badge—I’ve cocked our perfect curve already, before we got to the first check-station!”
His hands moved toward the controls, to correct their course and acceleration.
“As you were—hold everything! Lay off those controls!” snapped the computer.
“There’s something screwy, just as I thought—and it isn’t you, either. I’m no pilot, of
course, but I do know good compensation when I see it, and if you weren’t
compensating that point I never saw it done. Besides, with your skill and my figures I
know damn well that we aren’t off more than a tenth of one division. He’s cuckoo! Don’t
call him — let him start it, and refer him to me.”
“All x—I’ll be only too glad to pass the buck. But I still think, Steve, that you’re
playing with dynamite. Who ever heard of an astronomer being wrong?”
“You’d be surprised,” grinned the physicist. “Since this fuss has just started,
nobody’s tried to find out whether they were wrong or not . . .”
“IPV Arc turns, attention!” came from the speaker curtly.
“IPV Arcturus, Breckenridge,” acknowledged the chief pilot.
“You have been on my ray almost a minute. Why are you not correcting course
and acceleration?”
“Doctor Stevens is computing us and has full control of course and acceleration,”
replied Breckenridge. “He will answer you.”
“I am changing neither course nor acceleration because you are not in position,”
declared Stevens, crisply. “Please give me your present supposed location, and your
latest precision goniometer bearings on the sun, the moon, Mars, Venus, and your
Tellurian reference limb, with exact time of observations, gyroscope zero-planes, and
goniometer factors!”
“Correct at once or I shall report you to the Observatory,” E2 answered loftily,
paying no attention to the demand for proof of position.
“Be sure you do that, guy—and while you’re at it report that your station hasn’t
taken a precision bearing in a month. Report that you’ve been muddling along on loop
bearings, and that you don’t know where you are, within seven thousand kilometers.
And speaking of reporting—I know already that a lot of you astronomical guessers have
only the faintest possible idea of where you really are, plus, minus, or lateral; and if you
don’t get yourselves straightened out before we get to W4i I’m going to make a report
on my own account that will jar some of you birds loose from your upper teeth!” He
unplugged with a vicious jerk, and turned to the pilot with a grin.
“Guess that’ll hold ‘im for a while, won’t it, old egg?”
“He’ll report us, sure,” remonstrated Breckenridge. The older man was plainly ill
at ease at this open defiance of the supposedly infallible check-stations.
“Not that baby,” returned the computer confidently. “I’ll bet you a small farm
against a plugged nickel that right now he’s working his goniometer so hard that its
pivots are getting hot. He’ll sneak back into position as soon as he can calculate his
results, and pretend he’s always been there.”
“The others will be all right, then, probably, by the time we get to them ?”
“Gosh, no—you’re unusually dumb today, Breck. He won’t tell anybody
anything—he doesn’t want to be the only goat, does he?”
“Oh, I see. How could you dope this out, with only the recorder charts ?”
“Because I know the kind of stuff you pilots are—and those humps are altogether
too big to be accounted for by anything I know about you. Another thing—the next
station, P6, I think is keeping himself all x. If so, when you corrected for E2, which was
wrong, it’d throw you all off on P6, which was right, and so on—a bad hump at almost
every check-station. See?”
True to prediction, the pilot ray of P6 came in almost upon the exact center of the
micrometer screen, and Breckenridge smiled in relief as he began really to enjoy the
trip.
“How do we check on chronometers ?” asked P6 when Stevens had been
introduced. “By my time you seem to be about two and a half seconds minus?”
“All x—two point four I figure it—we’re riding on 981.286 centimeters, to allow for
the reversal and for minor detours. ‘Bye.”
“All this may have been coincidence, Breck, but we’ll find out pretty quick now,”
the computer remarked when the flying vessel was nearing the third check-station.
“Unless I’m all out of control we’ll check in almost fourteen seconds plus on W4i, and we
may not even find him on the center block of the screen.”
When he plugged in W4i was on the block, but was in the extreme upper right
corner. They checked in thirteen and eight-tenths seconds late, and a fiery dialogue
ensued when the computer questioned the accuracy of the location of the station and
refused point-blank to correct his course.
“Well, Breck, old onion, that tears it,” Stevens declared as he unplugged. “No use
going any further on these lousy reference points. I’m going to report to Newton—he’ll
rock the observatory on its foundations!” He plugged into the telegraph room. “Have you
got a free high-power wave? . . . Please put me on Newton, in the main office.”
Moving lights flashed and flickered for an instant upon the communicator screen,
settling down into a white glow which soon resolved itself into the likeness of a keen-
eyed, gray-haired man, seated at his desk in the remote office of the Inter-Planetary
Corporation. Newton smiled as he recognized the likeness of Stevens upon his own
screen, and greeted him cordially.
“Have you started your investigation, Doctor Stevens ?”
“Started it? I’ve finished it!” and Stevens tersely reported what he had learned,
concluding: “So you see, you don’t need special computers on these ships any more
than a hen needs teeth. You’ve got all the computers you need, in the
observatories—all you’ve got to do is make them work at their trade.”
“The piloting was all x, then?”
“Absolutely—our curve so far is exactly flat ever since we cut off the starting
power. Of course, all the pilots can’t be as good as Breckenridge, but give them good
computation and good check points and you shouldn’t get any humps higher than about
half a centimeter.”
“They’ll get both, from now on,” the director assured him. “Thanks. If your work
for the trip is done, you might show my little girl, Nadia, around the Arcturus. She’s
never been out before, and will be interested. Would you mind?”
“Glad to, Mr. Newton—I’ll be a regular uncle to her.”
“Thanks again. Operator, I’ll speak to Captain King, please.”
“Pipe down that guff, you unlicked cub, or I’ll crown you with a proof-bar!” the
chief pilot growled, as soon as Stevens had unplugged.
“You and who else?” retorted the computer, cheerfully. “Pipe down yourself, guy
— if you weren’t so dumb and didn’t have such a complex you’d know that you’re the
crack pilot of the outfit and wouldn’t care who else knew it.” Stevens carefully covered
and put away the calculating machine and other apparatus he had been using, and
turned again to the pilot.
“I didn’t know Newton had any kids, especially little ones? Of course I don’t know
him very well, since I’ve never been around the office much, but the old tiger goes over
big with me.”
“Hm-m. Think you’ll enjoy playing nursemaid all the rest of the trip?”
Breckenridge asked caustically, but with an enigmatic smile.
“Think so? I know so!” replied Stevens, positively. “I always did like kids, and
they like me—we fall for each other like ten thousand bricks falling down a well. Why, a
kid—any kid—and I team up just like grace and poise . . . What’s gnawing on you
anyway, to make you turn Cheshire cat all of a sudden ? By the looks of that grin I’d say
you’d swallowed a canary of mine some way or other; but darned if I know that I’ve lost
any,” and he stared at his friend suspiciously.
“To borrow your own phrase, Steve, ‘You’d be surprised,’ ” and Breckenridge,
though making no effort to conceal his amusement, would say no more.
In a few minutes the door opened, and through it there stepped a grizzled four-
striper. Almost hidden behind his massive form there was a girl, who ran up to
Breckenridge and seized both his hands, her eyes sparkling.
“Hi, Breckie, you old darling! I knew that if we both kept after him long enough
Dad would let me ride with you sometime. Isn’t this gorgeous?”
Stevens was glad indeed that the girl’s enthusiastic greeting of the pilot was
giving him time to recover from his shock, for Director Newton’s “little girl, Nadia” was
not precisely what he had led himself to expect. Little she might be, particularly when
compared with the giant frame of Captain King, or with Steve’s own five-feet-eleven of
stature and the hundred and ninety pounds of rawhide and whalebone that was his
body, but child she certainly was not. Her thick, fair hair, cut in the square bob that was