Pat and Maude had a second baby girl just before we reached the Tau Ceti system. Maudie put her foot down with respect to Lynette; she said two freaks in her family were enough.
XII TAU CETI
By the time we were a few light-hours from Tan Ceil we knew that we had not drawn a blank; by stereo and doppler-stereo Harry Gates had photographed half a dozen planets. Harry was not only senior planetologist; he was boss of the research department. I suppose he had enough degrees to string like beads, but I called him “Harry” because everybody did. He was not the sort you call “Doctor”; he was eager and seemed younger than he was.
To Harry the universe was a complicated toy somebody had given him; he wanted to take it apart and see what made it go. He was delighted with it and willing to discuss it with anybody at any time. I got acquainted with him in the bottle-washing business because Harry didn’t treat lab assistants like robots; he treated them like people and did not mind that he knew so much more than they did-he even seemed to think that he could learn something from them.
How he found time to marry Barbara Kuiper I don’t know, but Barbara was a torch watchstander, so it probably started as a discussion of physics and drifted over into biology and sociology; Harry was interested in everything. But he didn’t find time to he around the night their first baby was born, as that was the night he photographed the planet he named Constance, after the baby. There was objection to this, because everybody wanted to name it, but the Captain decided that the ancient rule applied: finders of astronomical objects were entitled to name them.
Finding Constance was not an accident. (I mean the planet, not the baby; the baby wasn’t lost.) Harry wanted a planet about fifty to fifty-one million miles from Tau, or perhaps I should say that the LRF wanted one of that distance. You see, while Tau Ceti is a close relative of the Sun, by spectral types, Tau is smaller and gives off only about three-tenths as much sunshine-so, by the same old tired inverse square law you use to plan the lights for a living room or to arrange a photoflash picture, a planet fifty million miles from Tau would catch the same amount of sunlight as a planet ninety-three million miles from Sol, which is where Earth sits. We weren’t looking for just any planet, or we would have stayed home in the Solar System; we wanted a reasonable facsimile of Earth or it would not he worth colonizing.
If you go up on your roof on a dear night, the stars look so plentiful you would think that planets very much like Earth must he as common as eggs in a hen yard. Well, they are: Harry estimates that there arc between a hundred thousand and a hundred million of them in our own Milky Way-and you can multiply that figure by anything you like for the whole universe.
The hitch is that they aren’t conveniently at hand. Tau Ceti was only eleven light-years from Earth; most stars in our own Galaxy average more like fifty thousand light-years from Earth. Even the Long Range Foundation did not think in those terms; unless a star was within a hundred light-years or so it was silly to think of colonizing it even with torchships. Sure, a torchship can go as far as necessary, even across the Galaxy-but who is going to he interested in receiving its real estate reports after a couple of ice ages have come and gone? The population problem would he solved one way or another long before then … maybe the way the Kilkenny cats solved theirs.
But there are only fifteen-hundred-odd stars within a hundred light-years of Earth and only about a hundred and sixty of these are of the same general spectral type as the Sun. Project Lebensraum hoped to check not more than half of these, say seventy-five at the outside-less since we had lost the Vasco da Gama.
If even one real Earth-type planet was turned up in the search, the project would pay off. But there was no certainty that it would. A Sol-type star might not have an Earth-type planet; a planet might be too close to the fire, or too far, or too small to hold an atmosphere, or too heavy for humanity’s fallen arches, or just too short on the H20 that figures into everything we do.