Hal Clement - The Foundling Stars

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THE FOUNDLING STARS

"All right—perfect. You're the most nearly motionless thing in the universe."

Hoey's words were figurative, of course; whether they were accurate or not depended entirely on

point of view. Rocco Luisi and his Ymyrgar were indeed at rest with respect to Hoey and the

Anfforddus, after more than four hours of maddening effort, but neither machine was motionless with

respect to much else. Both were travelling at about four kilometers a second, roughly galactic northward,

with respect to their home port on Rhyddid, seventy-five parsecs away. They were moving at a much

greater velocity with respect to the far more distant Solar System. With respect to each other, however,

velocity had been whittled down to somewhat less than five centimeters a year.

How long this would last was problematical. An automatic tracker was now on duty in Hoey's ship,

trying to hold steady the fringe pattern produced by combining two ultraviolet laser beams, one

originating in his own vessel and the other in Luisi's, in one of the most precise interferometers ever made.

Since the crafts were about a light-hour apart, however, corrections tended to be late in time and, in spite

of a computer's best efforts, erratic in amount and direction.

"Nineteen decimals" had been a proverbial standard of accuracy for well over a century; but

achieving it on any but the atomic size and time scale was not yet standard art.

"That seems to be it," Hoey repeated. "That means that you and I stay strapped in our seats, with no

more motion than we can help, for the next four hours or so. If either of the instrument platforms on our

ships moves more than half a micron with respect to the other, a lot of time and money go down the

drain."

"I know—I've had it hammered into me as often and as hard as you have." Luisi's voice was

undistorted, and the responses instant, on the medium communicator.

"Sure you have," retorted Hoey, "only a lot of people wonder whether you really believe it."

"Well, it depends on what you mean by believe. I can figure as well as anyone where the center of

mass of my ship would go if I stood up; I—"

"I know you can. Your trouble is that you can't believe it would make as much trouble as they say.

Just remember that they were even concerned about tidal forces from Cinder over there"—he gestured,

rather uselessly, at the grossly misnamed o6e star glaring at them from half a parsec away—"and even

went to the trouble of finding a part of this neighborhood where the wind was steady—

"Right there I break connection. Space is space. You only worry about wind when you're close to a

sun, and then it's only a hard-radiation problem."

"True enough, as a rule. The trouble is that the usual run of stellar winds involves a mass density of

around ten atoms to the cubic centimeter; here it's a couple of thousand. It turned out that even that much

mass wouldn't accelerate the ships seriously unless the relative velocity were very high indeed, but it was

something the planners had to check on. You see what I mean; so stay put. Let's cut the chatter. The

sooner the folks in 'Big Boy' can get to work, the sooner we can breathe comfortably. I'll call 'em."

Hoey's finger tensed on a button, replacing the microscopic crystal in the activity field of his

communicator with another, whose twin was aboard. "Big Boy"—more formally, the Holiad. He spoke

without preamble, knowing that someone would be listening.

'We're in position, and my tracker says we're holding. Get the job going while the going's good."

"Right." The answer was terse, but not casual. The speaker, a heavy-set, middle-aged man with an

almost fanatically intense stare in his blue eyes, leaned forward over the console in front of him and began

punching buttons in an intricate sequence. He paused every second or two to interpret the patterns of

light which winked at him from the board. After half a minute or so the pattern became fixed, and he

leaned back, more relaxed.

"Program A is running." A younger man, seated at a similar console a few yards away, nodded at the

words. At first he did not answer aloud; then he decided to speak, though for several seconds he was

obviously trying to make up his mind what to say. It was easy to make the wrong remark to Elvin Toner.

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Hal Clement - The Foundling Stars

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