Gold Star

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