Gold Star

know a helluva lot about what goes on when a ship is in subspace.» He fingered his skull. «What if subspace is dimensionless and infinite? Some say it is. We dump a ship into it by the power of a generator. That ship has no motion, Jan. It can be sitting absolutely stationary when a blink begins and it's absolutely stationary when the blink ends. And yet there's movement in subspace, movement of some kind. That ship has to know where to go in subspace in order to emerge at a particular point in real space.» «So?» she asked. «So the pre-blink signal points the way.» He was pacing now, his fingers actually scratching at the dent. «Or maybe the pre-blink is the ship, and it arrives in the subspace form in the form of the pre-blink and—» He halted. «Damn, damn, damn.» She recognized the symptom. He'd come up against a blank wall in his thinking. «You're doing pretty good for a guy with a hole in his head,» she said encouragingly. «Go on.» «It's silly,» he said. «Not at all. You're making sense.» «Yeah, old Peter Jaynes figures out things that the scientists have been working on for centuries.» «Why not?» she asked. «Billy Bob Blink was a TV repairman.» Lord, she had faith in him, and he was stupid, stupid, unable to think. He paced. «The basic design of the blink generator hasn't changed in a thousand years,» he said. He was just blowing smoke. He knew it. He was just acting as if he could think to earn the admiration of the person who was his life. «No reason to change it,» he said. «You can't improve on the perfect machine.» «But you're saying that it could be changed?» she asked. «Oh, sure. Well, it has been changed. The first one had just enough power to blink an egg ten feet across Billy Bob's workshop, and it was ten by ten feet itself and tied into a computer the size of this ship. They've made them smaller.» He envisioned a generator. The heart of it was amazingly simple, an electronically shaped magnetic field in a cloud chamber, highly compressed. Most of the bulk of a generator was made up of the computer, which was necessary to make the multi-billion calculations required to shape the magnetic charge, and by the ionized chambers in which the charge was stored. «Pete, maybe you'd better sleep on it,» Jan suggested. «You'll have a fresh perspective on whatever it is you're working toward when you're rested.» «There's a body of research,» he muttered, speaking to himself. He pounded the thumb end of his fist onto his forehead. Jan could hear the sound of it, thump, thump, thump. She cringed, almost rose to stop him, then sighed and sat back. «Now who the hell was it?» he asked. «Larson. Parson.» Thump, thump. «You're going to beat your brains out,» she said. «What's left of them?» He paced. «Person. Lewson.» He snapped his fingers. «Geson. Jan, punch up Alex Geson on the library viewer. What I want is something about the field mechanics of a blink generator.» She had it within seconds. «Alex J. Greson,» she said. «A Definitive Study of Blink Field Mechanics.» «That's it.» He sat and started rolling the film. To Jan, it was a mishmash of complicated formulae, of incomprehensible scientific jargon. It took Pete back to second-year theory classes at the Academy. He skipped, read, fingered his skull, drank the coffee which Jan poured him. After two hours he was flipping back and forth between an analysis of the field in the first blink generators and what was, at the time of Greson's work, a modern generator. Greson himself was long dead. His book was a standard on the subject of the blink field, and it was over three hundred years old. The work traced the development of the generator from its beginning, and much of the experimentation done by Greson had been termed useless. Endless experimentation had proved that only one configuration of magnetic field produced the blink effect. Only one configuration would cause an object, or a man, to cease to exist and exist almost simultaneously in another spot. Change the field and you had an expensive, powerful magnet capable of doing nothing but moving ions inside the cloud chamber. But there was something there, something which kept nagging at Pete. He turned off the reader, sighed. «Jan, I know I'm not much, but will you take a gamble with me?» «Don't you talk about my man like that,» she said, rising to go to him, to press against his shoulder and sooth her hand over his rumpled hair. «But I'll take any gamble with you.» «It's just money,» he said. «A good chunk out of our pay for this tour.» «You do what you need to do,» she said. He swiveled to the communications panel and activated the Blinkstater. It took a half hour to perform what could have been considered a minor miracle. He was connected to a computer long, long parsecs away on old Earth. All Academy cadets visited Earth at least once. The plebe class took their first outing on Earth. It would always be a high spot in Pete Jaynes' life. There he'd seen the museums, the preserved city, the vast, hundred-acre tract of original wilderness. The air had been cleaned over the centuries of its pre-space-age pollution. The streams ran clear and sweet. It had been like coming home. No one ever visited old Earth without that feeling, because from that small, blue planet man had struggled up over a thousand years ago, had flexed his wings on flying bombs, on combustion rockets. He'd walked on Earth's satellite in a miracle of dangerous engineering with those old fire-breathing dragons. He'd been crowded in his billions there on the good, blue planet, and he'd come close to possible termination of the race with his nuclear weapons. He'd actually detonated nuclear bombs in the clean, sweet air, oblivious to the poison of radioactivity. And then a TV repairman started fiddling with a compressed magnetic field and sent an egg ten feet across his workshop. Old Earth. «I'm going to take you there,» he promised Jan, as the Earthside Space Information computer flashed a set fee figure on the screen to cause him to gulp. The price had gone up. Man, had it ever. Well, you couldn't have every ship in space and every computer on the United Planets digging into old Earth's store of information. The computers there, complete as they were, wouldn't stand the traffic. He punched in his order and waited. The ship's computer accepted the blinked information with blinking lights and a low hum, and then it was over in seconds and he'd spent more money at one time than he'd ever spent in his life. They'd have enough left, after the advances were deducted from their tour pay and bonus, after paying for that few seconds of Earth computer time, to spend maybe one week on Tigian before shipping out again. He had to find the Rimfire now. He just had to. And he was frightened. There he was, a man with a hole in his head, a man who had lost his power of deductive reason, thinking he could discover something that millions of scientists had overlooked. He gulped coffee and punched buttons. The information he'd purchased from the museum computer on old Earth came up on the tape, and he fiddled with sound. First there was a copy of the first recording of a pre-blink signal, taken from the original machine built by Billy Bob Blink. Then, at one-hundred-year intervals, there were the sounds of pre-blink signals taken from ships which represented the state of the generator art at the time. «Pete, what is it?» Jan asked, when he froze, turned, stared at her with eyes wider than usual. «Just bear with me, kid,» he said. «Maybe I haven't blown our money in vain.» He punched information into the computer, worked for three solid hours, not at all sleepy, and then he sat back and listened, and there were the comparisons. He grinned at Jan in triumph. «Lock us in on NE793 and leap,» he said. «I'll tell you about it when we get there.» Jan obeyed. Before she pushed the blink button she said, «There's a ship between us and 793.» «Yeah,» Pete said. «That would be the Fleet Class tug from downrange toward New Earth. It doesn't matter.» He'd been doing some thinking about that Fleet Class tug during the long days of search. She had the same information he had, that Rimfire had last been reported at NE793 on the New Earth range. Her crew would be doing exactly what he was doing, taking short blinks, searching the blink lane, coming to meet the 47 somewhere between the two beacons. He had been praying all along that if Rimfire had dropped out of subspace, without power, somewhere in that parsecs-long blink she'd be closer to the 47's end of the range than to the Fleet Class tug's end. He didn't like the odds. There'd be four men on board the fancy tug, and they'd be working as hard and as fast as they could, with better detection gear, meaning that they could take longer blinks and still search the empty space. Ships could pass along the same blink route in subspace. It was as if neither ship existed. Well, let the other tug do the drudgery of searching the blink lane. The old Academy kick-out without deductive reasoning had something to try. It might not work, but at the moment it made sense. What he'd determined, without needing deductive reasoning, was so elementary that it would take someone like him to see it. It was too simple for a man with brains to waste time on. The basic design and function of the blink generator had never changed, but it had been made lighter and smaller with advances in electronics. As the centuries had passed, the generators had been refined to store the charge in smaller chambers, to compress the magnetic field ever denser. Pete was risking his and Jan's chance at a good future on the sounds he'd heard on the tape from an old Earth museum computer. It scared hell out of him. «Let's go, honey,» he said, and then he was looking visual at the last known point of Rimfire's voyage, NE793 on the New Earth range. Chapter Four «Honey,» Pete said, «what I plan to do is against all the rules.» «I won't tell if you won't,» Jan said. «If it goes wrong we'll never get a job in space again.» She thought a moment. «I don't think they'd take you on at the Spacer's Rest.» It was a healthy element in their relationship that they could joke about something that once had made both of them uncomfortable, her tour of duty in the spacer's playhouse. «Is it going to be dangerous, Pete?» she asked, after a moment of silence. He hesitated before answering. His impulse was to lie to her. On consideration, however, he decided he owed it to her to tell her everything. «It could be,» he said. «I'm going to be doing some things that could probably get my license lifted if the service ever heard about it. I don't think there's any possibility of blowing up the ship. Nothing like that. It's just that I'm going to be doing things that have never been done before.» «I see,» she said. «It's all your fault,» he said, with a grin. «You're the one who messed around with the tape and turned that disturbed area into the sound of a pre-blink signal.» «I don't understand.» «Well, it's really simple. So simple that even I thought of it.» She interrupted. «If it's so simple, why haven't others thought of it?» «Because it's too