Second Foundation - Isaac Asimov [12]
The chief choked down his near-automatic salute, turned sharply, and left.
The ship bounded through the Galaxy, its path a wide-spaced dotted line through the stars. The dots referred to were the scant stretches of ten to sixty light-seconds spent in normal space and between them stretched gaps of many parsecs that represented the Jumps through hyperspace.
Bail Channis sat at the control panel of the Lens and felt again the involuntary surge of near-worship at the contemplation of it. He was not a Foundation man and the interplay of forces at the twist of a knob or the breaking of a contact was not second nature to him.
Not that the Lens ought quite to bore even a Foundation man. Within its unbelievably compact body were enough electronic circuits to pinpoint accurately a hundred million separate stars in exact relationship to each other. And as if that were not a feat in itself, it was further capable of translating any given portion of the Galactic Field along any of the three spatial axes or of rotating any portion of the Field about a center.
It was because of that, that the Lens had performed a near-revolution in interstellar travel. In the younger days of interstellar travel, the calculation of each Jump through hyperspace meant any amount of work from a day to a week—and the larger portion of such work was the more or less precise calculation of “Ship’s Position” on the Galactic scale of reference. Essentially that meant the accurate observation of at least three widely-spaced stars, the positions of which, with reference to the arbitrary Galactic triple-zero, were known.
And it is the word “known,” that is the catch. To any who know the star field well from one certain reference point, stars are as individual as people. Jump ten parsecs, however, and not even your own sun is recognizable. It may not even be visible.
The answer was, of course, spectroscopic analysis. For centuries, the main object of interstellar engineering was the analysis of the “light signature” of more and more stars in greater and greater detail. With this, and the growing precision of the Jump itself, standard routes of travel through the Galaxy were adopted and interstellar travel became less of an art and more of a science.
And yet, even under the Foundation with improved computers and a new method of mechanically scanning the star field for a known “light signature,” it sometimes took days to locate three stars and then calculate position in regions not previously familiar to the pilot.
It was the Lens that changed all that. For one thing it required only a single known star. For another, even a space tyro such as Channis could operate it.
The nearest sizable star at the moment was Vincetori, according to Jump calculations, and on the visiplate now, a bright star was centered. Channis hoped that it was Vincetori.
The field screen of the Lens was thrown directly next to that of the visiplate and with careful fingers, Channis punched out the co-ordinates of Vincetori. He closed a relay, and the star field sprang to bright view. In it, too, a bright star was centered, but otherwise there seemed no relationship. He adjusted the Lens along the Z-Axis and expanded the Field to where the photometer showed both centered stars to be of equal brightness.
Channis looked for a second star, sizably bright, on the visiplate and found one on the field screen to correspond. Slowly, he rotated the screen to similar angular deflection. He twisted his mouth and rejected the result with a grimace. Again he rotated and another bright star was brought into position, and a third. And then he grinned. That did it. Perhaps a specialist with trained relationship perception might have clicked first try, but he’d settle for three.
That was the adjustment. In the final step, the two fields overlapped and merged into a