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"Great," Bilko said, tapping his fingers restlessly on the edge of his board.
"Just great. Now what?"
"They must have turned off their drive," I said, looking over the astrogate computer's report again. "That, or else it's failed. Rhonda?"
"Seems odd that they would turn it off," Rhonda said doubtfully. "Certainly not in the middle of nowhere like this. And for it to have run 130 years and just happened to fail now would be pretty ironic."
"Yeah, but about par for the way my luck's been going," Bilko said sourly.
"That last game I had on Angorki—"
"The Universe does not have it in for you personally, Bilko," Rhonda interrupted him. "Much as you'd like to think so. Jake, I'd guess it's more likely they simply changed course. If they shifted their vector even a few degrees their drive wouldn't be pointed directly at us anymore."
Abruptly, Bilko snapped his fingers. "No," he said, turning a tight grin on me.
"They didn't change course. Not from here."
"Of course not," I said as it hit me as well. "All we need is to reprogram the searcher—"
"I'm on it," Bilko said, hands already skating across the computer board.
"Any time you two want to let me in on this, go ahead," Rhonda invited.
"We've assumed they hit this point on the way from Sol," I explained, watching over Bilko's shoulder. "But maybe they didn't. Maybe they headed out on a slightly different vector, paused to take a look at some promising system along the way, then changed course and headed out again."
"Passing through this point on an entirely different vector than the direct line from Sol," Bilko added. "OK, here it comes... computer says the only real possibility is Lalande 21185. That would put the vector... right. OK, let's try that focused search again. And keep your fingers crossed."
We didn't have to keep them crossed for very long. Three minutes later, the computer had found it.
"No doubt about it," Bilko decided. "We are definitely genius-class material."
"Don't start making laurel-leaf soup too fast," Rhonda warned. "Now, I take it, comes the tricky part?"
"You take it correctly," I said, unstrapping. "I'll go tell Kulasawa we've found her floating museum. And then go have a chat with Jimmy."
Kulasawa was elated in a grim, upper-class sort of way, managing to simultaneously imply that I should keep her better informed and that I also shouldn't waste time with useless mid-course reports. I escaped to Jimmy's cabin, wondering if maybe Bilko's suggestion of upping our price would really be unethical after all.
As Rhonda had suggested, the tricky part now began. Two successive performances of Schubert's "Erlkonig," the versions differing by exactly point five seven second gave us our triangulation point. Another reading on the Freedom's Peace's drive glow, and we had them nailed at just over fifty A.U. away.
"Not exactly hauling Yellows, are they?" Bilko commented. "I mean, fifty A.U.s in ten years?"
"The engines were probably scaled for low but constant acceleration," Rhonda said. "They would have lost a lot of their velocity when they stopped to check out the Lalande system."
"Just as well for us they did," I pointed out. "If they'd been pulling a straight acceleration for the past 130 years we wouldn't have a hope in hell of matching speeds with them."
"Good point," Rhonda agreed. "Any idea what speed they are making?"
"As a matter of fact, I do," I said smugly, keying for the calculation I'd requested. "I took a spectrum of their drive at both our triangulation points.
Because we were seeing the red-shifted light from two different angles—well, I
won't bore you with the math. Suffice it to say the Freedom's Peace is smoking along at just under thirty kilometers a second."
"About three times Earth escape velocity," Bilko murmured. "Can the engines handle that, Rhonda?"
"No problem," she assured him. "We'll probably pop a few preburn sparkles, though. So what's the plan?"
"We'll set up a program that'll put us just a little ways ahead of them," I told her. "That way, we'll get to watch them go past us and can get exact numbers on their speed and vector."
"Provided they don't run us down," Rhonda murmured.
"They're not hardly going fast enough for that," Bilko scoffed. "Fifty A.U.s means another forward-back program, of course."
"Right," I said, nodding. "You work out the course while I go help Jimmy set it up."
"Right," he said, turning to his board. "You going to give our scholar the good news on the way to Jimmy's?"
"Let's let it be a surprise."
Fifteen minutes later we were ready to go. "Okay, Jimmy, this is it," I called toward the intercom. "Let's do it."
"Okay," he said. "Here goes Operation Reverse Columbus."
I flicked off the intercom. "Operation Reverse Columbus?" Bilko asked, cocking an eyebrow.
I shook my head as the pre-music C-sharp vibrated through the hull. "He thinks he's being cute," I said. "Just ignore him." The pre-tone ended; and as the strains of Schuma
A ride which turned out to be a lot shorter than I'd expected. Barely two notes into the piece, with the music still going, the stars abruptly reappeared.
"Jimmy!" I snarled his name like a curse as I grabbed for my restraints. Of all times to break his concentration and lose our flapblack—
And then my eyes flicked to the viewport... and my hands froze on the release.
Flashing past from just beneath us, no more than twenty kilometers away, was the Freedom's Peace.
And it was definitely cooking along. Even as I caught my breath it shot away from us toward the stars, its circle of six drive nozzles blazing furiously from the stern and dimming with distance—
And then, without warning, it suddenly flared into a brilliant blaze of light.
My first, horrified thought was that the colony had exploded right in front of us. My second, confused thought was that an explosion normally didn't have six neatly arranged nexus points... and as the six blazing circles receded in the direction the Freedom's Peace had been going, I finally realized what had happened. Not the how or the why, but at least the what.
On that, at least, I was ahead of Bilko. "What the hell?" he gasped.
"The music's still going," I snapped, belatedly hitting my restraint release and scrambling to my feet. "As soon as it got far enough ahead of us, we got wrapped again and caught up with it."
"We what? But—?"
"But why are we unwrapping when we get close?" I ducked my head and peered out the viewport, just in time to see us do our strange little microjump and catch up with the asteroid again. "Good question. Let me get Jimmy shut down and we'll try to figure it out."
I sprinted back to his cabin, cursing the unknown bureaucrat or pla
I reached the cabin and threw myself inside. Leaning back on his couch with his eyes closed and the massive headphones engulfing his head, Jimmy probably never realized anything was wrong until I slapped the cutoff switch.
At which point his reaction more than made up for it. He jolted upright like someone had applied electrodes to selected parts of his body, his eyes snapping wide open. "What—?" he gasped, ripping off his headphones.
"We've got trouble," I told him briefly, jabbing the intercom switch.
"Rhonda?"
"Here," she said. "Why have we stopped?"
"It wasn't our idea," I said. "We lost our flapblack."
"About six times in a row," Bilko put in tensely from the flight deck. "As soon as we get close enough to the Freedom's Peace, we lose them."