“Now that’s enough,” growled Magnus. He took a step toward her. “I’ve heard enough out of you. In my own house. And I never did hold with this new-fangled notion of letting a woman yap—”
“Stand back!” she yelled. “I’m not your wife!”
He halted. The lines in his face grew suddenly blurred. He raised his artificial hand as if against a blow.
“You’re my son’s wife,” he said, quite gently. “You’re a Ryerson too… now.”
“Not if this is what it means.” She had found the resolution she sought. She went to the wall and took her cloak off its peg. “You’ll lend me your aircar for a hop to Stornoway, I trust. I will send it back on auto-pilot and get transport for myself from there.”
“But where are you going?” His voice was like a hurt child’s.
“I don’t know,” she snapped. “To some place with a bearable climate. David’s salary is payable to me till he’s declared dead, and then there will be a pension. When I’ve waited long enough to be sure he won’t come back, I’m going to Rama.”
“But, lass… propriety—”
“Propriety be damned. I’d rather have David’s child, alive.” She slipped her boots back on, took a flashlight from the cupboard, and went out the door. As she opened it, the wind came straight in and hit Magnus across the face.
13
As he came around the gyro housing and pulled himself forward to the observation deck, David Ryerson heard the guitar skitter through half a dozen chords and Maclaren’s voice come bouncing in its wake. He sighed, pushed the lank yellow hair back out of his eyes, and braced himself.
Maclaren floated in the living section. It was almost an insult to see him somehow clean all over, in a white tunic, when each man was allowed a daily spongeful of water for such purposes. And half rations had only leaned the New Zealander down, put angles in his smooth brown countenance; he didn’t have bones jutting up under a stretched skin like Ryerson, or a flushed complexion and recurring toothache like Nakamura. It wasn’t fair!
“Oh, hullo, Dave.” Maclaren continued tickling his strings, but quietly. “How does the web progress?”
“I’m done.”
“I just clinched the last bolt and spotwelded the last connection. There’s not a thing left except to find that germanium, make the transistors, and adjust the units.” Ryerson hooked an arm around a stanchion and drifted free, staring out of sunken eyes toward emptiness. “God help me,” he murmured, “what am I going to do now?”
“Wait,” said Maclaren. “We can’t do much except wait.” He regarded the younger man for a while. “Frankly, both Seiichi and I found excuses not to help you, did less out there than we might have, for just that reason. I’ve been afraid you would finish the job before we found our planet.”
Ryerson started. Redness crept into his chalky face. “Why, of all the—” His anger collapsed. “I see. All right.”
“These weeks since we escaped have been an unparalleled chance to practice my music,” remarked Maclaren. “I’ve even been composing. Listen.
“Will you stop that?” screamed Ryerson.
“As you like,” said Maclaren mildly. He put the guitar back into its case. “I’d be glad to teach you,” he offered.
“No.”
“Care for a game of chess?”
“No.”
“I wish to all the hells I’d been more of an intellectual,” said Maclaren. “I never was, you know. I was a playboy, even in science. Now… I wish I’d brought a few hundred books with me. When I get back, I’m going to read them.” His smile faded. “I think I might begin to understand them.”
“When we get back?” Ryerson’s thin frame doubled in midair as if for a leap. “If we get back, you mean!”
Nakamura entered. He had a sheaf of scribbled papers in one hand. His face was carefully blank. “I have completed the calculations on our latest data,” he said.
Ryerson shuddered. “What have you found?” he cried. “Negative.”
“Lord God of Israel,” groaned Ryerson. “Negative again.”
“That pretty well covers this orbit, then,” said Maclaren calmly. “I’ve got the elements of the next one computed — somewhere.” He went out among the instruments.
A muscle in Ryerson’s cheek began to jump of itself. He looked at Nakamura for a long time. “Isn’t there anything else we can do?” he asked. “The telescopes, the — Do we just have to sit?”
“We are circling a dead sun,” the pilot reminded him. “There is only feeble starlight to see by. A very powerful instrument might photograph a planet, but not the telescopes we have. Not at any distance greater than we could find them gravitationally. S-s-so.”
“We could make a big telescope!” exclaimed Ryerson. “We have glass, and… and silver and—”
“I’ve thought of that.” Maclaren’s tones drifted back from the observation section. “You’re welcome to amuse yourself with it, but we’d starve long before a suitable mirror could be ground with the equipment here.”
“But — Maclaren, space is so big! We could hunt for a million years and never find a planet if we can’t… can’t see them!”
“We’re not working quite at random.” Maclaren reappeared with a punched tape. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten the principle on which we are searching. We position ourselves in an orbit about the star, follow it for a while, check our position repeatedly, and compute whether the path has been significantly perturbed. If it has been, that’s due to a planet somewhere, and we can do a Leverrier to find that planet. If not — if we’re too far away — we quarter to another arc of the same path and try again. Having exhausted a whole circumference thus, we move outward and try a bigger circle.”
“Shut up!” rasped Ryerson. “I know it! I’m not a schoolboy. But we’re guessing!”
“Not quite,” said Maclaren. “You were occupied with the web when I worked out the secondary principle… yes, come to think of it, you never did ask me before. Let me explain. You see, by extrapolating from data on known stellar types, I know approximately what this star was like in its palmy days. From this, planetary formation theory gives me the scale of its onetime system. For instance, its planets must have been more or less in the equatorial plane; such quantities as mass, angular momentum, and magnetic field determine the Bode’s Law constants; to the extent that all this is known, I can draw an orbital map.
“Well, then the star went supernova. Its closer planets were whiffed into gas. The outermost giants would have survived, though badly damaged. But the semimajor axes of their orbits were so tremendous — theoretically, planets could have formed as much as a light-year from this star — that even a small percentage of error in the data makes my result uncertain by Astronomical Units. Another factor: the explosion filled this space with gas. We’re actually inside a nonluminous nebula. That would shorten the orbits of the remaining planets; in the course of millions of years they’ve spiraled far inward. In one way that helps us: we’ve an area to search which is not hopelessly huge. But on the other hand, just how long has it been since the accident? What’s the density distribution of the nebula now, and what was it back then? I’ve taken some readings and made some estimates. All very crude, but—” Maclaren shrugged — “what else can we do? The successive orbits we have been trying are, more or less, those I have calculated for the surviving planets as of today. And, of course, intermediate radii to make sure that we will be measurably perturbed no matter where those planets actually are. It’s just a matter of getting close enough to one of them.”