"Sure. Written in Myporian. A very difficult language to translate. Especially when you're barricaded in the head."
I almost asked him why he had been barricaded in the bathroom of the Delta Crucis, but I figured it was safer to let him tell me in his own way, in his own time.
"Well," he said, "I got into parking orbit around Mypore without any trouble. The plastic film kept the water in the hydroponic tanks without any trouble, even in a no-gravity condition. And by the time I had lined up for Gloryanna and Jumped, I figured, like you said, that the trip would be a cakewalk.
"Do you remember how the plants always keep their leaves facing the sun? They twist on their stems all day, and then they go on twisting them all night, still pointing at the underground sun, so that they're aimed right at sunrise. So the stem looks like a corkscrew?"
I nodded. "Sure. That's why they can't stand an axial tilt. They 'remember' the rate and direction of movement, and keep it up during the night time. So what? We had that problem all figured out."
"You think so? That solution was one of yours, too, wasn't it?" He gazed moodily at his beaker of rhial. "I must admit it sounded good to me, too. In Limbo, moving at multiple light-speeds, the whole Universe, of course, turns into a bright glowing spot in our direction of motion, with everything else dark. So I lined up the Delta Crucis perpendicular to her direction of motion, put a once-every-twenty-one hour spin on her to match the rotation rates of Mypore II and Gloryanna III, and uncovered the view ports to let in the light. It gradually brightened until 'noon time', with the ports pointing straight at the light source, and then dimmed until we had ten and one-half hours of darkness.
"Of course, it didn't work."
"For Heaven's sake, why not?"
"For Heaven's sake why should it? With no gravity for reference, how were the plants supposed to know that the 'sun' was supposed to be moving?"