“Nothing picturesque. The reflection spectrum, barely readable, as faint as it was, of an object that standard theory does not believe ought to have the orbit this one does. Excuse me, please, while I interrupt the show,” said Rydberg to the others. He keyed his databanker. The image from the comet gave way to a band of dim lines, numbers below them indicating wavelengths, and more numbers in columns. At the bottom stood a listing of that which calculation had distilled from the raw data.
Beynac peered, started half out of his chair, sank back, and mumbled, “Mon Dieu. Enfin, enfin.” After a moment, into the air: “But it had to be. If I was right, this must be. It was only that no one looked as hard as they should. Too much else to search after.”
A song for him erupted in Dagny. She seized his hand.
“What means this?” Jinann inquired.
“It is a nickel-iron asteroid, at present about thirty astronomical units from the sun,” Rydberg told her. “We don’t yet have the figures to compute” a very accurate orbit, although I ran a probecraft to high velocity and got a parallax. Roughly, perihelion is at about five a.u., aphelion forty or fifty thousand— ultra-cometary. The inclination to the ecliptic is forty-three degrees.”
The young woman was not ignorant of basic astronomy, no Moondweller was, and she had sometimes heard her father talk about his heresy. “There should be no such thing, should there?” she said.
“No, no, rien la-bas—nothing yonder but ice dwarfs,” Beynac answered, almost automatically, as if he spoke in sleep OF a daze. “According to the standard picture. I agree they are nonsense, notions of colonizing the comets. Too far apart, too Jittle mineral buried too deep in ices. But this—“ His voice trailed away. He stared before him and breathed heavily.
“It could not have originated that far out, especially in an orbit so skewed,” Rydberg said to Jinann. He spoke awkwardly, unsure what she might already know, wishing neither to insult her nor exclude her. She gave him an amiable attention. Peripherally, Dagny admired how she could put on Earth-human femininity whenever she wanted to. “Your father’s idea, I suppose you are aware, his idea from studying the distribution of asteroid types in the inner System —he thinks there was at least one more than the accepted ten original bodies between Mars and Jupiter, which collisions reduced to those we know.” He gulped. “I thought the object we found might provide evidence.”
Beynac’s head swung toward them. How well Dagny knew him in that mood, his intellect aprowl after quarry to pounce upon. “I suspect those eleven began as three,” he boomed. “From this body perhaps we may find out. But it is not the major one that was lost. It is too small. And such an orbit is unstable. In a few million years, the planets will change it radically. My large, dense asteroid, it was exiled much longer ago, early in the life of the Solar System. Else we would have more pieces like what you have found, Lars. No, yours was perturbed back inward, probably by a close encounter with a big comet. That suggests the large one is still out there somewhere, not lost to interstellar space after all but in a wide and canted orbit. Perhaps someday we can find it. First we go to this little fellow.”
Rydberg shrugged. “I don’t know when we can do that, if ever.”
Beynac bristled. “Hein?” he barked.
Rydberg picked up his neglected beer, took a draught, collected his words. “The existing situation,”he then said. “Guthrie would have underwritten an immediate expedition, but he was a dying man, and now he is dead. Everything is confusion while his download takes over, if his download can. Factions in Fireball maneuver for advantage. Politicians fish in our troubled waters. Oh, even in far space we got plenty of news on the beams, and on my way home I was thinking what it meant. Besides, the Alpha Cen-tauri project engages most of Fireball’s discretionary resources, and will until it is well under way.”
As was right, Dagny thought. Was not a launch to Sol’s neighbor star Uncans’s memorial to Juliana, whose vision it had been? A flyby miniprobe, followed by a versatile little craft packed with molecular-level instructions for building the robots that would do the science on those planets—