ARDEN
"She will, too," grinned Don. "Well, I'd like to toss her one back, but she's got me there. I'll just fortify myself at the bar and think up a few choice ones for when we hit Mojave."
"Some day you'll be able to answer those," promised the steward. "Mind telling me why it's so tough?"
"Not at all," smiled Channing. "The problem is about the same as encountered by the old-time cowboy. It's a lot easier to hit a man on a moving horse from a nice, solid rock than it is to hit a man on a nice, solid rock from a moving horse. Venus Equilateral is quite solid as things go. But a spaceship's course is fierce. We're wobbling a few milliseconds here and a few there, and by the time you use that arc to swing a line of a hundred million miles, you're squirting quite a bit of sky. We're tinkering with it right now, but so far we have come up with nothing. Ah, well, the human race got along without electric lights for a few million years, we can afford to tinker with an idea for a few months. Nobody is losing lives or sleep because we can't talk with the boys back home."
"We've been hopping from planet to planet for quite a number of years, too," said the steward. "Quite a lot of them went by before it was even possible to contact a ship in space."
"And that was done because of an emergency. Probably this other thing will go on until we hit an emergency; then we shall prove that old statement about a loaf of bread being the maternal parent of a locomotive." Channing lit a cigarette and puffed deeply. "Where do we stand?"
"Thirty hours out," answered the steward. "About ready for turnover. I imagine that the power engineer's gang is changing cathodes about now."
"It's a long drag," said Channing. He addressed himself to his glass and began to think of a suitable answer for his wife's latest thrust.
Bill Hadley, of the power engineer's gang, spoke to the pilot's greenhouse below the ship. "Hadley to the pilot room; cathodes 1 and 3 ready."
"Pilot Greenland to Engineer Hadley: Power fade-over from even to odd now under way. Tubes 2 and 4 now dead; load on 1 and 3. You may enter 2 and 4."