the Space Service. That solution was to get married, to another spacer. The service gave married couples favorable consideration for posts together. If the couple had it together together, as Pat and Paul had, it was a fine arrangement. Neither X&A nor the service deliberately picked crews of approximately 50-50 sexual distribution, at least not according to the official manuals. However, no one questioned it when it turned out that way. Ships stayed in space a long time, and men were men and women were women and old Mother Nature had designed the race to be two and two. If you were the captain, and if you weren't married— Oh, well, he thought, as Julie Rainbow looked up at him with those big brown eyes. He'd handled similar situations with pretty young female ratings and officers before. A woman had to pass an emotional-stability test to get space duty. There were few weepers on board X&A ships. He put his mind back on the problem. «Paul, there's nothing between us and the rim except one Mule Class tug. When we pass her and go on out we'll be on our own. Before we get too far past that Mule, I want you to wring this baby out. Every jump full-power and then some. If she's going to break, I want her to break where we can hitch a quick ride home.» Paul nodded. «I want to run a few more tests before we leap again.» Dean Richards was left alone with Julie Rainbow. She smiled and he smiled back. They were, he thought, making them more beautiful these days. She was all woman, with long legs. He decided that the fashion designers who had concocted the new casual uniform, shorts and hosiery for women, had had Julie Rainbow in mind. «Permission to speak, sir?» Julie asked, with a smile which had the potential to outradiate a small sun. He nodded. «You are very impressive when you're being businesslike.» «Thank you,» he said, but he was thinking, Well, this one may be a bit more difficult to handle than some of the others. Nothing broke, but the feeling of vast time and eerie internal sensations was still there when the ship blinked at full power. Richards was about ready to admit that the thing was just the nature of the beast and go on about his mission, using no more than 80 percent power. But there was a fine jump coming up, one of the longer ones of the entire system. It was not just light-years, but parsecs. He'd give the generator one more test at full power on that long blink, and then he'd make his final decision. After the next blink, it would be go or no go. He would either call back and report the strange sensations to the scientists at X&A Headquarters, or he'd head for the emptiness out beyond the periphery. The blink was made during Julie Rainbow's shift at the control panel. «Full charge, sir,» she said. «Leave us leap, Miss Rainbow,» Richards said. The last syllable, «bow,» lingered in his ears as time stopped and that eerie feeling in his stomach came to be a part of him forever, and forever, and forever. He could feel himself moving, could see his extended hand. He knew that his hand was in the process of moving, because his brain had sent the messages for movement. His hand was coming from rest on the arm of his command chair with the intention of brushing back his hair from his forehead. His hand was moving, but it was moving so slowly that he couldn't see the movement. It was moving so slowly that it would take eons for that hand to reach his forehead. His hand would be moving for immeasurable time, lifting, and in that eon Julie Rainbow's hand would be lifting from the switch which had activated the generator. He knew the feeling of timelessness would end. It had ended before. There was no panic. His mind worked at normal speed, or at what seemed to him to be normal speed, and he could see the instruments and Julie and he couldn't order his hand to stop moving toward his forehead because his brain had ordered the movement and the neural pathways were clogged with that order. He could feel the impulse, the order, that tiny charge of electrical energy which was journeying from his brain to his hand. He could do nothing to stop the flow of that order. He could not blink his eyes. He tried to move his eyes, and felt the order go out and felt the infinitesimal beginning of movement and in thousands and thousands of years he'd be able to see the clock, on the port side of control. He realized, then, that it was going to go on and on. He sent the order to his vocal cords and was sad, because he knew that someday, eons away, when the universe as he knew it was altered, when the old Earth and the United Planets had long been consumed by their respective suns, the order would reach his throat and then over the next few eons the words would come thundering out. «My God.» He could think, and that added to the horror, to be aware. He was, for all practical purposes, alone. He could see Julie Rainbow, and there was a vast emptiness in him, for he knew that close as he was to her, he'd never, never be able to kiss those full lips, he would not even be able to communicate with her. He'd be alone forever with that sliding feeling in his guts. Ships had been lost, but only a few. Space travel was the safest, statistically, of all forms of travel. You were safer on a spaceship than in your living room in a major city on a highly civilized planet. He searched his memory. Yes, ships had disappeared, mostly during the war of a thousand years past. It gave him something to think about. In the tensions of action had fleet captains built generators to full power needlessly? Were there other ships caught in time and space like Rimfire? Were there men and women, thought to be long dead, alive, watching the slow eons crawl past with unblinking eyes, with that sliding, twisting eeriness in their bellies? He prayed. He prayed for others caught in the same web. He prayed for the crew and for Rimfire. He knew that he'd have plenty of time to say all the prayers he could remember and all that he could compose himself. He thought of the old Bible, that ancient book of odd, strange, and strangely beautiful language, the language of a young race. «Our father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.» He would be mad, of course. His active mind was imprisoned inside a frozen body. He could feel and sense the working mechanisms inside him. He would not age. Julie Rainbow would not age. He would be a raving madman inside a timeless prison. He passed time by exploring his own body. There was a strange freedom for his mind to roam, to feel things he'd never felt before. When he discovered that he could do something which men had tried to do for thousands of years, he knew that he would not go insane for a long time. He could unlock the doors to that vast and little-known portion of his mind, the unconscious, and he knew with certainty that the theorists were right. Men had thought for thousands of years that the unconscious mind recorded every detail of every sensation fed into the brain. For the entire lifetime of man that vast storehouse of sensation, memory, knowledge had offered challenge, and no man had ever discovered how to unlock it completely, but in that frozen continuum Dean Richards went back to beyond birth and experienced the sensations of being in his mother's womb. The possibilities were endless. He had lived a full life, and each minute sensation was there to be relived. When he finished with that, when he tired of that, there were books, entire books, every word, every page recorded there in his memory. The Bible alone would offer him entertainment for a few years, because he'd elected to study Old English while in the Academy and had fallen in love with the roll and thunder of it. Then there was Shakespeare. No, he would not go mad. Not for a long, long time. Chapter Three «Pete,» Jan said, «are we having our first fight?» The Stranden 47 had been searching the direct line between blink beacons NE794 and NE793 for over seventy-two hours. Jan had watched Pete grow gradually tireder and tireder as he insisted on pulling eight-hour shifts to her four hours. So she simply did not wake him up. She pulled eight hours and then had to shake him hard to awaken him from a deep sleep. Pete felt amazingly rested. As she walked back to the control room with him he grinned at her and said, «You see, I told you it was just a matter of learning how to sleep fast. I feel as rested after four hours' sleep as I would have after eight.» «That's good, dear,» Jan said. Then he saw the clock and said, «Now why did you go and do that? I told you how it was going to be.» «You needed some rest,» she said. «I'm not a baby. I can work eight hours.» «I don't want you working eight hours,» he yelled. «I'm the captain of this ship, and when I say wake me in four hours that's exactly what I mean.» And then, «No, dammit, we are not having our first fight. I'm just telling you—» He stopped yelling, grinned at her. She came to him and inserted herself into his arms with a contented little sigh. «Thanks, honey,» he said. «I miss you,» she whispered. «Me too.» Twice during his eight hours he went to the bedroom just to look at her and to count his blessings. It was a slow and tedious process. The ship would blink to the limit of its detection equipment's range, Pete would activate the detection units, see quickly that there was nothing within range, not a stray stone, not a ship the size of Rimfire, and then he'd blink again and go through the same thing over again. Days of it, weeks of it, months of it lay ahead of him. One lost an appreciation of the vast distances involved in blink travel until one had to cover the same space in diddly-bopping little hops. During that search of the space between the two beacons Pete got an idea of what life would have been like on an X&A ship assigned to laying down new blink ranges. He told Jan that maybe it was lucky he had a hole in his head so that he wasn't spending his life making short hops, checking detection instruments, waiting for the generator to build. He made no objection when, on her next watch, Jan pulled eight hours. He awakened naturally after a good, solid seven hours of sleep and came into control with a pot of fresh coffee and some of those excellent sweetmeats from Good Haven, a small planet back in the main body of the U.P. whose soil produced the most fantastic fruits and cereals in the entire known galaxy. «Hi,» he said. «Little taste of something?» «Ummm,» she said, reaching for a sweet. It was deliciously gooey and sticky, and she licked her fingers after eating it. He leaned over and kissed her. «You taste good,» he said. «You, too. Sweet.» «I'm always sweet. No action?» He punched the computer and got a quick read of the past seven hours. He wasn't checking up on her. She'd demonstrated that she'd learned well. It was just good policy to double-check. She did the same when she relieved him. «As you see,» she said. «More coffee?» «You're a doll,» she said, holding out her mug. «Ever consider how little important things change?» he mused. «This stuff. Coffee. It goes back into the dim, distant history of man. Back when there was only good, old Earth and it looked as if the race was intent on destroying itself with endless wars. Guys on duty on watercraft drank this stuff from wooden cups, or whatever they had then. I'll bet it tasted just as good then as it does now.» «My friendly philosopher,» Jan said. «Pete—» He looked up at her, lifting his eyes from the cream-whitened coffee. «I was playing around with that tape. The one from NE794?» «Yeah?» «I want you to hear something,» she said. She punched buttons. The brief, ghostly signal came into his ears, and then repeated itself several more times. «You've stretched it out just slightly,» he said. He'd noted the elapsed time on the meter of the communications bank. The original signal, microseconds long, had lasted twice as long. «No,» she said. «What do you mean, no?» «I mean it's not stretched. What you're hearing is the entire signal. Remember that little area which we thought might have been just a manufacturer's defect in the coating, or maybe an emission of some sort of energy which the tape was not designed to record? Well, I was fiddling with things. Frequency-distortion correction and things like that.» «Lord, you didn't mess up the original tape,» he said. «No. I used a duplicate to play with.» «So what did you do?» «I don't know, really. I was just playing with the machine to pass the time while the generator was building charge and I noticed that I could change the characteristic of the sound by making certain adjustments.» He nodded. «Honey, it doesn't mean anything. Actually, the sound we hear on that signal bears no direct relationship to the signal itself. A pre-blink signal is a kind of emission which is unique, and when it was first discovered there were no machines to convert it into something which our senses could detect. It's not sound, of course, nor light, nor anything but what it is. So they just arbitrarily chose to make the signal activate a sound-generating unit so that there'd be some way, other than looking at a sensitive meter, to know that a pre-blink signal was there.» She nibbled at another sweetmeat. «So all I did was just alter the tone of the sound?» «I'm afraid so.» «But that small area on the tape isn't like a regular blink signal. How did it get transcribed into sound waves?» He thought about it and it seemed to go around and around in his head. His fingers went up to toy with the dent in his skull over his ear. Jan was immediately sorry. She hadn't intended to pose a problem which would touch him in what he thought was his weak area. «Well, never mind,» she said. «Look, the generator's been drained. I used all of it in small jumps and now she's building.» She wiped her hands on a napkin, licked her lips, lifted herself from her chair to sit on his lap. «We have at least twenty minutes. Can you think of some way to spend it?» He could. He did. He left her sleeping peacefully and went to the control room. There he checked charge, decided to let the generator continue to build, punched up the tape she'd been playing with. He used the computer to analyze, and there was no difference between the first half of the signal, that ghostly beginning of a pre-blink emission, and the second half, which had been nothing more than a disturbed area on the coating of the tape. He rubbed his dent and tried to reason it out. He ran the problem through the computer and found that the odds against Jan's hitting the exact tone of that sound, starting with what was, in effect, nothing, were astronomical. The generator was on full charge. He started working, making the small leaps until he had the big beast drained down, finding nothing, then it was charge time again and he was back at the console, playing with Jan's tape. He started from the original and began to adjust and tinker with the various sophisticated adjustments which were designed to enhance, refine, delete certain overtones, and he had to get help from the computer to arrive at the same sound Jan had found by accident. But it was there. First of all that disturbed area of tape was converted to a level of sound so low that it had to be amplified thousands of times and then the gadgets began twisting and enhancing and then it was there, not just a ghostly beginning but a good beginning to a pre-blink signal. He pulled a complete pre-blink signal from the 47's permanent tapes and did the same tricks with it. He could alter the tone of it, tune it, at will, once he programmed the process into the computer. But it still meant nothing, for all he was doing was altering the tone of sound. He was not changing the basic pre-blink signal in the slightest, only the byproduct of that signal after the unique emission had been converted into audible waves. He shrugged and put the tapes away and concentrated on the search as the hours crawled by slowly. With two hours to go before he woke Jan he began to think about the tapes again. Pre-blink signals were all the same. There was no such thing as different frequencies. The pre-blink signal had no wavelength. It was different, as different as light from sound. It could not be tuned, or altered, in any way. Could it? He shook his head. At least not by an Academy kick-out with a hole in his head. But there was a thought somewhere, or at least a near thought, which haunted him as he went about the familiar routine of search. He pounded his head with his fist. It was not the first time he had silently cursed his inability to form an elusive thought, to break through the barrier that seemed to block him off from a part of his thinking ability. «Damn, damn, damn,» he muttered. He was