That damned formula again! “But what does it mean, Mr. Whitker? What did he say it meant?” Ross softly urged.
The old man looked surprised. “Genes?” he asked himself hazily. “Generations? I don’t remember. But you go to Earth, young man. Flarney said they’d know, and know what to do about it, too, which is more than he did. His very words, young man!”
Ross didn’t dare stay longer. Furthermore he suspected that the old man’s attention span had been exhausted. He started from the room with a muttered thanks, and was stopped at the door by Whitker’s hand on his shoulder.
“You’re a good boy,” Whitker squeaked. “Here.”
Ross found himself walking down the corridor with an enormous wad of cellosponge in his hand.
The bunks were hard, but that didn’t matter. Dormitories were the outermost layer of the hulk, pseudogravity varies inversely as the fourth power of the distance, and the field generator was conventionally located near “Minerva’s” center. When your relative weight is one-quarter normal you can sleep deliciously on a gravel driveway. This was the dormitory’s only attractive feature. Otherwise it was too many steel slabs, tiered and spotted too close, too many unwashed males, too much weary snoring. The only things in short supply were headroom and air.
Not everybody slept. Insomniacs turned and grunted; those who had given up the struggle talked from bunk to bunk in considerately low tones.
Bernie muttered from a third-tier bunk facing Ross’s: “I wonder if she made it.”
Ross knew what he meant. “Unlikeliest thing in the world,” he said. “But I think she went fast and never knew what hit her.” He thought of the formula and “They’d know on Earth—and know what to do about it too.” Earth the enigma, from which all planetary peoples were supposed to be derived. Earth—the dot on the traditional master charts, Earth—from which and to which no longliners ever seemed to travel. Haarland had told him no F-T-L ship had in recent centuries ever reported again after setting out for Earth. Another world sunk in barbarism? But Flarney had said—no; that was not data. That was the confused recollections of a very old man, possibly based on the confused recollections of another very old man. Perhaps it had got mixed up with the semilegendary origin story.
Poor sweet Helena! He hoped it had happened fast, that she had been thinking of some pleasant prospect on Halsey’s Planet. In her naïve way she’d think it just around the corner, a mere matter of following instructions....