After all the tension of preparing for it, the trip out seemed
interminable.
They were all impatient to reach their destination. During blastoff and
accelleration they had watched Mars dwindle to a tiny red dot; then time
seemed to stop altogether, and there was nothing to do but wait.
For the first eight hours of free fall, after the engines had cut out,
Tom was violently ill. He fought it desperately, gulping the pills
Johnny offered and trying to keep them down. Gradually the waves of
nausea subsided, but it was a full twenty-four hours before Tom felt
like stirring from his cot to take up the shipboard routine.
And then there was nothing for him to do. Greg handled the navigation
skilfully, while Johnny kept radio contact and busied himself in the
storeroom, so Tom spent hours at the viewscreen. On the second day he
spotted a tiny chunk of rock that was unquestionably an asteroid moving
swiftly toward them. It passed at a tangent ten thousand miles ahead of
them, and Greg started work at the computer, feeding in the data tapes
that would ultimately guide the ship to its goal.
* * * * *
Pinpointing a given spot in the Asteroid Belt was a gargantuan task,
virtually impossible without the aid of the ship's computer to compute
orbits, speeds, and distances. Tom spent more and more time at the
viewscreen, searching the blackness of space for more asteroid
sightings. But except for an occasional tiny bit of debris hurtling by,
he saw nothing but the changeless panorama of stars.
Johnny Coombs found him there on the third day, and laughed at his sour
expression. "Gettin' impatient?"
"Just wondering when we'll reach the Belt, is all," Tom said.
Johnny chuckled. "Hope you're not holdin' your breath. We've already
been _in_ the Belt for the last forty-eight hours."
"Then where are all the asteroids?" Tom said.
"Oh, they're here. You just won't see many of them. People always think
there ought to be dozens of them around, like sheep on a hillside, but
it just doesn't work that way." Johnny peered at the screen. "Of course,
to an astronomer the Belt is just loaded ... hundreds of thousands of
chunks, all sizes from five hundred miles in diameter on down. But
actually, those chunks are all tens of thousands of miles apart, and the
Belt _looks_ just as empty as the space between Mars and Earth."
"Well, I don't see how we're ever going to find one particular rock,"
Tom said, watching the screen gloomily.
"It's not too hard. Every asteroid has its own orbit around the sun, and
everyone that's been registered as a claim has the orbit charted. The
one we want isn't where it was when your Dad's body was found ... it's
been travelling in its orbit ever since. But by figuring in the fourth
dimension, we can locate it."