So without further comment, Conrad's requested graph appeared on the ceiling half a minute later.
“Engineering,” Conrad called down after that, “time to deutrelium depletion?”
“At current rates of consumption, sir?” Money returned.
“Obviously at current rates of consumption.”
“Because we want to leave some reserve in the tanks. Safety margins, yah? And inevitably there's ullage as well, the fraction we can't easily extract from the tanks and plumbing.”
“Money, not now,” Xmary warned. “Just tell us what we need to know.” He accepted the warning, and conferred for a few minutes with Robert in hushed intercom voices, and then went off by himself for a few minutes before coming back to the comm window and relating to Conrad that the burn was expected to last another eighteen hours, and that four tons of deutrelium—less than one percent of the original supply—would remain in usable form when they were done. They would need that fuel for in-system maneuvering, for transit to P2, for all the things that Newhope would be called upon to do once they had finally come to a halt. And since Newhope was the only transportation they had, at least for now, it would be called upon to do a great deal.
So the burn thundered on, barely felt in the ertially shielded and gravity-lasered confines of the crew quarters, terminating just as they passed the orbit of Gatewood on their way back out again. Newhope continued upward, not back toward Sol but in a direction only slightly bent from their original approach vector. Barnard's gravity was on their side, now, and though its light pressure was behind them, pressing on the sail and technically speeding them up, the tack on the sail (actually a dancing chorus of clear and silver patches, as the sail itself was immobile) allowed them to absorb the force in a lateral direction. This amounted to a minor deceleration, on the order of ten microgee.
“Now comes the frustrating part,” Xmary said to her bridge crew. “We go where we must, and not where we really want to.”
Strictly speaking, they had arrived. They had captured into Barnard orbit. But their orbit was cometary; they wouldn't reach aphelion—apoapsis, apobarnardian, whatever you wanted to call it: the high point of their orbit—for another ten years. They could, of course, burn up their remaining fuel and stop more or less dead, but this would be dangerous in the extreme, and wouldn't really help in the long run, because they'd need the sails to maneuver their way back to Planet Two anyway. And that would actually take longer. Instead, they would make a complete circuit around the star—a tight cometary ellipse, shedding speed all the while through the slow, steady push of the sail—and brake once more at the bottom. Twenty-two years from now.
“Back into storage?” Robert asked with a groan.
“You especially,” Xmary agreed. “I don't need two more decades of boredom and frustration building up in my astrogation team just when we're finally doing something tricky.”
Robert would have looked about as thrilled if she'd asked him to put on the Ugly Hat. But he nodded, and later that shift, Conrad personally escorted him to the fax machine at the forward inventory. “I just want to be there already,” Robert said to him as he stood by the print plate. “I want to run a position check and find that we've been there all along, that all this was a bad dream.”
Conrad could only shrug. “People used to say life was a journey, not a destination. My mother still says that, or anyway she did a hundred years ago. I'm not sure it's true anymore; people live forever and never seem to go much of anywhere. But we're different, Robert, or we ought to be. Once we're finished decelerating, we still have to unpack and make our way to the planet itself. And then we've got orbital colonies to set up, and then the first ground colonies, and then industry, and then agriculture and maybe even terraforming if we have the stomach for it. And the whole thing is going to take us hundreds of years even if we hustle, which I'm not sure we particularly need to. And even when we're finished with all of that, this place will never be like the Queendom. That's the whole point, isn't it? So why are you impatient? What, exactly, are you waiting for?”
Robert stared at him for a long moment, and finally said, “Paver's Boy, in subjective time I'm almost thirty years older than you.”
“Your choice,” Conrad said, shrugging. “I'd've spent even more time in storage if I thought I could get away with it.”
Robert waved a hand, impatient with that reply. “No, you're right. You're the one with the proper attitude, the immorbid attitude. And knowing you as I do, I can't for the life of me think where this wisdom of yours has come from. I've always believed in anarchy, in ad-hocracy and collectively half-assed solutions to the problems of life, but suddenly you make me wonder. Could it be that simply holding a position of authority—even petty authority—wakes up a little piece of us that knows how to lead? That knows what's right and proper. I've got my eye on you, young man. I'll be studying this.”
Then he turned and stepped and vanished through the fax's print plate.
The irony of it, of course, was that Conrad himself was burning with impatience. “Pretends,” he told the empty air. “The part that pretends to know what's right. Blue Robert, you nudist pirate chieftain, you know as well as I do: leadership is the art of lying.”
And yet . . .
It should be said that immorbid people gripe about time in much the same manner that Old Moderns once did about the distance of a telephone call or the altitude of an aircraft: with great conviction and very little practical consequence. Consider it a form of boasting, perhaps, or a vestige of the hunter-gatherer wiring which remained, in spite of everything, permanently baffled by the marvels of technology. In any case, for the vast majority of Newhope's crew, the time passed in no time at all.
Barnard's meager supply of asteroids—mostly the cosmic equivalent of coal—were nothing to write home about. Newhope did write home, of course, because the Queendom astronomers were squirming with curiosity, and were owed a favor or two for all the information they'd transmitted ahead to Newhope. But there were no minor terrestrial planets in these belts, nothing big enough that its own gravity would pull it into a spherical shape, as with Ceres in Sol system. In fact, only four asteroids were larger than two hundred kilometers across—all residents of the more populous inner belt, between the orbits of Van de Kamp and P2. These worldlets were egg-shaped and very dark, and Bascal, struggling for a name worthy of the journey that had brought him here, dubbed them the Four Horsemen: Bellum, Fames, Obitus, and Morbus.
The outer belt consisted mainly of rubble: irregular, sharp-edged chunks of carbonaceous chondrite and low-yield iron ore no more than a few kilometers wide. The total mass of the two belts together came to less than a tenth of Sol's own Asteroid Belt. Fortunately, in an energy sense, the outer belt was the easier one for them to get to, requiring less than half the fuel they'd need to reach the inner one.
So that was where Robert and Bertram steered them: to the outer belt, which they insisted on calling the Lutui Belt. Whether this was meant as a compliment to King Bascal or some sort of subtle dig in the ribs was neither clear nor specified. Nor asked, for that matter.
Newhope's first orbit carried her high up into the Oort cloud, but Barnard provided some fairly significant braking on the second pass, which dipped down into the upper reaches of the star's chromosphere, or middle atmosphere. How the ship—120 years old by now—rattled and groaned between her ertial shields! How she whined at the inconvenience, and sweated through the scorching heat! But she saw them through, riding the particle flux and magnetic disturbances as though she were born for them. Which of course, she was.