Gold Star

Scanned by Highroller. Proofed by the best elf proofer. Made prettier by use of EBook Design Group Stylesheet. Gold Star by Zach Hughes Chapter One Peter Jaynes came from deep sleep into instant alertness. He lay on his back, his eyes looking upward toward the planetside landscape which Jan had programmed into the decopanel on the bulkhead over the bed. The subconscious memory of a sound was just beyond his reach. He lifted his head from the pillow, was very still. The only thing he heard was Jan's deep, even breathing. He sighed, let his neck relax, and put out his hand to the heated softness of a rounded hip. He decided that he'd dreamed a sound. He turned and put one arm across Jan. She slept in the same garment she'd been wearing during the last wake period, a silken singlet. There was no need for formality on a deep-space tug crewed by man and wife. The tantalizing near-memory of having been awakened by something continued to nag at him. He closed his eyes but did not feel sleepy. He turned onto his back again. The landscape overhead had changed to show a Tigian sky over hard, red, rocky hills. It had rained and a rainbow arced the dome of blue. He was not going to be able to get back to sleep. «Come on, legs,» he said aloud. Legs heard and obeyed, swung off the bed. Jan stirred, but did not awaken. He checked the wall chronometer. He was only halfway through the sleep period, which accounted for his slight feeling of grogginess. He stepped into the shower. Cold, stinging, refreshing water penetrated the singlet he wore. He shook his head and sent droplets flying, cut off the water, stood with his eyes closed as a warm breeze from an ecologically pure desert dried him. The Stranden 47, Mule Class space tug, registered out of New Earth, was over two hundred light-years from the nearest populated planet. You didn't just ignore sounds, sounds so unusual that they woke you up, when you were that far from nowhere. A deep-space blink ship of any class was no place for odd sounds. Aboard any blinker things hummed, purred, clicked, bleeped, whistled, but each sound indicated perfect order, perfectly functioning hardware. An unusual sound usually meant that something had gone wrong in one of a couple of hundred thousand servomechanisms. A Mule Class tug had backup systems for backup systems, but the loss of any one system was a potentially serious threat which, if unattended, could make it doubtful that you'd ever get back to anywhere to collect deep-space bonus pay. Peter examined his face in the mirror as he brushed his hair. He saw a regular, not exactly ugly fellow who stood compactly just under six feet, with a strong neck, a thick chest, and well-muscled arms and torso. He was beginning to feel good. He'd run ship's gravity up to Earth Standard plus 0.1 because Jan had gained three pounds in the past thirty days. The extra exertion required by the additional 0.1 gravity would use up enough calories to trim her down. The logical place to start an inspection tour was the power room. The generator was on full charge with all readings normal. The power of the generator field made the blond hair stand up on his head and try to separate into individual strands. It was not a bad feeling. It was a healthy, reassuring tingle. There under the circular shield was the thing which gave deep-space wings to man, the blink generator. The Stranden 47's generator was a real horse, hefty enough to send the relatively small tug several galaxies away in one blink if the coordinates had been available, powerful enough to allow the 47 to latch onto the largest liner or freighter and blink her to the nearest repair base. No one really knew the potential power which was stored in even the smallest blink generator. It had been said that not even Billy Bob Blink, the Texan who had developed the blink generator, fully understood what happened when the energy accumulated in a blink generator was released. The practical result was that anything attached to the generator's vehicle or within the generated field ceased to exist in one location and came to exist in another. Pete worked his way through a checklist. There was nothing amiss. The generator was always held at full charge so that the 47 was ready to blink on a moment's notice in the event of a distress call. Such a call could come from the four directions of the blink routes which intersected at the 47's station. There wasn't all that much more to inspect once he had finished the power-room checklist. The generator took up a full half of the ship's 150-foot length. The compact control room, one wall taken up by the communications equipment, was located next to the power room. Aside from a tool and supply storage area the remaining space inside Stranden 4Ta rectangular, rounded-cornered hull was living area for a four-man crew. With only two people aboard, the living area was ample to luxurious. Into that space, roughly seventy-five by fifty feet, the Stranden designers had packed the food-preparation and dining areas, a small swimming pool which served as storage for the bulk of the ship's constantly recycled water, an exercise room, two lounge rooms, and two bedrooms. The Mule Class was designed to house a crew of four. Each time a Mule put out into deep space she was stocked with food and supplies for four. Pete and Jan Jaynes had food and some luxuries to last for twice the period of their contracted tour, because it was often difficult to find even two crewmen to man a deep-space tug. It was lonely work. Pete checked instruments in the control room. The 47 was in a good mood. She hummed at him and blinked reassuring little lights at him, and her computer gave him a quick readout which said «great» for all systems. He was becoming more and more convinced that he'd dreamed the sound. Not only were all primary systems great, all backup systems and secondary backup systems were great. A Mule Class tug stayed in space for a long time. At times of emergency, great demands were made on a tug. A Mule was known to be the most dependable vessel ever sent into space. Pete had saved the communications board for last. There were only two possible communications signals which would have activated any sound-producing mechanism on the 47. He pushed the self-examination button on the communications board and watched as the ship's computer showed blinking green after blinking green. There was a gong mounted in each separate ship's area, a gong which went bonkers upon activation by the communications board. When the gongs echoed throughout the ship it meant one of two things: Either a Blinkstat directed to the 47 was coming in or the detection equipment had sensed the pre-arrival signal of a blinking ship. If either of those things had happened the gongs would still have been bonging. The signal-indicator light was off. No Blinkstat, no call, no pre-arrival signal had come into the big bank of electronics. Pete sat down in the padded command chair and stared at nothing. He felt, rather than heard, Jan come into control. They were that close. He sensed her presence, turned, winked at her. «It's the middle of the night,» she said sleepily. Lord, Lord, he thought. Just seeing her was a pleasure of which he would never tire. She was so beautiful, so rounded in the right places. She looked to him more the Tri-D star than a crewman on a tug. The silken singlet molded itself to her. She came to lean her hip against his shoulder. He felt the warmth of her, allowed himself the luxury of a touch, smoothed his hand over the silkiness. «Coming back to bed?» she asked. «I don't know. I guess.» «What woke you?» «I don't know. A dream.» She sat down in the other command chair, turned it on its swivels to face him. «Was your dream something like a signal gong going of!?» Her steel-gray eyes were on his. He felt a little shiver go up his back. «You heard something, too?» «I'm not sure. I'm like you. I could have dreamed it.» «Honey, I love you, but when we start to dream the same dreams at the same time I'm going to wonder if such closeness is possible.» Pete pushed buttons. Since the incoming-signal light was not on he had not checked the tape for the sleeptime period. He put the audio on high-speed search and there was a whirr of sound and a hum of motion and then a little click and there it was. The sound was weak and incomplete. The tone, however, was that of the warning gong. The sound lasted a fraction of a second and then was gone. He played it back four times, then did a high-speed search of the entire four hours of tape. There was only the momentary hint of sound, almost a ghost of a sound. He turned the problem over to the computer and had an analysis in seconds. The sound had the tonal qualities of the communications warning gong. It lasted microseconds. The signal which had activated the gong for that brief moment, so brief it had not reached standard volume, had come from that section of the detection equipment which searched for the pre-arrival signal of a blinking ship. «Just a glitch,» Jan said. «A ghost.» «It came from Number One,» Pete said. For brevity, they had numbered the four intersecting blink routes so that in referring to them they would not have to use the full, lengthy chart designations. It worried him. A tiny microsecond signal had come through the far reaches of empty space which stretched back and away down the blink ranges toward home. Only one thing in the universe was known to be faster than the instantaneous travel of a blinking ship. Perhaps more research had been done on that phenomenon than on any other aspect of the blink mystery. A blinking ship sends a signal ahead of itself. The signal is unlike any known emission. As far as man knew, that particular signal, that flash sent toward the emergence point at the moment of generator activation, had not existed prior to the first use of Billy Bob Blink's machine. The pre-arrival signal could be detected along the entire length of the projected jump. The pre-arrival signal worried some. The space services spent millions each year trying to determine the cause of it, trying to find a way to eliminate it, for, although microseconds were involved, the pre-arrival signal gave electronic equipment time to prepare for the actual arrival of the ship. There hadn't been a war for almost a thousand years, but to the military mind that warning that a ship was on its way was, potentially, a dangerous situation. «Just a glitch,» Jan said. «Let's go back to bed.» «You go along. I'll be there in a few minutes.» She didn't have to use words to let him know that she was not going without him. They had been together for three years. In that three years the longest period of separation had been two hours, when she was taking her physical for tug duty. Even then Pete had tried to go into the examination room with her. He had just found her, then, and he was afraid of losing her. When Pete Jaynes worried, his left hand went to his head. If 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