The loose group of rocks, sand, random molecules, and microplanetoids known as the Hallelujah Node was travelling in company around the Sun at a speed of eleven miles per second. The Stone’s vector was eight miles per, second and in the same direction. Captain Stone speeded up his ship to match in by a series of blasts during the last two days, coming by a radar beacon deep in the swarm and thereby sneaking up on the collection of floating masses at a low relative speed.
The final blast that positioned them dead with the swarm was a mere love tap; the Stone did clear her throat — and she was one with the other rolling space stones of space.
Captain Stone took a last look into the double eyepiece of the stereo radar, swung the sweep control fore and aft and all around; the masses of the Hallelujah, indistinguishable from the background of stars by naked eye, hung in greatly exaggerated perspective in the false ‘space’ of the stereo tank while the true stars showed not at all. None of them displayed the crawling trail of relative motion.
A point brighter than the rest glowed in a fluctuating pattern fairly close by and a few degrees out-orbit; it was the radar beacon on which he had homed. It too, seemed steady by stereo; he turned to Castor and said, ‘Take a doppler on City Hall.’
‘Just getting it, Captain.’ In a moment he added, ‘Uh, relative about ten miles an hour — nine point seven and a whisper. And just under seven hundred miles away.’
‘Vector?’
‘Closing almost for it. We ought to slide past maybe ten, fifteen miles south and in-orbit’
Roger Stone relaxed and grinned. ‘How’s that for shooting? Your old man can still figure them, eh?’
‘Pretty good, Dad — considering.’
‘Considering what?’
‘Considering you used Pol’s figures.’
‘When I figure out which one of us you are insulting, I’ll answer that.’ He spoke to the mike: ‘All hands, secure from maneuvers. Power room, report when secure. Edith, how soon can we have dinner?’
‘It’s wrapped up, son,’ Hazel reported.
‘About thirty minutes, dear,’ his wife answered.
‘A fine thing! A man slaves over a hot control board and then has to wait thirty minutes for his dinner. What kind of a hotel is this?’
‘Yes, dear. By the way, I’m cutting your calorie ration again.’
‘Mutiny! What would John Sterling do?’
‘Daddy’s getting fat! Daddy’s getting fat!’ Lowell chanted.
‘And strangle your child. Anybody want to come out with me while I set jato units?’
‘I will, Daddy!’
‘Meade, you’re just trying to get out of helping with dinner.’
‘I can spare her, dear.’
‘Spare the child and spoil the fodder. Come with your fodder, baby.’
‘Not very funny, Daddy.’
‘And I’m not getting paid for it, either.’ Captain Stone went aft, whistling. The twins as well as Meade went out with him; they made quick work of setting jato units, the young people locking them in place and the Captain seeing to the wiring personally. They set a belt of them around the waist of the ship and matched pairs on the bow and quarter. Wired for triggering to the piloting radar, set at minimum range, they would give the ship a sharp nudge in the unlikely event that any object came toward them on a collision course at a relative speed high enough to be dangerous.
Coming through the Asteroid Belt to their present location deep in it, they had simply taken their chances. Although one is inclined to think of the Belt as thick with sky junk, the statistical truth is that there is so enormously more space than rock that the chance of being hit is negligible. Inside a node the situation was somewhat different, the concentration of mass being several hundred times as great as in the ordinary reaches of the Belt. But most of the miners took no precautions even there, preferring to bet that this unending game of Russian roulette would always work out in their favor rather than go to the expense and trouble of setting up a meteor guard. This used up a few miners, but not often; the accident rate in Hallelujah node was about the same as that of Mexico City.