“Especially not me.” The doctor concentrated on his driving. Presently: “If I take you to the rendezvous, can you find your ship from there?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Ross confidently. “And Doc—welcome to our party.”
Space had never looked better.
They hung half a million miles off Jones, and Ross fumbled irritatedly with the Wesley panel while the other three stood around and made helpful suggestions. He set up the integrals for Earth just as he had set them up once before; the plot came out the same. He transferred the computations to the controls and checked it against the record in the log. The same. The ship should have gone straight as a five-dimensional geodesic arrow to the planet Earth.
Instead, he found by cross-checking the star atlas, it had gone in almost the other direction entirely, to the planet of Jones.
He threw his pencil across the room and swore. “I don’t get it,” he complained.
“It’s probably broken, Ross,” Helena told him seriously. “You know how machines are. They’re always doing something funny just when you least expect it.”
Ross bit down hard on his answer to that. Bernie contributed his morsel, and even Dr. Sam Jones, whose race had lost even the memory of spaceflight, had a suggestion. Ross swore at them all, then took time to swear at the board, at the starship, at Haarland, at Wesley, and most of all at himself.
Helena turned her back pointedly. She said to Bernie, “The way Ross acts sometimes you’d honestly think he was the only one who’d ever run this thing. Why, my goodness, I know you can’t rely on that silly board! Didn’t I have just exactly the same experience with it myself?”