I sat back with a breath of deep, deep relief.
"There you are, boys," I wheezed. "One sun as per specification. Completely under control. Lomack, if your fingers were fast enough we could use it for a blinker. All you have to do is control the speeds the right way."
Listless had established equilibrium by now, and threw over the box to automatic. He went back to the store room and brought out the last case. We sat down and drank to my health. Several times. And to my brain. Often.
"How'd you figure it?" asked Murphy when the back pounding was over.
"Boys," I said in a superior tone, "it's really very simple." Murphy threw the opener at me, so I got down to business.
"You both know the rudiments of Einstein, don't you?" I asked. They nodded in agreement.
"Well, you know the theory of space warp. Not the way the plates work but the fundamental proposition. Gravity does not exist as such. I mean there is no actual attraction between the sun and the planets. The sun is of such tremendous mass that it warps space elliptically around it in such a way that any body of a given mass and speed just has to travel a certain way. Instead of speaking of orbits, you might say, that, like marbles, the planets fall into certain grooves and there they stay."
I stopped for a long one.
"As I was saying, I thought that if the sun establishes grooves for the planets to travel in, what would happen if we establish the grooves by means of planets without a sun? Why, it follows as the noon the morning that with the conditions just right, a sun would have to come into existence. When we started those asteroids whizzing around we created a sort of 'mass vacuum' in the center, and mass just had to rush in to fill it. Or maybe it isn't even mass; just energy with an apparent mass due to an apparent attraction. Anyway, there's your sun. We can sell lots. We go to the boys and ask them how big a plant they want to build, government supervision doesn't hold in free space you know, so we can go in, snag an asteroid of the right size and set it up in a slow orbit around our little power plant. Charges will be reasonable but sufficient. And all the free beer we want."