Complete Short Fiction, page 21
That was unfortunate. To remain alive on any of these worlds would demand that he stay in the ship, and use power, for heat and light. Even such slight radiation as that would cause meant a virtual certainty of detection by even a cursory sweep of the planet on the part of a League cruiser. He had to find a place where the ship would remain at least habitably warm without aid from its own converters. He could do without light, he thought.
The problem would not have bothered a pilot of even moderate experience, of course. The ship could easily be set in a circular orbit of any desired radius about one of the stars. Unfortunately, there is a definite relation between the mass of a star, the radius of the desired orbit, and the amount of initial tangential velocity required: and this simple relation was unknown to La Roque. Trial and error would be very unsatisfactory: the error might be unnoticeably small to start with, and become large enough to require correction when searchers were around. A worried frown began to add creases above La Roque’s black brows as the little flyer raced on.
The spot of light in the front vision plate grew paler as Sol, who provided most of its radiance, faded astern. Within a day, he was merely a bright star; in a week, dozens of others outshone him whenever La Roque cut the drive fields. Space, the runaway began to realize, was a terrifying lonely environment. Earth was beginning, in his memory, to assume a less forbidding aspect.
Two days out, he passed the first of the seven systems. It was not visible, at half a light-year, even when the fields were off; the chart reference described it as a binary, both stars cool enough to have clouds of solid and liquid particles in their atmospheres, and neither emitting any visible radiation to speak of. The relative orbit was of almost cometary eccentricity, with a period of about seventy years. The suns had passed periastron about a dozen years before, without anyone’s being greatly concerned.
It was a dry collection of data, but it jogged La Roque’s mind into recalling something. He had been picturing the result of an error in establishing an orbit, as being a spiral drop into the star he had chosen. Now he recalled that he would merely find himself in a slightly eccentric, rather than a circular, orbit; and if the eccentricity were not great enough to bring his periastron point actually within the star’s atmosphere, it would be perfectly stable.
The idea attracted him for a moment; even he could set up a passable concealment orbit. The possibility of being alternately too warm and too cold was unpleasant, but not forbidding. The system he was passing would not do, of course; he took it for granted that the perturbations produced by the companion star would nullify his attempts. However, four single suns were among those he had looked up along his course, and were within easy reach.
It remained to choose one of the four. Any reasonable and normal person would have without hesitation laid a course for the nearest; La Roque, under the elemental motivation that sent an incognito Hitler to Borneo rather than Switzerland, chose the farthest. Perhaps his gambling spirit had something to do with the choice; for there was actually some doubt that he would reach the star before a League cruiser would come nosing along his wake into detection range.
From where he was, the runaway could not lay a direct course for his chosen hideout. His knowledge of solid geometry and trigonometry was so small that all he could do was to continue on his present course until the proper heliocentric distance was attained, then stop, put Sol exactly on his beam, hold it there while he turned in the proper direction, and again run in second-order flight for a certain length of time—dead reckoning pure and very simple. By thus reducing his goal position to a known plane—or near plane; actually the surface of a sphere centered on Sol—he could get the course of his second leg by simply measuring, on a plane chart, the angle whose vertex was the point in the sky toward which he had been driving, and whose sides were determined, respectively, by some beacon star such as Rigel or Deneb, and the star of his destination. He dragged out a heliocentric chart and protractor, and set to work.
Time crawled on. The nearer stars, on the trail photographs, drifted sluggishly toward Sol. La Roque found a photometer, and managed to obtain with its aid a check on his distance from the Solar system. He spent much of his time sleeping. There was nothing to read except the charts, astrographical and planetographical references, and the numbers on the currency leaves whose gathering had necessitated his departure from Earth. The latter kept up his morale for a while.
Second-order pilotage is not difficult; it depends chiefly on proper aiming of the ship before cutting in of the converters. There is practically no tendency to drift from the original heading; in fact, it is impossible to turn without cutting the fields and re-aligning the vessel’s axis. Actually, the ship will follow the arc of a circle whose radius depends to some extent on the power of the generators, but in any case is so enormous that a “local” interstellar flight may be considered rectilinear. La Roque’s intended flight path was so short that his ignorance of short-order field technology made no difference. An experienced navigator, planning a flight across the galaxy, or to one of the exterior systems, would have to forecast and allow for the “drift” caused by generators of any given make and power.
One by one, the star systems La Roque had rejected dropped behind. Each time he fought the temptation to turn aside and seek refuge. Days turned into weeks, three of them, from the time he had chosen his destination. By the most generous estimate, his margin of clearance from the law was growing narrow, when he cut the fields at—according to his reckoning—twenty-eight point seven seven four seven fight-years from the Solar System.
He snapped on plate after plate, looking around in every direction. A fifth-magnitude star on the cross wires of the rear plate was, of course, Sol. He looked for Deneb, but Cygnus was too badly distorted by a parallactic variation of nine parsecs to permit him to identify its alpha star with certainty. Orion was recognizable, since he had been moving more or less directly away from it and all its principal stars were extremely distant; so he decided to use Rigel to control his direction.
He zeroed the cross wires of one of the side plates and, using the gryos, swung the ship until Sol was centered on that plate. Rigel was, conveniently, visible on the same plate; so he snapped a switch which projected a protractor onto it, and swung the ship again until Rigel was on the proper—according to his measures—radius. Using the plate’s highest power, he placed the two stars to four decimals of accuracy, released the gyro clutches, and cut in the second-order fields before friction at the gyro bearings could throw off his heading.
His arithmetic said he had eight hours and thirty minutes of flight to his destination. Experience would have told him that his chances of stopping within detection range of his goal were less than one in a hundred thousand; as it was, the chief worry that actually disturbed him was whether or not there was risk of collision. Not too surprising! In dead reckoning, the novice navigator makes a tiny point and says, “Here we are.”
The junior makes a small circle and says the same. The experienced navigator lays the palm of his hand on the chart and says, “We ought to be here.” And La Roque’s was the deadest of dead reckoning.
He cut the fields five seconds early, and looked expectantly at the forward plate. There should have been a crimson, glowing coal half a billion miles ahead of him. Of course there wasn’t.
For a moment he was completely bewildered; but, as he was a reasonable creature, it was only for a moment. He had evidently made a mistake; not necessarily a very large one. He had already obtained the spectrobolometric curve of the star, and fitted the appropriate templets into the detectors. There would be no confusion; no sun having anything like that energy curve could be picked up by those instruments at more than a few billion miles. The galaxy is crowded with such expiring stars, it is true; but a “crowded” star system still contains a vast amount of empty space.
La Roque “sat down”—strapped himself into a seat, since he was weightless—and planned again. He would have to sweep out the space around him, stopping at least every ten billion miles—every two minutes—for at least the ten seconds the instruments would require to sweep the celestial sphere. A volume of space that could be covered in a reasonable time would have to be decided on, and the decision adhered to. If he started a random search, he might as well open the ports.
The results of some more arithmetic bothered him. A really appalling number of five-billion-mile cubes could be packed into an area that looked very small on the chart. He finally worked the other way—allowing himself one hundred hours for the search. He decided he could cover a cube roughly one hundred and forty billion miles on a side, in that time. He realized sadly that his dead reckoning error could easily be several times that.
He was no quitter, however. He was beginning to realize the chances against him—not merely against his escape, but against his survival; he had long since realized his error in tackling a job about which he knew next to nothing; but having decided on his course of action, he embarked on it without hesitation. He started the sweep.
His patience lasted admirably for the first hour. It stood up fairly well for the second. By the end of the third, the smooth routine of flight—cut-wait-and-watch-flight was growing ragged. When the clock and radiometer dials began to blur, and the urge to break something grew almost irresistible, he called it a day and slept for two or three hours. After the second period, he couldn’t sleep either.
Really, he was undeservedly lucky. One of the radiometers reacted after only eighteen hours of blind search. His near hysteria vanished instantly, washed away in a flood of relief; and with hands once more reasonably steady he swung the little ship until the emanations registered on the bow meter. He noted the strength of the reading, cut in the second-order fields for five seconds, and read the dial again. He knew the inverse square law, at least; he figured for a moment, then drove forward again for eleven more seconds, and cut the fields between twenty and thirty million miles from the source of the radiation.
It was visible to the naked eye at that range, which, in a way, was unfortunate. Had it not been, La Roque would have had a few more happy minutes. As things were, he took one look at the forward plate, and for the next ninety seconds used language which should really have been recorded for the benefit of future sailors. He had some excuse. The star was listed in the chart reference as single; La Roque had chosen it for that reason. However, plainly visible on the plate, revolving evidently almost in contact, were two smoky red suns—a close binary system.
Of course, no one would normally be greatly interested. The Astrographic Survey vessel which had covered the section had probably swept past fifty billion miles out, and noted the system’s existence casually as its radiometers flickered. Size? Mass? Companions, if any? Planets? Who cared!
La Roque, of course.
The stars were red dwarfs, small and dense. They would have been seen to be irregular variables, if anyone had looked long enough; for their surface temperatures were so low that “cirrus” clouds of solid carbon particles formed and dispersed at random in their atmospheres. The larger sun was perhaps a hundred thousand miles in diameter, the other only slightly smaller. Their centers were roughly half a million miles apart, and the period of revolution about eight hours. In spite of their relatively high density, there were very noticeable tidal bulges on both.
All these facts would have been of absorbing interest to an astronomer seeking data on the internal structure of red dwarf stars; La Roque didn’t know any of them, and at first didn’t give a dam. He was wondering how a stable orbit could be established close enough to this system to keep him from freezing without using ship’s power. The near-circular one he had planned was out; it would have had to be less than a million miles from a single sun of such late type, and the doubling of the heat source wasn’t much help.
He thought of doubling back to one of the other systems which the chart had said to be single; but the nerve-racking search and disappointment he had suffered the first time made him hesitate. It was while he hesitated that memory came to his aid.
There had been an episode in his experiences which had occurred on Hector, one of the Trojan asteroids. Circumstances had caused him to remain there for some time, and a friendly jailer had explained to him just where Hector was and why it stayed there. It was in the stability point at the third comer of an equilateral triangle whose other comers were Sol and Jupiter; and though it could—and did—wobble millions of miles from the actual point, gravitational forces always brought it back.
La Roque looked out at the twin suns. Could his ship stand the temperature at the Trojan points of this system? More important, could he stand it?
He could. His instruments gave the energy distribution curve of the suns; one of the reference charts contained a table that turned the curves into surface temperatures. He was able to measure the distance between the centers of the suns, from the scale lines on the plate and his distance, which he knew roughly. Half a million miles from the surface of a star whose radius was fifty thousand miles and whose effective radiating temperature was a thousand degrees absolute, the black-body, temperature was, according to his figures, about thirty degrees Centigrade. The presence of two stars made it decidedly warmer, but his ship was well insulated and the surface highly polished. It would eventually reach an equilibrium temperature considerably above that of an ideal black body, but it would take a long time doing so.
It seemed, then, that the Trojan point was the best place for him. He could find it easily enough; getting the centers of the stars sixty degrees apart would put him at the right distance. He could find the proper plane by moving around until the two suns appeared to move across each other in straight lines. It would not take long; by varying his distance from the system he could, in a few minutes, observe it through half a revolution.
It took him, in fact, less than an hour to find the orbital plane of the suns. It took him five and a half hours of first-order acceleration at one gravity to get rid of the hundred and twenty mile per second velocity difference between Sol and this system—fortunately, the chart had mentioned the high relative velocity, or La Roque would never have thought of such a thing. In a way, he didn’t mind the necessity; it was good to have weight for the first time in nearly a month. He was, of course, a little worried at the amount of time consumed; he wished he had not wasted so much of the commodity in putting Sol so far behind.
He cut the first-order drive the instant his clock told him the speeds should be equal, headed for the twin suns, and hopped for his Trojan point. Since moving bodies were involved, he had to make five legs out of the short trip—he failed to allow for the short period of the system and the fact that he started the first leg several light-hours from his goal.
He got there eventually, however. He suddenly realized that he would have to use first-order power again, to give his ship something like the proper orbital velocity; but even he was able to understand the proper magnitude and direction of this new vector; the only unjustified assumption he had to make was that the suns were of equal masses, and this happened to be nearly the case. He wasn’t too worried; he understood that in a Trojan orbit such small variations are opposed, not helped, by the gravity of the primary bodies. He was quite right.
He cut all his power except the detector relay currents, which did not radiate appreciably. To these he connected an alarm, and set them to synchronize with the low-frequency waves which form the “wake” of a vessel cruising at second-order speeds. Then, abruptly feeling the reaction of the past days, he drifted over to a “bunk,” moored himself, and was instantly asleep.
It is impossible to say just how long he slept; he was exhausted mentally and emotionally, and when weightless the human body can approach a condition near to suspended animation, if given the chance. It couldn’t have been for very many hours, but the alarm rang for minutes before its sound penetrated to his consciousness. When it did, he had to wait several moments before he could move a muscle.
Recovered at last, he unmoored himself and kicked his body across the narrow cabin to the instrument board, and cut the alarm, cursing. He had forgotten that the bell would radiate, and was not sure that the hull would shield its waves. The detectors were reacting violently, the needles wobbling rapidly from positive to negative limits. He knew that a ship had driven past in second-order flight, but that was as far as he could interpret the readings. It would have required an expert to compute the speed, type, and distance of the ship creating the disturbance.
After a few minutes, the needles quieted. La Roque remained at the board, judging that the ship had not left for good. He was right. The disturbances started again half an hour later, and kept up for hours thereafter—sometimes so feeble as to cause a barely visible quiver of the needles, sometimes slamming them against the stop pins with audible clicks. La Roque was incapable of reading any meaning except changing distance into this phenomenon.
The “wake” of a ship in straight-line, second-order flight consists of a few low-frequency electromagnetic waves, the wave-front being, as can easily be seen, coneshaped, with the ship at the apex. The cone expands radially at the speed of light, and its tip moves forward with the ship—in the case of a military craft, at anywhere up to something like a million light velocities.
If the ship is not in straight-line flight, but cutting its fields and changing direction every few minutes or seconds, the shape of the wave front becomes rather complex. A standard search path spirals around the surface of a torus, and after a few hours the traces of such a flight would be the despair of a competent mathematician, let alone an amateur at a comparatively fixed observation post. The space for billions of miles around that binary sun was quivering with crisscrossing wave fronts. Each set the needles of La Roque’s detectors quivering in tune as it passed him, and each quiver brought beads of sweat to the runaway’s brow. His own ship, he realized, had left similar fronts; and he had shaved his margin of escape much too fine. Had they been given a week, or even three or four days, for expansion at the speed of light, he could have ceased to worry about their being used to trail him.
