“I was only going to add-”
“I know. But you were already out of the world when I stopped you.”
Someone from the crowd shouted one more question. “When do we get there?”
“I don’t know,” Libby admitted, thinking of the question the way Nancy Weatheral had put it to him long ago. “I can’t say what year it will be . . . but it will seem like about three weeks from now.”
The preparations consumed days simply because many round trips of the ship’s boats were necessary to embark them. There was a marked lack of ceremonious farewell because those remaining behind tended to avoid those who were leaving. Coolness had sprung up between the two groups; the division on the beach had split friendships, had even broken up contemporary marriages, had caused many hurt feelings, unresolvable bitterness. Perhaps the only desirable aspect of the division was that the parents of the mutant Marion Schmidt had elected to remain behind.
Lazarus was in charge of the last boat to leave. Shortly before he planned to boost he felt a touch at his elbow. “Excuse me,” a young man said. “My name’s Hubert Johnson. 1 want to go along but I’ve had to stay back with the other crowd to keep my mother from throwing fits. If I show up at the last minute, can 1 still go along?”
Lazirus looked him over. “You look old enough to decide without asking me.”
“You don’t understand. I’m an only child and my mother tags me around. I’ve got to sneak back before she misses me. How much longer-”
“I’m not holding this boat for anybody. And you’ll never break away any younger. Get into the boat”
“But. . .”
“Oft!” The young man did so, with one worried backward glance at the bank. There was a lot, thought Lazarus, to be said for ectogenesis.
Once inboard the New Frontiers Lazarus reported to Captain King in the control room. “All inboard?” asked King.
“Yeah. Some late deciders, pro and con, and one more passenger at the last possible split second-woman named Eleanor Johnson. Let’s go!”
King turned to Libby. “Let’s go, Mister.”
The stars blinked out.
They flew blind, with only Libby’s unique talent to guide them. If he had doubts as to his ability to lead them through the featureless blackness of other space he kept them to himself. On the twenty-third ship’s day of the reach and the eleventh day of para-deceleration the stars reappeared, all in their old familiar ranges-the Big Dipper, giant Orion, lopsidecL Crux, the fairy Pleiades, and dead ahead of them, blazing against the frosty backdrop of the Milky Way, was a golden light that had to be the Sun.
Lazarus had tears in his eyes for the second time in a month.
They could not simply rendezvous with Earth, set a parking orbit, and disembark; they had-to throw their hats in first. Besides that, they needed first to know what time it was.
Libby was able to establish quickly, through proper motions of nearest stars, that it was not later than about 3700 A.D.; without precise observatory instruments he refused to commit himself further. But once they were close enough to see the Solar planets he had another clock to read; the planets themselves make a clock with nine hands.
For any date there is a unique configuration of those “hands” since no planetary period is exactly commensurate with another. Pluto marks off an “hour” of a quarter of a millennium; Jupiter’s clicks a cosmic minute of twelve years; Mercury whizzes a “second” of about ninety days. The other “hands” can refine these readings-Neptune’s period is so cantankerously different from that of Pluto that the two fall into approximately repeated configuration only once in seven hundred and fifty-eight years. The great clock can be read with any desired degree of accuracy over any period-but it is not easy to read.
Libby started to read it as soon as any of the planets could be picked out. He muttered over the problem. “There’s not a chance that we’ll pick up Pluto,” he complained to Lazarus, “and I doubt if we’ll have Neptune. The inner planets give me an infinite series of approximations-you know as well as I do that “infinite” is a question-begging term. Annoying!”