"H ... m ... m. That would be nice, all right. Dope enough?"
"Got the direction solid, from my own observations; the velocity's a pretty rough approximation though. But after allowing for my probable error, it figures an ellipse of low eccentricity, between the orbits of Io and Europa. Its period is short—about two days."
"Isn't it wonderful to have a brain?" Brandon addressed the room at large. "The kid's clever. Nobody else would have thought of it, except maybe Westfall. Let's see your figures. Um ... m ... m. According to that, we're within an hour of it, right now." He turned to the pilot and sketched rapidly.
"Get on this line here, please, and decelerate, so that the stuff'll catch up with us, and pass the word to the lookouts. Stevens and I will take the bow plates.
"That's a good idea," he went on to Stevens, as they took their places at main and auxiliary ultra-banks. "Lot of plunder in that ship. Instruments, boats, and equipment worth millions, besides most of the junk of the passengers—clothes, trunks, trinkets, and what-not. You're there, bucko!"
"Thanks, Chief," ... and they fell silent, watching the instruments carefully, and from time to time making computations from the readings of the acceleration and flight meters.
"There she is!" An alarm bell had finally sounded, the ultra-lights had flared out into space, and upon both screens there shone out images of the closely clustered wreckage of the Arcturus. But both men were more interested just then in the mathematics of the recovery than in the vessel itself.
"Missed it eight minutes of time and eleven divisions on the scale," reported Stevens. "Not so good."
"Not so bad either—I've seen worse computation." Thus lightly was dismissed a mathematical feat which, a few years earlier, before the days of I-P computers, would have been deemed worthy of publication in "The Philosophical Magazine."
Director Newton was called in, and it was decided that the many small fragments of the vessel were not worth saving; that its upper half was all that they should attempt to tow the enormous distance back to Tellus. The pace of the Sirius was adjusted to that of the floating masses, and tractor beams were clamped upon the undamaged portion of the derelict, and upon the two slices from the nose of the craft. A couple of the larger fragments of wreckage were also taken, to furnish metal for the repairs which would be necessary. Acceleration was brought slowly up to normal, and the battle-scarred cruiser of the void, with her heavy burden of inert metal, resumed her interrupted voyage toward Europa; the satellite upon which the passengers and crew of the ill-fated Arcturus had been so long immured. On she bored through the ether, detector screens full out and greenly scintillant Vorkulian wall-screens outlining her football shape in weird and ghastly light; unafraid now of any possible surviving space-craft of the hexans.