Gold Star

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