That brought back some exciting memories. Merganser was one of the two original prototypes of the balanced drive, and McAndrew and I had ironed the bugs out of her personally. She was limited to a 50-gee acceleration, but still in good working order. I’d fly her anywhere. Mac seemed much less happy when he read the letter.
“I hope she knows what she’s doing,” he said. “That ship’s not a toy. Do you think it’s safe?”
“Safe as anything in the System. Jan won’t have any trouble. We used the Merganser for training before they mothballed her, don’t you remember?”
He didn’t, of course. He carries physics and mathematics in his head at an astonishing level of detail, but useful everyday information is another matter. He nodded at me vaguely, and wandered off to send more messages to Wicklund (who had to date provided no replies).
We heard from Jan again, just as the explicit order was coming in from Tallboy’s office to decommission Hoatzin and remove the supplies for the Alpha Centauri mission.
I screwed up Tallboy’s order into a tight ball and threw it across the room.
Then I sat down to read what Jan had to say.
No preamble this time: “Wicklund says it works! He’s already found three rogues, and expects a lot more. They must be a lot more common than anybody thought. Now sit back for the big news: there’s one only a light-year away! Isn’t it exciting?”
Well, maybe — less so to me than to Mac, I was sure of that. I assumed that solitary planets would be rather rare, so one closer than the nearest star was a bit surprising. But it was her next words that shot me bolt upright and sent a tingle through my spine.
“Merganser is working perfectly, all ready for a trip. I’ve persuaded Wicklund to take her out for a look at Vandell — that’s his name for the planet. I’m sure you don’t approve, so I won’t ask. Lots of love, and see you when we get back.”
Even as I screamed inside, I wasn’t completely surprised. She was McAndrew’s daughter all right — it was exactly the harebrained sort of thing he would have done.
Mac and I both played it very cool. That boneheaded pair, we said to each other. We might have guessed it, the follies of youth. They’ll be in trouble when they get back, even though the Merganser is an old ship that Triton Station can do what they like with.
But deep inside we both had other feelings. Wicklund had sent the coordinates of Vandell to us before they left, and as Jan said it was close, less than a light-year and a quarter away. Easily in Merganser’s range, and a lure that any scientist worth his salt would find hard to resist, even without Jan’s coaxing. Where had it come from, what was it made of, how long since it had been ejected from its parent star? — there were a hundred questions that could never be answered by remote observations, not even with the super-sensitive methods that Wicklund had developed.
But it was those same questions that made me so uneasy. If I’ve learned one thing wandering around inside and outside the Solar System, it’s this: Nature has more ways of killing you than you can imagine. When you think you’ve learned them all, another one pops up to teach you humility — if you’re lucky. If not, someone else will have to decide what did you in.
For a week after Jan’s message I monitored the messages closely that came in from the outer relay stations. And every day I would ride over to the Hoatzin and potter about there, sometimes with Mac, sometimes alone. I was supposed to be working on the decommissioning, but instead I would sit in the pilot’s chair, check all the status flags, and think my own thoughts. Until finally, ten days after Jan and Wicklund had left, I went over to visit the Hoatzin late one sleep period.
And found that the lock had been cycled since I left.
McAndrew was sitting in the pilot’s chair, staring at the controls. I came quietly up behind him, patted him on the shoulder, and slipped into the copilot’s seat. He turned toward me, straggly eyebrows raised.
“It’s now or never,” he said at last. “But what about Tallboy? What will he do to the Institute?”
I shrugged. “Nothing. Not if we make it clear that it’s our fault.”
I reached out and called for a destination reading. When I left, the coordinates had all been set to zero. Now they carried precise values.
“Do you think that anyone else suspects?” I said. “I checked the experimental logs in your lab today, and they were all current up to this afternoon — and you’re always months behind. If I noticed that, maybe one of the others will.”
He looked surprised. “Why should they? We’ve been careful not to talk about this when anyone else could hear.”
There was no point in telling Mac that he was probably the world’s worst person you’d want to keep a secret. I tapped him on the shoulder. “No point in worrying about it once we’re on our way. Come on, Mac, move over — you’re sitting in my chair. And think positively. We’ll have a nice, long trip, just the two of us.”
He stood up, rubbing at the back of his head the way he always did when he was embarrassed. “Och, Jeanie,” he said. But he was smiling to himself as we changed seats.
The calculations were elementary, and I could do them as well as he could. The Merganser would reach the rogue planet in about sixty days of shipboard time if they kept close to maximum acceleration all the way. We could be there in thirty-five days of shipboard time, but that would pick up only ten days of inertial time. We would reach Vandell a couple of days after them. For me, that was two days too late.
Our drive wake left an ionization track across the whole width of the Solar System. Mac checked that there were no ships directly behind for us to burn a hole through, and while he was doing it I had a new idea and sent a message back to External Affairs. I said that we were about to perform a brief high-gee test of the Hoatzin’s drive before we took her in and decommissioned her. With luck, Tallboy’s group would assume we had been the unhappy victims of a nasty accident, shooting out of the Solar System on a one-way journey when some control element of the drive unit had failed. Limperis and friends at the Institute wouldn’t believe that, not as soon as they checked our destination coordinates — but they would never tell their suspicions to Tallboy. Maybe they could even get some mileage from our disappearance, pointing out the need for more funds for reliability and system maintenance. Limperis could play that game with his eyes closed.
Perhaps everything would work out fine — until McAndrew and I came back. Then the truth would come out, and we’d be roasted for sure.
Neither of us could get too worried about that possibility. We had other things on our minds. As we raced out along the invisible scintillation of the Merganser’s drive, Mac dumped the data bank for information about Vandell’s rogueworld. He didn’t get much. We had coordinates relative to the Sun, and velocity components, but all they did was make sure we could find our way to the planet. Wicklund had been able to put an upper limit on its diameter using long base line interferometry, and estimated that we were dealing with a body no bigger than Earth. But we were missing the physical variables — no mass, internal structure, temperature, magnetic field, or physical composition, not even an estimate of rotation rate. Mac fumed, but at least I’d have a lot more information for him as soon as we got close. In the week before we left the Institute, I had put on board the Hoatzin every instrument that wasn’t nailed down, anything that might tell us something useful about Vandell without having to go down there and set foot on its surface.