Under the beam setting controls was a small drawer which also contained two sets of numbers — again, spatial coordinates; but this time Ken froze to attention as he realized that one set at least did not refer to planets — they contained no cyclic term. The set was short, consisting of six groups of numbers containing from six to ten digits each; but he recognized them. The first identified by spectrum a beacon star; the next three were direction cosines, giving the three-dimensional bearing to another sun; the fifth gave a distance. Normally he might not have recognized or remembered the lengthy figures; but those were the coordinates of the blazing A-class sun which warmed Sarr, his home planet. The final number was another range; and beyond question it represented the distance from the present point of observation to the listed star. Ken knew enough of the standard navigational notations to be sure of that.
The other set of numbers, then, must give the direction of the same sun relative to some local set of coordinates; and not only was he ignorant of the coordinates, but the numbers were too long to remember. To copy them would be suicide, if anything more than commercial secrecy were involved. For long minutes Sallman Ken stood frozen in thought; then, abruptly, he slipped the sheet back into the drawer, closed the latter, and as quickly as was compatible with caution left the observatory. Since the information was there, it would not do for anyone to get the idea he had been there for any great length of time. It would be better if no one knew he had been there at all, but he had been seen on the way up the ramp. He proceeded to get back to his own quarters and assume an attitude of repose, though his mind still raced furiously.
He knew his distance from home. Evidently the twenty-two days of the journey to this system had not been spent in straight-line flight; the distance was only two hundred twelve parsecs. Score one for Rade; that would be an expensive business precaution, but a normal criminal one.
The direction home from this system he did not know. It did not matter too much anyway; what the Narcotics Bureau would want would be the opposite direction, on Galactic coordinates, and there would be no mathematical connection between the two except a purely arbitrary formula which would be harder to memorize than the direction itself.
Of course, the beacon listed in the stellar coordinates was probably visible from here; but could he recognize it with any certainty without instruments? The instruments were available, of course, but it might not be wise to be caught using them. No, orientation was definitely the last job to be accomplished in his present location. At any rate, one fact had been learned and one point of probability had been added to the Rade theory. Sallman Ken decided that made a good day’s work, and allowed himself to relax on the strength of it.
6
Nearly three of Sarr’s thirteen-hour days passed uneventfully before the relay station circling Earth picked up the approaching torpedoes. As Feth Allmer had predicted — and Laj Drai had confirmed, after checking with his tables — the signals from the planted homing unit were coming from the dark side of the planet. Drai phoned down from the observatory to the shop, where Ken and Allmer were engaged in decelerating their missile.
“You may as well drop straight down as soon as you swing around to the dark side,” he said. “You will pick up the beacon if you spiral in, keeping between forty and fifty-five degrees above the plane of the planet’s orbit, measured from the planet’s center. The beam can be picked up by your torpedo more than forty diameters out, so you can’t possibly miss it. You’d better ride the beam down automatically until you’re into atmosphere, then go manual and move off a couple of miles if you plan to go all the way to the ground. If the natives are camping near the beam transmitter, it would be a pity to touch off your chemicals right in their midst.”
“True enough,” Ken replied. “Feth is swinging around into the shadow now, still about five diameters out. I wish there were a vision transmitter in that machine. Some time I’m going down close enough to use a telescope, unless someone builds a TV that will stand winter weather.”
“You’ll get worse than frostbite,” Drai responded sincerely. “The time you were really looking at that world, you didn’t seem quite so anxious to get close to it.”