It was finished.
Commodore Theodore Wilson eyed the stereo grid with distaste. The filmy
white haze, marking off the volumes already combed, filled the grid
completely and overlapped the enclosing lines.
The pattern search had been most thorough. The random search teams had
cut curlicues and looping curves back and forth through the grid. Their
coverage had not been perfect, by far, but it was good enough for a
random search. The volume covered by the infrawave detector spacer was
spotty, but adequate.
The equipment was still breaking down every five or ten minutes, still
delivering a horde of spurious responses. Scoutships still were being
sent scurrying back and forth to investigate.
He faced the grid unhappily. He was gaunt from lack of sleep, from
hastily snatched meals, or meals missed completely, from chain smoking,
from watching what had started as a chance to make a good mark turn
into drab failure. Worse, a failure that in no man's mind could be
blamed upon Ted Wilson. For he had found one lifeship, and the fluke
would be forgotten.
So would his failure. By every man but Wilson.
Somewhere back in that vast black volume of nothing, outlined by
imperfect mathematical concepts in a larger field of nothing, was a
lifeship, lost. A tiny cold mote of iron twenty-odd feet tall and nine
feet in diameter across its widest point.
Wilson tried to draw his mind from it, but could not. Hysteria crept in
but was quickly subdued.
In his mind he saw her as he had last seen her, pert and happy, with
her light spacebag on the floor of the waiting room beside her slender
ankles. He saw her before him, taut with thrill and excitement, vibrant
and alive. He remembered her parting kiss, and the warmth of her body
pressed against him.
Alice had been filled with anticipation, wanting to share her
excitement with him, but unable to share what was a brand-new
experience to her of going to space with a man who had been a-spacing
for years. A man who knew all too well how space could be boring,
lonely, and incredibly monotonous.
Not like travel across land, where there is scenery to watch, and
although a tree is a tree, no two trees are ever alike, just as no one
mountain ever looks the same at two o'clock in the morning as it had
four hours earlier at ten in the evening.
Not even like travel on water, across the broad ocean where the scenery
is water, whipped into waves of some similarity. For no two waves are
ever the same exactly, and there is always the chance of a whitecap or
a surfacing fish. The motion of the waves is incessant, at some times
as soothing to the nerves as a lullaby.
But space was always the same. Across the galactic reaches covered by
Man so far, there is little change in the aspect of the sky. A nearby
star here or there is misplaced, but by and large the sky looks the
same from Terra as it does from any planet or any star within fifty
light years.
Move a man from Sol to Sirius, and Canis Major loses a bright star
and changes shape to a degree not noticed by any but a trained
uranographer. Ophiuchus gains another unimportant star that no one
would care much about.
But then, Alice had been thrilled from the center of her heart to the
flush on her skin with the idea of taking to space at last, so that she
could at least begin to grasp the immensity and the mystery that he had
failed to bring to her through talk.
Well, Alice Hemingway was getting her young tummy full of space!
He was still swearing under his breath when the men came in to ask him
what they should do next.
He eyed them sourly. Manning, Edwards and Wainwright of his own ship.
Hatch, Weston, Allison; then others Wilson knew only by reputation and
name--Morganstern, Cunningham, Wilkes, Thordarson, Moore, Silkowski,
Themes, and Calcaterra.
* * * * *
They watched him quietly, knowing what he must be feeling. They wanted
orders, either to continue this fruitless search or to abandon it. But
not one of them wanted to be the first to speak.
Finally Wilson singled out Toby Manning, the computer.
"Well?" he snapped.
Manning shrugged. "Tell me what to do next and I'll do it," he said
defensively.
Wilson exploded, "You know your job! Suppose you tell us all how
three hundred ships could comb space and miss anything bigger than a
hard-boiled egg."
Toby Manning started to open his mouth to say something. He was not at
all sure what he should say, not at all sure what was wise to say, but
he knew he was expected to say something. It was as well for Manning
that he felt indecision, for if he had uttered a syllable it would have
been blasted back down his throat.
"Space search!" roared Wilson angrily. "Integrated maneuvers! We
might as well be a bunch of crying children, lost, and scrambling all
over a department store trying to get ourselves located. Sure I know
there are indeterminates. I know there's always trouble with space
coordinates. Sure, it ain't like plowing a farm where you can follow
the edge of where you've been last. But you, Manning, are supposed to
be a computer, capable of plowing with the Law of Probabilities which,
my math prof once told me, should include the probability that human
beings will make errors and be generally sloppy. You set up the search
grid and proposed the search pattern with what you called a factor of
overlap-safety."
Wilson turned on Hugh Weston. "And you are supposed to have a bunch
of the finest astrogators in the Universe! You and your collection of
schoolboys, confidently walking behind the stereo and drawing pinpoints
and hairlines to show where we've been! Nuts. You should have used a
ten-inch kalsomine brush."
He paused for breath as he scorned them with his eyes, then picked
Allison.
"That fancy doodad of yours, Allison--the famous infrawave detector and
ranger! Did you ever get more than ten minutes of constant operation
out of it?"
"Once," Allison snapped angrily, his face red and his hands opening and
closing.
"Fine," sneered Wilson. "Oh, fine. Oh, hell!"
He looked at them all again. He saw them, this time.
"All right," he said contritely. "I've been off base. I'm wrong.
Manning, what are the probabilities for error in the grid itself?"
"Commodore, nothing can be perfect. We had to approximate their
position, we had to guess their speed. But we did put our search area
out beyond the region where their chances ended. If they do lie outside
of the volume of space searched, their position lies under a nine-nines
figure against the computation. I may sound like I'm talking gibberish,
but that's it. No man can make a perfect sampling cross section unless
he samples every item. I would stake my uniform on the probability that
the lifeship lies within the volume outlined on our grid."
"Yes." Wilson nodded. "Weston, can you add anything? I chewed you out,
too, and now I want to back down and ask your honest opinion."
Hugh Weston shrugged. "We're far from perfect ourselves," he said
quietly. "I'll put it this way. I gave strict orders to the men in the
marker ships that if there was any remote chance they might drift, they
were to overcompensate. In other words, running a channel through space
back and forth leaves a man lost himself, as to his exact position.
I had men marking the courses. Each run through the grid covered a
cylindrical volume. If there were a chance for any cylindrical coverage
to miss its neighbor, leaving a hole in the grid, my men were to move
in and see to it that these errata were closed. But I repeat, we're not
perfect."
* * * * *
Wilson said contritely, "Allison, I owe you the most. You snapped me
out of it. Maybe I owe you the least for bringing that damned gizmo out
here and tying up Hatch's entire fleet of scout craft. But Hatch would
have been sitting quiet anyway, as it turned out. Anything to add?"
"Nope," said Allison, with a shake of his head. "We know the infrawave
detector is no polished instrument. We're fumbling in the dark. But
there was that possible chance that the detector might have worked
in deep space where it hadn't worked in the interference field of a
planetary system. We hardly know what makes the infrawaves radiate, let
alone how they propagate. But we tried. Just as you tried. We failed."
"Just as I failed," said Wilson bitterly.
"Not completely," said Commander Hatch. "We did catch one of them."
"Batting fifty per cent. One hit and one miss."
"Stop beating yourself, Wilson."
"Beating myself? I--" He stopped, then spoke to Manning. "What are
their chances of being in the same general region as that other
lifeship?"