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

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