Gold Star

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