Channing stopped talking. "Proceed," he said. "In what way has my perspective been warped?"
"You talk like Burbank," said Thomas, mentioning a sore spot of some months past. "You think a mass detector would work at this distance? Nuts, fellow. It might, if there were nothing else in the place to interfere. But you want to shoot out near Mars. Mars is on the other side of the Sun—and Evening Star to anyone on Terra. You want us to shoot a slap-happy beam like a mass detector out past Sol; and then a hundred and forty million miles beyond in the faint hope that you can triangulate upon a little mite of matter; a stinking six hundred-odd feet of aluminum hull mostly filled with air and some machinery and so on. Brother, what do you think all the rest of the planets will do to your piddling little beam? Retract, or perhaps abrogate the law of universal gravitation?"
"Crushed," said Franks with a sorry attempt at a smile.
"Phew!" agreed Channing. "Maybe I should know more about mass detectors."
"Forget it," said Thomas. "The only thing that mass detectors are any good for is to conjure up beautiful bubble dreams, which anyone who knows about 'em can break with the cold point of icy logic."
"What would you do?" asked Channing.
"Darned if I know. We might flash 'em with a big mirror—if we had a big mirror and they weren't heading into the Sun."
"Let's see," said Franks, making tabulations on the tablecloth. "They're a couple of hundred million miles away. In order that your mirror present a recognizable disk, it should be about twice the diameter of Venus as seen from Terra. That's eight thousand miles in—at the least visibility—say, eighty million or a thousand-to-one ratio. The Empress of Kolain is heading at us from some two hundred million miles, so at a thousand-to-one ratio our mirror would have to be twenty thousand miles across. Some mirror!"
Don tipped Walt's beer over the edge of the table, and while the other man was busy mopping up and muttering unprintables, Don said to Thomas: "This is serious and it isn't. Nobody's going to lose their skin if we don't, but a problem has been put to us and we're going to crack it if we have to skin our teeth to do it."
"You can't calculate their position?"