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
