Billy Thompson fretted for four long months in the confines of the
returning spacecraft. He was not idle. Daily he spent his time in the
communications room, talking and conferring with his laboratory staff
on Terra.
The order freeing the Solar Sector of its displacement of peoples took
about ten days to clear, and another ten days to settle. It was swift;
no Loard-vogh wanted to remain in that section of the Galaxy anyway.
And though most of the worlds were cleaning up the shambles of the
bitter struggle, the laboratory staff and research organizations went
to work with a will. Let the others clean up the mess; it was their
job to make the cleaning worth while by coming up with the answer to
Billy's problem.
For only the right answer would leave Terrans around to inhabit a
cleaned-up Terra.
So Billy fretted because he had to confer by voice alone. It did not
matter that the secondary radiation from his subtransmitter, exciting
bands in the electromagnetic spectrum near forty megacycles, would
not reach Sol for hundreds of years, and that relative to his ship,
the beams were hurled out backwards instead of coming forward toward
Sol. But the four months were not entirely wasted. By the time that
Billy landed, conferred with Kennebec on the future, discussed the
major problem with a few Terran scientists, and then took off and
finally arrived at the stellar laboratory on VanMaanen's Star's only,
God-forsaken planet, they knew several hundred things that would not
work.
Hendricks, the chief of staff, smiled wearily as Billy entered the
safety dome and flipped back his space helmet.
"Hi, Billy. I hope you have a few new ideas."
"Nope. Not right now. I've been busier than the devil for the past
seventy hours."
"So've we, on the last seventeen suggestions. We ran out of ideas when
you ran into Terra. Now what?"