"Bigman knows it. And I tell you right now, we've got to take risks. Earth is underestimating the pirate menace so badly that-"
He interrupted himself as the signal light of the Com-mum-tube flashed on and off in rapid dots of light.
Conway, with an impatient motion of his hand, cut in the signal analyzer, then sat up straight.
He said, "It's on the Council wave length and, by Ceres, it's one of the Council scramblings."
The small visiplate above the Communi-tube was showing a characteristic rapidly shifting pattern of light and dark.
Conway inserted a sliver of metal, which he took from a group of such in his wallet, into a narrow slot in the Communi-tube. The sliver was a crystallite unscrambler, the active portion of the gadget consisting of a particular pattern of tiny crystals of tungsten embedded in an aluminum matrix. It filtered the sub-etheric signal in a specific way. Slowly Conway adjusted the unscrambler, pushing it in deeper and extracting it again until it matched exactly a scrambler, similar in nature but opposite in function, at the other end of the signal.
The moment of complete adjustment was heralded by the sudden sharp focusing of the visiplate.
Lucky half-rose to his feet. "Bigman!" he said. "Where in space are you?"
Bigman's little face was grinning puckishly out at them. "I'm in space all right. A hundred thousand miles off Ceres. I'm in the hermit's ship."
Conway whispered furiously, "Is this another of your tricks? I thought you said he was on Ceres?"
"I thought he was," Lucky said. Then, "What happened, Bigman?"
"You said we had to act quickly, so I fixed things up myself. One of the wise guys in the Control Tower was giving me the business. So I slammed him around a little and took off." He laughed. "Check the guardhouse and see if they're not on the lookout for a guy like me with a complaint of assault and battery against him."
"That wasn't the brightest thing you could have done," said Lucky gravely. "You'll have a hard time convincing the men of the asteroids that you're the type for assault. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but you look a little small for the job."
"I'll knock down a few," Bigman retorted. "They'll believe me. But that's not why I called."
"Well, why did you?"
"How do I get to this guy's asteroid?"
Lucky frowned. "Have you looked in the logbook?"
"Great Galaxy! I've looked everywhere. I've looked under the mattress even. There's no record anywhere of any kind of co-ordinates."
Lucky's look of uneasiness grew. "That's strange. In fact it's worse than strange. Look, Bigman," he spoke rapidly and incisively, "match Ceres' speed. Give me your co-ordinates with respect to Ceres right now and keep them that way, whatever you do, till I call you. You're too close to Ceres now for any pirates to bother you, but if you drift out further, you may be in a bad way. Do you hear me?"
"Check. Got you. Let me calculate my co-ordinates."
Lucky wrote them down and broke connections. He said, "Space, when will I learn not to make assumptions."
Henree said, "Hadn't you better have Bigman come back? It's a foolhardy setup at best and as long as you haven't the co-ordinates, give the whole thing up."
"Give it up?" said Lucky. "Give up the one asteroid we know to be a pirates' base? Do you know of any other? One single other? We've got to find the asteroid. It's our only clue to the inside of this knot."
Conway said, "He's got a point there, Gus. It is a base."
Lucky jiggled a switch on the intercom briskly and waited.
Hansen's voice, sleep-filled but startled, said, "Hello! Hello!"
Lucky said briskly, "This is Lucky Starr, Mr. Hansen. Sorry to disturb you, but I would like to have you come down here to Dr. Conway's room as fast as you can."
The hermit's voice answered after a pause, "Certainly, but I don't know the way."
"The guard at your door will take you. I'll contact him. Can you make it in two minutes?"
"Two and a half anyway," he said, good-humoredly. He sounded more awake.
"Good enough!"
Hansen was as good as his word. Lucky was waiting for him.
Lucky paused for a moment, holding the door open. He said to the guard, "Has there been any trouble at the base earlier this evening? An assault, perhaps?"
The guard looked surprised. "Yes, sir. The man who got hurt refused to press charges, though. Claimed it was a fair fight."
Lucky closed the door. He said, "That follows. Any normal man would hate to get up in a guardhouse and admit a fellow the size of Bigman had given him a banging. I'll call the authorities later and have them put the charge on paper anyway. For the record..,. Mr. Hansen."
"Yes, Mr. Starr?"
"I have a question the answer to which I did not want floating around the intercom system. Tell me, what are the co-ordinates of your home asteroid. Standard and temporal both, of course."
Hansen stared and his china-blue eyes grew round. "Well, you may find this hard to believe, but do you know, I really couldn't tell you."
Chapter 9
The Asteroid That Wasn't
Lucky met his eye steadily. "That is hard to believe, Mr. Hansen. I should think you would know your coordinates as well as a planet dweller would know his home address."
The hermit looked at his toes and said mildly, "I suppose so. It is my home address, really. Yet I don't know it."
Conway said, "If this man is deliberately-"
Lucky broke in. "Now wait. Let's force patience on ourselves if we have to. Mr. Hansen must have some explanation."
They waited for the hermit to speak.
Co-ordinates of the various bodies in the Galaxy were the lifeblood of space travel. They fulfilled the same function that lines of latitude and longitude did on the two-dimensional surface of a planet. However, since space is three dimensional, and since the bodies in it move about in every possible way, the necessary coordinates are more complicated.
Basically there is first a standard zero position. In the case of the Solar System, the Sun was the usual standard. Based on that standard, three numbers are necessary. The first number is the distance of an object or a position in space from the Sun. The second and third numbers are two angular measurements indicating the position of the object with reference to an imaginary line connecting the Sun and the center of the Galaxy. If three sets of such co-ordinates are known for three different times, set well apart, the orbit of a moving body could be calculated and its position, relative to the Sun, known for any given time.
Ships could calculate their own co-ordinates with respect to the Sun or, if it were more convenient, with respect to the nearest large body, whatever it was. On the Lunar Lines, for instance, of which vessels traveled from Earth to the Moon and back, Earth was the customary "zero point." The Sun's own co-ordinates could be calculated with respect to the Galactic Center and the Galactic Prime Meridian, but that was only important in traveling between the stars.
Some of all this might have been passing through the hermit's mind as he sat there with the three Councilmen watching him narrowly. It was hard to tell.
Hansen said suddenly, "Yes, I can explain."
"We're waiting," said Lucky.
"I've never had occasion to use the co-ordinates in fifteen years. I haven't left my asteroid at all for two years and before that any trips I made, maybe one or two a year, were short ones to Ceres or Vesta for supplies of one sort or another. When I did that, I used local coordinates which I always calculated out for the moment. I never worked out a table because I didn't have to.
"I'd only be gone a day or two, three at the most, and my own rock wouldn't drift far in that time. It travels with the stream, a little slower than Ceres or Vesta when it's further from the Sun and a little faster when it's nearer. When I'd head back for the position I calculated, my rock might have drifted ten thousand or even a hundred thousand miles off its original spot, but it was always close enough to pick up with the ship's telescope. After t
hat, I could always adjust my course by eye. I never used the solar standard co-ordinates because I never had to, and there it is."
"What you're saying," said Lucky, "is that you couldn't get back to your rock now. Or did you calculate its local co-ordinates before you left?"
"I never thought to," said the hermit sadly."It's been so long since I left it that I never gave the matter a second's attention. Not until the minute you called me in here."
Dr. Henree said, "Wait. Wait." He had lit up a fresh pipeful of tobacco and was puffing strongly. "I may be wrong, Mr. Hansen, but when you first took over ownership of your asteroid, you must have filed a claim with the Terrestrial Outer World Bureau. Is that right?"