“Ingenious,” muttered Kimber looking over the First Scientist’s shoulder. “Could be a code.”
“Yes,” Tas was going to the door. “I must study it. And look upon the other notes again. I must—”
With that he was gone. Dard sighed.
“It probably doesn’t mean a thing,” he said wearily. “But what should it be?”
“The formula for the ’cold sleep,’ ” Kimber told him.
“Cold sleep?”
“We go to sleep, hibernate, during that trip—or else the ship comes to its port manned by dust! Even with all the improvements they have given her the new drive—everything—our baby isn’t going to make the big jump in one man’s lifetime, or in a number of lifetimes!” Kimber paced back and forth as he talked, turning square corners at either end of the room. “In fact, we didn’t have a chance—we’d begun thinking of trying to make a stand on Mars—before one of our men accidentally discovered Lars Nordis was alive. Before the purge he’d published one paper concerning his research on the circulatory system of bats—studying the drop in their body temperature during their winter sleep. Don’t ask me about it, I’m only a pilot—astrogator, not a Big Brain! But he was on the track of something Kordov believed might be done—the freezing of a human being so that he can remain alive but in sleep indefinitely. And since we contacted him, Lars has continued to feed us data bit by bit.”
“But why?” Why, if Lars bad been working with this group so closely, hadn’t he wanted to join them? Why had they had to live in the farmhouse on a starvation level, under constant fear of a roundup?
“Why didn’t he come here?” It was as if Kimber bad picked that out of Dard’s mind. “He said he wasn’t sure he could make the trip-crippled as he was. He didn’t want to try it until the last possible moment when it wouldn’t matter if he were sighted trying—or traced here. He believed that he was under constant surveillance by some enemy and that the minute he, or any of you, made a move out of the ordinary, that enemy would bring in the Peacemen, perhaps before he had the answer to our problem. So you had to live on a very narrow edge of safety.”
“Very narrow,” Dard agreed. There was logic in what Kimber said. If Folley had been spying on them, and he must have or else he would not have appeared in the barn, he would have suspected something if any of them had not shown around the house as usual. Lars could never have made the journey they had just taken. Yes, he could see why his brother had waited until it was too late for him.