The screen convulsed again; when it cleared the third planet was directly in the center; its small moon, looking almost as large, was a little above and to the right, sunlit on one side and planetlit on the other. Kirbey locked the red handle, gathered up his tobacco and lighter and things from the ledge, and pulled down the cover of the instrument-console, locking it.
"All yours, Sharll," he told Renner.
"Eight hours to atmosphere," Renner said. "That's if we don't have to waste a lot of time shooting up Junior, there."
Vann Larch was looking at the moon in the six hundred power screen.
"I don't see anything to shoot. Five hundred miles; one planetbuster, or four or five thermonuclears," he said.
It wasn't right, Trask thought indignantly. Minutes ago, Tanith had been six and a half billion miles away. Seconds ago, fifty-odd million. And now, a quarter of a million, and looking close enough to touch in the screen, it would take them eight hours to reach it. Why, on hyperdrive you could go forty-eight trillion miles in that time.
Well, it took a man just as long to walk across a room today as it had taken Pharaoh the First, or Homo Sap.
In the telescopic screen Tanith looked like any picture of any Terra-type planet from space, with cloud-blurred contours of seas and continents and a vague mottling of gray and brown and green, topped at the pole by an icecap. None of the surface features, not even the major mountain ranges or rivers, were yet distinguishable, but Harkaman and Sharll Renner and Alvyn Karffard and the other old hands seemed to recognize it. Karffard was talking by phone to Paul Koreff, the signals-and-detection officer, who could detect nothing from the moon and nothing that was getting through the Van Allen belt from the planet.
Maybe they'd guessed wrong, at that. Maybe Dunnan hadn't gone to Tanith at all.