Checkpoint Lambda by Murray Leinster

Author:Murray Leinster [Leinster, Murray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473227262
Publisher: Gateway / Orion
Published: 2019-08-13T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Golconda Ship broke out to normal space again. Once more it was light-years from the nearest trace of solidity. The pilot of the ship—the astrogator—was highly expert. It was not too difficult to take a spacecraft from one planet to another in a solar system. There were orbital motions and meteor streams and sometimes solar flares to complicate the problem, but it wasn’t really difficult. It was even simpler to take a ship from one solar system to another, with all the quantities of distance and of speed worked out—provided the distance wasn’t too great. At six or seven light-years the pilot would aim accurately and go into overdrive for a specific period, with an allowance for the fact that the star he was aiming for had been moving for six or seven years since it emitted the light he could see. Breakout was usually within a light-week and often much closer than that. The pilot would drive for the nearby sun in one or more short overdrive jumps.

Then he would recognize the planetary system and know what to look for. Between nearby systems, astrogation was no great matter.

But the Golconda Ship leaped light-centuries and not for the neighborhood of suns. In such cases, at breakout the pilot wouldn’t know exactly where he was. The identity of nearby stars couldn’t be easily established. Unless there was an ultra-short-period Cepheid close by, he could spend days trying to locate himself while errors mounted up.

So ships normally used space lanes, duly surveyed and the stars along it fully described, with checkpoints and other aids to astrogation. But the Golconda Ship could make no use of them without revealing at least approximately where it had come from and roughly where it was bound. At this last breakout for observation it was where no other ships ever appeared at all, and it went through a long, complicated procedure to locate itself. Then it refined those results until it knew exactly where it was. But nobody else in the galaxy did. Then, suddenly, the Golconda Ship vanished.

It was still in the blackness and isolation of overdrive when Scott moved toward a corner of Lambda’s control room. An inconspicuous door there opened on a narrow stairway that led down to the next level and opened in the kitchen of the hotel restaurant. When Lambda was a liner, this stair was used to carry coffee and such items to the astrogators, without marching it through the hotel lobby. Having studied its plans, Scott knew even such details about the lobby.

He led Janet down. As they reached the bottom of the stair, she said, “You haven’t any real hope, have you?”

“I don’t know,” said Scott. “I’ve been too busy getting things lined up. I haven’t had time either to hope or despair.”

“I haven’t had any hope from the beginning,” said Janet quietly. “From the first moment I’ve known there wasn’t the faintest chance that I wouldn’t be—murdered. But one can only stay terrified so long. The emotion wears out.

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