Leaving him properly insulted, Unterzuyder went to the control turret where he cornered Foshag, drew him to the Solar Chart.
Unterzuyder picked up a pencil, made an indentation at random. It was considerably to the east of the Ares' present position.
"Change course immediately. To that point."
Foshag huffed rebelliously. "That won't help us outrun Bailes. The new course will but give him a hypotenuse to travel. He'll run us down quicker."
Unterzuyder's lips turned thinner. Muttering, Foshag sat down to the computations. On the way out of the turret, Unterzuyder slipped a slide-rule out of an instrument case so deftly that nobody noticed.
Another hour's work showed him that the two sets of figures, respectively, indicated X's point of origin and direction of travel. c stood for cosine, of course, s for sine.
X had been, when the map was made, some degrees below the plane of the ecliptic. Its orbit was at a steep slant to that plane.
So what? So the point of origin was located in time 50,000 years ago?
The map was a fake!