Novee muttered under his breath, “I wouldn’t dream of doubting it.”
Cimon looked displeased and continued, “The system revolves as a unit. Troas is always a hundred million miles from each sun, and the suns are always a hundred million miles from one another.”
Novee rubbed his ear and looked dissatisfied. “I know all that. I was listening at the briefing. But why is it a Trojan planet? Why Trojan?”
Cimon’s thin lips compressed for a moment as though holding back a nasty word by force. He said, “We have an arrangement like that in the Solar System. The sun, Jupiter and a group of small asteroids form a stable equilateral triangle. It so happens that the asteroids had been given such names as Hector, Achilles, Ajax and other heroes of the Trojan war, hence—or do I have to finish?”
“Is that all?” said Novee.
“Yes. Are you through bothering me?”
“Oh, boil your head.”
Novee rose to leave the indignant astrophysicist but the door slid open a moment before his hand touched the activator and Boris Vernadsky—geochemist; dark eyebrows, wide mouth, broad face and with an inveterate tendency to polka-dot shirts and magnetic clip-ons in red plastic—stepped in.
He was oblivious to Novee’s flushed face and Cimon’s frozen expression of distaste.
He said, lightly, “Fellow scientists, if you listen very carefully you will probably hear an explosion to beat the Milky Way from up yonder in captain’s quarters.”