Lazarus decided to check on their popularity rating. He switched on the ship-to-ship again, found that it was still angrily squawking, although a little more faintly. They knew his own name now-one of his names-which caused him to decide that the boys in the Chili must have called traffic control almost at once. He tut-tutted sadly when he learned that “Captain Sheffield’s” license to pilot had been suspended. He shut it off and tried the Naval frequencies . . . then shut them off also when he was able to raise nothing but code and scramble, except that the words “New Frontiers” came through once in clear.
He said something about “sticks and stones may break my bones-” and tried another line of investigation. Both by long-range radar and by paragravitic detector he could tell that there were ships in their neighborhood but this alone told him very little; there were bound to be ships this close to Earth and he had no easy way to distinguish, from these data alone, an unarmed liner or freighter about her lawful occasions from a Naval cruiser in angry pursuit.
But the New Frontiers had more resources for analyzing what was around her than had an ordinary ship; she had been specially equipped to cope unassisted with any imaginable strange conditions. The hemispherical control room in which they lay was an enormous multi-screened television receiver which could duplicate the starry heavens either in view-aft or view-forward at the selection of the pilot. But it also had other circuits, much more subtle; simultaneously or separately it could act as an enormous radar screen as well, displaying on it the blips of any body within radar range.
But that was just a starter. Its inhuman senses could apply differential analysis to doppler data and display the result in a visual analog. Lazarus studied his lefthand control bank, tried to remember everything be had been told about it, made a change in the set up.
The simulated stars and even the Sun faded to dimness; about a dozen lights shined brightly.
He ordered the board to check them for angular rate; the bright lights turned cherry red, became little comets trailing off to pink tails-all but one, which remained white and grew no tail. He studied the others for a moment, decided that their vectors were such that they would remain forever strangers, and ordered the board to check the line-of-sight doppler on the one with a steady bearing.
It faded to violet, ran halfway through the spectrum and held steady at blue-green. Lazarus thought a moment, subtracted from the inquiry their own two gees of boost; it turned white again. Satisfied he tried the same tests with view-aft.
“Lazarus-”
“Yeah, Lib?”
“Will it interfere with what you are doing if I give you the corrections now?”
“Not at all. I was just taking a look-see. If this magic lantern knows what it’s talking about, they didn’t manage to get a pursuit job on our tail in time.”
“Good. Well, here are the figures . . .”
“Feed ’em in yourself, will you? Take the conn for a while. I want to see about some coffee and sandwiches. How about you? Feel like some breakfast?”
Libby nodded absent-mindedly, already starting to revise the ship’s trajectory. Ford spoke up eagerly, the first word he had uttered in a long, time. “Let me get it. I’d be glad to.” He seemed pathetically anxious to be useful.
“Mmm . . . you might get into some kind of trouble, Slayton. No matter what sort of a selling job Zack did, your name is probably ‘Mud’ with most of the members. I’ll phone aft and raise somebody.”
“Probably nobody would recognize me under these circumstances,” Ford argued. “Anyway, it’s a legitimate errand-I can explain that.”
Lazarus saw from his face that it was necessary to the man’s morale. “Okay . . . if you can handle yourself under two gees.”
Ford struggled heavily up out of the acceleration couch he was in. “I’ve got space legs. What kind of sandwiches?”
“I’d say corned beef, but it would probably be some damned substitute. Make mine cheese, with rye if they’ve got it, and use plenty of mustard. And a gallon of coffee. What are you having, Andy?”