k will happen if you start fooling around with the field the way Pete Jaynes did?» «Well,» Jarvis said, «we're not doing anything critical. Jaynes tells us exactly how to do it. It must have worked for him.» «We don't know it did,» King said. «We know he's gone,» Fuller said. «And we know he's off the range.» «Yeah,» King said, «and he could be dead out there.» He looked at the viewport and shuddered visibly. There was something just a little spooky about looking into space and not seeing a single point of a star. «All right,» Fuller said. «Jarvis says he can tune the generator to follow the Mule. It makes sense to me to think that Jaynes knows something. I know the guy's reputation. He's a good tugboater. He wouldn't be risking his ship unless he had a pretty good idea the Rimfire is out there somewhere. I say that if three of us say go, we go.» «I think it should be unanimous,» Tom Asher said. «Majority,» Jarvis growled. «Okay, okay,» Asher said. «I say we give it try.» «That makes three,» Fuller said. «I don't even get to vote?» Buck King asked, leaping to his feet. «Vote any way you damned well please,» Jarvis said. «I'm in,» King said. «Good for you,» Jarvis told him. It took Jarvis Smith longer to find the correct size of the magnetic field than it had taken Pete Jaynes. Then there was more time spent while they discovered that there was a faint echo from a blink beacon from out in that empty area of space. They arrived at the beacon, read its tapes, saw the passage of a fleet of ships a thousand years in the past, saw the passing signal of a ship, probably Rimfire, and saw that the Stranden Mule had been at the beacon. They blinked out into normal space near a Sol-type sun. There was nothing nearby. Fuller immediately began to run a search for a ship, either the Stranden Mule or the Rimfire or both. Tom Asher stood beside his partner near the viewport, looking back toward the edge-on disc of the galaxy. It looked to Asher like an illustration in an astronomy book. It looked damned beautiful. «Man, that's something,» Asher said. King didn't answer. «What's the matter?» Asher asked. King put up a hand and wiped his forehead. His hand was shaking. «It's too far,» King said. There was a tremble in his voice. «It's too far, Tom. We're too far from home. We ain't never gonna get back.» «Don't talk crazy,» Asher said. «We're two blinks from the New Earth range, that's all.» «Too far,» King said. In spite of himself, Asher felt a little chill go up his back. Chapter Six One small star had strayed from the fold. One little sun existed all alone, so far from the rim of the galaxy that it would have taken a planet-size radiotelescope to see it. Stranden 47 was not an exploration ship. She did not have the instrumentation to run an analysis on the star, but a spacer sees a lot of suns, and to Pete's experienced eyes the sun gave some of its secrets. He knew that it was a relatively small sun, and that it fell generally into type G, much like old Sol. The 47 began to move at sublight speed toward the sun, and although Pete had been awake for twenty-four hours, he was not sleepy. Jan was with him, of course. She operated the detection equipment. It was she who located the blink beacon. The beacon was located one old astronomical unit from the sun. It was identical to the beacon they'd examined back there in space. Its tape was identical, too. This time Pete, whistling to hide his nervous excitement, checked current readings first and found something which stopped his whistle and sent his hopes flying away into the emptiness out beyond the isolated sun. There was a signal. It was a passing signal, just as there'd been a recent passing signal on the last beacon. If that signal had been left by Rimfire the X&A ship had blinked on past the beacon and the lonely sun out into nothingness. Pete checked and double-checked. The tape recorded the passage of a vast fleet a thousand years ago. Between that passage and the passing signal of the Rimfire there was nothing. He sat down, fingers on his scalp. It had all been for nothing. Rimfire had not dropped back into normal space. Jan, meanwhile, had been using the detection instruments. «Hey,» she yelled. She'd turned the optical scope outward, searching toward intergalactic space. «Pete! Pete!» He leaped to her side, made adjustments. «There,» she said. There was something millions of miles away. He began to move the ship at its maximum sublight speed, a speed which was not inconsiderable. The image on the optics was resolved after a few hours' running. The sun was not alone. Far away, at a distance which seemed impossible, a small, icy planet circled her. That was all he needed. An ice planet. But Jan was excited. He squeezed her. «We'll call it Jan's Sun,» he said. «And you can pick a name for the planet.» «Can we name them, really?» «Maybe. We'll have to check the Galactic Atlas. Someone was out here a thousand years ago. They may be named already.» «Oh, shoot,» she said. He busied himself with the atlas. It was something to do. He started with the area of the New Earth range and zeroed in on the big, black hole and there was nothing. «You've got yourself a planet,» he said. «I want to see it close up.» What the hell. As they moved toward the planet at sublight speed he searched the surrounding space for Rimfire. Then they were orbiting the ball of ice. Their limited instrumentation and their optic instruments showed the planet to be Pluto-size, solid ice, with, perhaps, a metallic core. She was so far from her sun that she swam in eternal darkness. She would become a tiny footnote in the Galactic Atlas. «Pete,» Jan asked, «isn't it unusual for a sun to have just one planet?» «Unusual,» he agreed. «Not unknown.» «But usually where there's one there are others.» «Most of the time.» He, too, had allowed himself one crazy moment of wild hope when the 47 emerged near a sun. Every spaceman dreams of discovering a new planet, a life-zone planet. He'd searched the life zone first thing when the 47 first emerged. «Honey?» She lifted her eyes from the optics. «We've lost,» he said. «We haven't looked much.» «She's not here. She went on past.» There was one more thing to do. He sent random stats off into the blackness, searched for an echo. Nothing. «We haven't lost. We've found a new sun, a new planet.» «Yeah. We'll get a letter of congratulations from X&A.» «Well, that's more than most people get,» she said. «It's time to go back, honey,» he said. «We need to get back to the range and report.» «Can't we stay just for a while?» «Why? Nothing here. We've seen it all.» «Well, I at least want a good look at my sun,» she said. He humored her. He went to the larder and came back with two drinks, sat moodily, eyes downcast, drinking his while Jan studied the distant sun, and the 47, having been turned, moved at sublight speed back toward the sun. «It's beautiful,» Jan said. «If you've seen one sun you've seen them all,» Pete said. «But this is ours.» Big deal, he was thinking, as he mentally kissed goodbye to all his dreams. With the salvage money from Rimfire they could have bought their own tug. They could have gone out to one of the new planets and bought thousands of acres of virgin wilderness, built a private empire. Or if they'd chosen to, they could simply have picked a nice planet and lived in luxury and leisure for the rest of their lives. Now it was all gone. He'd spent a good portion of the remaining bonus money to get the information from the old Earth computer. They'd have a few days on Tigian and then they'd be back on a Mule at some remote junction of blink routes. He grinned. Hell, what was so bad about that? He leaped up and hugged Jan, laughing. She turned in his arms. «What's so funny?» «Me,» he said. «Stupid me. Here I am with my lower lip hanging because we didn't find Rimfire, thinking that all is lost. But, babe, we have each other.» «Yes, we do,» she said, kissing him. «And it's all right, Pete. It was a nice dream. But let me tell you this, buster. I've been happier on this damned old tug than I've ever been in my life, and I'm ready to sign on for about two hundred years of duty with you.» His eyes glistened, formed tears. «Why, Peter Jaynes,» she whispered, kissing one of the tears away. «God, I'm so lucky to have you,» he said, his voice choked. The universe was in his arms, all he ever needed. He could feel sorrow for Rimfire's crew, but not for himself. He was a happy man. «Take as long as you like to look at your sun,» he said. She went back to the optics. She could see the flares shooting up from the disc of the sun. She was fascinated. The 47 moved at sublight speed at an angle which would bring her to within one astronomical unit of the sun in passing. Behind them, Jan's ice planet was moving in its solitary orbit in the opposite direction. The second planet had been on the opposite side of the sun. Even after it cleared the intervening mass of the star, the light of the sun hid it from the optics and from Jan's eyes. Pete had the generator on charge, building for the two blinks back to the New Earth range. They had taken time out to eat. Jan went back to the optic viewer for one last look at Jan's Star, and when she'd finished looking she made one more, just one more sweep, searching, searching. Her cry was a near-scream. It made Pete's hair stand on end. He leaped to her side. She couldn't get the words out. «L—l—l—look,» she stammered, pointing. The planet swam there in space, almost a precise astronomical unit from the sun. The ship's motion past the sun had altered the viewpoint so that the planet was no longer hidden from them by the glare of radiated energy. Even at that distance there was a definite disc shape. Pete punched up the image, enhanced it electronically. The enhancement caused his breath to catch in his throat. The distant planet, definitely in the sun's life zone, showed the blue-and-white colors of a water world. Too impatient to wait for sublight speed to get them closer, Pete took readings, found a satellite of the planet, picked a clear area, had the computer figure coordinates, and blinked. The 47 came into normal space at a distance of a quarter of a million miles from the planet. She was a beautiful sight. They were just out beyond the orbit of the planet's moon. The moon was visible out of the starboard viewer. But it was the planet which held their attention. One of Pete's favorite decopanel scenes was old Earth viewed from space, a good, blue planet, a planet which screamed life to the eyes. And there, in his optical viewer, was another Earth, Earth-sized, blue-and-white. Water. Out of infinite combinations of distance, sun size, combination of elements, another water world had been formed. The odds against it were astronomical. Yet, there it was. A beautiful, blue planet. He put the image on maximum magnification and enhancement and they could see the swirl of a weather system, white clouds, the unmistakable blue of an ocean, snow-covered poles. Jan was beside herself, jumping up and down in her excitement. «Closer,» she yelled. «Let's go closer.» Pete turned the optics to the planet's moon. He saw a lifeless, cratered surface. He turned back to the planet. His fingers were toying with the hole in his head. He was remembering that fleet of ships which had passed two blink beacons a thousand years ago. And there were questions. Why was this sun, this life-zone planet, not listed in the Galactic Atlas? Obviously, men in blink ships had visited her a thousand years ago. How had the knowledge of her become lost? He felt the ship move. Jan was at the controls, moving the 47 closer to the planet at sublight speed. He kept his eyes on the optics. He used the few instruments he had. His equipment had been designed to spot a ship in space, a ship with lots of metals. The planet gave him a huge metallic reading, of course. She'd have metals at her core and in her crust. He could not even guess, short of going so near that the optics could pick up surface details, if there were people on the planet. There wasn't a life-zone planet known to the U.P. that was unpopulated. Life-zone planets were so rare that a wave of settlement began immediately when one was discovered. There was something strange about the situation. There'd been ship traffic here a thousand years ago. There could still be people down there. If so, they'd been cut off from civilization for a millennium. «Jan,» he said, «I want you to be ready. Punch in the coordinates of the midpoint blink beacon. If I tell you, hit the button and don't ask questions, okay?» «Okay,» she said. The sublight flux drive edged the 47 closer. Continents began to be defined on the planet below. They were now inside the moon's orbit. Pete was scanning the planet's surface eagerly, but was still too far away to see detail. The startling tone of the communications gong jerked her head around. It was a weak, incomplete gong. He recognized it immediately. It was the same ghostly almost-gong that had started the whole thing. Pete leaped to the computer and began punching instructions. He knew what to do this time. The program was already in the computer, so it took just seconds to alter the field of the generator, a few more seconds, as the communications gong began to sound, to see the stat message begin to emerge in print and to hear a metallic voice intoning words which sent Pete into even more frenzied action. «You are in peril, identify. You are in peril, identify.» Pete punched quickly. «U.P.S. Stranden 47.» He sent it. The metallic voice ceased. The communications gong went silent. «Stranden 47 requests communication,» Pete sent. The answer was silence. «Who are you?» Pete sent. Silence. He kept trying. There were people down there. Once again their hopes had been dashed, because the monetary reward for the discovery of a life-zone planet made the salvage money on Rimfire seem insignificant. But there were people there and they'd been cut off from the United Planets for a thousand years. That alone was a discovery. That alone kept Pete at the communications board, begging for contact. «Pete,» Jan said, in a strained voice, «you'd better have a look at this.» They had been moving ever closer to the planet. Neither of them had seen the long streaks of fire which arced up from both the northern and southern continents of the planet. But the time Jan looked and adjusted focus the shapes were there, long, sleek, antique. They trailed tails of fire. «Holy jumping—» Pete was mesmerized. It was like something out of a period piece, a space thriller. He watched the antique rockets reaching up for them, the Stranden 47 herself helping to close the distance with her forward speed. He put the instruments on them, and they were metal and something else. Radiation is every spacer's enemy. Every ship is equipped to detect and measure it. There had not been nuclear reactors onboard spaceships for hundreds of years, but there is radiation in space, fields of it, and some, suns give off some of the more deadly varieties, so the 47 could sense the nuclear warheads on the tips of the oncoming missiles. Pete took one last, fascinated look. No man alive had seen such a sight. Real rockets. Real antiques. Tails of fire and heads of death. Then he leaped for the control panel and, with the lead missiles getting too close for comfort, forgot that he had the generator in the altered mode. He felt his insides slide. They seemed to come out of his navel and hang there for an eternity. Then the ship was back in normal space near the midpoint blink beacon. He breathed a sign of relief, but it was premature. Jan, at the viewers, gasped. «Two of them came with us,» she said. He could see them clearly. They came side by side, only hundreds of yards apart, more deadly than he'd imagined. They were equipped with small blink generators. It was absolutely anachronistic, rockets with blink capability. He had to do something fast. If he blinked again he'd emerge into normal space with the two nuclear-tipped rockets in the same relative position on his tail. His fingers flew. The rockets came closer, closer. They were so near that if they went up the 47 might go with them, or at least be bathed in the radiation of the nuclear explosion. He had it right, selected coordinates at random for a spot a few thousand miles away, but in the mode of the test specifications of the 47's generator. He hit the button just as the lead rocket, exploded by proximity, began to blossom into nuclear fire, then he was in the clear and the optics showed no rockets. Off there, toward the midpoint blink beacon, a new sun flared briefly and then was gone. They'd have to avoid that area. The 47's hull was radiation-