“Maybe the messenger craft hadn’t gotten here when they passed by,” Patulcius said. “We don’t know when the messengers arrived.” He pondered. “Except that it must have been less than—four hundred thirty years ago, did you say, Hanno? Otherwise the aliens could have had robots at Sol by now.”
“Maybe they do.” Aliyat shivered. “We’ve been gone a long time.”
“I doubt it,” said Wanderer. “That would be one hell of a coincidence.”
“They might not want to, for whatever reason,” Macan-dal pointed out. “We’re completely ignorant.”
“You’re forgetting the nature of those robots at Pha-eatia,” Svoboda said. “They’re not like the ones bound for Pegasi in the wake of messages beamed beforehand—great, intelligent, flexible machine minds intended to attempt con-versation with other minds able to understand what they are. The Phaeacia robots were designed and programmed to go there and collect information on that specific planetary system. Almost monomaniacs. If they noticed these neu-trino bursts en route, they paid no attention.” She smiled sardonically. “Not their department.”
Yukiko nodded. ‘”Nobody can foresee everything,” she said. “Nothing can.”
“But when we’re surprised, we can Investigate and learn.” Hanno’s words rang. “We can.”
Their looks shot to him and struck fast, all but Svoboda’s. The color mounted in her cheeks.
“What do you mean?” Tu Shan rumbled after several breaths.
“You know what,” Hanno replied. “We’ll change course and go to Star Three.”
“No!” Aliyat screamed. She half sprang to her feet, sank back down, and shuddered.
“Think,” Hanno urged. “The diagram. That line between our course, this very point of our course, and Three. What is it but an invitation? They must be lonely too, and hopeful of hearing marvelous things. Pytheas calculated it. If we change direction now, we can reach them in about a dozen years, ship’s time. It’s three light-years more than we planned, but we are still at close to light speed and— A dozen little years, to meet the farers of the galaxy.”
“But we only had four to go!”
“Four years longer to our home.” Tu Shan knotted his fists on the tabletop. “How far from it would you take us?”
Hanno hesitated. Svoboda answered: “Between Three and Phaeacia Sun is about three hundred light-years. From a standing start, sixteen or seventeen ship years. We won’t abandon our original purpose, only postpone it.”
“The hell you say,” Wanderer rapped. “Whichever star we go to, we’ll need more antimatter before we can take off for anywhere else. Building the production plant and then making the stuff, that’s probably ten years by itself.”
“The aliens should have plenty on hand.”
“Should they? And will they share it, freely, just like that? How do you know? How can you tell what they want of us, anyway?”
“Wait, wait,” Macandal broke in. “Let’s not get paranoid. Whatever they are, it can’t be monsters or, or bandits or anything evil. At their stage of civilization, that wouldn’t make sense.”
“Now who’s being cocksure?” Aliyat shrilled.
“What do we know about Star Three?” Yukiko asked.
Her quietness smoothed bristles down a little. Hanno shook his head. “Not much, beyond its type and inferred age,” he admitted. “Being normal, it’s bound to have planets, but we have no information on them. Never been visited. My God, a sphere eight or nine hundred light-years across holds something like a hundred thousand stars.”
“But you say this one’s not so bright as ours,” Macandal reminded him. “Then the chances that it’s got a planet where we could breathe are poor. Even with much better candidates—”
The table thudded beneath Tu Shan’s smiting. “That is what matters,” he said. “After fifteen weary years, we were promised, we shall walk free on living ground. You would keep us locked in this hull for … eight years longer than that, and then at journey’s end we still would be, for decades or centuries or forever. No.”
“But this chance, we cannot pass it by,” Svoboda protested.
Wanderer spoke crisply. “We won’t. Once we get to Phaeacia, we’ll have the robots build us a proper transceiver and send a beam to Three, start conversation. Eventually we’ll go there in person, those of us who care to. Or maybe the aliens will come to us.”