He sat down in the hydraulic chair and buckled himself in tightly. Mark did likewise. (Sheffield would have liked to help, but that would have been injudicious.) He looked at his watch. They must be spiraling down even now.
Under his disappointment, Sheffield felt a stronger disturbance. Mark Annuncio had acted wrongly in following up his own hunch that the captain and everybody else had been lying. Mnemonics had a tendency to believe that because their store of facts was great, it was complete. This, obviously, is a prime error. It is therefore necessary—thus spake Karaganda—for them to present their correlations to properly constituted authority and never to act upon it themselves.
Well, how significant was this error of Mark’s. He was the first Mnemonic to be taken away from Service headquarters; the first to be separated from all of his kind; the first to be isolated among noncompos. What did that do to him? What would it continue to do to him? Would it be bad? If so, how to stop it?
To all of which questions, Dr. Oswald Mayer Sheffield knew no answer.
The men at the controls were the lucky ones. They and, of course, Cimon who, as astrophysicist and director of the expedition, joined them by special dispensation. The others of the crew had their separate duties, while the remaining scientific personnel preferred the relative comfort of their hydraulic seats during the spiral around and down to Junior.
It was while Junior was still far enough away to be seen as a whole that the scene was at its grandest.
North and south, a third of the way to the equator, lay the ice caps, still at the start of their millennial retreat. Since the Triple G was spiraling on a north-south great circle—deliberately chosen for the sake of viewing the polar regions, as Cimon, at the cost of less than maximum safety, insisted—each cap in turn was laid out below them.
Each burnt equally with sunlight, the consequence of Junior’s un tilted axis. And each cap was in sectors, cut like a pie with a rainbowed knife.
The sunward third of each was illuminated by both suns simultaneously into a brilliant white that slowly yellowed westward, and as slowly greened eastward. To the east of the white sector lay another, half as wide, which was reached by the light of Lagrange I only, and the snow there blazed a response of sapphire beauty. To the west, another half-sector, exposed to Lagrange II alone, shone in the warm orange-red of an Earthly sunset. The three colors graded into one another band-wise, and the similarity to a rainbow was increased thereby.
The final third was dark in contrast, but if one looked carefully enough, it, too, was in parts—unequal parts. The smaller portion was black indeed, but the larger portion had a faint milkiness about it.