"Oh," said Nora, but her tone indicated a lack of comprehension.
Paul smiled. "One second of error at one light-velocity equals a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles of error. One second of error at a hundred times the velocity of light equals eighteen millions of miles error. Not much as cosmic distance goes, but a long way to walk."
Nora understood that, and said so.
Grayson's data had been handed to him by Haedaecker. But apparently the long-range calculations that had been temporarily halted were still halted, for the operator was taking this opportunity of feeding some future flight-constant information to the big machine.
It was not a complex calculation as some computations may go, but there were a myriad of factors. Terran latitude and longitude, the instant of take-off as applied to the day and the year, an averaging of previous dispersion-factors noted from previous trips, velocities, vector angles, momentum, and others, all obtained from tables and entered in the machine before the start lever was pulled. The machine mulled the information over, tossed electrons back and forth, chewed and digested a ream of binary digits, and handed forth a strip of paper printed with an entire set of coordinates in decimal angles.
Paul showed Nora his folder of data. "The rest," he said, "is up to me."
He led Nora from the computation room, intending to hit the dining room for coffee. Half-way across the lobby of the administration building he was hailed by the autocall. He went to the telephone.
It was Stacey.
"I've a couple of things to let you think over," said Stacey.
"So?"