"Zach Hughes - Gold Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

"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.