"The guard at your door will take you. I'll contact him. Can you make it in two minutes?"
"Two and a half anyway," he said, good-humoredly. He sounded more awake.
"Good enough!"
Hansen was as good as his word. Lucky was waiting for him.
Lucky paused for a moment, holding the door open. He said to the guard, "Has there been any trouble at the base earlier this evening? An assault, perhaps?"
The guard looked surprised. "Yes, sir. The man who got hurt refused to press charges, though. Claimed it was a fair fight."
Lucky closed the door. He said, "That follows. Any normal man would hate to get up in a guardhouse and admit a fellow the size of Bigman had given him a banging. I'll call the authorities later and have them put the charge on paper anyway. For the record..,. Mr. Hansen."
"Yes, Mr. Starr?"
"I have a question the answer to which I did not want floating around the intercom system. Tell me, what are the co-ordinates of your home asteroid. Standard and temporal both, of course."
Hansen stared and his china-blue eyes grew round. "Well, you may find this hard to believe, but do you know, I really couldn't tell you."
Chapter 9
The Asteroid That Wasn't
Lucky met his eye steadily. "That is hard to believe, Mr. Hansen. I should think you would know your coordinates as well as a planet dweller would know his home address."
The hermit looked at his toes and said mildly, "I suppose so. It is my home address, really. Yet I don't know it."
Conway said, "If this man is deliberately-"
Lucky broke in. "Now wait. Let's force patience on ourselves if we have to. Mr. Hansen must have some explanation."
They waited for the hermit to speak.
Co-ordinates of the various bodies in the Galaxy were the lifeblood of space travel. They fulfilled the same function that lines of latitude and longitude did on the two-dimensional surface of a planet. However, since space is three dimensional, and since the bodies in it move about in every possible way, the necessary coordinates are more complicated.
Basically there is first a standard zero position. In the case of the Solar System, the Sun was the usual standard. Based on that standard, three numbers are necessary. The first number is the distance of an object or a position in space from the Sun. The second and third numbers are two angular measurements indicating the position of the object with reference to an imaginary line connecting the Sun and the center of the Galaxy. If three sets of such co-ordinates are known for three different times, set well apart, the orbit of a moving body could be calculated and its position, relative to the Sun, known for any given time.
Ships could calculate their own co-ordinates with respect to the Sun or, if it were more convenient, with respect to the nearest large body, whatever it was. On the Lunar Lines, for instance, of which vessels traveled from Earth to the Moon and back, Earth was the customary "zero point." The Sun's own co-ordinates could be calculated with respect to the Galactic Center and the Galactic Prime Meridian, but that was only important in traveling between the stars.
Some of all this might have been passing through the hermit's mind as he sat there with the three Councilmen watching him narrowly. It was hard to tell.
Hansen said suddenly, "Yes, I can explain."
"We're waiting," said Lucky.
"I've never had occasion to use the co-ordinates in fifteen years. I haven't left my asteroid at all for two years and before that any trips I made, maybe one or two a year, were short ones to Ceres or Vesta for supplies of one sort or another. When I did that, I used local coordinates which I always calculated out for the moment. I never worked out a table because I didn't have to.
"I'd only be gone a day or two, three at the most, and my own rock wouldn't drift far in that time. It travels with the stream, a little slower than Ceres or Vesta when it's further from the Sun and a little faster when it's nearer. When I'd head back for the position I calculated, my rock might have drifted ten thousand or even a hundred thousand miles off its original spot, but it was always close enough to pick up with the ship's telescope. After that, I could always adjust my course by eye. I never used the solar standard co-ordinates because I never had to, and there it is."
"What you're saying," said Lucky, "is that you couldn't get back to your rock now. Or did you calculate its local co-ordinates before you left?"
"I never thought to," said the hermit sadly."It's been so long since I left it that I never gave the matter a second's attention. Not until the minute you called me in here."
Dr. Henree said, "Wait. Wait." He had lit up a fresh pipeful of tobacco and was puffing strongly. "I may be wrong, Mr. Hansen, but when you first took over ownership of your asteroid, you must have filed a claim with the Terrestrial Outer World Bureau. Is that right?"
"Yes," said Hansen, "but it was only a formality."
"That could be. I'm not arguing that. Still, the coordinates of your asteroid would be on record there."
Hansen thought a bit, then shook his head. "I'm afraid not, Dr. Henree. They took only the standard co-ordinate set for January 1 of that year. That was just to identify the asteroid, like a code number, in case of disputed ownership. They weren't interested in anything more than that and you can't compute an orbit from only one set of numbers."
"But you yourself must have had orbital values. Lucky told us that you first used the asteroid as an annual vacation spot. So you must have been able to find it from year to year."
"That was fifteen years ago, Dr. Henree. I had the values, yes. And those values are somewhere in my record books on the rock, but they're not in my memory."
Lucky, his brown eyes clouded, said, "There's nothing else at the moment, Mr. Hansen. The guard will take you back to the room and we'll let you know when we need you again. And, Mr. Hansen," he added as the hermit rose, "if you should happen to think of the co-ordinates, let us know."
"My word on that, Mr. Starr," said Hansen gravely.
The three were alone again. Lucky's hand shot out to the Communi-tube. "Key me in for transmission," he said.
The voice of the man at Central Communications came back. "Was the previous incoming message for you, sir? I couldn't unscramble it so I thought-"
"You did well. Transmission, please."
Lucky adjusted a scrambler and used Bigman's coordinates to zero in the sub-etheric beam.
"Bigman," he said when the other's face appeared, "open the logbook again."
"Do you have the co-ordinates, Lucky?"
"Not yet. Have you got the logbook open?"
"Yes."
"Is there a sheet of scrap paper somewhere in it? Loose, with calculations all over it?"
"Wait. Yes. Here it is."
"Hold it up in front of your transmitter. I want to see it."
Lucky pulled a sheet of paper before him and copied down the figuring. "All right, Bigman, take it away. Now listen, stay put. Get me? Stay put, no matter what, till you hear from me. Signing off."
He turned to the two older men. "I navigated the ship from the hermit's rock to Ceres by eye. I adjusted course three or four times, using his ship's telescope and vernier instruments for observation and measurements. These are my calculations."
Conway nodded. "Now, I suppose, you intend calculating backwards to find out the rock's co-ordinates."