“A planet?” I asked, not particularly brilliantly. I stared at him, hoping that he’d been drinking or something. Not because I had any objections to his seeing a planet sober but because if Johnny ever unbent to the stage of taking a few drinks, the alky would probably dissolve some of the starch out of his backbone. Then I’d have someone to swap stories with. It gets lonesome traveling through space with only two women and a Polytech grad who follows all the rules.
“A planet, sir. An object of planetary dimensions, I should say. Diameter about three thousand miles, distance two million, course apparently an orbit about the star Sirius A.”
“Johnny,” I said, “we’re inside the orbit of Thor, which is Sirius I, which means it’s the first planet of Sirius, and how can there be a planet inside of that? You wouldn’t be kidding me, Johnny?”
“You may inspect the viewplate, sir, and check my calculations,” he replied stiffly.
I got up and went into the pilot’s compartment. There was a disk in the center of the forward viewplate, all right. Checking his calculations was something else again. My mathematics end at checking coins out of coin machines. But I was willing to take his word for the calculations. “Johnny,” I almost shouted, “we’ve discovered a new planet! Ain’t that something?”
“Yes, sir,” he commented, in his usual matter-of-fact voice.
It was something, but not too much. I mean, the Sirius system hasn’t been colonized long and it wasn’t too surprising that a little three-thousand-mile planet hadn’t been noticed yet. Especially as (although this wasn’t known then) its orbit is very eccentric.
There hadn’t been room for Ma and Ellen to follow us into the pilot’s compartment, but they stood looking in, and I moved to one side so they could see the disk in the viewplate.
“How soon do we get there, Johnny?” Ma wanted to know.
“Our point of nearest approach on this course will be within two hours, Mrs. Wherry,” he replied. ” We come within half a million miles of it.”