“Right,” Bilko added. “Obviously, she fed us the location directly without realizing that she was looking at where the colony was ten years ago.”
“You got it,” I said. “Hard to believe a scholar would make such a simple error, though.”
“Unless she didn’t realize they were still moving,” Rhonda offered.
“No, she told me they were still underway,” I said. “That’s how she knew there was still someone aboard, remember?”
“She’s a historian,” Bilko said, waving a hand in dismissal. “Or maybe an archaeologist. Probably doesn’t even know what a light-year is—you know how rampant upper-class specialization is.”
“And someday all of us in the tech classes will take over,” Rhonda echoed the populist slogan. “Dream on. OK, we know the problem. What’s the solution?”
“Seems straightforward enough,”
Bilko said. “We know they were headed away from Sol system, so we figure out how much farther they could have gone in ten years and go that far along that vector.”
“And how do we figure out what speed they were making?” I asked him.
“From the redshift in their drive spectrum, of course,” he said. “Assuming, of course, that Kulasawa was smart enough to bring some of the actual telescopic photos with her.” He smiled at me. “You can be the one to go ask for them.”
I grimaced. “Thanks. Heaps.”
“Don’t go into grovel mode quite yet,” Rhonda warned. “Even if she has photos they won’t do us any good, because we don’t know what the at-rest spectrum for their drive was.”
“Why not?” Bilko asked, frowning at the intercom speaker. “I thought it was just a standard ion-capture drive.”
“There was nothing standard about it,” Rhonda told him. “You can’t just scale up an ion-capture drive that way—the magnetic field instabilities will tear it apart. Even now our biggest long-range freighters are running right up to the wire. God only knows what trick the Jovians pulled to make theirs work.”
“If you say so,” Bilko said. “Engines aren’t really my field of expertise.”
“Of course.” I cocked an eyebrow at him. “What was that again about rampant specialization?”
He smiled lopsidedly. “Touche,” he said. “So let’s hear your idea.”
I gazed out the viewport. “We start with a focused search along the vector from Sol system,” I said slowly. “Even if we don’t know what the spectrum looks like, we know they can’t have gotten too far away from here yet. That means the drive glow will be reasonably bright, and our astrogator ought to be able to pick up on a major star that’s not supposed to be there. Right?”
“Sorry,” Rhonda said. “Astrogation’s not my field of expertise.”
“Give it a rest, Blankenship,” Bilko growled. “Assuming it’s still firing hot enough to look like a major star, yes, it’ll work. Then what?”
“Then we head at right angles to that direction for a small but specified distance,” I said. “Say, a few A.U. Then we come back out, find the drive trail again, and get the location by straight triangulation.”
“Can we do a program that short?” Rhonda asked. “Even at Blue speeds an A.U. must go by pretty fast.”
“A shade under six-hundredths of a second, actually,” Bilko said. “And no, we can’t do that directly.”
“What we can do is run a few minutes out and almost the same number of minutes back,” I added. “Some of the bigger freighters do that all the time to fine-tune their arrival position. Jimmy should have what he needs to work up that kind of program.”
“We assume so, anyway,” Bilko added. “But of course musicmastery isn’t our field of expertise.”
“Look, Bilko—”
“Play nicely, children,” I said. “Bilko, get the sensors going, will you?”
The Sergei Rock’s sensors weren’t quite up to the same ultra-high standard of quality as our legal and financial software was. But they were certainly nothing to sneer at, either—the myriad of transport regulators that swarmed like locusts across the Expansion made sure of that. And so it came as something of a surprise when, thirty minutes later, the result of our search turned up negative.
“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 “Erlkünig,” 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.”