He was about to return the way he had come, when it occurred to him that he might as well make sure of that fact. There were not many places where paper work of any sort could be kept, at least at first glance; and these he rapidly covered. They were mostly cabinets built under instrument panels, and seemed to contain nothing but tables of the motions of the planets of this system. These seemed rather valueless; their most probable use would be in navigation, and Ken could not imagine anyone’s wanting to navigate anywhere in this system except to the world of Ice. They could also be used to direct the instruments, if anyone wanted to look at the planets in question; but that seemed even less helpful.
Under the beam setting controls was a small drawer which also contained two sets of numbers — again, spatial coordinates; but this time Ken froze to attention as he realized that one set at least did not refer to planets — they contained no cyclic term. The set was short, consisting of six groups of numbers containing from six to ten digits each; but he
The other set of numbers, then, must give the direction of the same sun relative to some local set of coordinates; and not only was he ignorant of the coordinates, but the numbers were too long to remember. To copy them would be suicide, if anything more than commercial secrecy were involved. For long minutes Sallman Ken stood frozen in thought; then, abruptly, he slipped the sheet back into the drawer, closed the latter, and as quickly as was compatible with caution left the observatory. Since the information was there, it would not do for anyone to get the idea he had been there for any great length of time. It would be better if no one knew he had been there at all, but he had been seen on the way up the ramp. He proceeded to get back to his own quarters and assume an attitude of repose, though his mind still raced furiously.
He knew his distance from home. Evidently the twenty-two days of the journey to this system had not been spent in straight-line flight; the distance was only two hundred twelve parsecs. Score one for Rade; that would be an expensive business precaution, but a normal criminal one.
The direction home
Of course, the beacon listed in the stellar coordinates was probably visible from here; but could he recognize it with any certainty without instruments? The instruments were available, of course, but it might not be wise to be caught using them. No, orientation was definitely the last job to be accomplished in his present location. At any rate, one fact had been learned and one point of probability had been added to the Rade theory. Sallman Ken decided that made a good day’s work, and allowed himself to relax on the strength of it.
6
Nearly three of Sarr’s thirteen-hour days passed uneventfully before the relay station circling Earth picked up the approaching torpedoes. As Feth Allmer had predicted — and Laj Drai had confirmed, after checking with his tables — the signals from the planted homing unit were coming from the dark side of the planet. Drai phoned down from the observatory to the shop, where Ken and Allmer were engaged in decelerating their missile.
“You may as well drop straight down as soon as you swing around to the dark side,” he said. “You will pick up the beacon if you spiral in, keeping between forty and fifty-five degrees above the plane of the planet’s orbit, measured from the planet’s center. The beam can be picked up by your torpedo more than forty diameters out, so you can’t possibly miss it. You’d better ride the beam down automatically until you’re into atmosphere, then go manual and move off a couple of miles if you plan to go all the way to the ground. If the natives are camping near the beam transmitter, it would be a pity to touch off your chemicals right in their midst.”
“True enough,” Ken replied. “Feth is swinging around into the shadow now, still about five diameters out. I wish there were a vision transmitter in that machine. Some time I’m going down close enough to use a telescope, unless someone builds a TV that will stand winter weather.”
“You’ll get worse than frostbite,” Drai responded sincerely. “The time you were really looking at that world, you didn’t seem quite so anxious to get close to it.”
“I hadn’t gotten curious then,” responded Ken.
The conversation lapsed for a while, as Feth Allmer slowly spun the verniers controlling the direction of thrust from the torpedo’s drivers. The machine was, as Ken had said, cutting around into the shadow of the big planet, still with a relative speed of several miles per second to overcome. Allmer was navigating with the aid of a response-timer and directional loop in the relay station, whose readings were being reproduced on his own board; the torpedo was still too far from Earth for its reflection altimeter to be effective. For some minutes Ken watched silently, interpreting as best he could the motions of the flickering needles and deft tentacles. A grunt of satisfaction from the operator finally told him more clearly than the instruments that the beam had been reached; a snaky. arm promptly twisted one of the verniers as far as it would go.
“I don’t see why they couldn’t power these things for decent acceleration,” Feth’s voice came in an undertone. “How much do you want to bet that we don’t run all the way through the beam before I can match the planet’s rotation? With nine-tenths of their space free for drivers and accumulators, you’d think they could pile up speed even without overdrive. These cheap—” his voice trailed off again. Ken made no reply, not being sure whether one was expected. Anyway, Allmer was too bright for his utterances to be spontaneous, and any answer should be carefully considered purely from motives of caution.
Apparently the mechanic had been unduly pessimistic; for in a matter of minutes he had succeeded in fighting the torpedo into a vertical descent. Even Ken was able to read this from the indicators; and before long the reflection altimeter began to register. This device was effective at a distance equal to Sarr’s diameter — a trifle over six thousand miles — and Ken settled himself beside the operator as soon as he noted its reaction. There was not far to go.
His own particular bank of instruments, installed on a makeshift panel of their own by Allmer, were still idle. The pressures indicated zero, and the temperatures were low — even the sodium had frozen, apparently. There had been little change for many hours — apparently the whole projectile was nearly in radiative equilibrium with the distant sun. Ken watched tensely as the altimeter reading dropped, wondering slightly whether atmosphere would first make itself apparent through temperature or pressure readings.
As a matter of fact, he did not find out. Feth reported pressure first, before any of Ken’s indicators had responded; and the investigator remembered that the door was shut. It had leaked before, of course, but that had been under a considerably greater pressure differential; apparently the space around the door was fairly tight, even at the temperature now indicated.
“Open the cargo door, please,” Ken responded to the report. “We might as well find out if anything is going to react spontaneously.”
“Just a minute; I’m still descending pretty fast. If the air is very dense, I could tear the doors off at this speed.”
“Can’t you decelerate faster?”
“Yes, now. Just a moment. I didn’t want to take all night on the drop, but there’s only about twenty miles to go now. You’re the boss from here in.” The needle of the altimeter obediently slowed in its march around the dial. Ken began warming up the titanium sample — it had the highest meeting point of all. In addition, he was reasonably sure that there would be free nitrogen in the atmosphere; and at least one of the tests ought to work.
At five miles above the ground, the little furnace was glowing white hot, judging from the amount of light striking the photocell inside the nose compartment. Atmospheric pressure was quite measurable, though far from sufficient from the Sarrian point of view, if the Bourdon gauge could be trusted; and Feth claimed to have worked out a correction table by calibrating several of them on the dark side of Planet One.
