Of course, it sounded like a fantasy, and if I had been in Goil's place, I would have thought it so. But Goil had been worrying over the impending loss of his interests, and even the fantastic was something to clutch at for the moment.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
I nodded to the stuff I had tossed on his desk. "Look at those. The chart particularly. I got the course plotted by Artie Jones. I checked the path and timing of both Willy's asteroid and the freighter. Willy's asteroid is due to come out of sub-space in about six hours at this point."—I pointed to an X I had marked on the chart—"And the freighter will be at the same point at the same time."
Goil said nothing, but examined the chart and the computation figures, and finally the tapes. He shook his head a number of times as if he didn't want to believe but did not dare not to. Finally, he looked up at me and said:
"The course and figures seem to check both ways. But I don't believe it. That the rock and the freighter should meet in the same place at the same time would be more than a coincidence. It would be a miracle."
"More so than the 'coincidence' of the freighter headed straight for Mars's only industrial area?" I asked.
Goil thought it over for a while. Then he said, "Yes. More than I can imagine. We have the rock and the freighter, two moving bodies, meeting in space by pure chance. Space is too vast for that sort of thing. It can't happen."
"Mars and the freighter are two moving bodies in space that are going to meet," I pointed out.
"Yes, but the ship was originally headed on a course to Mars. And Mars is much bigger."
"True," I conceded. "But the asteroid is also on an interception course with the freighter. And it is a lot bigger than the freighter."