“Why should it?”
“Well, doesn’t it?” Long insisted.
Rioz and Swenson stared at it thoughtfully.
“It does look bigger,” said Swenson.
“You’re just putting the notion into our minds,” Rioz argued. “If it were getting bigger, it would be coming closer.”
“What’s impossible about that?”
“These things are on stable orbits.”
“They were when we came here,” said Long. “There, did you feel that?”
The ground had trembled again.
Long said, “We’ve been blasting this thing for a week now. First, twenty-five ships landed on it, which changed its momentum right there. Not much, of course. Then we’ve been melting parts of it away and our ships have been blasting in and out of it—all at one end, too. In a week, we may have changed its orbit just a bit. The two fragments, this one and the Shadow, might be converging.”