“That’s all I know. Read it some place a long time ago. Can I go back to sleep now?”
“Go back to sleep,” said Banner.
They spent the next three hours maneuvering carefully around the asteroid. They took six thousand feet of movies and stared at the projections for another three hours. One thousand seven hundred and thirty silvery needles flashed reflected starlight into astonished, wild eyes.
“At least,” whispered Banner, “there’s nobody there.”
“A lot of good that does us. They’ll be back from their home planet in a few weeks, just as soon as the breeding season is over. Why should they leave anybody here? There’s not a map in the galaxy that indicates the position of this piece of rock. And we haven’t any weapons.”
“I don’t suppose the computer—”
“You can’t compute an orbit without at least one more reference point. Besides, we’re four weeks from any kind of fleet contact.”
“Great. In other words, they’ll be back here, ready to roll before we can even tell anybody that we don’t know how to find it again.”
“Right. And since there’s not any room left to park another ship of that size, it’s a pretty safe assumption that they are ready to roll.”
“Armageddon,” muttered Harcraft.