”More or less?” Margo echoed. “Isn’t it precise?”
”Scouts always fudge by at least twenty-four hours in both directions when using the ATLS, just to be sure. Most of us build an even larger safety margin in, because as good as the ATLS is, it isn’t absolutely precise. It can’t be. Our lives are riding on how closely we cut it. Without it-and the personal log-we couldn’t function at all. Even time touring would be impossible, because the tour companies need scouts to push new tour routes. The ATLSs casing gives it the same kind of protection your personal log has.”
Margo was frowning at the ATLS. “If it’s so dangerous to step through, why not just put the ATLS on a long pole and shove that through, then let it do its thing?
That way nobody’d ever have to risk going `poof’.”
Kit shook his head. “It isn’t that simple. For one, you have only a fifty-fifty chance of a gate opening at night. If it opens during the day, you can’t take a star fix, so the long pole idea would be useless. Or it might be a cloudy night no stars. We could roboticize the whole thing, I suppose, and send it through to take the proper magnetic and star-fix readings, but it would cost a ton of money for each robot and there are thousands of unexplored gates with new ones opening all the time. Anything could still go wrong and recovering the robot might prove impossible. Frankly, human scouts are cheaper, more reliable, and have the advantage of being able to gather detailed social data no robot could. That’s important particularly when scholarly research or potential time touring is involved.