Harkins leaned contentedly back in the padded control seat and watched while the needles gradually found their final position on dials. A few scattered lights bloomed on the console ahead of him. He grunted once with satisfaction as the thermoneedle steadied at 6,000° C. After that he was silent.
He leaned forward and flipped up two switches, and a faint sound of a woodpecker came into the control room as the spectrograph punched its data on a tape. The end of the tape began to come out of a slot. Harkins tore it off when the spectrograph was finished with it, threaded it on the feeder spool of the ship's calculator, and inserted the free end in the input slot.
The calculator blinked once at him, as if surprised, and spat out a little card with the single word SOL neatly printed in the center.
Harkins whistled softly to himself, happily. I had a true wife but I left her, he whistled. Old song. Old when he first heard it. Had a true....
He wondered vaguely what a "wife" was, but decided it probably didn't matter. Had a true wife but I left her, he whistled.
He was glad to be home.
The direction finder gave him a fix on Earth and he tried to isolate the unimportant star from the others in the same general direction, but he couldn't do it, visually. The ship would do it, though, he wasn't worried about that. He wished he could use the Skipdrive to get a little closer. It would take a long time to get in close on the atomic rockets. Several days, maybe.
Well, he had to do it. The Skipdrive wasn't dependable in mass-space. You couldn't tell what it was going to do when you got it too close to a large mass. He'd have to go in on the chemical.
Mass-space, he thought. Molasses-space, I call it.
Too slow, everything too slow, that was the trouble.