“Go on. No such ship with an Earth registry. I knew that before I got on. I’ve been waiting to ask you.”
The captain blinked. He said, “Official name is George G. Grundy. Triple G is what everyone calls it.”
Mark laughed. “All right, then. And after I see the log book, I want to talk to the crew. I have the right. You ask Dr. Sheffield.”
“The crew too, eh?” the captain seethed. “Let’s talk to Dr. Sheffield, and then let’s keep you in quarters till we land. Sprout!”
He snatched at the intercom box.
The scientific complement of the Triple G were few in number for the job they had to do, and, as individuals, young. Not as young as Mark Annuncio, perhaps, who was in a class by himself, but even the oldest of them, Emmanuel George Cimon—astrophysicist—was not quite thirty-nine. And with his dark, unthinned hair and large, brilliant eyes, he looked still younger. To be sure, the optic brilliance was partly due to the wearing of contact lenses.
Cimon, who was perhaps overconscious of his relative age, and of the fact that he was the titular head of the expedition—a fact most of the others were inclined to ignore—usually affected an undramatic view of the mission. He ran the dotted tape through his fingers, then let it snake silently back into its spool.
“Run of the mill,” he sighed, seating himself in the softest chair in the small passenger’s lounge. “Nothing.”
He looked at the latest color photographs of the Lagrange binary and was impervious to their beauty. Lagrange I, smaller and hotter than Earth’s own sun, was a brilliant green-blue, with a pearly green-yellow corona surrounding it like the gold setting of an emerald. It appeared to be the size of a lentil or of a ball bearing out of a Lenser-ratchet. A short distance away—as distances go on a photograph—was Lagrange II. It appeared twice the size of Lagrange I, due to its position in space. (Actually, it was only four-fifths the diameter of Lagrange I, half its volume and two-thirds its mass.) Its orange-red, toward which the film was less sensitive, comparatively, than was the human retina, seemed dimmer than ever against the glory of its sister sun.
Surrounding both, undrowned by the near-by suns, as the result of the differentially-polarized lens specifically used for the purpose, was the unbelievable brilliance of the Hercules cluster. It was diamond dust, scattered thickly, yellow, white, blue, and red.