“I don’t know. It was over my head like a lunar dome. But it—whatever it was—was exactly what the doctor ordered. I can handle all those extra barrels now like van Buskirk handles a space-axe. How about you?”
“Me, too—I think.” She hugged his arm. “It shocked me speechless for a minute, but it’s all settling into place fast. . . . But that message? They could get it from your mind that you expected that fine-tooth pretty soon, but how could they know it’s coming in right now? We don’t—in fact, we know it can’t get here for a good ten minutes yet.”
“I wish I knew. I’d like to think they were bluffing, but I know they weren’t.”
“Hi Storm and Joan!” Philip Strong’s face appeared upon a screen, his voice came from a speaker. “The Survey ship has just reported. Technical dope is still coming in. Communications is buzzing you a tape of the whole thing, but to save time I thought I’d call you and give you the gist. To make it short and unsweet, there’s nothing there.”
“Nothing there!”
“Nothing for you. They gave it the works, and all there is to that system, Cahuita, they call it, is one red dwarf with one red microdwarf circling it planetwise.”
“Huh?” Cloud demanded. “Come again, chief.”
“How could a micro-sun like that exist?” Strong laughed. “That had me bothered, too, but they’ve got a lot of cosmological double-talk to cover it. It’s terrifically radioactive, they say. And even so, it’s temporary. In the cosmological sense, that is; a hundred million years or so either way don’t matter.”
“No solid planets at all? Not even one?”
“Not one. Nothing really liquid, even. Incandescent, very highly radioactive gas. Nothing solid bigger than your thumb within twelve parsecs.”