Then Guy cut the barrier and pointed the top of the Loki north; at ninety degrees from his line of flight and drove it for thirty minutes at a bone-tingling 10-Gs. Then he set the barrier again and coasted.
He'd been loafing along the road to Pluto at 1-G. He was about halfway there, and it had taken him slightly less than ten days, twenty-four hours each, to achieve his present initial velocity, Plutowards, of just a trace over five thousand miles per second. His action at driving the ship northward had changed his course only slightly. It had given him one hundred and ten miles per second velocity northward. His course, then, differed from the original course by the angle whose tangent is equal to one hundred ten divided by five thousand, or roughly one over fifty.
In decimals, this becomes point zero two. It is one degree, eight minutes, and forty-four plus seconds.
Not much, but enough to throw Guy quite a bit out of place by the time he continued to coast toward Pluto. Minute angles add up when they are projected for half the distance from Sol to Pluto, a matter of one billion, eight hundred fifty million miles. That plus the fact that he should start decelerating at 1-G to make Pluto and his calculated course constants come out even.
Then there came a long period of nothing to do.
But Guy found things to do. He went to work on the detector. He increased its gain, and in doing so sacrificed much of its selectivity and directivity. Targets at one million miles, formerly at extreme range, would no longer be pinpoints in the celestial sphere, but shapeless masses but one third the distance out from the center of the detector sphere. The angles of confusion would be greater, too, and the noise level went up to almost prohibitive quantities. Flecks of noise-projected light filled the globe with a constantly swirling, continually changing pattern that reminded Guy of the Brownian Movement viewed in three dimensions.
Calibration of the souped-up detector range was based on estimation since no accurate measure of distances was available to him. Guy pessimistically estimated the range at three million miles and hoped it good enough.
At least, no ships were within that range.
And since the barrier, when first established, had broken the far-flung contact maintained by the driver-detectors on Terra, Guy was safe until they could send out ships to intercept him.
He cursed the cardex files in all Patrol ships, and wondered whether he could change the Loki sufficiently to make it appear different to the sorting machines and the characteristic detectors. The detector impulses were based on the size, the characteristic radiation of the drivers, the mass, and the metal of the hull. Those four characteristics were individual and while some duplications occurred, sufficient evidence remained to pin the cardex-information down to a particular ship. Especially when this particular ship was being sought and others of the same characteristic would be catalogued as to course, and position.