oison 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 horse. We can leap with a fraction of a full charge, so I think I can reduce the intensity of the magnetic field in the chamber. It'll be trial and error. When we get a sound-tone match with the harmonic then we'll try sending a stat on that power. If Rimfire went off somewhere on that harmonic maybe we can contact her.» «Sounds logical to me,» Jan said. «And you're the man who thinks he can't figure things out?» She kissed him. When he first issued the instructions to the computer a red light flashed and words appeared on the screen. «Your order not within test specifications,» the computer told him. He punched in instructions to override test specifications. His fingers tended to slip on the keys, because he was nervous, and the perspiration was popping out on his finger pads. «Unusual action to be recorded,» the computer told him. He punched in a program. Inside the generator the dense, compact magnetic field began to expand. He had begun with the generator on one-quarter of full charge. The ship's servomechanisms hummed, clicked, whined. As the magnetic field became less dense, and expanded, the quarter charge expanded accordingly, almost filling the available charge-storage chambers. «Well, honey, wanta change your mind and tell me to forget it?» «You promised me Martian emeralds,» Jan said. She sat in her command chair, tense, but trying not to show it. «Here goes.» He punched the button. They lived. Things were normal. There was a slightly different feel to the blink, but they were back in normal space a short distance from the beacon. He checked the sound generated by the pre-blink signal, compared it to the sound he was trying to duplicate. He hit the exact tone of the Rimfire's harmonic signal on the fifth try. The blink had taken them back to NE793. He double-checked, then swiveled to the communications panel. «Rimfire, this is Stranden 47.» he sent, using the harmonic, and the ship's instruments saw the Blinkstat message go out, but not toward any of the established blink beacons on the range. The signal left the 47 on an angle pointing out toward the rim, into a sac of empty space, a black, huge hole in the starfields. The instruments looked through the blackness, saw only the intergalactic void beyond. Twice more he sent the message. Then they waited. If Rimfire's generator had malfunctioned and sent the ship out into that black void, she could be far, far outside the galaxy, so far that she would be lost forever. The direction taken by the Blinkstat led to infinity, with, perhaps, another island universe somewhere out there so far away that the ship's optics could not even detect it. «Well,» he said, after a quarter hour during which there was nothing, «it was a good try.» «That's it?» Jan asked. «That's all we're going to do?» «That's it,» he said. She keyed the message for transmission one more time, worked with the communications bank, turned the signal detector to full power so that there was a noise of space static on the speakers. Nothing. «Wait,» Pete said, as she started to turn down the volume. «Send that message one more time.» He leaped to the communications bank, his fingers flying, adjusting, turning, cutting out the space static. Jan sent the stat and heard it come back instantly, faint, distorted. Pete wheeled to check the tape, amplified the tape, enhanced it, ran it through an electronic maze to purify it, strengthen it. It was, when he played it back, 47's own message. «Rimfire, this is Stranden 47.» «She's out there, Jan,» he whispered. «Oh, Lord, she's out there.» «How do you know?» «That was an echo off a Blinkstat receiver. It couldn't be anything else. Our stat went into Rimfire's receiver.» He worked with the panel. «Look, it works like this.» He sent the Blinkstat message downrange toward a distant beacon, the communications equipment still on high volume. The echo which bounced back from the receiving beacon was louder than the weak echo from the black sac of space. «See what I mean? There's only one thing that will bounce back an echo, and that's a stat receiver. There's only one possible stat receiver that could be out there in that empty space, and that's Rimfire's.» He did a little dance. He pranced around the control room and swept Jan from her chair and held her close. «We've got her, honey. We've got her. Martian emeralds? I'll put so many on you you'll have to walk slowly, there'll be so much weight. Hell, we can buy a planet. We can do anything. We'll be free.» She was laughing. She loved seeing him so happy. She kissed him, swiftly, hard, a wet little peck, and he sobered and kissed her hard and held her. Then he pushed her away. «Let's get with the program,» he said. First he calibrated the distance represented by the returned echo. His face lost its happy grin when he had the results. He couldn't believe the distance involved. A jump of parsecs, two or three, was a long jump. The echo came from over six parsecs away, an impossible distance. And yet it was there, repeated tests showed that it was there, and he had to trust his equipment. He had the computer figure coordinates which would put him within visual of the stat receiver which had sent back the echo, and then he prayed silently. «Jan, we don't have to do this.» She looked at him seriously. «I think we do.» «If it were just me—» «You can't get rid of me.» She put her arms around him. «What was I without you? What would I be now if you hadn't been so damned persistent? I go where you go, buddy.» He postponed it. He ordered a full meal from food preparation's servomechanisms, and they ate in the little dining room, the lights turned low, a scene from old Earth on the decopanel, a scene of white beaches and blue water and white, flying birds. Then he made love to her, and she began to be frightened, because he was so serious about it, as if it might be the last time. «You're worried,» she said, as they went into the control room. «A little.» «Don't be. It'll be all right. We'll find the Rimfire and bring her back and—» «That's what we're going to do,» he said. «Want me to do it?» she asked, as his hand hesitated over the blink button. He had returned the generator to its test-specification condition, the magnetic field compact, the charge full. He had allowed a considerable leeway when he figured the coordinates for the jump. «Hold it,» he said, moving his hand, putting the safety over the blink button. «Lord,» Jan said, «I was all ready for it.» «We owe this much to the company,» he said. «We need to tell them what we're going to do.» «They might give us orders not to do it.» He considered. He compromised. He put it all into Blinkstat form, sent it the short distance to the NE 793 beacon with instructions to hold for transmission until further orders or seventy-two hours later, whichever came first. He took the action for a couple of reasons. First, he owed some loyalty to his company. After all, it was the Stranden Corporation which had made it possible for him to be with Jan. Second, if something went wrong they'd know where to look for him and for Rimfire. It was, in the end, Jan who pushed the button. She wanted to. He let her. The 47 emerged into the total blackness of empty space. The viewports showed nothing, no tiny glint of star, no spread of the galaxy. Pete manipulated the instruments. The mass of the galaxy was behind them. It glowed, a soft, warm-looking light in the blackness. He ran a star search. A few rim stars were within detection distance, lying behind them. And there was something else. Something nearby. His heart leaped. He activated all instruments, and the object was only a short ten-thousand-mile hop away. That was the distance he'd allowed for safety when he'd programmed the blink. «Ah ha,» he said, figuring coordinates. «That's her.» He blinked and his hands trembled with the thought of the riches that would be his as he adjusted the opticals. He pushed the button to activate the search screen, expected to see Rimfire, huge, majestic. He saw, instead, a tiny metallic object alone in that deep, black space, and it took only a few tests to find out that it was a blink beacon. He moved the ship closer. It was a beacon unlike any he'd ever seen. The configuration was all wrong, and yet it was there. It had a strange lack of grace about it. It was a studded square. It gleamed in the searchlight of the 47. He se