* * * * *
Jayjay Kelvin was sitting in the lounge of the interplanetary cargo
vessel _Persephone_, his feet propped up on the low table in front of
the couch, and his attention focused almost totally on the small book
he was reading. The lounge itself was cozily small; the _Persephone_
had not been designed as a passenger vessel, and the two passengers
she was carrying at the time had been taken on as an accommodation
rather than as a money-making proposition. On the other hand, the
_Persephone_ and other ships like her were the only method of getting
to where Jayjay Kelvin wanted to go; there were no regular passenger
runs to Pluto. It's hardly the vacation spot of the Solar System.
On the other side of the table, Jeffry Hull was working industriously
with pencil and paper. Jayjay kept his nose buried in his book--not
because he was deliberately slighting Hull, but because he was
genuinely interested in the book.
_"Now wait," said Masterson, looking thoughtfully at the footprints on
the floor of the cabin where Jed Hooker had died. "Jest take another
look at these prints, Charlie. Silver Bill Greer couldn't have got
much more than his big toe into boots that small! Somethin' tells me
the Pecos Kid has...."_
"... Traveled nearly two billion miles since then," said Hull.
Jayjay lifted his head from his book. "What?" He blinked. "I'm sorry;
I wasn't listening. What did you say?"
The younger man was still grinning triumphantly. "I said: We are
approaching turnover, and, according to my figures, nine days of
acceleration at one standard gee will give us a velocity of seventeen
million, five hundred and fifty miles per hour, and we have covered a
distance of nearly two billion miles." Then he added: "That is, if I
remembered my formulas correctly."
Jayjay Kelvin looked thoughtfully at the ceiling while he ran through
the figures in his head. "Something like that. It's the right order of
magnitude, anyway."