Chapter III

Under the temporary command of Commodore Theodore Wilson the space squadron sped out into the uncharted wastes of the sky on the true line toward Castor. Slowly, as the squadron flew, its component spacecraft diverged in a narrow cone so that the volume of space to be covered would fall within the scope of the detection equipment aboard each ship. Computers flicked complex functions in variables of the laws of probability, and came up with a long series of "and-or-if" results.

Toby Manning, Master Computer for the squadron, sympathized when Wilson showed the latest sheaf.

Wilson grunted, "This is no damn good at all. It sort of says that the lifeships will be wherever we find them."

Manning nodded. "Like the problem of catching a lion on the Sahara Desert. You get a lion cage with an open door, electronically triggered to close at the press of a distant button. Then the laws of probability state that at any instant there exists a mathematical probability the lion is in the region of the cage. At this instant you shut the door. The lion lies within the cage, trapped."

"Stop goofing off. This is no picnic. Have you any idea of how many square light years we have to comb?"

"Cubic light years, Commodore Wilson."

"Cubic. So I'm sloppy in my speech, too? Look, Manning, all we really want from you is the overall conic volume in which the lifeships must lie. You know the course of Flight Seventy-nine. You know the standard take-off velocity of a lifeship. The forward motion plus the sidewise, escape velocity, produces a vector angle which falls in the volume of a cone because we don't know which escape angle they may have used. We can pinpoint the place of escape fairly close."

"Yeah, within a light year. Maybe two."

"And we know that the lifeship will reduce its velocity below light as soon as possible."

"Naturally."

"So somewhere on that vector cone, or within it, is a lifeship--two lifeships--traveling on some unknown course at some velocity considerably lower than the speed of light."

"We've located 'em before. We'll locate 'em again."

Wilson shook his head worriedly. "That's a lot of vacant space out there. Even admitting that we have the place pinpointed, the pinpoint is a couple of light years in diameter, and will grow larger as time and the lifeship course continues. Or," he added crisply, "shall we take a certain volume of space and assert that a definite mathematical probability exists that the survivors lie within that volume?"

"Sorry, Commodore. I didn't mean to be scornful."

"Well, then, you'd better set up your space grid in the coordinate tank and we'll start combing it cube by cube."

"Correct," said Toby Manning.

The "tank" was not really a tank. It was a stereo projection against a flat glass wall at one end of the big Information Center Room below the bridge section of the flagship. Wilson went there some time later to watch the bustle as the tank was set up to cover the segment of space they intended to comb.

Even looking at the thing required some training. The plotters and watchers wore polaroid glasses to provide the stereo effect. Through the special glasses, the tank looked like a small scale model of this section of the sky. Castor and Pollux and other nearby stars were no longer pinpoints on a flat black surface, but tiny points of light that seemed to hang in space, some in front of and some behind the position of the screen itself.

Behind the glass screen, a technician was carefully laying a curve down on a drawing table with a pantagraph instrument. As he moved the pencil point along the curve, a thin green line appeared in stereo, starting close by and abruptly, and leading towards the dot labeled Castor.

The loud-speaker said, "This green line is the computed course of Spaceflight Seventy-nine."

* * * * *

A red knot was placed on the line.

"This is the approximate point of explosion."

Wilson asked, "Is that nominal or is that placed on the minus side?"

"The spot is placed to give the maximum factor of safety."

"Good."

"Now, after considering the probable velocity of escape from Seventy-nine, which would be a lifeship leaving the mother vessel at a ninety-degree relative course at full lifeship speed, we find a vector combination of velocities and courses that diverge from the main course."

From the red knot another line went out at a small angle to the original course, thin and red.

"But because we have no way of knowing what the axial attitude of Seventy-nine was at the moment of escape, the volume of probability now becomes a cone."

The angled red line revolved about a green course line describing a thin cone, its base pointed toward the star, Castor. As the line revolved about the axis of the cone, it left a faint residue behind it, which became a thin, transparent cone.

Manning said, "Our field of operations lies within this cone."

Someone running the projector went to work. The scene expanded until the thin red cone filled the screen and seemed to project deep into the room, its apex almost at the eyes of the watchers. Then a polar pattern appeared across the cone near the apex, a circular grid marked off in thin white lines, each line numbered, each area or segment, marked with a letter.

Down the room where the cone was larger, another grid appeared similarly marked.

Manning went on, "We cannot tell, of course, at what point in the collapse the survivors made their escape. We know that the automatic circuits begin deceleration as soon as the warp-generator shows signs of failure, the hope being that the spacecraft will fall to a safe velocity before the field collapses completely. Therefore escape could be made at any velocity between forty parsecs per hour, if they escaped before the deceleration began, or at normal under-light velocity, which might take place if the spacecraft had succeeded in dropping to safety before the field collapsed. However, in that case, there would have been no explosion and our space wreck victims would have remained in the spacecraft, or returned to it as soon as they saw it was safe. Therefore, integrating the probabilities outlined here, the survivors must lie between the planes of maxima and minima, representing escape at maximum forward velocity and minimum forward velocity. Here, gentlemen, is your search grid."

The rest of the stereo-field went out, leaving the white lines of the grids. Lateral lines now appeared to connect intersections of the fore grid with the corresponding intersection of the aft grid.

"We are here."

Tiny discs of purple dotted space before the small end grid. The discs were flat-on to the grid and represented the maximum distance for space detection of matter.

Wilson felt something touch him on the arm. He turned. A tech-operator standing there had a bewildered look on his face.

"Yes?" said Wilson.

"I'm puzzled, Commodore. Suppose we don't find them in a long time. Won't that far grid have to be pushed back?"

"No," Wilson explained wearily. "The function of a lifeship is to get its occupants down below the velocity of light and then coast. Since that grid represents a total distance of about ten light years, they'd have to be floating for ten years at the velocity of light to make it. Any normal speed, over a period of weeks, would hardly appear long enough to cover the thickness of one of the grid lines."

"Ten light years!"

Wilson nodded and repeated. "This is no picnic." He turned from the tech-operator to the planning table. "Unless someone has a better suggestion, we'll set up a hexagonal flight pattern with a safe detector overlap and start by cutting a hole down through this grid volume along the prime axis. Anybody got any other suggestions?"

Space Captain Frank Edwards shook his head. "Not unless someone has improved on the _Manual of Flight Procedures_," he said.

"Okay then. Here we go."

* * * * *

Commodore Wilson leaned back and watched the grid as Edwards got on the ship-to-ship and gave the operational orders. The little discs rearranged themselves slowly into a hexagonal lattice with their edges overlapping, then the flight began to move forward into the grid, running down the line of axis.

Somewhere inside of the cage made by the white lines a lifeship was drifting, a sub-sub-microscopic mote alone in a volume of space so large that light would take ten years to traverse the volume from top to bottom.

Wilson shook his head and took off his polaroids to brush his eyes. The stereo-field collapsed flat against the glass screen and became a meaningless jumble of lines. Wilson put his glasses back on hastily.

Captain Edwards said softly, "Take it easy, Ted. We'll find her."

Wilson nodded. "I know. But I can't help thinking how rough it must be."

"Why?"

"To take her first space flight and get involved in a blowup."

"It will be an experience she'll never forget, but it shouldn't be too hard on her. It isn't as though she were completely alone, you know."

"No, I suppose not. She probably got out with anywhere from two to eight others. A lot of those were--well, not real spacemen, but at least they were regular space trippers. I--"

A detector alarm rang and everybody jumped to the alert. Edwards barked an order and one of the flight-techs darted off toward the launching deck. There was no point in stopping the whole flight, for any detection of matter would be investigated by one-man scooters. If a lifeship should be found, an infrawave call would bring the search flight hurrying back.

This was not it. The flight-tech reported a small clutter of pebbles and frozen gas. Probably a comet on its long, cold, dead swing near aphelion.

And the search went on....

Charles Andrews snorted angrily and growled, "It's damned inefficient, that's all I have to say."

Pilot Jock Norton shrugged. "We're alive."

"But why can't we pack on some power and get going somewhere?"

"Because this is a lifeship and not an interstellar spacecraft. I told you that before. D'ye expect a lifeship to be as big as the carrier?"

"Don't be an imbecile."

Norton towered over Andrews. "Don't be too bright, Andrews. Ships don't founder once in a green-striped moon. The function of a lifeship is to protect the customers until help can arrive. Our storage bank held enough quick-power to counteract the speed of the lifeship, with a safety factor. We've a small accumulator cell for temporary storage. It ain't pheasant under glass and brandy, but we'll neither starve nor die of asphyxiation. We're alive and healthy. So just wait it out. I told you that, too."

"I don't like it."

"Do I sound as though I did?"

"You seem to," Alice said reproachfully.

Norton gave her a bland smile. "I didn't intend to imply that I was in love with this clambake. Sure, it's a rough situation, but there's little point in looking at the black side."

"How long will this take?" she asked.

"Maybe a couple of days," he said easily. "Maybe as long as a week. Maybe even more. But we'll be all right."

"At a hundred dollars per hour," sneered Andrews.

"It ain't hay."

Andrews pulled a long pale cigar out and lit it with a flourish. "Norton, tell you what _I_ think of a hundred dollars per hour. I'll take that week you mentioned as an outside limit and if you can do something to get us home before that date, I'll pay you one thousand dollars for every hour under that week."

"Nuts!"

* * * * *

Andrews said firmly, "Miss Hemingway, witness this, please. Do something brilliant right this moment, Norton, and you'll collect seven times twenty-four times one thousand dollars. Now that's what I call not-hay."

Norton growled angrily, "If there was anything I could do, I'd take you up on that."

"There probably is, if you'd only try to think."

"I'm the space pilot," Norton pointed out. "And I'm telling you there is nothing we can do about it."

"All right. Forget it. Let's have something to eat."

"We don't eat for an hour, Andrews."

Charles Andrews puffed on his cigar. "Why not?" he asked softly.

"Because we've got to conserve. It's in the book of rules."

"Rules are made to be broken."

"Not space rules. And I'm still skipper, you know."

"No matter how--" Andrews was going to say "incompetent" but he stopped short as Norton got lazily up out of his chair and came forward. Andrews realized he could push Norton just so far, then the pilot would lose his laziness and begin getting violent. Andrews could not stand up to violence. He was not big enough. He was not young enough.

Alice said calmly, "Stop it, both of you! You'll just make trouble for all of us."

Norton sat down again. Doggedly he said, "We'll eat in an hour."

Andrews turned to Alice. "Miss Hemingway, are you, perhaps, a bit hungry?"

She shook her head quickly. "Frankly, I couldn't get it down and keep it."

"Then perhaps in an hour," said Andrews. "I was only thinking of your comfort."

Alice squirmed. Both of them were, in their own way, fighting to control the situation. Andrews had just oozed out of the indignity of having an order or request countermanded. Norton had just ignored an implied insult.

So long as they struggled, quietly, nothing would result but well-rubbed nerves. But if open conflict broke out it might get rough indeed.