“Where’s that?”
“Where? You mean, where?” Ross scratched his head. “Well, let’s see. Frankly, Helena, your planet was quite a disappointment to me. I had hoped——Well, no matter. I suppose the best thing to do is to look up the next planet on the list.”
“What list?”
Ross hesitated, then shrugged and plunged into the explanation. All about the longliners and the message and faster-than-light travel and the Wesley Families—and none of it, while he was talking, seemed convincing at all. But perhaps Helena was less critical; or perhaps Helena simply did not care. She listened attentively and made no comment. She only said, at the end, “What’s the name of the next planet?”
He consulted the master charts. Haarland’s listing showed a place called Azor, conveniently near at hand in the strange geodesics of the Wesley Effect, where the far galaxies might be near at hand in the warped space-lines, and the void just beyond the viewplates be infinitely distant. The F-T-L family of Azor was named Cavallo; when last heard from, they had been builders of machine tools.
Ross told Helena about it. She shrugged and watched curiously as he began to set up the F-T-L problem on the huge board.
..... 7
THEY were well within detection range of Azor’s radar, if any, and yet there had been no beeping signal that the planet’s GCA had taken over and would pilot them down. Another blank? He studied the surface of the world under his highest magnification and saw no signs that it had been devastated by war. There were cities—intact, as far as he could tell, but not very attractive. The design ran to huge, gloomy piles that mounted toward central towers.
Azor was a big world which showed not much water and a great deal of black rock. It was the fifth of its system and reportedly had colonized its four adjacent neighbors and their moons.
His own search radar pinged. The signal was followed at once by a guarded voice from his ship-to-ship communicator: “What ship are you? Do you receive me? The band is 798.44.”