"You will be more than amply repaid," said Thompson. "And one research we will make to provide the Galaxy with adequate protection against visiting Terrans, and protection for those visiting the Solar Sector. That, too, is a promise."
Within an hour, Thompson was on his way back to Terra. A year, he had. And four months would be gone ere he landed on Terra, and another long period of time would pass before he could get to Sscantoo. All in all, Billy felt that he had too little time.
Yet he smiled. For even in defeat, Terra would not lose her integrity. And how bad is slavery when the master prefixes his request with "Please"?
XVIII.
Billy Thompson fretted for four long months in the confines of the returning spacecraft. He was not idle. Daily he spent his time in the communications room, talking and conferring with his laboratory staff on Terra.
The order freeing the Solar Sector of its displacement of peoples took about ten days to clear, and another ten days to settle. It was swift; no Loard-vogh wanted to remain in that section of the Galaxy anyway. And though most of the worlds were cleaning up the shambles of the bitter struggle, the laboratory staff and research organizations went to work with a will. Let the others clean up the mess; it was their job to make the cleaning worth while by coming up with the answer to Billy's problem.
For only the right answer would leave Terrans around to inhabit a cleaned-up Terra.
So Billy fretted because he had to confer by voice alone. It did not matter that the secondary radiation from his subtransmitter, exciting bands in the electromagnetic spectrum near forty megacycles, would not reach Sol for hundreds of years, and that relative to his ship, the beams were hurled out backwards instead of coming forward toward Sol. But the four months were not entirely wasted. By the time that Billy landed, conferred with Kennebec on the future, discussed the major problem with a few Terran scientists, and then took off and finally arrived at the stellar laboratory on VanMaanen's Star's only, God-forsaken planet, they knew several hundred things that would not work.
Hendricks, the chief of staff, smiled wearily as Billy entered the safety dome and flipped back his space helmet.