Gold Star

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