“A thousand people did die,” said Novee, softly.
“Sure. About a billion men a day die all over the galaxy.”
“Not this way.”
“Not what way?”
With an effort, Novee kept to his usual drawl. “No discussions except at official meetings. That was the decision.”
“I’ll have nothing to discuss,” said Cimon, gloomily. “They’re just two ordinary stars. Damned if I know why I volunteered. I suppose it was just the chance of seeing an abnormally large Trojan system from close up. It was the thought of looking at a habitable planet with a double sun. I don’t know why I should have thought there’d be anything amazing about it.”
“Because you thought of a thousand dead men and women,” said Xovee, then went on hastily. “Listen, tell me something, will you? What’s a Trojan planet, anyway?”
The physician bore the other’s look of contempt for a moment, then said, “All right. All right. So I don’t know. You don’t know everything either. What do you know about ultrasonic incisions?”
Cimon said, “Nothing, and I think I hat’s fine. It’s my opinion that information outside a professional man’s specialty is useless and a waste of psycho-potential. Sheffield’s point of view leaves me cold.”
“I still want to know. That is, if you can explain it.”
“I can explain it. As a matter of fact, it was mentioned in the original briefing, if you were listening. Most multiple stars, and that means one third of all stars, have planets of a sort. The trouble is that the planets are never habitable. If they’re far enough away from the center of gravity of the stellar system to have a fairly circular orbit, they’re cold enough to have helium oceans. If they’re close enough to get heat, their orbit is so erratic that at least once in each revolution, they get close enough to one or another of the stars to melt iron.
“Here in the Lagrange System, however, we have an unusual case. The two stars, Lagrange I and Lagrange II, and the planet, Troas—along with its satellite, Ilium—are at the corners of an imaginary equilateral triangle. Got that? Such an arrangement happens to be a stable one, and for the sake of anything you like, don’t ask me to tell you why. Just take it as my professional opinion.”
Novee muttered under his breath, “I wouldn’t dream of doubting it.”
Cimon looked displeased and continued, “The system revolves as a unit. Troas is always a hundred million miles from each sun, and the suns are always a hundred million miles from one another.”
Novee rubbed his ear and looked dissatisfied. “I know all that. I was listening at the briefing. But why is it a Trojan planet? Why Trojan?”
Cimon’s thin lips compressed for a moment as though holding back a nasty word by force. He said, “We have an arrangement like that in the Solar System. The sun, Jupiter and a group of small asteroids form a stable equilateral triangle. It so happens that the asteroids had been given such names as Hector, Achilles, Ajax and other heroes of the Trojan war, hence—or do I have to finish?”
“Is that all?” said Novee.
“Yes. Are you through bothering me?”
“Oh, boil your head.”
Novee rose to leave the indignant astrophysicist but the door slid open a moment before his hand touched the activator and Boris Vernadsky—geochemist; dark eyebrows, wide mouth, broad face and with an inveterate tendency to polka-dot shirts and magnetic clip-ons in red plastic—stepped in.
He was oblivious to Novee’s flushed face and Cimon’s frozen expression of distaste.
He said, lightly, “Fellow scientists, if you listen very carefully you will probably hear an explosion to beat the Milky Way from up yonder in captain’s quarters.”
“What happened?” asked Novee.
“The captain got hold of Annuncio, Sheffield’s little pet wizard, and Sheffield went charging up-deck, bleeding heavily at each eyeball.”
Cimon, having listened so far, turned away, snorting.
Novee said, “Sheffield! The man can’t get angry. I’ve never even heard him raise his voice.”
“He did this time. When he found out the kid had left his cabin without telling him and that the captain was bully-ragging him—Wow! Did you know he was up and about, Novee?”
“No, but I’m not surprised. Spacesickness is one of those things. When you have it, you think you’re dying. In fact, you can hardly wait. Then, in two minutes it’s gone and you feel all right. Weak, but all right. I told Mark this morning we’d be landing next day and I suppose it pulled him through. The thought of a planetary surface in clear prospect does wonders for spacesickness. We are landing soon, aren’t we, Cimon?”
The astrophysicist made a peculiar sound that could have been interpreted as a grunt of assent. At least, Novee so interpreted it.
“Anyway,” said Novee, “what happened?”
Vernadsky said, “Well, Sheffield’s been bunking with me since the kid twirled on his toes and went over backward with spacesickness and he’s sitting there at the desk with his charts and his fist computer chug-chugging away, when the room-phone signals and its the captain. Well, it turns out he’s got the boy with him and he wants to know what the blankety-blank and assorted dot-and-dash the government means by planting a spy on him. So Sheffield yells back at him that he’ll stab him with a Collamore macro-leveling-tube if he’s been fooling with the kid and off he goes leaving the phone activated and the captain frothing.”
“You’re making this up,” said Novee. “Sheffield wouldn’t say anything like that.”
“Words to that effect.”
Novee turned to Cimon. “You’re heading our group. Why don’t you do something about this?”
Cimon snarled, “In cases like this, I’m heading the group. My responsibilities always come on suddenly. Let them fight it out. Sheffield talks an excellent fight and the captain never takes his hands out of the small of his back. Vernadsky’s jitterbugging description doesn’t mean there’ll be physical violence.”
“All right, but there’s no point in having feuds of any kind in an expedition like ours.”
“You mean our mission!” Vernadsky raised both hands in mock-awe and rolled his eyes upward. “How I dread the time when we must find ourselves among the rags and bones of the first expedition.”
And as though the picture brought to mind by that was not one that bore levity well after all, there was suddenly nothing to say. Even the back of Cimon’s head which was all that showed over the back of the easy-chair seemed a bit the stiffer for the thought.
Oswald Mayer Sheffield—psychologist, thin as a string and as tall as a good length of it, and with a voice that could be used either for singing an operatic selection with surprising virtuosity or for making a point of argument, softly but with stinging accuracy—did not show the anger one would have expected from Vernadsky’s account.
He was even smiling when he entered the captain’s cabin.
The captain broke out mauvely, as soon as he entered. “Look here, Sheffield—”
“One minute, Captain Follenbee,” said Sheffield, “How are you, Mark?”
Mark’s eyes fell and his words were muffled. “All right, Dr. Sheffield.”
“I wasn’t aware you’d gotten out of bed.”
There wasn’t the shade of reproach in his voice, but Mark grew apologetic. “I was feeling better, Dr. Sheffield, and I feel bad about not working. I haven’t done anything in all the time I’ve been on the ship. So I put in a call to the captain to ask to see the log book and he had me come up here.”