slumped in his chair, fingering the dent in his head, when Jan, fresh from sleep, awake a bit early, came in with the coffee. Her heart went out to him as she saw the look of intensity on his face, saw the fingers moving in a little frenzy of motion over the little depression in his skull. She occasionally tired of wearing the simple silken singlet. She'd dressed in a frilly little frock which was suitable for nothing much but entertaining at the Spacer's Rest and for making her husband forget any problems. He broke into a wide smile when he saw her, and then the coffee was good, and the talk good. The dress reminded him of the time when he was talking his head off trying to persuade her to marry him, and he was thinking seriously about letting the damned generator sit on full charge for a while. There were sweeter things to do than search endlessly for a ship that might or might not have been blown to nothing. «I think we deserve a little time off,» he grinned at her. «You're the skipper,» she said. He rose, bent to kiss her. «Race you to the bedroom.» «No fair,» she said. «My legs are shorter than yours.» «I'll give you a head start.» «That sounds fair,» she said, reaching up to kiss him. Oh, God, she was beautiful. She deserved all the best things that the galaxy had to offer her, not the isolation of life on board a Mule. She deserved much more than life had handed her, a tour of duty in a whorehouse, a broken-down tugboat loser. And he had a way to give it to her. All he had to do was find Rimfire. It blazed into his mind like a runaway comet. «The pre-blink signal guides the ship,» he said, straightening suddenly. «That, sir, is an abrupt change of subject,» Jan said. «Jan, that's what it's for. It has to be. All these centuries we've been looking on it as just something which was there, and we've even looked for ways to get rid of it because in times of war an enemy ship could have advance warning because of it. But it has to be there.» «I'm lost,» Jan admitted. «Don't you see?» He bent over her, his hands on the arms of her chair, his face near hers. «Look, we talk about locking onto the next blink beacon, right? It's standard procedure. An officer says, 'Lock onto blink beacon so-and-so.' But there's nothing to lock onto, because a blink beacon doesn't broadcast a signal or anything. It's just there. It has relay and recording equipment. But we 'lock onto' a beacon by inserting a predetermined coordinate into the navigation computer. We can even pick a coordinate at random and leap out into an area where there's no blink beacon, if we want to risk it.» «I agree,» Jan said. «But I don't see where you're going with this.» «We don't 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 simple, I guess,» he said. «A simple man like me believes there's a reason for everything, you know? I mean, I'm not one of the most pious fellows, as you well know, but I believe that something out there looks after the universe.» He shrugged. «You see, a scientist will beat his brains out for a lifetime trying, for example, to find out why the pre-blink signal goes ahead of a ship by microseconds. I'm so simple I just accept it. It's there, and there's a reason why it's there, and maybe God put it there for a reason.» «Ah,» she said. «You said something about the pre-blink signal's being a guide for the ship.» «Well, it could be. I don't know. I know this. When I was messing around with the pre-blink signals recorded over the centuries, the ones we paid through the nose for, I matched your signal, the one on the tape from NE794, with a signal from a ship of the line which went out from old Earth almost one thousand years ago.» «But the basic design of the generator has never changed.» «No. I wanted to see the tapes on NE793 before I talked to you about this idea of mine. That's what I've been doing. Listen to this.» He played the pre-blink signal of Rimfire, the one which had been recorded on the tape of the last beacon she'd contacted. To Jan it sounded the same as any pre-blink signal, loud and clear, speaking of the vast power of Rimfire's generator. She shrugged. «Okay, now I'm tuning it, the way you tuned your brief little signal.» The new sound matched Jan's signal exactly. «What she was doing, Jan, was sending a split signal. There's no word, yet, for the difference. But one of them, when converted to sound, is different. It has the same sound characteristics as that old ship of the line a thousand years ago. I think maybe it has to do with the fact that Rimfire's generator is the biggest and most powerful one built yet. I don't know how to put it, but maybe all that power created a, well, for lack of a better word, a harmonic.» «I'm listening, but I still don't understand,» Jan said. «Well, just suppose that the ship, in whatever state it exists in subspace, does ride the pathway laid down by the pre-blink signal. Suppose Rimfire's new generator was putting out two pre-blink signals, each one different. The destination of a ship is determined by computer, and the computer places the order inside the generator's computer, as determined by the coordinates punched in. Suppose that harmonic, or whatever that second signal is, overrode the pre-blink signal determined by the chosen coordinates.» «I think I understand,» Jan said. «Then she'd go off like on a tangent. She could be anywhere.» «Or nowhere,» Pete said. «Or in the core of a sun.» «I take it that you think you can do something to our generator to make it put out a pre-blink signal to match that harmonic on Rimfire's signal?» «The computer says I can,» he said. «It's possible because this old generator on the 47 is such a