It took me at least an hour and almost as long to prove it, using a different sequence-and a third time, because the answers didn’t match (I had forgotten to multiply by 5280, and had “miles” on one side and “feet” on the other-a no-good way to do arithmetic)-then a fourth time because my confidence was shaken. I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls.
But I got a proved answer. Five and a half days. I was on Pluto.
Or maybe Neptune-
No, on Neptune I would not be able to jump to a twelve-foot ceiling; Pluto alone matched all facts. So I erased and computed the trip at one gravity, with turnover.
Fifteen days.
It seemed to me that it ought to take at least eight times as long at one gee as at eight-more likely sixty-four. Then I was glad I had bulled my way through analytical geometry, for I made a rough plot and saw the trouble. Squared time cut down the advantage-because the more boost, the shorter the trip, and the shorter the trip the less time in which to use the built-up speed. To cut time in half, you need four times as much boost; to cut it to a quarter, you need sixteen times the boost, and so on. This way lies bankruptcy.
To learn that I could get home in about two weeks at one gravity cheered me. I couldn’t starve in two weeks. If I could steal a ship. If I could run it. If I could climb out of this hole. If- Not “if,” but “when!” I was too late for college this year; fifteen more days wouldn’t matter.
I had noticed, in the first problem, the speed we had been making at skew-flip. More than eleven thousand miles per second. That’s a nice speed, even in space. It made me think. Consider the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, four and three-tenths light-years away, the distance you hear so often on quiz shows. How long at eight gees?
The problem was the same sort but I had to be careful about decimal points; the figures mount up. A lightyear is-I had forgotten. So multiply 186,000 miles per second (the speed of light) by the seconds in a year (365.25 x 24 x 3600) and get-5,880,000,000,000 miles -multiply that by 4.3 and get- 25,284,000,000,000 Call it twenty-five trillion miles. Whew!
It works out to a year and five months-not as long as a trip around the Horn only last century.
Why, these monsters had star travel!
I don’t know why I was surprised; it had been staring me in the face. I had assumed that Wormface had taken me to his home planet, that he was a Plutonian, or Plutocrat, or whatever the word is. But he couldn’t be.
He breathed air. He kept his ship warm enough for me. When he wasn’t in a hurry, he cruised at one gee, near enough. He used lighting that suited my eyes. Therefore he came from the sort of planet I came from.
Proxima Centauri is a double star, as you know if you do crossword puzzles, and one is a twin for our own Sun-size, temperature, special pattern. Is it a fair guess that it has a planet like Earth? I had a dirty hunch that I knew Wormface’s home address.
I knew where he didn’t come from. Not from a planet that runs a couple of centuries in utter airlessness with temperatures pushing absolute zero, followed by a “summer” in which some gases melt but water is solid rock and even Wormface has to wear a space suit. Nor from anywhere in our system, for I was sure as taxes that Wormface felt at home only on a planet like ours. Never mind the way he looked; spiders don’t look like us but they like the things we like-there must be a thousand spiders in our houses for every one of us.
Wormface and his kin would like Earth. My fear was that they liked it too much.
I looked at that Proxima Centauri problem and saw something else. The turn-over speed read 1,110,000 miles per second, six times the speed of light. Relativity theory says that’s impossible.