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

projected jump.

The pre-arrival signal worried some. The space services spent millions
each year trying to determine the cause of it, trying to find a way to
eliminate it, for, although microseconds were involved, the pre-arrival
signal gave electronic equipment time to prepare for the actual arrival of
the ship. There hadn't been a war for almost a thousand years, but to the
military mind that warning that a ship was on its way was, potentially, a
dangerous situation.

"Just a glitch," Jan said. "Let's go back to bed."

"You go along. I'll be there in a few minutes."

She didn't have to use words to let him know that she was not going
without him. They had been together for three years. In that three years
the longest period of separation had been two hours, when she was taking
her physical for tug duty. Even then Pete had tried to go into the
examination room with her. He had just found her, then, and he was
afraid of losing her.

When Pete Jaynes worried, his left hand went to his head. If he was
wearing a cap at the time the fingers of his left hand would slip under the
cap, tilting it, until the pads of his index and large fingers were on the
depression in his skull just over his left ear. If he was not wearing a cap
the motion seemed less unconscious. Jan saw his hand go up, begin to toy
with the dent in his skull.

"Pete, it was a false signal. There's no need to worry."

Pete knew that Jan had not spent almost a full year of two-hour-a-day
classes studying shipboard communications equipment. Jan could not
know that what had happened was impossible, that the signal of a
blinking ship could not emerge out of empty space. The signal had been
recorded. Weak as it was, momentary as it was, it was there. It had been
automatically transcribed from the communicator tape to the master
tape. At the end of the tour that master tape would have three full years of
ship's functions recorded on it, and it would be run routinely through the
Stranden Corporation's statistical information center. Any operator could
review any category of information with the press of a button. Stranden
was, of course, under the jurisdiction of the Space Service, and any Space
Service statistician had access to Stranden's records, could press a button
and review, for example, all of the incoming jump signals on the tape
within seconds.

The weak, momentary signal was there on tape. For the skipper of any
spacegoing ship to ignore such a signal, which without a doubt indicated
something abnormal, was, at the least, grounds for losing one's license.

The master tape of the Stranden 47 would be easy to review, because