid drifting into the lane?" Pat asked.

   There just were not many objects of significant size drifting free in deep
space. Richards shook his head. To check for a relatively small object
along the line of the last blink would be the work of months. He pushed a
button on the communicator and asked for a report on generator charge.

  "We're at full power again," he said.

  "Gulp," Pat said.

  They stood in control as the captain checked instruments. The rating
who had brought coffee without knocking was at the console.
   "Are you locked onto the next beacon, Miss Rainbow?" Richards asked.

   "Yes, sir."

  "Then drain her, Miss Rainbow," Richards said, bracing himself
mentally.

  It was there again, that sliding of his intestines, and it went on for
another eternity until it stopped.

   "Definitely not peculiar to one blink leg," Paul Victor said.

   "Okay," Richards said. "We want to know why, of course."

   After the next few blinks it didn't seem so bad. That funny feeling
inside, that feeling that the blink was going to last forever, became a part
of them. When the generator was backed off to 80 percent or less the blink
was normal, with the same old familiar feeling which some of them had
experienced thousands of times. But above 80 percent, wow.

   And still there were no abnormalities, no clues, no nothing but that
feeling that time had stopped.

   The Rimfire was moving farther and farther away from the traveled
blink routes, leaping light-years at a time toward the rim of the galaxy
where the stars were scattered and the blinks long. They rested, and
allowed the generator to rebuild charge, within visual and audio contact of
a bluntly built Fleet Class tug. They exchanged conversation with the
lonely crew of the tug, four of them. The tug's crew had been on post for
over two years and were looking forward to R&R on Tigian.

   "Captain," Paul Victor said, "all we have to do is cut power back to 80
percent or less. Even when we use just 80 percent we're draining more
power than has ever been used before, about twice the power of a Mule's
generator. Let's face it. It's just something that goes with the territory. It'll
keep the desk pounders back at base busy for years trying to figure it out.
We've got power to burn at 80 percent. We're not sacrificing any safety
factor."

   Richards mused for a moment, thinking of the distance which would be
between them and any possible help once they were in intergalactic space.
   "As I see it, Dean," Paul said, "you have two choices. One, you take her
back home and let the slide-rule boys go to work. Two, we go on and
perform our assigned mission."

   There was no possibility in Richards' mind of going back, not unless he
discovered that the unexplained feeling during a full-power blink
represented a clear danger to the ship.

   The two officers were standing in the control room. Julie Rainbow was
on duty at the console. She was looking at Richards as he thought, and he
caught her eyes, smiled. He'd taken time to explain to her that tech
ratings knocked before entering the captain's cabin, and that ratings
spoke to officers when spoken to.

  Julie Rainbow had the most beautiful, big, brown eyes.

   Sometimes Dean Richards felt that Pat and Paul had the only viable
solution for staying in the Space Service. That solution was to get married,
to another spacer. The service gave married couples favorable
consideration for posts together. If the couple had it together together, as
Pat and Paul had, it was a fine arrangement.

   Neither X&A nor the service deliberately picked crews of approximately
50-50 sexual distribution, at least not according to the official manuals.
However, no one questioned it when it turned out that way. Ships stayed
in space a long time, and men were men and women were women and old
Mother Nature had designed the race to be two and two. If you were the
captain, and if you weren't married—

   Oh, well, he thought, as Julie Rainbow looked up at him with those big
brown eyes. He'd handled similar situations with pretty young female
ratings and officers before. A woman had to pass an emotional-stability
test to get space duty. There were few weepers on board X&A ships.

   He put his mind back on the problem. "Paul, there's nothing between
us and the rim except one Mule Class tug. When we pass her and go on
out we'll be on our own. Before we get too far past that Mule, I want you to
wring this baby out. Every jump full-power and then some. If she's going
to break, I want her to break where we can hitch a quick ride home."

  Paul nodded. "I want to run a few more tests before we leap again."
   Dean Richards was left alone with Julie Rainbow. She smiled and he
smiled back. They were, he thought, making them more beautiful these
days. She was all woman, with long legs. He decided that the fashion
designers who had concocted the new casual uniform, shorts and hosiery
for women, had had Julie Rainbow in mind.

  "Permission to speak, sir?" Julie asked, with a smile which had the
potential to outradiate a small sun.

  He nodded.

  "You are very impressive when you're being businesslike."

  "Thank you," he said, but he was thinking, Well, this one may be a bit
more difficult to handle than some of the others.

   Nothing broke, but the feeling of vast time and eerie internal sensations
was still there when the ship blinked at full power. Richards was about
ready to admit that the thing was just the nature of the beast and go on
about his mission, using no more than 80 percent power. But there was a
fine jump coming up, one of the longer ones of the entire system. It was
not just light-years, but parsecs. He'd give the generator one more test at
full power on that long blink, and then he'd make his final decision. After
the next blink, it would be go or no go. He would either call back and
report the strange sensations to the scientists at X&A Headquarters, or
he'd head for the emptiness out beyond the periphery.

  The blink was made during Julie Rainbow's shift at the control panel.
"Full charge, sir," she said.

   "Leave us leap, Miss Rainbow," Richards said. The last syllable, "bow,"
lingered in his ears as time stopped and that eerie feeling in his stomach
came to be a part of him forever, and forever, and forever.

   He could feel himself moving, could see his extended hand. He knew
that his hand was in the process of moving, because his brain had sent the
messages for movement. His hand was coming from rest on the arm of his
command chair with the intention of brushing back his hair from his
forehead. His hand was moving, but it was moving so slowly that he
couldn't see the movement. It was moving so slowly that it would take eons
for that hand to reach his forehead. His hand would be moving for
immeasurable time, lifting, and in that eon Julie Rainbow's hand would
be lifting from the switch which had activated the generator.

   He knew the feeling of timelessness would end. It had ended before.
There was no panic. His mind worked at normal speed, or at what seemed
to him to be normal speed, and he could see the instruments and Julie and
he couldn't order his hand to stop moving toward his forehead because his
brain had ordered the movement and the neural pathways were clogged
with that order.

   He could feel the impulse, the order, that tiny charge of electrical
energy which was journeying from his brain to his hand. He could do
nothing to stop the flow of that order. He could not blink his eyes. He tried
to move his eyes, and felt the order go out and felt the infinitesimal
beginning of movement and in thousands and thousands of years he'd be
able to see the clock, on the port side of control.

   He realized, then, that it was going to go on and on. He sent the order
to his vocal cords and was sad, because he knew that someday, eons away,
when the universe as he knew it was altered, when the old Earth and the
United Planets had long been consumed by their respective suns, the order
would reach his throat and then over the next few eons the words would
come thundering out. "My God."

    He could think, and that added to the horror, to be aware. He was, for
all practical purposes, alone. He could see Julie Rainbow, and there was a
vast emptiness in him, for he knew that close as he was to her, he'd never,
never be able to kiss those full lips, he would not even be able to
communicate with her. He'd be alone forever with that sliding feeling in
his guts.

   Ships had been lost, but only a few. Space travel was the safest,
statistically, of all forms of travel. You were safer on a spaceship than in
your living room in a major city on a highly civilized planet. He searched
his memory. Yes, ships had disappeared, mostly during the war of a
thousand years past.

   It gave him something to think about. In the tensions of action had
fleet captains built generators to full power needlessly? Were there other
ships caught in time and space like Rimfire? Were there men and women,
thought to be long dead, alive, watching the slow eons crawl past with
unblinking eyes, with that sliding, twisting eeriness in their bellies?
   He prayed. He prayed for others caught in the same web. He prayed for
the crew and for Rimfire. He knew that he'd have plenty of time to say all
the prayers he could remember and all that he could compose himself.

   He thought of the old Bible, that ancient book of odd, strange, and
strangely beautiful language, the language of a young race.

  "Our father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name."

   He would be mad, of course. His active mind was imprisoned inside a
frozen body. He could feel and sense the working mechanisms inside him.
He would not age. Julie Rainbow would not age. He would be a raving
madman inside a timeless prison.

    He passed time by exploring his own body. There was a strange
freedom for his mind to roam, to feel things he'd never felt before. When
he discovered that he could do something which men had tried to do for
thousands of years, he knew that he would not go insane for a long time.
He could unlock the doors to that vast and little-known portion of his
mind, the unconscious, and he knew with certainty that the theorists were
right. Men had thought for thousands of years that the unconscious mind
recorded every detail of every sensation fed into the brain. For the entire
lifetime of man that vast storehouse of sensation, memory, knowledge had
offered challenge, and no man had ever discovered how to unlock it
completely, but in that frozen continuum Dean Richards went back to
beyond birth and experienced the sensations of being in his mother's
womb.

   The possibilities were endless. He had lived a full life, and each minute
sensation was there to be relived. When he finished with that, when he
tired of that, there were books, entire books, every word, every page
recorded there in his memory.

   The Bible alone would offer him entertainment for a few years, because
he'd elected to study Old English while in the Academy and had fallen in
love with the roll and thunder of it. Then there was Shakespeare.

  No, he would not go mad. Not for a long, long time.
                          Chapter Three

   "Pete," Jan said, "are we having our first fight?"

   The Stranden 47 had been searching the direct line between blink
beacons NE794 and NE793 for over seventy-two hours. Jan had watched
Pete grow gradually tireder and tireder as he insisted on pulling
eight-hour shifts to her four hours. So she simply did not wake him up.
She pulled eight hours and then had to shake him hard to awaken him
from a deep sleep.

   Pete felt amazingly rested. As she walked back to the control room with
him he grinned at her and said, "You see, I told you it was just a matter of
learning how to sleep fast. I feel as rested after four hours' sleep as I would
have after eight."

   "That's good, dear," Jan said.

   Then he saw the clock and said, "Now why did you go and do that? I
told you how it was going to be."

  "You needed some rest," she said. "I'm not a baby. I can work eight
hours."

   "I don't want you working eight hours," he yelled. "I'm the captain of
this ship, and when I say wake me in four hours that's exactly what I
mean."

   And then, "No, dammit, we are not having our first fight. I'm just
telling you—" He stopped yelling, grinned at her. She came to him and
inserted herself into his arms with a contented little sigh.

   "Thanks, honey," he said.

   "I miss you," she whispered.

   "Me too."

  Twice during his eight hours he went to the bedroom just to look at her
and to count his blessings.

   It was a slow and tedious process. The ship would blink to the limit of
its detection equipment's range, Pete would activate the detection units,
see quickly that there was nothing within range, not a stray stone, not a
ship the size of Rimfire, and then he'd blink again and go through the
same thing over again. Days of it, weeks of it, months of it lay ahead of
him. One lost an appreciation of the vast distances involved in blink travel
until one had to cover the same space in diddly-bopping little hops.

   During that search of the space between the two beacons Pete got an
idea of what life would have been like on an X&A ship assigned to laying
down new blink ranges. He told Jan that maybe it was lucky he had a hole
in his head so that he wasn't spending his life making short hops, checking
detection instruments, waiting for the generator to build.

   He made no objection when, on her next watch, Jan pulled eight hours.
He awakened naturally after a good, solid seven hours of sleep and came
into control with a pot of fresh coffee and some of those excellent
sweetmeats from Good Haven, a small planet back in the main body of the
U.P. whose soil produced the most fantastic fruits and cereals in the entire
known galaxy.

  "Hi," he said. "Little taste of something?"

   "Ummm," she said, reaching for a sweet. It was deliciously gooey and
sticky, and she licked her fingers after eating it. He leaned over and kissed
her.

  "You taste good," he said.

  "You, too. Sweet."

  "I'm always sweet. No action?" He punched the computer and got a
quick read of the past seven hours. He wasn't checking up on her. She'd
demonstrated that she'd learned well. It was just good policy to
double-check. She did the same when she relieved him.

  "As you see," she said.

  "More coffee?"

  "You're a doll," she said, holding out her mug.

  "Ever consider how little important things change?" he mused. "This
stuff. Coffee. It goes back into the dim, distant history of man. Back when
there was only good, old Earth and it looked as if the race was intent on
destroying itself with endless wars. Guys on duty on watercraft drank this
stuff from wooden cups, or whatever they had then. I'll bet it tasted just as
good then as it does now."

  "My friendly philosopher," Jan said. "Pete—"

  He looked up at her, lifting his eyes from the cream-whitened coffee.

  "I was playing around with that tape. The one from NE794?"

  "Yeah?"

   "I want you to hear something," she said. She punched buttons. The
brief, ghostly signal came into his ears, and then repeated itself several
more times.

   "You've stretched it out just slightly," he said. He'd noted the elapsed
time on the meter of the communications bank. The original signal,
microseconds long, had lasted twice as long.

  "No," she said.

  "What do you mean, no?"

   "I mean it's not stretched. What you're hearing is the entire signal.
Remember that little area which we thought might have been just a
manufacturer's defect in the coating, or maybe an emission of some sort of
energy which the tape was not designed to record? Well, I was fiddling
with things. Frequency-distortion correction and things like that."

  "Lord, you didn't mess up the original tape," he said.

  "No. I used a duplicate to play with."

  "So what did you do?"

   "I don't know, really. I was just playing with the machine to pass the
time while the generator was building charge and I noticed that I could
change the characteristic of the sound by making certain adjustments."

  He nodded. "Honey, it doesn't mean anything. Actually, the sound we
hear on that signal bears no direct relationship to the signal itself. A
pre-blink signal is a kind of emission which is unique, and when it was
first discovered there were no machines to convert it into something
which our senses could detect. It's not sound, of course, nor light, nor
anything but what it is. So they just arbitrarily chose to make the signal
activate a sound-generating unit so that there'd be some way, other than
looking at a sensitive meter, to know that a pre-blink signal was there."

   She nibbled at another sweetmeat. "So all I did was just alter the tone
of the sound?"

  "I'm afraid so."

   "But that small area on the tape isn't like a regular blink signal. How
did it get transcribed into sound waves?"

  He thought about it and it seemed to go around and around in his
head. His fingers went up to toy with the dent in his skull over his ear.

  Jan was immediately sorry. She hadn't intended to pose a problem
which would touch him in what he thought was his weak area.

   "Well, never mind," she said. "Look, the generator's been drained. I
used all of it in small jumps and now she's building." She wiped her hands
on a napkin, licked her lips, lifted herself from her chair to sit on his lap.
"We have at least twenty minutes. Can you think of some way to spend it?"

   He could. He did. He left her sleeping peacefully and went to the control
room. There he checked charge, decided to let the generator continue to
build, punched up the tape she'd been playing with. He used the computer
to analyze, and there was no difference between the first half of the signal,
that ghostly beginning of a pre-blink emission, and the second half, which
had been nothing more than a disturbed area on the coating of the tape.

   He rubbed his dent and tried to reason it out. He ran the problem
through the computer and found that the odds against Jan's hitting the
exact tone of that sound, starting with what was, in effect, nothing, were
astronomical.

   The generator was on full charge. He started working, making the small
leaps until he had the big beast drained down, finding nothing, then it was
charge time again and he was back at the console, playing with Jan's tape.
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. 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
rock, adjusted the field, and lifted tons of rock as if it were an integral part
of the ship.

  "That's just what we're gonna do," he chuckled, as he lifted the Lady
Sandy for altitude. "We're gonna throw rocks at 'em."
                           Chapter Ten

    When the armored vehicle burst up over a sand dune and the fortified
position, with all of the dark, threatening laser cannon ports near the top,
was just below on a flatness, Pete cut speed and swiveled the vehicle to
turn quickly back behind the dune. Each second he expected to feel the
first heat of the blasting, melting power of a laser. When they were safely
behind the dune he stopped the vehicle.

   He walked on the sun-heated sand and rock to peek over the top of the
rise. The concrete-and-metal vastness was silent. Heat waves shimmered
from its domed top.

  Jan crept up to lie on the hot sand beside him.

  "Are you thinking about going in?" she asked.

  "I don't know anything else to do." It was a large continent, and a large
desert. Hundreds of miles separated them from the nearest green zone. He
had no idea how to find water in the desert.

   He used hand-held binoculars to examine the fort. He was intrigued by
what seemed to be unfinished construction, partially covered by drifted
sand. "Jan, I think that either they didn't have time to finish the defenses
against land assault or they're covered by sand," he said.

   He led Jan back to the rusting old armored vehicle and circled the fort,
pausing now and then to study the structure. On what had to be the
leeward side of the prevailing winds he could clearly see the strong metal
framework of unfinished construction.

   It was getting hot. It was midday, and the sun blazed down with an
intensity which completely overwhelmed the sporadic air conditioning of
the inside of the tank. It didn't take deductive reasoning to understand
that their only chance was somehow to get inside the fort. He had to hope
that once there they'd find a way of communicating with the Lady Sandy,
or that he could close down the laser cannon so that the Lady could come
searching for them out of curiosity if there were no communications gear
working.
  He explained it to Jan. She listened, although she'd arrived at the same
conclusion. She nodded when he finished.

   They came in following the outgoing tracks of the three vehicles which
had come to the site of the 47's emergency landing. The tracks led straight
toward the leeward side and ended in an area protected by standing walls.
Two other armored vehicles sat in the parking area. Pete was ready with
the weapons, but the other tanks did not move.

   Up close, the fortification was impressive. A good grade of some steel
alloy had been used for the metallic supports and reinforcements. The dry
air of the desert had not damaged the metal. It gleamed as if it were years
old, not centuries old.

   Pete led the way toward the entrance of a tunnel leading away from the
parking area. Sand had drifted into the tunnel's mouth, so they had to
stoop, but soon the footing was cement. The end of the tunnel was closed
by a solid metal door with only one slit breaking its surface. Beside the
door was a closed cubicle with glass windows that had been hazed by time.

   Pete's fingers went to his skull. Jan was interested in the little cubicle.
She heaved on the door to the cubicle, and it came open with a groan of
protesting hinges. When she looked inside she went still, then she spoke in
a voice full of pity.

  "Pete, look."

   The arid desert air had preserved the thousand-year-old corpse well.
Flesh had shrunk, pulling blackened, brittle, dried skin tightly over the
bones. There were shreds of decaying cloth, a military-type belt at the
waist, a crumpled, dried holster for the weapon which was still clasped in
the dead man's bony fingers. The shattered skull told a story which had
been hidden from human eyes for a thousand years.

  "That's a projectile weapon," Pete said. He'd seen them in the Academy
museum. A charge of explosive powder expelled a metal pellet from the
muzzle.

   "Why did they do it?" Jan asked in an awed voice. "Why did men kill
each other?"

  Pete bent, held his breath, although there was no hint of odor from the
mummified corpse. His interest had been caught by a metal tab, about
two by three inches. A shred of rotted cloth clung to a pin fastener on the
back of the tab when he pulled it away. He brushed the dusty remnants of
cloth away. There were a design and numbers on the card.

   He went to the metal door and inserted the metal tab into the slit,
where it fit perfectly and activated ancient machinery. The door began to
slide slowly back into the wall, creaked, grumbled, then stopped after
opening just wide enough to allow him to push Jan through and follow.

   Sunlight streamed down from skylights to show them a large room with
various corridors leading away from it. A fine dust arose as they walked. A
metal desk was littered with brittle papers. Pete didn't take time to
examine it. He choose the largest of the corridors and, Jan's hand in his,
walked slowly toward a door at the other end, which opened to them with
the use of the metal tab taken from the dead man.

   The large room beyond the door had been sleeping quarters. There
were about fifty beds lined up along either wall in front of standing wall
lockers. On a few of the beds lay the skeletons of long-dead men. There was
a staleness to the air which made Jan's head begin to hurt.

   They tried other corridors. One led to the power room. The fort had
drawn solar power through panels atop, converting it to electricity. The
power plant had been built well. Glowing lights indicated that it was still
functional.

   More exploration revealed more scattered bodies. Some, like the man
in the guard shack outside the door, held weapons in their hands.

   "It's almost as if they killed themselves," Jan whispered, as they stood
in a little officelike room with a desk and file cabinets, looking down on a
man with one of the antique pistols in his hand.

   Some areas of the fort, unlike the stale, sickening sleeping quarters
where most of the dead lay, still had sweet, fresh air, indicating that the
ventilation system was still working. Men who could construct machinery
to function untended for a thousand years, Pete thought, had one hell of a
technology.

   He found what he was looking for after an hour's search. The fire center
for the fort's weapons was buried deeply at the center of the installation,
entered by a series of metal ladders or an elevator which still worked,
jerking into motion as Pete pushed the buttons. He didn't trust the
elevator. They climbed down, down, and found a room which was closed
by one of the solid metal doors, which opened at the insertion of the tab.

   Inside, there was fresh air. The room was free of dust, surgically clean.
Glowing lights indicated power. Pete began to study the complex panels of
instruments and controls. A stack of brittle instruction manuals finally
had to be resorted to before, with a grunt of satisfaction, he flipped two
switches and there was a low hum and then a click.

  "The weapons should be turned off," he said. "Now let's see if the
communications system is still working."

   He sat down to read. The old, brittle pages sometimes threatened to
disintegrate as he turned them. He had found what he wanted when there
came a little quiver and the room seemed to move, ever so slightly. He
jerked his head up. "What the hell was that?"

   He still didn't know all he needed to know about the controls there in
that war room deep under the ground below the fort, but he had glanced
at the manual for operating the outside viewers. He pressed buttons,
praying that those long-dead men had not left behind a self-destruct
booby trap.

   A view of the outside desert came onto a screen. He caused the topside
cameras to swivel. Just a few yards away from the fortification a huge
boulder, a mass of tons, had buried itself into the sand. It had landed with
an impact powerful enough to cause that little quiver he and Jan had felt.

  "Meteorite?" Jan asked.

   "No. Plain desert stone." He went back to the books. There was an
urgency now. The language was antique, and he thanked God for having
exposed himself to a study of the evolving English language while at the
Academy. It was slow going.

   "All four of the fortified sites are linked," he told Jan. "The central
computer is on the southern continent in the other hemisphere. That's all
very interesting. All we have to do is get there and turn it off and we
disarm the whole series of weapons."
   But meanwhile there was a huge desert boulder lying just yards away
from the fort, and he was very sure that another would be falling soon. He
continued to thumb the stack of manuals in an effort to find the
instruction book for the communications system.

  The second huge boulder dropped by the Lady Sandy struck the
armored-vehicle park, demolishing the three vehicles there and sending a
shudder through the bedrock underneath the fort.

   On board the Lady, Brad Fuller cursed. "Just missed," he said. "But I
think I've got it right now." He took the Lady off to find another rock. It
was pretty tricky, trying to figure the exact landing point of an irregularly
shaped boulder from sixty thousand feet up, out of the range of cannon.
They'd had to waste some time leading off the short-range missiles which
the old fort had fired at them.

   Pete had the voice communicator working. He tuned it to the frequency
used between U.P. ships and began sending. "Lady Sandy, this is Pete
Jaynes. We're inside the fort that you're dropping rocks on, Lady Sandy.
We have turned off the fort's weapons. Come in, Lady Sandy."

  "I read you, Jaynes," Fuller answered.

  "Lady Sandy." Pete said, "our ship is disabled. It is safe for you to land
near the fort."

   Fuller looked at his partner, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip.
Jarvis was thinking, too. "Okay, Jaynes," Fuller sent. "We'll be right
down."

   Buck King glowered at Tom Asher. "Too bad the machines didn't get
them," he said.

  Asher rubbed his chin. "Brad, is it smart to go down and pick them
up?"

   "No way out of it," Fuller said. "Damned if I know how things kept
running so long on this planet, but they did. He's got voice
communications. He might have or be able to rig blink capacity. I wanta
tell you jokers something. Not many people know it." He paused. "When I
was a kid I spent three years in the mines out around Arcturus. They say
we live in a civilized society, and I guess we do. You spend three years on a
mining gang, and you begin to doubt it."

   "How'd you get a job on a tug with a record?" Asher asked.

   "I was sixteen," Fuller said. "I got sent out by a hanging judge on a
frontier planet, a no-good ball of sand and rock not fit for settlers. When I
finally got an appeal back to New Earth they brought me out of the mines.
Judge there said I'd had a raw deal, that minors should be sent to
correctional training for nonviolent crimes, not to the mines. The judge
said I'd paid my debt and wiped the slate clean."

   "What's the point?" King asked.

   "The point is this, meathead," Fuller said. "The mines ain't civilized.
Our society is too humane to have direct capital punishment, but by God
they've got it indirectly. The average life span in the mines is five years. I
was young and strong and some of the older guys took pity on me. But I
know what it's like. I know what some of you are thinking, that we can just
go down and wipe Jaynes and his wife out and we've got a planet. I'm
telling you that we've got to be damned sure he hasn't sent a stat back
down the range."

   King grinned. "But you're open to suggestion if he hasn't, huh?"

   Fuller looked out a viewport. The planet was green and beautiful
outside the desert areas. "Let's just see how it stacks up when we get down
there. No one makes a move unless I say so, you got it?" He patted his
saffer. "As captain of a U.P. tug, enforcing orders or protecting life, I don't
face the mines if I burn a couple of jokers. You understand?"

   "Let's get on with it," King said.

  "Jaynes," Fuller said into the communicator, "how about picking me
out a good landing spot?"

   Pete and Jan made their way out to the entrance, past the huge boulder
which had demolished the three armored vehicles and narrowly missed
the entrance to the tunnel. They watched the Lady Sandy lower slowly,
getting larger and larger to the eye. She landed in a swirl of dust. A hatch
opened and a man in a spacesuit peered out. He saw Pete and Jan without
helmets, ducked back inside. A few minutes later they began to come out,
one at a time, without the suits.
   Brad Fuller stuck out his hand. "Nice to see the man behind the voice
I've been hearing," he said, with a smile. They shook hands one by one,
Jan extending her hand, too.

  "What have we got here?" Fuller asked, the formalities over.

  "A hard site, missile-launching silos, laser guns," Pete said.
"Everything's turned off now. A few very dead people inside."

  "No one alive, huh?" Buck King asked.

   "I'd say they starved," Pete said. "A few shot themselves. Listen, what
we need to do is use your ship to hop around to the other sites and turn off
the automatic defenses before one of them discovers one last weapon—"

  Buck King looked up at the hot, glaring sky nervously.

   Brad Fuller was thinking the situation over carefully. It looked as if
there were only six people alive on the planet. Two of them stood in the
way of Fuller's being a very wealthy man. He was wondering how he could
be sure whether or not Jaynes had communicated with the home worlds
via Blinkstat. He wasn't quite ready to ask a direct question.

  "Jaynes," Fuller said, "do you think we ought to call in some help?
Maybe get a ship of the line out here to take out these fortifications?"

   "I thought about that," Pete said. "I could have sent a stat via the
altered mode back to NE793, but God only knows when a ship will come
out to 793, much less get around to reading the tape."

  Buck King looked at his partner with a hidden grin.

  "I'd like to look this place over," Jarvis Smith said. "Who wants to
come?"

  "I'll go," Asher said, nodding toward King.

  "All right, but make it quick," Fuller said.

    The three men went into the tunnel. The door to the fort had stuck in
its half-opened position.

  "I don't know whether I want to get involved in messing around with
those other strongpoints or not," Fuller said. "Whoever built these places,
they were pretty warlike people. We saw what they did to your ship with
computer-controlled equipment a thousand years old. No telling what we
might run into."

   Pete wondered if Fuller had intended giving him the information that
Fuller knew Pete's recorded claim to the planet had been destroyed. He
had noted that as per regulations, only the captain of the Lady Sandy was
armed. Pete's own APSAF matched Fuller's weapon. But there were four of
them. And the stakes were high. Pete was not a misanthrope, but he
wasn't all that blinded by man's innate goodness, either. Men were
capable of stealing, of killing if the rewards were worth the risk. However,
he couldn't bring himself to believe that a smiling, seemingly capable,
old-line tug man would stop at nothing to gain an entire planet.

   And there was still Rimfire. Pete admitted that his stupidity in making
that one last run over the fort had cost him his immediate chance to
rescue Rimfire from the limbo in which she hung. In retrospect, that last
run was probably the most costly mistake he'd made in his life. Fuller and
his men had the only available transportation. If, Pete knew, Fuller were as
sharp as he looked, he'd have already made his own claim to the planet on
the Lady's permanent tapes.

   Pete knew that he wasn't in the best of positions. He stood to lose a
planet. However, he could rely on the long arm of U.P. justice. No man in
his right mind would risk having the fleet looking for him for a crime
against space laws. He hoped that Fuller was a wise man. If so, Pete was
halfway prepared to offer the other group a deal, up to half the rewards for
claiming a planet. Perhaps Fuller would be sensible enough to realize that
half of a planet split four ways was preferable to endless court battles and
delay.

   "We have to be sure that the fortifications have no further weapons,"
Pete said. "There are thirty people out there on the Rimfire. We have to
turn off the master computer, and then go get Rimfire."

   Fuller was instantly alert, although his lazy, relaxed, slumped posture
did not change.

  "You know where she is?"

  "Yes. Within range of the missiles. That's why we had to clear them
out."

   "You been in communication with them?" Fuller asked.

   Pete hesitated just a split second too long before saying, "Yes."

  "Okay. I guess we go close down the master computer and then go get
her," Fuller said. "Maybe I'd better go inside and take a look here, so I'll
have a better idea of what we're up against."

   "Pete," Jan said, when they stood alone outside the old fort, "will you
think I'm dumb if I say those men scare me?"

  He put his arm around her. The desert heat had caused her to perspire.
Her tunic was wet. "It's all right, honey," he said.

  "Did you see the way he looked when you said you'd been in
communication with the Rimfire?"

   "What do you mean?"

   "Well, dear, you never were a good liar."

   "Better than that," he said.

   She shook her head. "He knew."

   "Let's go in," he said.

    He went to a room he'd seen just off the buried war room, a room of
files and bookcases. They encountered King and Asher on the way down,
exchanged small talk about the size and age of the place. Then Pete was
browsing through the books and files. He found the commanding officer's
logbook in the drawer of a desk.

   He called out highpoints to Jan as he scanned it. The fortifications had
been built in the middle days of the war against Zede II. Time of
construction, cost, weaponry, personnel, all were duly recorded. Pete,
however, was more interested in the later days. He skipped over pages of
routine daily reports.

  "Listen to this," he said. He read the date first, a day in old Earth's
August, just under a thousand years in the past. " 'Fleet away at 0800 this
date. Incoming reports state that U.P. Strike Force 88 cleared route
junction'—he gives a number here. We'd have to find a chart to know what
area he was talking about. He goes on to write that—well, here are his
words. 'Cargo consigned to charge of Fleet Admiral Arlen P. Dunking gross
weight twenty metric tons aboard two armored cruisers.' "

  "What cargo?" Jan asked.

   "He doesn't say," Pete said, turning pages. "The fleet left, if I remember
my history right, just a few days before the climactic battle. Strike Force
88 caught a big enemy fleet in normal space and destroyed it, then went
after the Zede planets."

  He scanned pages of routine, day-to-day events in the logbook.

   Then he leaned forward, his heart pounding. "I think I know what the
cargo was. Listen. He writes that—'shortage of rations forced a halt to the
work. Miners quartered inside the fort pending the arrival of supplies.'
This was a mining planet."

  "I didn't see any signs," Jan said.

  "The centuries would have wiped out a lot of it," he said, "and they may
have had the mines concealed."

  "What would they be mining?"

  "What would you guess?" He grinned. "What was in short supply, so
short that they had to use obsolete rockets instead of blink-drive
weapons?"

  "Gold," she said.

  "Rüüight."

   He read on. "It got rough," he said. "He writes that men were sick and
dying of starvation. Here, he states that he sent several tanks off across the
desert, with very little hope of them reaching a food-growing area. All but
five of them."

  Jan shuddered. "Poor men."

  "The writing gets weak, wavery here toward the last. He's desperate. He
says that many are already dead. He says that some men are committing
suicide rather than suffer the hunger, the slow death."

  He was silent.

  "Then what?" Jan asked.

  "I am very weak," Pete said.

  "There are only five of us left alive. I had to shoot Sergeant John F.
Market for the heinous crime of cannibalism. Again, there has been no
communication from—"

   He looked up. "It ends there. The writing is very weak, a scrawl that
trails off."

  "And the tanks never made it across the desert," Jan said.

   "It would be interesting to know how they found this planet," Pete said.
"I can guess. In the heat of combat, with an enemy ship near, ships
sometimes took random blinks, risking that rather than a sure death
under the enemy's weapons. Maybe a Zede ship was under attack and
popped off and ended up here. When they found that the planet had more
than the usual amount of gold-yielding ore—"

   "This is quite a place," Brad Fuller said, as he entered the room. He
looked around. "Find out what and why?" He waved a hand at the books.

   "It was a Zede II Group warbase," Pete said. "My guess is that it was
sort of a final retreat for some of the Zede brass, in case things went
wrong."

  "Well, they never made it," Fuller said. "I guess we've seen enough.
Hardware is interesting. Computers surprisingly good for the time. I guess
we're ready if you folks are."

   Pete had made up a quick lie because he remembered Jan's statement
that Fuller and his men frightened her. To know that there was gold on
Jan's Planet, enough gold to warrant the construction in wartime of some
very expensive bases, changed the situation. A war had been fought for
gold, and, in reality, nothing much had changed since man killed man and
then destroyed entire planets. Gold, more than any other thing, brought
out the worst in men.




                         Chapter Eleven

    The position of the southern continent was near the southern tropical
zone. When the Lady Sandy made a test run over the area, only three of
the short-range missiles had to be led off into space. Then they were
approaching at an altitude calculated to draw harmless fire from the laser
cannon. A few feeble flashes told them that at least five of the cannon were
still operational. Visual examination showed that subtropical growth had
taken over the fortification, almost hiding it from the air.

   Many long-range missiles sat in their silos. Vines grew over the
launching pads of the short-range weapons, and the climbing, persistent
growth had clogged ports of many of the laser cannon. One entire side of
the fort was buried under an age-old avalanche of green. After some
testing, Fuller brought the Lady Sandy down on the bank of a stream
which ran nearby, in an area of low, soft growth in what was, apparently,
an often-flooded area.

   It was about half a mile to the fort. They set out, Fuller assuming the
leadership, hacking his way at times through dense growth. It took well
over two hours to reach the missile silos. It was, for Jan, an eerie feeling to
look down into the pits to see the rounded, rusting nose of a missile and to
know that there, within a few feet, was a nuclear weapon.

   Armored vehicles were covered with green growth which had sprung up
through the paving of a parking lot. The tunnel entrance, similar to the
entrance to the fort in the desert of the large, eastern continent, had to be
cleared. Once Tom Asher was almost bitten by a reptile which had a
deadly look. Pete used his saffer on the snake, watched it become
motionless.

   This time there was no dead guard in the guardhouse from whom to
take an entry tab. The metal door was closed, rusted. The feel of ruin was
everywhere, for the subtropical climate had not been as kind to man's
creations as the arid atmosphere of the eastern desert.
   Asher and King went back to the ship for a cutting torch. While they
were gone, Pete scouted the fort, climbing atop it with the aid of the
clinging vines which had found root holds in the seemingly impervious
cement. He was eager to see what was inside. Around the fort, trees with
fruit and nuts abounded. The men in this installation would not have died
of starvation. It seemed unlikely that such a variety of fine-looking fruit
would all be poisonous to man.

   Only the very peak of the fort's dome was free of vegetation. From that
vantage point he could look off toward the river. Some trees grew taller
than the fort, but he could see that the jungly woodland stretched onward
and outward beyond vision, rising into a range of low, forested hills to the
north.

   King and Asher were cutting through the door when he came back
down. They were through within half an hour, cutting a hole large enough
to crawl through. Fuller entered first, followed by Jan and then Pete. The
large room beyond the door was much the same as in the other fort. There
was a desk, but no papers. The dampness of the climate had penetrated,
somehow. There were no dead men. There was a coating of some kind of
slime on the cement floor which made walking tricky.

   Pete led the way down a corridor, assuming that the interior design of
this installation was much the same as that of the one in the desert. The
rungs of the ladders going downward toward the war room were slick,
rusted.

   Things were different down below. There was, instead of the war room,
a room which, from rotting remains of beds, from rusting metal
equipment, had been a sick bay. They saw the first indication of human
remains there. He was not well preserved, not preserved at all. There was
only a hint of human bones in a damp, moldy pile of dust, but Pete saw
the metal of a door-opening tab amid the dust, and retrieved it.

   The life in the subtropical fort had been lived underground. There were
large rooms with the remains of many beds, food-preparation areas,
recreation areas.

   It was Jan who discovered the closed hatch which opened to reveal
another flight of metal ladders leading to a still-lower level. Pete inserted
himself in front of Fuller and went down first. Halfway down he felt a hint
of fresh air, cool, refreshing. It carried a slight aroma of decay and rot, but
it was much better than the muggy, stale air of the upper levels.

   He emerged from the downshaft into a cooled area. As he stepped
forward a blaze of light almost blinded him. The room was huge. The floor
was fairly clean. The ceiling was high, and studded with lights. And across
that room, lying in the open, between two partitions, was a huge stack of
rectangular yellow bricks.

   "Gawd, look at that," Tom Asher said, having followed Pete down the
ladder.

   One by one they came down, stepped out of the downshaft, halted, eyes
dazzled by enough gold to buy a man anything he ever wanted if he lived
to be four hundred years old.

  Gold.

   Man's history was tinged yellow by it. From the dawn of time the metal
had been coveted, fought over, traded, bought, sold, stolen. Countless men
had died for gold which would amount to a tiny fraction of the hoard of
roughly pressed bricks gleaming under the lights of that room far below
the ground level in a thousand-year-old war fortification.

   Buck King, breathing hard and fast, started walking swiftly toward the
stacks of gold.

  "Hey, hold it," Pete yelled. "Don't touch that stuff."

   King turned. "I just want to look," he said. He was fully aware that Pete
carried a saffer. He was sure, however, that Jaynes wouldn't use it. Not
yet. And he had to touch, to feel, to sample the weight of one of those
bricks of gleaming gold.

  "King," Pete yelled, "don't—"

   Pete was moving forward, yelling, even as the arcs of high voltage shot
out, lightninglike, from the eyes he'd noticed on the partitions which
housed the gold. King bucked and danced, already dead, his body
supported in its lifeless state by the force of the voltage which fried him,
left a stench of burning flesh in the air as the beams cut off and what was
left of Buck King fell wetly to the floor.
   "I tried to warn him," Pete said. "Jesus, I tried to warn him."

   Tom Asher, his mouth open in surprise, had taken a couple of steps
forward.

   "God, if he'd only listened," Pete said, his fingers toying with the dent in
his skull. Jan went to his side.

   "You tried, Pete," she said soothingly.

   "We'd better find the computer and turn all this stuff off," Fuller said.

   "We can at least get him out of there," Asher said.

   "If you wanta reach in there, you go right ahead," Fuller said. "He ain't
going nowhere."

   Jan stood chewing on one knuckle, her face white. The ventilation
system was slowly taking the smell of charred flesh from the air.

   The war room was on the lower level. The door would not open to the
tab Pete had taken from the pile of human dust. Once again the cutting
torch sizzled, and then they were inside. This was a much more complex
place than the war room in the desert fort.

   "You're the expert," Fuller said to Pete. Pete nodded. He prowled,
taking a quick glance at three walls of meters, instruments, controls. Dead
lights and red trouble lights told him that parts of the system were
decayed.

   "There'll be a bunch of manuals somewhere," he said. "I don't want to
start experimenting in here without knowing what I'm doing."

   Jan found a closed shelf. The manuals were old, brittle, yellowed, but
readable. "This is going to take a while, if you fellows want to go
exploring," Pete said.

   "You guys go ahead," Fuller said. Jarvis and Asher left the room.

   Pete sat on a steel cabinet and began to read.

   "This one links all the positions," he said. "We were right in that."
   Jan looked at Brad Fuller's expressionless face. She did not like the way
he kept looking at Pete when Pete wasn't watching. There was something
about the man which set her teeth on edge.

   "Don't want him to push the wrong button," Fuller said, grinning at
her. "There's still a lot of nuke warheads outside, and maybe some stored
inside."

  "No," she said. "We don't, and he won't."

  "All right," Pete said, after an hour's examination of the various
manuals. "Here's one thing I can do right now."

   He walked to a control bank, checked and double-checked, then began
to flip switches. "This puts the other three forts in a stand-by, or
deactivated, stage." What he didn't say was that there in the manual in
the master war room were instructions for destroying all of the facilities.
Built into each fort were explosive charges which had a series of fail-safes.
They could be set off only from this room. The self-destruct stage in the
headquarters fort had a delay which could be programmed up to two
hours. That one was the biggie. Down underneath the fort, put there by
desperate, determined men a thousand years ago, was the most terrible
weapon ever invented by man. They were all walking atop, sitting right on
top of, a planet buster which would, upon detonation, turn a beautiful
planet into molten stone and metal and asteroid-sized chunks.

   He spent a few minutes on the section which detailed how to deactivate
and dismember the planet buster. That, however, could be done later.
There was a possibility, in that climate, that the wiring belowground had
long since corroded away, but sooner or later someone, Pete hoped under
his own direction, would have to bring that thing up and break it down
into harmless components and destroy it piece by piece.

   Next he found the bank which shut off all of the central fort's weaponry,
and the few remaining laser cannon which were operational went dead as
their charges slowly seeped away, power cut off. It was amazing to Pete to
think that so much of the fort's weaponry was still in an operational mode.

  He went to work on finding the source of power and control for the
guard beams in the gold storeroom. It took half an hour. He was ready to
deactivate when a frantic shout came in through the hole burned in the
war-room door.
   It was Jarvis. "Brad, Jaynes, you guys better get out here, and I mean
on the double."

   Turning off the beam could wait. Pete leaped to his feet. Jan followed
him out the hole in the door. As she stuck her head through she saw Tom
Asher strike Pete on the skull with a piece of pipe. She heard a sickening
thud, realized in an agonized instant that the blow had fallen directly on
the weak spot in Pete's head. She started to scream, and was seized by
Jarvis Smith.

   Asher jerked the saffer from Pete's belt as he fell, crouched, the weapon
pointed at Brad Fuller.

   "Fuller," Asher said, "you've got about fifteen seconds to decide if you're
in or out."

    "Tom, you know the two of you together aren't smart enough to bring
this off," Brad said. "Now point that weapon some other way before I take
it away from you and jam it down your throat."

  "He's with us," Jarvis Smith said. "I told you he would be."

   "You jerks jumped the gun," Fuller said. "You didn't give Jaynes enough
time to deactivate the guard beams on the gold."

   Asher looked uncertain. He lowered the saffer. Jan pulled away from
Smith and fell to her knees beside Pete. He was breathing deeply and
evenly. When she lifted an eyelid his eye was rolled back, showing white.

   She was surprised at her reaction. Pete could be hurt badly, having
been struck on that area of his skull where the old injury had left a
depression, but she was no longer concerned about whether or not the
blow had done permanent damage. She was angry. There was a deep faith
in her that Pete would survive the blow, but atop that faith was a seething
rage at the men who were responsible.

  "The way we figure it," Jarvis said, "they can have an accident, Brad."

   "That's the way you figured it, huh?" Fuller said. He'd been thinking of
some way to tie the death of the Jaynes couple into the destruction of their
ship. It had been hit by laser fire. The problem was that a laser burns a
human body in a way that no other heat does. If they tried to fake it and a
fleet ship investigated, that would be too risky. The dry desert air where
the 47 was wrecked would preserve the bodies well.

  The guard beams. The high voltage had gotten Buck King.

   "Okay," he said, "pick Jaynes up and bring him along, Jarvis. Tom, you
bring the woman."

  Smith bent over Pete. "He's coming around," he said.

   "Okay," Brad said, changing plans. "Bring him back into the war
room."

   Pete had caught a flicker of movement as he walked out the door. He
had seen the upraised arm, the dark object in the hand. From the time of
his accident he'd had a deathly fear of being hit on the head. The
depressed spot on his skull wasn't actually weaker than the surrounding
areas of bone. The doctors had done a fine job of grafting in bone, but
there were times when he had nightmares of feeling things impacting on
his skull, and he always carried a vivid memory of the months of totally
debilitating headaches.

   It was that fear of being struck on the head which, in all probability,
had saved his life. Just a flicker of movement, an awareness, and he was
throwing his feet out from under him to begin to fall flat on his face as the
piece of pipe came down and made a thudding impact. The blow was still
severe enough to cause him to fall endlessly into blackness.

   He became aware of movement. His head was as large as the world, and
there was pain which cut through the blackness and jerked his eyes open.
He groaned.

   He allowed someone to steer him to a metal chair. He tried to see. Jan's
face, taut, pale, swam before his eyes. "Jan?"

  Jan took his hands in hers, squeezed. "Can you hear me, Pete?"

  He moaned with the pain of the sound. "Yes," he said.

   "Jaynes," Brad Fuller said, "what we want you to do is turn off the
voltage of those guard beams. Do you hear me?"
  "I hear you," Pete said, with great effort.

  "Move him over to the console," Fuller said.

   Pete tried to struggle against the hands on his arms, but a part of him
was far away, unable to come back. He slumped into the dust of a decayed
cushion. In front of his eyes lights glowed on a tall panel.

  "They're going to kill us, Pete," Jan said.

  "Shut her up," Fuller ordered.

   Pete heard a meaty, slapping sound. He turned. Smith had struck Jan
across the mouth. The sound and the look of pained surprise on her face
drove the pain far back in his mind and left his head reasonably clear.

  "Turn off the power to the beams, Jaynes," Fuller said. He had his saffer
pointed at Pete's head.

   It didn't take deductive reasoning to understand. A planet, a planet of
gold, was the prize. To men like Fuller and the others, two lives would not
stand in the way.

   He felt a wave of overwhelming sadness. The time aboard the poor old
47 had been the happiest time of his life. Before Rimfire went missing and
put dreams of wealth into his head he'd been blissfully content just to look
forward to years and years of life on a tug with Jan. And now it was all
going to end. No wealth. That didn't matter. No Jan.

   That's what mattered. Thinking of being dead was not as painful to him
as thinking of being deprived of that girl he'd found in a spacer's
whorehouse on Tigian.

  "Show me which switches to push," Fuller said.

   Why should he cooperate? They were going to kill him and kill Jan. He
felt a wave of dizziness, almost fell from the chair.

  "Quit faking it, Jaynes. Either you show me how to turn off the beam or
your wife gets it now," Fuller said.

  "All right," he said, holding onto the edge of the console with both
hands to steady himself.
   Pete Jaynes had never been a fatalist. It was the pain in his head, the
dizziness. He couldn't think. He could only grieve over the loss of the
woman he loved. And a slow anger fought with the pain in his head, grew
into a devastating force. He saw in his mind a sinister thing buried far
underground, down into the planet's bedrock. The killer. The planet
destroyer. He was too weak. He hurt too much. There were three of them
and there was nothing he could do to save Jan. She was going to be killed
and he was going to be killed and that was something he couldn't accept
without protest.

  "Jaynes, you've got five seconds," Fuller said, in a tone of voice which
convinced Pete.

   "Okay," he said. He took a deep breath. The step he was about to take
was a final, irrevocable step. Once activated, there was no stopping the
process which would result in Jan's beautiful planet being reduced to
space rubble. The makers had obviously reasoned that if the situation was
desperate enough to activate the planet buster there would be no need to
make a change in plans.

   The device was set for a two-hour delay. That was adjustable. Pete
decided, first, to shorten the time, then felt that wave of sadness. He left
the timer at two hours. He looked at Jan. Silent tears had streaked her
cheek. Her lip was starting to swell.

   His fingers shook as he lifted the cover of the first protected switch. He
pushed it with a solid flick, began to go through the sequence he'd read
only once in the manual. He had that kind of mind. He was low on
deductive reasoning, so he'd compensated for it by developing his
memory. He had been so impressed by the mere fact that men had been so
desperate that they could coldly provide for the destruction of a planet
that the sequence was burned into his brain.

   It took six steps. He had gone through five of them. Lights were
blinking. He took a deep breath, took one last look at Jan, and pushed the
final button.

   There was a sizzling sound from the tall panel. Smoke burst out. There
was crackling and popping and then a small explosion which buckled the
metal front of the panel. He didn't know if that had been programmed by
the builders of the fort, but it had happened. The entire panel which
contained the instrumentation for activating the planet buster was dead.
   Fuller let out a curse as the panel burned and destroyed itself. He would
have to change his plans again. He'd intended only to have Jaynes show
him how to turn off the guard beams which protected the gold, then turn
them back on. Mr. and Mrs. Pete Jaynes would then have joined Buck
King in a charred heap.

  "Is the damned thing off?" Jarvis asked.

  "Yes," Pete said, praying that it was not. The ventilation system still
worked. Other panels in the war room showed ready lights.

   Fuller needed time to think, but the gold was blinding him. He could
picture it in his mind. He could see it, solid banks of it, stacked over
head-high, tons and tons of it. There had to be a safe way of getting rid of
the Jayneses, but he could think of that later. Maybe he could simply take
them back to the Stranden 47 and make them start walking. The desert
would do the job.

  "Let's go see that gold," Tom Asher said. He pushed Jan ahead of him
out the door.

   Pete tried to leap to his feet. The sudden movement sent blackness into
his skull, and he slumped.

  "Hold it, Tom," Fuller said.

  Asher seized Jan's arm and pulled her to a stop.

  "Let's just finish him off," Jarvis said.

  "Not here, you dumb bastard," Fuller yelled.

   "I don't know about you two," Asher said, "But I'm having a look at that
gold."

   Fuller rolled his eyes. They had a planet and those idiots were able to
think only of a few tons of gold.

  "Bring Jaynes," he told Jarvis.

   Pete felt himself being lifted. His legs were wobbly, but after a few steps
he could walk with Smith's support. He made it as far as the main room
where the gleaming gold was stored. The lights still functioned, blazing
into glare as they entered the area.

  "Man," Jarvis said, letting Pete slump weakly to the floor, "I'm gonna
buy me a space yacht and hit every high-class whorehouse in the galaxy."

   Tom Asher was moving toward the gold. Pete forced his eyes to focus.
Smith, too, was mesmerized by the golden gleam. He took two or three
running steps and was side by side with Asher when they walked into the
beam and the force of the killing voltage flared, causing the muscles of
their bodies to spasm in a wild dance of death.

  Brad Fuller let out a surprised yell. And at that moment Jan shoved
him with all her might. He'd leaned forward involuntarily as his two
companions began to jerk and crackle, as the stench of burning flesh
came, once again, to his nostrils. The shove sent him to his knees, and Jan
was running for the dark entrance of a corridor as he turned.

   Pete used all his reserve strength to throw himself at the bigger man, to
put his arm over Fuller's weapon arm. The saffer's charge sparkled against
the cement floor. Pete was unconscious again even before Fuller's fist
slammed into his chin.

   Jan had gained the dimness of the corridor and was running knees
high, arms pumping. She felt a surge of hope. Pete, bless him, had tricked
them, had taken two more of them, leaving only one.

   She reached the ladder shaft and climbed with all her strength, had put
one landing behind her when Smith pounded down the corridor. She
could hear the clatter of his boots on the rungs of the metal ladder as she
climbed.

   She'd had no plan when she made her move. She had acted
instinctively, taking advantage of the surprise of the death of the two men.
Now she had a picture in her mind. The big room where the dust of
several men lay amid the rotted ruins of beds.

   She reached the door. It had been, thank God, left open. She skidded as
she turned in and ran to the nearest pile of molded, rotting rubble. What
she wanted wasn't there. She heard running footsteps in the corridor
outside as she scurried from molding pile to molding pile. Then, at last,
she saw what she was looking for. One of those ancient projectile weapons
lay amid the fragmented bones of a human hand. She seized it.
   She knew little about weapons, nothing about antique weapons. She
did not know that the pistol was an automatic, that a round was in the
chamber, moved there by the automatic action when its owner had, a
thousand years past, ended his suffering.

   Fuller spotted the door, wheeled into it, came to a skidding stop. The
woman stood a few feet away by a moldering pile of bed and human
bones, pointing one of the old handguns at him. He had to laugh. It was a
brief, throaty chuckle.

   "What the hell good do you think that thing is going to do you?" he
asked, moving slowly toward Jan.

   "We won't know until I pull the trigger, will we?" Jan asked. She was
surprised by the calmness in her voice.

  "It might blow up in your face," Fuller said, still walking.

   "We'll see," Jan said. He was about five paces away. She had the muzzle
of the old weapon pointed directly at his face.

  She pulled. The trigger did not move. Fuller, seeing the movement of
her hand, seeing her eyes go wide, laughed again.

   She pulled harder, and Fuller's laugh was driven from him by the
impact of a thousand-year-old slug of metal which struck him high on the
bridge of the nose.

    Jan let the old gun fall to the floor, It struck with a metallic clang.
Fuller had been blown backward by the impact of the heavy slug. He fell to
lie on his back, his face a study in death, mouth wide in surprise, blood
covering his open eyes. Jan screamed. She screamed just twice, then bit
on one knuckle, edged past the body, ran to the ladder shaft.

  Pete heard the shot echo throughout the room. The sound galvanized
him into effort. He was on his hands and knees when Jan came running to
him to throw herself down and put her arms around him.

  "Fuller?" Pete croaked.

  "Dead," she said.
  "We've got to get out of here," he said. He told her, then, what he had
done and watched her eyes go wide.

  "Oh, no."

  "They were going to kill us. I couldn't let them live."

  "I understand."

  He had noted the time of activation. Less than ten minutes had passed.

  "Can you walk?" Jan asked.

  "I think so."

   He got to his feet and fought the dizziness. A man just didn't get a blow
to the head and recover immediately and do heroic things. He walked with
his arm across Jan's shoulder for support.

   The ladder shaft was torture. He dragged himself up rung by rung, Jan
below him, encouraging him. She had not had time to think that her
beautiful planet was going to be destroyed. She could think only of Pete,
and the fact that they were both alive.

   When at last Pete struggled out into the open air the freshness of it
seemed to help. They were still a long way, through the undergrowth, from
the Lady Sandy. The way had been marked as Brad Fuller had hacked
away jungle growth. But the going was slow. Pete's head ached, but he was
able to keep going. The dizziness came and went.

   They broke through into the flood zone, covered by low, rank growth.
The Lady was there, of course. Pete broke into a staggering run, the
growth whipping at his legs.

  Inside, breathing hard, fighting to keep from blacking out again, he
checked his watch.

   "We made it," he said. There was just under an hour left. He could
blink the tug far away to safety in mere seconds. The generator was at full
charge, all systems operative.

  "Pete, isn't there anything we can do?" Jan asked, as he seated himself
and began preparations for a quick blink.
   "Maybe. If there's time." He'd kept himself on his feet with that hope,
that faint, long-shot hope. He'd been thinking of that device down deep in
the earth under the old fort. It had been man's last, great achievement in
the use of the nuclear fusion. The trigger was a hydrogen bomb. The
energy released by the fusion of a light chemical element to form nuclei of
heavier elements was relatively minor, exploding so far underground.
What happened with that explosion, however, was not minor. The fusion
energy triggered an intricate reaction which released the bonding
molecular energy of medium-heavy elements with a force which spread
and could not be contained, not even by the core and crust of a planet.

   The planet buster had been such a terrible weapon that following the
war against the Zede II group, a lot of money had been spent finding a way
to counter it. There was, of course, no way to stop the reaction once it had
been triggered, but U.P. scientists had found a way to disarm a planet
buster before the hydrogen trigger exploded. For a long, long time, all
ships of the line had been equipped with a magnetic beam which could
penetrate miles of solid rock to disrupt the initial fusion action and
prevent detonation.

   The problem was that when Pete was at the Academy there'd been talk
of discontinuing the practice of making the neutralizer mandatory
equipment for fleet ships. The chances of Rimfire's having a neutralizer
were slim. She was an X&A ship. But X&A ships, going into the unknown,
went prepared. Weaponry on an exploratory ship matched, and often
exceeded, that of a ship of the line.

  He had fifty-two minutes.

  He punched in the coordinates for Rimfire's position, and the Lady
Sandy blinked.

   Jan had been busy. She treated the knot on Pete's head, cleaned it,
sterilized it. The skin was broken and blood had clotted his hair.

   The Lady came into normal space a few hundred yards from the
shadowy outline of Rimfire.

   "Get me headache pills," Pete told her. He had some thinking to do.
He'd planned how to get into the same never-never zone with Rimfire
previously, had had it worked out, but he wanted to be sure. Jan was alive,
and soft-warm. He wanted to be with her forever, but not frozen in time
and space like Rimfire.

  He took the powerful drug, and his head felt much better almost
immediately.

   "We need to talk this over, Jan," he said.

   "Pete, I don't want to see my planet destroyed."

   "It's risky, Jan. We can blink back, call in some of the bright scientists
from New Earth. Rimfire's not going anywhere."

   "Please," she said.

   "It means that much to you?"

  "Not if you think it's too risky," she said. "But we were rich, Pete. We
had a planet of our own. Didn't you like that?"

   "I did."

   "I'll leave it up to you."

   Forty-nine minutes.

   He talked it, using spoken thoughts to get it straight in his mind.
"Okay. Rimfire programmed a blink in the normal mode. Something,
perhaps the size of her generator, the power, something, caused her to
vector off onto that generator harmonic which matched the blink mode of
ships of a thousand years ago. Her computer was programmed to bring
her back into normal space from the normal mode, and didn't function in
the altered mode."

   She knew what he was doing. He was merely thinking aloud. But the
chronometer was ticking off precious seconds.

    "The computer says this will work. In effect, I program a mixed blink. If
I just programmed a blink in the old mode we'd come back into normal
space right past wherever it is that Rimfire is hung up. What we have to
do is program some delay into the blink, so that we'll exist in the same,
whatever, frame, time and space, whatever, that Rimfire exists in."

   Jan nodded.
   "We haven't tried that yet, you know."

   "Pete."

   "Okay, okay." He punched instructions. "Hang on."

   He felt the slide, the exit of his internal organs and tubings. His heart
seemed to beat outside of his body, and once again he felt, in that
timeless, endless eon of waiting, a great pity for the crew of Rimfire.

   He'd been looking at Jan's face when he pushed the blink button. If he
had to spend eternity frozen in some strange state, he wanted to spend it
looking at her.

   After a few thousand years, during which he had time to review his
entire life, time to remember every moment with Jan, he saw her eyes
blink and it was over.

   He breathed. "It works."

   Thirty-five minutes.

   He talked as he made preparations. "What I did was program two sets
of exit instructions," he said. "First, the blink was programmed
standard-mode, but with the generator tuned old-mode. That left us hung
up."

   "Wow," Jan said. "I relived my whole life."

   "It's not bad, except for that feeling of being outside of one's body,"
Pete said. "But I also programmed a switch to old mode which, after a
delay in tuning the generator—that went on while we were feeling
timeless—"

   "Evidently doesn't affect a computer," Jan said.

   "Evidently not."

   So it worked. Now came the ticklish part. He told her what he expected
of her. "We're going to have to actually make hull contact with Rimfire
while we're hung up in time," he said.

   That meant a series of tiny blinks. It didn't matter to either the
generator or the computer how short the blinks were. The process was the
same.

   He moved the Lady Sandy a few hundred yards closer to the shadow of
Rimfire, measured carefully. Each blink was the same. Each took an
eternity.

   "It's almost like psychotherapy," Jan said, as they readied for another
small blink which would cut the distance between the ships down to mere
feet. "I can go back to the womb. I can remember every sensation, every
word I've ever said or read, everything anyone has said to me."

   "I spent a few thousand years going over our first month together," Pete
said.

  He had calculated it carefully. There was no time to wait for the Lady's
generator to charge fully.

  Twenty-one minutes.

   He would make two more of the eternity blinks, hanging in limbo for a
time which proved, in real space, to be only seconds. The next-to-the-last
blink put the tug's metal side mere inches from the shadowy metal cliff of
Rimfire's portside. In normal space it would have been simple. He would
merely have snaked a cable over, and the field of the generator would have
traveled down the cable to lift Rimfire back. However, to exist where
Rimfire had solidity, he was in a state of frozen time, unable to blink an
eye, much less control a cable. It had to be a hull contact. And since no one
had ever blinked a ship into actual hull contact he had a few nightmare
visions inspired by that man-made sculpture out in deep space, a ship
fused, sharing a molecular bone with a stone asteroid.

  Nineteen minutes.

   Within a few seconds there could very well be another frozen sculpture
in space, or in near space, a shadow of two ships, a huge X&A ship and a
stubby tug blended together forever and ever, molecules intermixed, flesh
become a mixture of metal and all the elements which went into the
construction of the two ships.

  He used a precious few seconds kissing Jan. She felt, then, her first fear.
Until that time she'd had total confidence. The kiss, the way he clung to
her, told her that there was, indeed, danger.

   "You know," Pete said, releasing her, sitting down, his fingers poised
over the blink button, "I've dreamed about this moment from the first day
I set foot on a tug. I've envisioned latching onto a big, rich ship. I've
repeated a phrase a million times in my mind. Lord, how I'd like to be able
to say to this ship, 'Captain, do you accept a Lloyd's?' "

   "I know, darling," she said. "I know."

   "And here I'm about to latch onto the most expensive, most valuable
ship ever built, pull her out of trouble, and I'm not even going to be able to
talk."

   "It's all right," she said. "We'll have a planet."

   If it worked. If Rimfire had a neutralizer. If it wasn't already too late.

   "Ready?"

   "Hold my hand."

   He squeezed her hand hard, pushed the button. A metallic, clanging
thud was in his ears, remaining there for eons. All of his vital organs, all
that was within him, his life force, his everything, seemed to flow up his
arm and blend where their flesh made contact with all that was Jan.




                         Chapter Twelve

   Captain Dean Richards, having reviewed all he had ever been exposed
to in the way of mathematics, amused himself for a few thousand years
figuring exactly how far his hand had moved. He'd started it toward his
forehead to brush back his hair a few eternities past and it had moved
exactly .0000000 0001211 millimeters. It would be interesting to
calculate, in units of near infinity, how long he'd feel the tickle of the lock
of hair.

  Tiring of that, Richards began at the beginning again. He knew the first
moment of sensation. He was in the womb. He could feel the
thump-thump of his mother's heart, hear the singing sound of blood in his
tiny, forming veins.

   After a few times through a lifetime, things were revealed which had
been lost in the haste or excitement of the moment in actual life. He found
that he could concentrate on things he had seen with peripheral vision
only and create almost a new set of lifetime awareness.

   The brain was, he had found, a most marvelous organ. He was
astounded by the things it had stored, things which he hadn't even noticed
at the time.

   Lord, what an educational tool! He could review, word by word,
thought by thought, every book he'd ever read. He could extend theory. He
was a mental superman, but he was helpless.

   And then the damned ship's alarm system clanged and clanged and
Julie Rainbow was looking up at him with wide eyes.

  "Object in hull contact, sir," Julie said.

   He had not fully recovered. He was still living an interesting, forgotten
segment of his life. And things were happening too fast. The alarm was
clanging and people were leaping to stations and a voice came at him
from the bulkheads and all the metal in the ship.

  "Captain," the voice said, "do you accept a Lloyd's?"

  "What in holy hell?" Dean Richards said.




                      Chapter Thirteen

   He had to say it. He just had to say it. He'd just undergone an eternity
of closeness with Jan which was unlike any other experience of his life,
their souls, everything that was them blended and aware at the point of
contact, their closely held hands. And he'd lived his life again, knew that
with the knowledge he'd accumulated in deep, word-by-word study of
every book he'd ever read he could breeze through any exam the Academy
could throw at him and then teach the professors a thing or two.

   All that, and he still had to say, "Captain, do you accept a Lloyd's?"

   He sent the question through the cable communications system and it
reverberated in the hull of the Lady. Then he clicked on the voice
communicator.

   "Identify," Rimfire sent.

   "U.P.S tug Ramco Lady Sandy." Pete said.

  "This is Captain Dean Richards, U.P.S. Rimfire. I see no reason to
understand your question."

   "You did seconds or eternities ago, Captain," Pete said.

  Dean Richards brushed the lock of hair back from his forehead. Yes, the
man was right. But now Rimfire was functioning perfectly.

   "Captain Richards," Pete said, "we can talk about that later. This is a
vital question. Do you have a planet-buster neutralizer on board?"

  Richards was still trying to clear his head. "That, sir, is service
business, not yours," he said.

   Fifteen minutes.

   Pete's fingers flew. He felt the strange, eerie tug, knew that suspended,
timeless feeling. He passed it going over the little he'd ever read about
planet busters and neutralizers. Then they were back in normal space
again.

   "Captain Richards," he said, "you have an empty generator." He was
angry. Seconds were ticking away. Jan's beautiful planet was just under
fourteen minutes away from destruction. "You can't blink. Answer my
question or I'll blink you back and leave you there until I can get messages
back to New Earth and get a fleet ship out here."

   "That is classified information," Richards said.

  "My God, man, a planet's going to blow up," Pete shouted into the
communicator. "I can explain everything later."
  "Yes, we have a neutralizer."

  "How long will it take to get it activated and to do the job?"

  "Hold one," Richards said.

   Paul Victor, rubbing his eyes in puzzlement, had come into the control
room. Richards put the question to him.

   "Activate in two minutes," Paul said. "In position, five minutes to do
the job. Maybe a little more if there's a great deal of heavy metal in the
planet's crust."

   "Get it going," Richards said. He'd let the whole exchange be broadcast
to the tug which was in hull contact with the Rimfire. Even as he gave the
order he felt the Rimfire blink. The tug had moved him. More alarms
sounded. He checked visuals and saw a water planet quite close.

  Ten minutes.

  "The buster is immediately under the fortified position directly below,"
Pete said. "We have nine minutes and twenty seconds and counting."

   Paul Victor looked up quickly. He'd started warming the neutralizer. It
had one minute and thirty seconds to go before it was ready. He spoke
into the communicator. "Young man," he said, "it's going to be close. I'd
suggest that you be prepared to blink us to hell out of here."

  "Just neutralize that thing," Pete said.

  "Neutralizer activated," Paul said.

   Pete looked at the chronometer. Six minutes, thirty seconds. Jan was at
his side, tense, her hand on his shoulder, her eyes on the visuals to get, she
felt, what might be her last look at her beautiful planet. She'd seen Pete
punch in a blink coordinate. She knew that he was ready to blink both
ships out of the range of the devastating explosion.

   "There's a planet buster down there, all right," Paul Victor said, as he
sent the neutralizing beam out and down to flash through the planet's
crust. "And there's one hell of a lot of heavy metal."

  He had six minutes and five seconds to kill the capacity to react in a
hydrogen warhead.

  "It will be very, very close," Paul said.

  "Keep the tug skipper posted," Richards told him.

   "It's old," Paul said, "but it's alive. Good, strong reading. Going down
slowly."

   Jan reached for Pete's hand, praying at the same time. She was careful
not to hold the hand which was poised over the blink button. There was
just enough charge left in the Lady's generator to lift both ships to safety.

  Four minutes. Three. Two. At sixty seconds, Pete began to count down.

  "Lady Sandy," Paul Victor said, "we're not going to make it. I'm sorry."

  "Forty-nine," Pete counted. "Forty-eight."

   He'd lost it all. No Lloyd's on the Rimfire. No planet. And one hell of a
lot of explaining to do.

  "Fusion potential coming down," Paul said tensely, watching the clock,
hearing the tug captain's countdown.

  "Thirty," Pete counted. "Twenty-nine."

  "Get us out of here," Dean Richards said. "Now."

   "Twenty-five. Twenty-f—" He jerked to attention, his finger jabbing at
the blink button at the same time. The damned thing had gone off early.
He saw it clearly, saw it in full Tri-D color on the viewer, saw the old
fortification tremble and buckle upward, and as his finger hit the blink
button and the viewer went black he saw just a beginning burst of fire
dissolve the domed roof of the fort.

  "We lost it all, honey," he said, the ship back in normal space.

  "Lady Sandy, where are we?" Dean Richards asked.

   Rimfire's computer was working. He'd have coordinates within
seconds, but his viewers showed nothingness, blackness.
   Pete, in a dull voice, gave Rimfire the coordinates of the position. He'd
blinked back to the midpoint beacon, back toward the galaxy and the New
Earth range. He felt drained. His head hurt. With all the renewed
knowledge in his head he couldn't imagine how he'd explain all of the
events of the past few hours to a service inquiry board. They'd have a ball
with just one aspect of it, how he and Jan came to be in command of the
Ramco Lady Sandy. All the proof, all the evidence, was flying outward
from a central point in fragments and molten lava.

   No planet. No salvage contract. No job.

   He stood, pulled Jan into his arms. He had that. Yes, he had that.

  "Sir," the voice said on the communicator, "I'd like to know your
name."

   Pete gave it.

   "Captain Jaynes," Richards said, "we're beginning to piece things
together a bit over here. I have many questions. I'd like to suggest that you
suit up and enter Rimfire through the hatch just astern of you."

   It was, Pete knew, not a suggestion. It was an order. He wasn't about to
go anywhere without Jan. They suited up.

   The cold of space is a tangible thing. It can crystallize metal. It can
make itself felt through the best-insulated spacesuit, if only
psychologically. They moved along the Lady's hull clinging to safety lines,
magnetic shoes clomping on the hull. Line at his waist, Pete pushed
himself, floating, from the Lady's stern, contacted the hull of the Rimfire
feet-first, pulled Jan across.

   Two efficient service ratings helped them out of their suits once the
airlock had filled, led them forward to the control room. All of Rimfire's
officers were congregated there. Julie Rainbow was at her post.

   Pete accepted the outstretched hand of the Rimfire's captain,
introduced Jan, shook hands with the other officers.

   "Well," Pete said, feeling very, very tired, "there's a lot of explaining to
do."
   Richards smiled, waved them to a seat. "I think we already have a few
of the answers, Captain." Rimfire's crew had been working during the
period of time it took Pete and Jan to cross over and enter the X&A ship.

  "I want to confirm one thing, first," Richards said. "May I look at your
watch?"

   Pete's wristwatch was standard service issue. He held his arm out,
crooking his wrist so that Richards could see the face.

  Richards whistled and help up his own wrist, but Pete had already
checked the control-room chronometer.

   "Captain," Richards said, "in view of this I think we can have a little
talk, later, about that Lloyd's contract you mentioned. My engineer, Mr.
Victor, tells me that some abnormality in our generator got us caught up
in subspace. Is that your opinion?"

   "Captain," Pete said, "it's a long story, and I'll be happy to tell it to you.
I have only one request. Well, two. First, we'd love a cup of good service
coffee, and I'd like your word that you'll listen to the entire thing before
you start asking questions. It seems that all the proof of what is going to
seem like a bunch of wild lies went up with our planet."

   Julie Rainbow was already in motion. She had two steaming mugs of
coffee within seconds.

   "You said your planet," Richards prompted, as Pete sipped.

   "Captain," Julie Rainbow said, "excuse me."

   Richards looked at her with one raised eyebrow. The girl was never
going to learn not to interrupt. It seemed ages ago and only days ago that
he'd told her—

   "Captain," Julie persisted, "that planet. It's still there."

   Jan leaped to her feet.

   Julie nodded. "I just put the long-range detectors on it." Rimfire's
detectors were vastly superior to the detectors on board a tug. "I wanted
to see what a planet buster did, and it's still there."
   Jan had spilled coffee when she leaped to her feet. It didn't matter. She
put her mug down and started doing a little dance of joy. She pulled Pete
to his feet and hugged him.

  "It's still there," she whispered. "It's still there."

   "Captain," Pete said, "before I start talking, can we check out Jan's
Planet visually? What's on that planet will answer a lot of questions."

   "I don't want to risk a blink with the Rimfire, not until I know what the
hell happened," Richards said.

   Pete turned to the computer, and even as Richards started to protest,
his fingers flew. "It's all right. I'll explain later. It's a simple matter of
tuning the generator. I didn't take time to do that. I just programmed
instruction." And with that, even as Paul Victor lunged at him, he pressed
the blink button, and they all froze, felt the eerie, old mode, and were back
in space within visual of a beautiful blue-and-white water world, one of
the most beautiful sights in the universe, a life-zone planet.

   "There was a nuclear blast," Paul Victor said, after examining
instruments. "Either it was too weak to trigger the buster, or the buster
malfunctioned."

   There was a crater at the site of the old fort, edges glazed by heat.
There'd been some radiation released into the air, but nothing which
would give anyone any problems. The site of the explosion itself could be
cleared by an antiradiation team in a couple of months.

  "And now, young man," Paul Victor said, "I want to know what you
meant when you said something about tuning a generator."

  "I have some questions first," Richards said.

  "I think they'll all be answered as I go through it," Pete said, grinning
down at an ecstatic Jan. "Two things first."

  "Coffee?" Julie Rainbow asked, coming to her feet.

   "Yes, thank you," Pete said. "Then I'll record our claim to the planet on
the Rimfire's permanent tapes, just to make it doubly official."
  "And then maybe you'll be kind enough to tell us what the hell has been
happening," Richards said.

   "Be glad to, sir," Pete said, unable to control the grin, feeling Jan at his
side, soft-warm and wonderful.




                       Chapter Fourteen

   The atmospace yacht Jan's Planet, cleared for approach and landing at
Rimfire Spaceport, zapped down with a flair, leveling and stopping just
before disastrous impact seemed imminent. She skimmed the pad, settled
in front of a large, private hangar. White-clad attendants swarmed around
her as the hatch opened. Directly behind her a service launch made a
more sedate approach, a slow, careful landing, eased to come to rest near
the Jan's Planet. Again the white-clad attendants scurried.

   They met halfway between the ships, a rather handsome foursome, a
fleet admiral in service blue, a fleet captain, dainty, pretty even in the
severe uniform, and a sportily dressed couple who came from Jan's Planet
hand in hand.

   Captain Julie Rainbow ran a few steps forward to kiss first Jan, then
Pete. Dean Richards, his temples showing a bit of distinguished gray,
embraced Jan and shook Pete's hand. The four boarded Jan's Planet. Pete
had given the crew time off, so there were just the four of them as the
sleek yacht soared vertically and then leveled and shot into the
stratosphere and into near space on a ballistic trajectory.

   "Good Lord," Julie laughed, as the trajectory peaked and she felt that
over-the-hump quick kiss of momentary weightlessness. "That's the first
time I've done that since I was a kid in trainers."

   "Pete's in his second childhood," Jan said.

   "Nothing too good for real heroes," Pete said. "First to circumnavigate
the galaxy, discoverers of humpteen new life-zone planets."

   Dean Richards was using the visuals. "Richardsville has grown," he
said.

  "Namesake of the principal city on Jan's Planet," Pete went on. "Want
me to do the kiss-me-quick again?"

   "I came here to see a museum," Dean Richards said.

  "Don't let him kid you," Julie said. "He came to see the city named after
him and to see his godson."

   "How is little Dean?" Richards asked.

   "Pete's ready to buy him his first ship," Jan laughed.

   "Well, he's smart for a five-year-old," Pete said.

   He was going down, calling for clearance. The skies of Jan's Planet were
no longer theirs and theirs alone. He made one of the patented, wild,
heart-stopping Jaynes landings. A ground vehicle wheeled up to the yacht.
As the four boarded, Julie admired the building ahead. It was set in the
center of a vast, deeply grassed plain.

   "You picked a spot for it, all right," she said.

   The ground vehicle delivered them to an impressive entrance under a
sign which said: JAYNES MUSEUM OF ANCIENT WEAPONS OF WAR.

   Pete and Dean fell behind as the tour of the new museum began. The
curator hired by Pete, noting that the two men seemed to want to talk,
directed his comments to Jan and Julie.

    "You made a wise decision, Pete," Richards said, "taking the finder's fee
in land."

   "I didn't think so the first few years," Pete said.

   "That mining contract on the eastern desert didn't hurt you."

   "Nope."

   "Hope you're seeing to it that they don't mess up the land."

   "Sure," Pete said. "It's a clean operation, all underground. There's the
same desert up above that was there when we first saw it."

    A flash of memory. Jan's Planet in his viewers for the first time, the loss
of the old Stranden 47, the terrible moment when he'd seen nuclear fire
burn up through the domed roof of the old fort on South America. He'd
named the continents of the western hemisphere after similar landmasses
on old Earth. The first few years of residence on one of their vast tracts of
land on the continent he'd named North America. And, not quite so
pleasant, the months of investigations which had finally resulted in
confirmation of their claim to the planet, and to the salvage contract on
U.P.S. Rimfire. Favorable testimony by Dean Richards and his officers had
helped, and a firm friendship had resulted.

   "Guess you've heard that the Academy and the service are now using
old-mode hangup time for pounding education into the heads of
empty-headed cadets," Richards said.

   "Read something about it." He halted in front of a battered, partly
melted tug. The 47, lifted from the eastern desert, had a permanent home
in the museum.

   "Pete, I'm always pleased when we can stop off here, but I made a
special trip this time," Richards said.

   Pete turned, brought his mind back from the sweet, sweet days aboard
that old Mule of a tug.

   "Department of Space and Alien Exploration suggested it," Richards
said. "You've made yourself quite a reputation with those papers on
theoretical effects of blink-generator tunings."

   "Ummm," Pete said.

   "They've assigned me to research your theory that the pre-blink signal
can be read both ways."

   "Good," Pete said. "I'll be glad to see some work done on that." It
needed someone with the power of deductive reasoning, he felt. An old
Academy kick-out could only take it so far, reasoning that although
subspace has dimension, of sorts, that that dimension is infinitely large or
small and that there should be a way to take the short way to infinity, read
the emergence of a pre-blink signal and use that signal to make blinks into
previously unexplored space. By doing so, the long, tedious exploration to
lay new blink routes would be eliminated.

   "X&A has authorized me to offer you a temporary admiralcy," Dean
said.

   Pete's fingers went to his skull, played there for only a second. "What in
the hell for?"

    "To be consultant on the project. We'll use Julie's ship, the old Rimfire.
I'll be project boss."

  Lord, Lord, he was thinking. Admiral Peter Jaynes. He laughed.

  "Intrigues you, doesn't it?" Richards asked.

  "It does." If it had come a few years earlier he would have leaped at it.

  "Like to have you and Jan aboard."

  "Dean, I wish to hell I could."

  "Thinking about little Dean?"

   "Yeah. We're away from him enough as it is. And we've just started
renovation of the fort in the desert. It's the best-preserved one. Give people
a chance to see the kind of things men did back when we fought wars. And
we've got our first crop of wheat coming up out on the plains."

  "Well," Richards said, "I told them I wouldn't be able to pry you away."

  "I'm afraid not. You'll keep me posted, I hope."

   "Sure. Might be calling on you for some of that nondeductive reasoning
of yours, too. You know what it will mean if you're right about this."

   He knew. A ship could move through space, through any space, in
galaxy or out, just as fast as the blink charge would build. No more careful
probes to be sure blink lines were clear. Julie Rainbow, for example, could
take the Rimfire out past the periphery, send an exploratory pre-blink
signal, clear the area, and be on the fringe of another galaxy in one blink.

  "Well, our ladies are waiting," Richards said.
   A quick, low orbit of the planet showed the two service officers how well
settlement and development were going, and then they were on the launch
headed back for Rimfire.

  The sleek atmospace yacht blinked outward, past Rimfire, even as she
pointed her blink signal for the familiar blackness of intergalactic space.

  Jan's Planet headed inward, hit the New Earth range, and blinked to
come to rest in normal space near blink beacon NE795.

   Nearby, a Stranden Mule kept vigil over the junction of blink routes.
The two-man crew, man and wife, had a few moments of interest in a
boring, three-year hitch as the pre-blink signal of the yacht came and a
brief courtesy greeting was exchanged. The man-wife, with four months to
go to relief, were dreaming of a holiday back on Tigian.

  "Every year, same time," the tugboat man told his wife.

  "New yacht this time," the wife said.

  "Same name."

  "Yes."

  The man adjusted the visuals to have the yacht in view. "Every year
same thing. They say hello and then put up a privacy screen. I wonder
what the hell they do over there for two weeks same time every year?"

  Jan came into the lounge on board Jan's Planet in a silken singlet.
"Ready for coffee?" she asked.

  "Sounds good," Pete said.

   She poured. He sighed in contentment. Two weeks. Two glorious weeks
of nothing. Nothing but Jan. Little Dean was in good hands living it up on
the farms. Two glorious weeks. She looked more like a Tri-D star than a
girl he'd talked away from the Spacer's Rest, Lord, how many years ago?

   "You'd like to be out there with Dean and Julie, wouldn't you?" Jan
asked, as she sat beside him and he felt the silken touch of her hip against
his.

  "In a way. But not now. This is my time."
   "And, sir, your time is my time," she said.

   "Sure you don't think this is a dull way to spend a vacation?"

   "What do you think?"

   His fingers went to his skull. She reached for his hand. "I'll tell you what
I think," she said. She said it with silent, moist, pressing lips.