He cut the first-order drive the instant his clock told him the speeds should be equal, headed for the twin suns, and hopped for his Trojan point. Since moving bodies were involved, he had to make five legs out of the short trip — he failed to allow for the short period of the system and the fact that he started the first leg several light-hours from his goal.
He got there eventually, however. He suddenly realized that he would have to use first-order power again, to give his ship something like the proper orbital velocity; but even he was able to understand the proper magnitude and direction of this new vector; the only unjustified assumption he had to make was that the suns were of equal masses, and this happened to be nearly the case. He wasn't too worried; he understood that in a Trojan orbit such small variations are opposed, not helped, by the gravity of the primary bodies. He was quite right.
He cut all his power except the detector relay currents, which did not radiate appreciably. To these he connected an alarm, and set them to synchronize with the low-frequency waves which form the “wake” of a vessel cruising at second-order speeds. Then, abruptly feeling the reaction of the past days, he drifted over to a “bunk,” moored himself, and was instantly asleep.
It is impossible to say just how long he slept; he was exhausted mentally and emotionally, and when weightless the human body can approach a condition near to suspended animation, if given the chance. It couldn't have been for very many hours, but the alarm rang for minutes before its sound penetrated to his consciousness. When it did, he had to wait several moments before he could move a muscle.
Recovered at last, he unmoored himself and kicked his body across the narrow cabin to the instrument board, and cut the alarm, cursing. He had forgotten that the bell would radiate, and was not sure that the hull would shield its waves. The detectors were reacting violently, the needles wobbling rapidly from positive to negative limits. He knew that a ship had driven past in second-order flight, but that was as far as he could interpret the readings. It would have required an expert to compute the speed, type, and distance of the ship creating the disturbance.
After a few minutes, the needles quieted. La Roque remained at the board, judging that the ship had not left for good. He was right. The disturbances started again half an hour later, and kept up for hours thereafter — sometimes so feeble as to cause a barely visible quiver of the needles, sometimes slamming them against the stop pins with audible clicks. La Roque was incapable of reading any meaning except changing distance into this phenomenon.
The “wake” of a ship in straight-line, second-order flight consists of a few low-frequency electromagnetic waves, the wave-front being, as can easily be seen, coneshaped, with the ship at the apex. The cone expands radially at the speed of light, and its tip moves forward with the ship — in the case of a military craft, at anywhere up to something like a million light velocities.
If the ship is not in straight-line flight, but cutting its fields and changing direction every few minutes or seconds, the shape of the wave front becomes rather complex. A standard search path spirals around the surface of a torus, and after a few hours the traces of such a flight would be the despair of a competent mathematician, let alone an amateur at a comparatively fixed observation post. The space for billions of miles around that binary sun was quivering with crisscrossing wave fronts. Each set the needles of La Roque's detectors quivering in tune as it passed him, and each quiver brought beads of sweat to the runaway's brow. His own ship, he realized, had left similar fronts; and he had shaved his margin of escape much too fine. Had they been given a week, or even three or four days, for expansion at the speed of light, he could have ceased to worry about their being used to trail him.
He wondered just what the searchers would do. They must have trailed him directly to this system, as he had expected. They might try to find an inactive ship in space, but La Roque doubted that such a search would be practical unless there existed detection instruments unknown to the general public.
He wondered if the system contained any planets, to add to the searchers' difficulties. He himself had seen none, and none was listed on the chart; but they would have been nearly invisible in the dim light of the twin suns, and La Roque's faith in the chart had dropped a long way. If there were any, they would be a real help; they would have to be searched mile by square mile.
But the question of prime importance was, how long would the pursuers stay? Certainly, if they had the patience they could outwait him, for their food supply would outlast his; but for all they knew he might have met with a fatal accident, or encountered an organized outlaw base — either could easily happen. If he refrained from radiating long enough, they might decide further search futile. He could do that; the darkness didn't bother him particularly, and the ship was warm enough — a little too warm, in fact. Evidently his figures had not been exact.
Eventually the detectors stopped reacting, and La Roque started waiting. He was still perspiring, less from worry now than from actual warmth. The ship was becoming uncomfortable. He removed his outer clothing and felt better for a while.
Time crawled on — rapidly decelerating, in La Roque's opinion. He had nothing to do except notice his own discomfort, which was on the increase. He cursed the ship's builders for failure to insulate it properly, and the men who had computed the tables he had used to obtain the probable temperature at this distance from the suns. He didn't bother to curse his own arithmetic.
Once he was almost on the point of driving farther out, hoping the pursuing ship had gone; but a flicker from one of the detectors made him change his mind. He hung and sweated; and the temperature mounted.
It must have been a hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit when he finally gave in. He could have stood more in the open — anyone could — but the air-conditioning apparatus had been stopped along with everything else, and the air in the ship was approaching saturation. With that fact considered, he held out remarkably well; but eventually his will power gave out. He kicked his way feebly back to the board and snapped on the vision plates.
He lacked the energy to curse. For moments he could only stare in shocked horror at the plates — and realize how misdirected his previous denunciations had been. There was nothing wrong with his ship's insulation; the wonder was that it had held out so well. One of the suns — he never knew which — completely filled the front, top, and port plates with a blaze of sooty crimson; he must have been within thirty or forty thousand miles of its surface. His hand darted toward the activating switch of the second-order drivers, and was as quickly checked. They would only send him straight forward, into the inferno revealed by the front plate. The ship must be turned.
He started the gyros, careless now of any radiation that might result. The control knobs were hot to the touch; and a smell of burning oil reached his nostrils as the gyros wound up to speed. The ship abruptly shuddered and began to gyrate slowly, as one of them seized in its bearings. He watched tensely as the vessel went through a full rotation, his hand hovering over the board; but not once was the glow in the forward plate replaced by the friendly darkness of space. The ship was spinning on its longitudinal axis.
The other gyros were working. He tried to turn the vessel with them. The result was to shift the axis of spin about thirty degrees — and increase its rate tenfold as another of the heavy wheels, spinning at full speed, jammed abruptly. Centrifugal force snatched him away from the board and against one wall; he shrieked as his flesh touched hot metal, and kicked violently. His body shot across the room, reaching the other side at about the same time his previous point of contact was carried around by the ship's rotation.