resistant, but not to the extent of blocking out all of the products of nuclear fission. «Systems check,» he said. He'd blinked the 47 in the altered mode, and he wanted to see he hadn't done any damage. Jan started the check. He took the communications bank. «They are not very friendly,» Jan said. «I think it's time we went back on station,» Pete said. «We'll report in and let the fleet handle that little planet back there.» He was reading tapes, high-speed search. He had to shift back and forth, because he'd made two blinks, one on test-specification mode, the other on the thousand-year-old mode. It was on the old mode that he found the information which made him change his mind about going back on station. The instruments had been searching while he punched in the altered mode and during the time he was on it, back there when the rockets were coming and during the time the signal gong had been sounding because of the warning message from the planet. But the signal gong had also been ringing because the instruments had spotted a ship. The readings showed it was a ship of some size, recorded its shape. The ship lay dead in space at a distance of about half a million miles from the hostile but beautiful planet. The configuration meant only one thing. They had found the Rimfire. She was stationary. The instruments recorded a total lack of power emanations from her. She was dead in space, helpless. She was too near a planet which shot out nuclear missiles to be safe. Pete had no idea of the penetration of that planet's detection instruments, but if they should spot Rimfire out there a half million miles into space and send rockets after her, Rimfire would be destroyed. He didn't want to go back. He'd had enough of being scared out of his skin. But he had no choice. He obtained Rimfire's coordinates from the instruments, punched in, blinked. There's a limit even to excitement. He'd known exaltation when he first thought he had the answer and had Rimfire within his grasp, even greater excitement thinking about the reward, the share of development, when he felt they'd discovered a new life-zone planet. Now Rimfire was clearly visible on his optics and he was closing on her and instead of excitement he felt a gnawing little doubt. He kept his detection instruments pointed toward the distant planet. Even as he closed on Rimfire Jan said, «Five of them, Pete.» He took a look. They had cleared the planetglow and were pinpoints of light with tiny tails. And he'd led them right to Rimfire. His fingers scratched his skull, digging, trying to force his brain to work. First thing he had to do was lead them away from Rimfire. There was time, however. He eased the 47 closer. The sleek and beautiful X&A ship was now only a hundred yards off the 47's bow. He tried the communicators. Nothing. And it was puzzling, very puzzling, when a Blinkstat seemed to go directly through Rimfire with no echo. He was near enough now to send out a cable. He sent it snaking out, waited for it to connect. The distance was in feet, then inches, and he was forming his words. His voice would go down the cable, go through Rimfire 's hull to become audible sound waves inside. He tried to think of something historic to say. The best he could come up with was, «Hello, Rimfire, you look as if you could use some help.» And then he'd say, «Captain, do you accept a Lloyd's contract?» He was forming the words, savoring them, when the cable touched Rimfire's hull. And kept going. The cable went through Rimfire as if she hadn't been there, reached the limit of its length. He hauled it in, tried once again. The rockets coming from the unfriendly planet were still there, main engines cut off, streaming silently through space, reaching for them. But there was still time. He circled Rimfire, trying to make his mind work. When Rimfire came between them and the sun there was no shadow cast by the ship. Looking at her he could see the sun through her. The Rimfire was a ghost. She lay there, dead in space, three-dimensional, real and yet unreal. «Like a hologram,» Jan said. Pete didn't understand, and he didn't have time to worry. He had five rockets to worry about. They were still a long way off. He sent the ship at maximum nonblink speed toward them, angling across in front of them. He didn't know whether a nuclear explosion would damage the ghostly Rimfire, but he didn't want to take a chance. The guidance systems of the rockets locked onto the 47, fire spurted in guidance engines, and the five deadly missiles followed the 47. When Pete had them well diverted from Rimfire, when they were breathing down his tail, he blinked in a normal mode and left them to cruise forever into the blackness of intergalactic space. Then he had a little time to think. «They detect power emission,» he said. «If not, they'd have sent missiles after Rimfire before.» To test it, he approached the planet again. «You are in peril, identify,» the metallic voice said. «We are friends,» Pete sent. «You are in peril, identify.» They came again, arching up from the two continents, and he led that batch, too, off into outer blackness. At a distance which prevented detection from the planet, Pete halted the 47 and tried to reason it out. The problem was that Rimfire was there and yet she wasn't there. The goal was to get Rimfire safely away, take her back to U.P. yards. The problems there were multifold. First, each time he approached Rimfire the planetside detectors would fire missiles, possibly endangering Rimfire. Second, he had no idea how to pull Rimfire into reality. «It has something to do with the blink process,» he said, fingering his skull. «Something to do with blinking in that old mode.» «I think you're right in saying that Rimfire's generator developed a harmonic and she followed it in to get here,» Jan said. «Yes. And maybe they wouldn't have known what was happening.» «It's almost as if she's caught between space and subspace somehow,» Jan said. He scratched his skull. «I wonder what would happen if we programmed a jump in normal mode and made the leap in the old mode.» «I'm not sure I want to find out,» Jan said. «Not if what happened to Rimfire is going to happen to us.» There had to be a way. He thought Jan had touched on the problem. Rimfire's computer had ordered a blink on the standard mode and the harmonic had taken over and Rimfire had gone leaping off into dark space, perhaps influenced by a reflection from one of the ancient beacons. «The program for the jump tells a ship were to come out,» he said, the words coming slowly. «But if the order is shunted into another mode—» He tried to picture it in his mind, that instantaneous exchange of information between elements of the Rimfire's computers. «We don't know what happens during a blink, but we know that there has to be an order to tell the ship when to come back into normal space. If the order is never received, the order to emerge—» «She'd be hung up between space and subspace,» Jan said. Pete went to work on the computer. He found a way. He assumed that the blink order was in two parts. The first part activated the generator, sending the ship into subspace. The second part told the generator when to stop, and ordered the ship into normal space at a designated point. He was able, with a rather ingenious program, even if he did think so himself, to give orders to the computer to separate the blink order into two parts, delaying the second half, the emergence order, for a split second. He leaped the ship and there was that sliding feeling in his stomach and for an eternity he looked at Jan's frozen face and could not move or blink his eyes. She smiled. «You've done it.» They were back in normal space after the passage of eons. «My God,» he whispered. «They're caught in that, Jan.» «We've got to help them,» she said. He still didn't know exactly how. And there was the planet which sent nuclear-tipped missiles toward any ship approaching under power. First he had to get through to those crazy people down there planetside that he was merely a tugboater on a rescue mission. He didn't want to find a way to pull Rimfire back into normal space only to have both ships blown up by a nuclear explosion. «Well,» he said, «let's go talk to our friends down there.» Chapter Seven The Stranden 47 orbited Jan's planet. Pete was at the controls. He had worked a program on the computer which required only one instruction to alter the blink mode. He took careful note of the launch points of the nuclear missiles. He was in very close, inside the moon's orbit, near enough for his optics to see distinguishing surface features, forests, lakes, the larger rivers. He was looking for signs of population, for city centers. It was a beautiful planet. In one hemisphere there were two rather large continents separated by perhaps five hundred miles of ocean. In the opposite hemisphere one huge continent balanced out the surface stress of the planet's crust. The oceans were huge, joined in ice at both poles. In the south polar areas was one large ice island which reflected gleaming sunlight. He saw no sign of man. He saw only the flash of launch as the missiles began their reach for the 47. The missile sites were either too well hidden or too small to be seen on optics at that distance. The antique but deadly weapons came up from both of the continents in what Pete thought of as the western hemisphere, his mind comparing the two-continent configuration to the western hemisphere of old Earth, and, as the 47 orbited, from the single large continent in the east. He could not count the numbers. They came up in a flock, a firefly hoard of things with glowing tails. «They're really giving it to us with both barrels,» he said, as the missiles converged and pointed toward the tug. He'd timed the fuel supply of the missiles during earlier attacks. He put the 47 into motion, leading the missiles out toward the blackness of space. They followed dutifully, little spurts of fire marking the firing of course-correction rockets. When the lead missiles got too close he blinked in the old mode, and saw that approximately half of the missiles had blink capability. Then he blinked in the test-configuration mode and checked to be sure that the missiles were continuing their course outward into intergalactic space. He was getting set to do the same thing again when the communications gong sounded and the signal for voice transmission came. He punched buttons and said, «This is Stranden 47.» «Stranden 47, this is the Ramco Lady Sandy. What the hell is going on here?» «Lady Sandy, what's your position?» There was a silence, as if the Lady Sandy was thinking. Then the human voice said, «Stranden 47, we're about a half million miles off the planet toward the blink beacon at one astronomical unit.» «They pulled the information from NE793 and used it to follow us,» Pete told Jan, making a wry face. Then, into the transmitter, «Lady Sandy , you will soon be under attack by nuclear rockets. Do you read?» «I read. What the hell is this?» «I'd advise you,» Pete said, «to allow the rockets to home in on you. Then set a sublight course which will direct the rockets away from the galaxy before using the test-specification mode to blink.» Aboard the Lady Sandy Jarvis Smith whispered, «He's up to something, Brad.» «You get on the instruments and let me know if anything comes at us from the planet,» Fuller said. Almost immediately Jarvis yelled, «Brad, there's a half-dozen vehicles coming at us.» Fuller examined the instruments, nodded. «He wasn't lying about rockets.» He shook his head. «Rockets?» He led the rockets in a long curving turn. They were getting too close for comfort when he blinked and nothing followed him. Back in normal space he contacted Stranden 47. «Have you located Rimfire?» Brad Fuller asked. «Brad, listen,» Jarvis was saying. «Maybe they've got armed ships down there. If they send up ships—» «Pete Jaynes has been here longer than we have,» Fuller said. «If they had ships they'd have sent them after him. I think he's got it figured right. It has something to do with the blink mode. Those rockets didn't follow us on a normal mode. Next time I'll try the altered mode and see if he's lying about that.» Meanwhile, he was waiting for Jaynes' answer to his question, and it took a while in coming. It took a while because, although Pete had been expecting it, he hadn't decided how to answer it. «We can't tell him where Rimfire is,» Jan said. Pete was thinking with his fingers. He was gradually acquiring information about the planet. First, the computer said that the voice which warned them, «You are in peril, identify,» was not human, was formed by the mechanics of a computer. Second, he, too, had wondered why the planet didn't send up ships with weapons. Third, he'd been unable to spot any signs of human habitation down on the planet's surface. Fourth, repeated attempts to open communications with the planet resulted only in that cryptic warning. In short, he was beginning to wonder if there were any people on the planet. If there were, they were all underground, or in very small groups. What Pete had intended to do, before the arrival of the Lady Sandy, was to keep drawing missile fire until, if possible, the missile batteries were exhausted. He'd already led a herd of them off into space. There couldn't be too many more. Rockets had been phased out over a thousand years ago. A thousand years ago no planet would have had infinite resources. The number of rockets had to be limited. He had discarded immediately the possibility that he and Jan had done what all of the probes and voyages of X&A had failed to do for a thousand years, find alien life. The voice which warned them, even if it was not human, spoke English, the language which had almost caused a nuclear war on old Earth before it was designated the official language of space. «I repeat, Stranden 47, do you know Rimfire's location?» «No,» Pete said. It was not a total lie. He knew where a shadow was, a shadow which looked very much like Rimfire. He did not know where the Rimfire of solidity was. «Lady Sandy, I propose that we cooperate. Do you agree?» «Cooperate in what?» Brad Fuller asked. «First, let me say,» Pete sent, speaking slowly and clearly, «that I have duly, and in accordance with Space Service regulations, recorded the sighting of a life-zone planet onto our permanent tapes, with confirmed date and hour settings. Should the planet below us turn out to be unoccupied, I have filed claim to it in the name of Peter and Janice Jaynes. Do you read?» «Loud and clear,» Brad Fuller said. He was a little confused. The guy was talking about an unoccupied planet while the bastards down there were shooting nukes at them. However, he wasn't going to underestimate this Pete Jaynes again. Pete had figured out that mess with altering the blink field. Maybe, again, he knew something that the Lady Sandy's crew didn't know. «What we need to do,» Pete said, «is draw off all the missiles that can be thrown at us, until there are no more. Will you cooperate?» «What's in it for us?» Jarvis Smith growled. «With what purpose?» Fuller asked. So there it was. They were right back to Rimfire. «You want us to risk our necks to help you clear a planet which you've claimed, is that it?» Fuller asked. «Lady Sandy.» Pete said, speaking slowly and clearly, checking lights to be sure the conversation was going onto the permanent tapes, «it is my opinion that U.P.S Rimfire is in the area of the planet. My intentions are this: To clear the hostile weapons from the area so that we may conduct a safe search.» «He knows where she is,» Jarvis Smith hissed. «She's around here somewhere. Let's let him play with his missiles while we find her.» Fuller was thinking. He keyed the mike and said, «Stranden 47, you've got yourself a planet. I will agree to cooperate with you on one condition, that Rimfire is ours. Do you agree?» «Pete, he has no right to ask that,» Jan said. He held up one hand to hush her. His fingers worked on his scalp. He had no idea how long it would take to clear the missiles, or even if he could. They might always hold some in reserve, to come streaking out to catch them when they were hooked onto Rimfire. He wasn't sure the plane was theirs. If there were only a few men, if there was only one man down there, it would be classed as an occupied planet. «Lady Sandy.» he said, «no deal. You take your chances. However, if Rimfire is near this planet and you lead missiles to her, she could be destroyed.» «He's trying to fake us out,» Jarvis Smith said to Fuller. «We'll be in touch,» Fuller said, breaking the broadcast link. «What are we going to do?» Jarvis Smith asked. «Find Rimfire,» Fuller said