ayneses, and he wasn't going to blow it because of some glitch in an electronic system. And yet he worried. His woman stood beside him, her hip against his shoulder, and she hurt inside to see the pained look on his face. She'd told him time and time again that there wasn't a thing wrong with his mind, not with his deductive reasoning or anything else. But he knew. He was the one who had failed the tests during his last year at the Academy. He was the one who had begged the people at Stranden to take on an inexperienced woman. «Pete,» she whispered, putting her hand atop his to stop his fingers from their continuous examination of the dent in his skull. «Pete, now you stop it.» «You're right,» he said. «I'm always right,» she said, with a little smile. «It's time to stop worrying and start doing something.» «What?» He didn't answer. He swiveled his chair to the control panel, punched up the blink beacon guide on the screen, and made his selection, his fingers flying over the keyboard. «Hang on, honey,» he said. Moving a Mule Class tug was a joy. There was power to waste. Blinks came fast and easy. Not even a fleet liner could build charge for a blink as fast as that huge power plant down there on one end of the 47's rectangular hull. As Pete activated the brute power of the generator there was a feeling of displacement, a tingling unlike anything ever experienced, a wrenching feeling of movement which was not movement and ended almost before it began. The hardware blinked, clicked, hummed, sensing a new starfleld around the ship, orienting the ship instantly and giving exact coordinates. Pete put the viewer on telescopic scan and located the blink beacon which had been his target. It had been a long jump. The blink beacon on the New Earth range was the nearest beacon to the 47's permanent station. Even without deductive reasoning, Pete had guessed that if the signal which was worrying him had been genuine, and not just a glitch in the equipment aboard his ship, it might also be recorded on the permanent tape of the New Earth range beacons. There was a new feeling inside the 47. The generator was reaching out, building charge, and the result was that special feeling of tingling power. There near the fringe of the galaxy the distance between beacons was great, measured not in light-years but in parsecs. The star fields were thin, scattered. The blink had taken power, and now the generator was drawing on the stars to rebuild. Pete ran a check, got a «great» reading from the computer. The blink beacon, within optical distance, sent out its steady, perpetual target signal. He punched instructions into the keyboard which activated a system and pulled the readings from the beacon's tapes. The action recorded the 47's name, the time, the date on the beacon's tape. He saw that the beacon's tape had not been monitored in the past five years, a testimony to the remoteness of the range. He started a fast search of the tape. Two ships had passed the beacon in five years and then the reading was up-to-date, and, at the precise time recorded by the 47's computer there was, on the beacon's tape, that same ghostly signal. The computer analyzed and said the two readings were identical. Weak, incomplete, but the signal definitely was the beginning of that signal which a blinking ship sends ahead of itself through the continuum. He ran stress and wave analysis a second time, and the results were the same. His ship's communications bank and the blink beacon had recorded the signal at the same time. Jan's face had gone serious. She sat in her command chair and watched Pete play with the computer, running the two signals through for comparison again and again. She was silent. She knew him well now, and she knew that when he was doing serious thinking he didn't like to be distracted. He punched instructions, and the two tapes played together. Then he began to slow the speed of play, and the sound changed tones, but began to be stretched out. They both heard the difference in the two tapes at the same time when Pete had the momentary sound stretched out for a full ten seconds. The tape of the blink beacon had recorded something which was not on Stranden 47's tape. That additional something was not signal. It was more a distortion of the coating of the tape. «Defect in manufacture?» Pete muttered, running the two sounds again. «No,» he said, in answer to his own question. He had Jan dig out a technical manual and bent over it for a few minutes. «Find anything?» Jan asked when he looked up. «I don't know,» he said. «It may have been an emission of a kind of energy which the tape was not designed to print.» «So?» she asked. «I'd like to check the next beacon down the New Earth range.» «Ummm,» she said. It was not up to her to remind him that he'd defied company and Space Service policy by leaving station without first Blink-stating his intentions to the home office. She knew that he was taking a chance that there would be no traffic through their remote junction of space routes during the few minutes it took to blink out and check the blink beacon's tape and then blink back home. The generator's charge was building to a power which caused Jan's hair to tend to stand out straight. Her skin tingled. She had a thought which sent a smile to warm her face. Making love during a generator charge was, well, it was just wow. Pete began to punch the coordinates for the jump back to the station. He'd decided that it was too risky to blink farther away from his assigned place to check another beacon's tape. He was about ready to call the home office and lay it all in their laps. He jerked with surprise, and Jan gave a small cry, when the communicator began to blink lights at them and the golden tone of the gong filled the control room. Pete whirled his chair to the communications bank and monitored. The nearby blink beacon was relaying a Blinkstat. The coded signal came into the ship's communications bank and from there was transcribed into the odd, mechanical voice of the ship's computer. At the same time a printer was working with a chatter. «X&A, New Earth, to U.P.S. Rimfire. Order: immediate contact.» That was it. The message was from Exploration and Alien Search Headquarters, New Earth. Blinkstats, which were possible through the same power that lifted a ship from one point to another instantaneously, followed a line of pre-established blink beacons. Blinkstats were expensive. When the ship for which a Blinkstat was intended received the message, the expensive transmission was terminated by automatics at the next blink beacon past the ship's position. Even a man without deductive reasoning could figure out that the U.P.S. Rimfire was thought by X&A to be on the New Earth range leading toward the Stranden 47's station. Since the message had arrived at the blink beacon near the 47's present location, Rimfire had to be somewhere between that blink beacon and the next one downrange toward New Earth. Pete sent a test signal down the New Earth range toward the home planet, with programmed termination at a selected beacon far away. Each of the beacons which he tested had relayed the Blinkstat intended for Rimfire. He punched other instructions and found that the beacon nearest him had relayed the stat on to the beacon at his home station, and that beacon, too, had relayed. Pete was beginning to have a creepy feeling. There was no way that the newest and most glamorous ship in the service of Exploration and Alien Search could have passed the Stranden 47's station. Not unless X&A and the service had come up with something so new that all of the old rules were out. He didn't think it possible that such a development had been made. Even before she was ready to go into space the U.P.S. Rimfire had been a famous ship. She had been undergoing final outfitting at the time Pete and Jan left Tigian to begin their tour. The media had been full of her. She was the first X&A ship with true intergalactic capability. She was the finest and most expensive ship ever built. According to Tigian Tri-D, not always dependable, considering the Tigian temperament, Rimfire's skipper was to be given the order to take the Rimfire toward the fringe stars, to the last established blink beacon, and turn left. There was no way she could be out there beyond the 47's station. Pete punched in the buttons for home, felt the leap, and the old 47 was back within fractions of an inch of her original position at the junction of four lonely blink routes leading from nowhere to nothing. The homebase blink beacon had dutifully recorded the Blinkstat for Rimfire and relayed it. Pete was glumly silent for a long time. «Hungry?» Jan asked. «Not very.» «Bowl of kanji fruit?» «Sounds good.» She started to rise, and the tone of his voice stopped her. She settled back. «What we're gonna hear, and pretty soon, is an all-points alert on Rimfire.» he said. «Oh, no,» Jan said. «Let's eat,» he said. «It'll take a while.» It took twelve hours. The Blinkstat came from New Earth, and it was a blockbuster, carrying the preliminary code which indicated that it was being sent simultaneously along all established blink routes. The general transmission, in itself, was a tipoff to the seriousness of the situation, even if the wording was not. The message was merely a formal request to all ships in space, all stations, all fleet installations to report any knowledge of U.P.S. Rimfire. It was when the stat gave Rimfire's last known position that Pete began to dream. Rimfire's arrival had been recorded at blink beacon 7C3X99-34R-NE793. Her next jump should have been recorded at blink beacon 7C3X99-34R-NE794. «NE794,» Pete muttered. «That's where we went,» Jan said. «She arrived at NE793.» Now he was beginning to regret that he hadn't had more courage, that he had not jumped on downrange to NE793. «She's lost,» he said. She was the most expensive ship ever built. She had every piece of equipment known to man. She could chart new routes in space, discover new planets; she had on board the equipment to analyze every aspect of that new planet and, in the unlikely event of life, hostile life, she was armed with weapons which could reduce a world to charred cinders in seconds. Pete couldn't even estimate her worth, but he had a glowing feeling as his dream grew. The crew's share of a salvage on Rimfire would be the single biggest haul ever made. He started punching buttons. He wouldn't reveal the dream to Jan. Not yet. No use raising her hopes until he had a more solid handle on the situation. But Rimfire was lost. Out there between the 47 and the first beacon down the New Earth range were a few parsecs of empty space. Past that one, NE 794, a few more parsecs, and Rimfire's last known position near NE793. «Jan,» he said, «send a stat to Stranden on Tigian. Keep it simple. Just say Stranden 47 asks permission begin search Rimfire.» Jan had learned fast. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. The tiny amount of energy required to send a signal allowed almost instantaneous relay down the Tigian range. The answer was clicking off the printer within a minute. «They say hold,» Jan said. «Must confirm Rimfire in trouble.» Pete used one of his infrequent profanities, then shook his head. «If she wasn't in trouble she wouldn't have disappeared.» If it was simple trouble, such as merely falling out of blink drive before arriving at NE 794, somewhere in those parsecs of empty space between beacons, her communications generator was enough to send a call for help. Pete knew the space regulations. No skipper would be silent if his ship was in trouble. If he had a way to yell for help, he'd be yelling loud and clear. If anyone was alive on Rimfire and if the communications equipment was working, there'd be a call going both ways down the New Earth range. The blink was a relatively safe way to travel, but when man depends on hardware and electronics, he is vulnerable. Hardware and electronics fail. The results, to a blink ship, are not always tragic, or fatal. Sometimes a generator just lost power for one reason or another and dropped the ship out of subspace, or wherever a ship went when blinking, back into normal space a long, long way from anywhere. There were no mysteries in space travel. When a ship failed to arrive, and didn't report, a search always found her. There'd been a few times when the search found a dead ship, gutted by internal explosion, but even the dead ships were found. There were some old stories from the last war, a thousand years old, about ships disappearing, but that was war. It's difficult to find the disassembled atoms of a ship which has been caught in the full blast of a rebinder beam. Pete's guess was that whatever had happened to Rimfire, it was damned serious. It saddened him. He'd never seen her, but he'd seen pictures of her, and she was one beautiful hunk of stuff. «Jan, she's lost all power. If she had auxiliary power we'd be hearing from her. She's out there somewhere between 794 and 793.» He didn't add that there might be people still alive on her, people who were waiting and praying for a tug. He made up his mind. «Send this to Stranden. Stranden 47 blinking NE794 to begin search.» He didn't bother to wait for an answer. The 47 ceased to exist and reexisted near the beacon from which he'd taken the tape reading twelve hours previously. He activated the optics and detections instruments and read the straight-line route toward New Earth as far as his instruments could penetrate. Emptiness. Parsecs of space lay ahead between NE794 and NE793. The search pattern would be tedious, tiring. He started it. A short leap, just to the point where the 47's detection instruments could read backward and forward and, in a large number of short, jerky blinks, search every mile, every inch, every light-year of the long, long parsecs of that long, long jump out near the rim of the galaxy. He put the computer to work to figure out how long it would take, and his heart sank when he had the answer. He didn't communicate his doubt to Jan. The generator was building charge constantly now, and it was possible to make jumps within seconds of emerging, giving the instruments only time to search the cold emptiness before pushing the button. When the generator was drained completely by the multiple small jumps, a longer period of waiting was necessary. Lord, Lord, he thought, if we can find her. If he found her and locked onto her and took her back to New Earth with the crew dead or alive, oh, Lord. The way she was built, the way she was equipped, she had cost billions. Even after the owners of the 47 took the lion's share of the salvage percentage there'd be, hell, millions. There'd be enough to make Mr. and Mrs. Peter Jaynes very, very wealthy. It made him feel queasy in the stomach to think of the Rimfire's crew being dead. He dreamed a dream as the long hours went by and he snatched sleep while the generator was building charge. He'd see a blip on the instruments and take a visual and blink up beside the huge, sleek, beautiful ship. She'd be lying dead in space, but everyone on her would be alive, praying and waiting for a good old Mule to come blinking up beside her. He'd shoot a cable over and it would plunk against the big, sleek ship and attach and he'd use the cable to communicate, since Rimfire had no power. «Captain,» he'd say, «you look lonely.» «Glad to see you, sir,» the captain of the Rimfire would say. «You've made excellent time in finding us.» «My pleasure,» he'd say. And then the biggie. Then the question every tug skipper dreams of asking. «Captain,» he'd say, «do you agree to a Lloyd's contract?» «Well, sir,» the Rimfire's captain would say, having no other choice, «I do agree to a Lloyd's contract.» The phrasing, Pete thought, might not be historic, «"but the effect was. He wasn't sure the company that gave its name to the salvage agreement still existed, for the tradition went far, far back into the history of old Earth, long before the age of space, when transport and cargo moved on Earth's oceans and seagoing tugs searched out ships in trouble. Then, as now, maritime law outlined the procedure. If a vessel could not proceed to the nearest port under its own power and was assisted by another vessel, a certain percentage of the value of ship and cargo would be paid to the rescuing vessel by the victim's insurance company. It was only necessary to confirm in advance with the skipper of the vessel in trouble that he was giving his ship over to the rescue vessel. That old Earth insurance company was Lloyd's of London. Thus the phrase, «Captain, do you agree to a Lloyd's contract?» In any area occupied by the United Planets, the insuring company, to Pete's kno