On the ninth day of the passage Captain Doyle betook himself to the chart room and commenced punching keys on the ponderous integral calculator. Then he sent his orderly to present his compliments to the navigator and to ask him to come to the chartroom. A few minutes later a tall heavyset form swam through the door, steadied himself with a grabline and greeted the captain.
“Good morning, Skipper.”
“Hello, Blackie.” The Old Man looked up from where he was strapped into the integrator’s saddle. “I’ve been checking your corrections for the meal time accelerations.”
“It’s a nuisance to have a bunch of ground-lubbers on board, sir.”
“Yes, it is, but we have to give those boys a chance to eat, or they couldn’t work when we got there. Now I want to decelerate starting about ten o’clock, ship’s time. What’s our eight o’clock speed and co-ordinates?”
The Navigator slipped a notebook out of his tunic. “Three hundred fifty-eight miles per second; course is right ascension fifteen hours, eight minutes, twenty-seven seconds, declination minus seven degrees, three minutes; solar distance one hundred and ninety-two million four hundred eighty thousand miles. Our radial position is twelve degrees above course, and almost dead on course in R.A. Do you want Sol’s co-ordinates?”
“No, not now.” The captain bent over the calculator, frowned and chewed the tip of his tongue as he worked the controls. “I want you to kill the acceleration about one million miles inside Eighty-eight’s orbit. I hate to waste the fuel, but the belt is full of junk and this damned rock is so small that we will probably have to run a search curve. Use twenty hours on deceleration and commence changing course to port after eight hours. Use normal asymptotic approach. You should have her in a circular trajectory abreast of Eighty-eight, and paralleling her orbit by six o’clock tomorrow morning. I shall want to be called at three.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Let me see your figures when you get ’em. I’ll send up the order book later.”
The transport accelerated on schedule. Shortly after three the Captain entered the control room and blinked his eyes at the darkness. The sun was still concealed by the hull of the transport and the midnight blackness was broken only by the dim blue glow of the instrument dials, and the crack of light from under the chart hood. The Navigator turned at the familiar tread.
“Good morning, Captain.”
“Morning, Blackie. In sight yet?”
“Not yet. We’ve picked out half a dozen rocks, but none of them checked.”
“Any of them close?”
“Not uncomfortably. We’ve overtaken a little sand from time to time.”
“That can’t hurt us — not on a stern chase like this. If pilots would only realize that the asteroids flow in fixed directions at computable speeds nobody would come to grief out here.” He stopped to light a cigarette. “People talk about space being dangerous. Sure, it used to be; but I don’t know of a case in the past twenty years that couldn’t be charged up to some fool’s recklessness.”
“You’re right, Skipper. By the way, there’s coffee under the chart hood.”
“Thanks; I had a cup down below.” He walked over by the lookouts at stereoscopes and radar tanks and peered up at the star-flecked blackness. Three cigarettes later the lookout nearest him called out.
“Light ho!”
“Where away?”
His mate read the exterior dials of the stereoscope. “Plus point two, abaft one point three, slight drift astern.” He shifted to radar and added, “Range seven nine oh four three.”
“Does that check?”
“Could be, Captain. What is her disk?” came the Navigator’s muffled voice from under the hood. The first lookout hurriedly twisted the knobs of his instrument, but the Captain nudged him aside.
“I’ll do this, son.” He fitted his face to the double eye guards and surveyed a little silvery sphere, a tiny moon. Carefully he brought two illuminated cross-hairs up until they were exactly tangent to the upper and lower limbs of the disk. “Mark!”
The reading was noted and passed to the Navigator, who shortly ducked out from under the hood.
“That’s our baby, Captain.”
“Good.”
“Shall I make a visual triangulation?”