Channing looked up at the luminescent spot, sought the calibration spheres, made a casual observation, and forgot about it. To him it was a harmless meteor.
Even the fact that his own velocity was a thousand miles per second, and the object's velocity was the same, coming to them on a one hundred and seventy degree course and due to pass within five thousand miles did not register. Their total velocity of two thousand miles did not register just because of that rarity with which ships pass within detector range, while meteors are encountered often.
Had Channing been thinking about the subject in earnest, he would have known—for it is only man, with all too little time, who uses such velocities. The universe, with eternity in which to work her miracle, seldom moves in velocities greater than forty or fifty miles per second.
Channing forgot it, and as the marker-spheres switched to accommodate the approaching object, he turned to more important things.
In the other ship, Hellion Murdoch frowned. He brightened, then, and depressed the plunger that energized his solar beam and projector. He did not recognize the oncoming object for anything but a meteor, either, and his desire was to find out how his invention worked at top speeds.
Kingman asked: "Another one?"
"Uh-huh," said Murdoch idly. "I want to check my finders."
"But they can't miss."
"No? Look, lawyer, you're not running a job that may be given a stay or a reprieve. The finders run on light velocities. The solar beam runs on the speed of light squared. We'll pass that thing at five thousand miles and at two thousand accumulative miles per second. A microsecond of misalignment, and we're missing, see? I think we're going to be forced to put correction circuits in so that the vector sums and velocities and distances will all come out with a true hit. It will not be like sighting down a searchlight beam at high velocity."
"I see. You'll need compensation?"