"We had to push the star-maps back in time--galactic motion, star
streaming, a million complicated problems of relative motion and proper
motion, back five hundred years and then another five hundred, and then
correlate them. Handling an almost unlimited number of variables like
that, it could only be done on the biggest math-machines and electronic
computers at Llyrdis. And that meant it all had to be done secretly,
bit by bit. That work's been going on for a long, long time."
Edri drew a long breath that was coupled with a racking yawn.
"The resultant charts indicate an unnamed dark star following an orbit
here, outside the main stream of the Galaxy." He traced a line with
his finger. "These charts for the fringing stars are incomplete, as
you know. There's nothing to draw anyone out to these godforsaken
regions and they've never been properly explored. But according to our
calculations, that dark star was in the right place a thousand years
ago and Orthis' life-skiff was launched from there. Now the wheel of
the Galaxy has turned so, taking the dark star with it...."
He laid his hand on the crossing of two marked lines on the chart, and
looked at them.
"That's our destination, Joris. If we're right, the ship of Orthis is
there. If we're wrong--well, somebody else will have to try again in
another thousand years."
He remained standing, silent, his hands braced on the table, too tired
to move. Joris rubbed his bleary eyes and began to read the coordinates
aloud from the chart. Mechanically the Second Officer set up the
combination on the finder.
Joris moved heavily back to the pilot chair. When the finder clicked
off the new course, he set the Mirzim on it. Then he spoke over the
intercom to Radar. "What's the position of that cruiser?"
A croaking voice answered him. He listened, and then turned to the
others. "Closer," he said. "Always closer."
Trehearne's mind turned back to its constant half-waking nightmare.
The cruiser, following, hanging on, dogged, persistent, relentless. He
lived over painfully every maneuver, every trick by which Joris had
managed to delay their pursuer, to grasp a little more time, a little
more distance.
He remembered the last-minute plunge into a dark nebula when the
cruiser was almost close enough to range them. He remembered the
turning and twisting and doubling inside the blackness of the cloud,
where the absorptive cosmic dust fogged the radar. They had lost the
cruiser there. They had got clear away and for a time they had hoped.
They had made it to this fringe sector--and then the red spark showed
again on the screen, coming closer, always closer.
There were times when Trehearne forgot the physical fact of the
cruiser, a ship of ordinary metal officered and manned by ordinary
Vardda spacemen. At such times it seemed to him that the _Mirzim_
was pursued by a demoniac nemesis striding naked across the plunging
gulfs--a nemesis wearing Kerrel's face with Kerrel's hands outstretched
to grasp them.
Sometimes Shairn's face was there beside Kerrel's, white, unreadable, a
misty cloud that blotted out the stars.
The hoarse voice of the radar man croaked at intervals. The ship fled
on toward the dark star.
Joris finally turned around. The table had been taken out, the charts
and the toilsome calculations rolled up and shoved away. Arrin lay on
the deck against the after bulkhead, sleeping. He would not leave the
bridge until he knew whether or not his life and work had gone for
nothing. Edri sat beside him. He was not asleep.