The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven [49]
The Engineer returned to her ship.
Telescope and spectrometer failed her at first. There were two of the golden slivers, and some bulk inside each of them, but something was shutting out her view of the masses inside. Patiently the Engineer went to work on her instruments, redesigning, recalibrating, rebuilding, her hands working at blinding speed guided by a thousand Cycles of instincts.
There were force fields to be penetrated. Presently she had something that would do that. Not well, but she could see large objects.
She looked again.
Metal. Endless, endless metal.
She took off immediately. The call of treasure was not to be ignored. There was little of free will in an Engineer.
Blaine watched a flurry of activity through a red fog as he fought to regain control of his traitor body after return to normal space. An all-clear signal flashed from Lenin, and Rod breathed more easily. Nothing threatened, and he could enjoy the view.
It was the Eye he saw first. Murcheson’s Eye was a tremendous ruby, brighter than a hundred full moons, all alone on the black velvet of the Coal Sack.
On the other side of the sky, the Mote was the brightest of a sea of stars. All systems looked this way at breakout: a lot of stars, and one distant sun. To starboard was a splinter of light, Lenin, her Langston Field radiating the overload picked up in the Eye.
Admiral Kutuzov made one final check and signaled Blaine again. Until something threatened, the scientists aboard MacArthur were in charge. Rod ordered coffee and waited for information.
At first there was maddeningly little that he hadn’t already known. The Mote was only thirty-five light years from New Scotland, and there had been a number of observations, some dating back to Jasper Murcheson himself. A G2 star, less energetic than Sol, cooler, smaller and a bit less massive. It showed almost no sunspot activity at the moment, and the astrophysicists found it dull.
Rod had known about the gas giant before they started. Early astronomers had deduced it from perturbations in the Mote’s orbit around the Eye. They knew the gas giant planet’s mass and they found it almost where they expected, seventy degrees around from them. Heavier than Jupiter, but smaller, much denser, with a degenerate matter core. While the scientists worked, the Navy men plotted courses to the gas giant, in case one or the other warship should need to refuel. Scooping up hydrogen by ramming through a gas giant’s atmosphere on a hyperbolic orbit was hard on ships and crew but a lot better than being stranded in an alien system.
“We’re searching out the Trojan points now, Captain,” Buckman told Rod two hours after breakout.
“Any sign of the Mote planet?”
“Not yet.” Buckman hung up.
Why was Buckman concerned with Trojan points? Sixty degrees ahead of the giant planet in its orbit, and sixty degrees behind, would be two points of stable equilibrium, called Trojan points after the Trojan asteroids that occupy similar points in Jupiter’s orbit. Over millions of years they ought to have collected dust clouds and clusters of asteroids. But why would Buckman bother with these?
Buckman called again when he found the Trojans. “They’re packed!” Buckman gloated. “Either this whole system is cluttered with asteroids from edge to edge or there’s a new principle at work. There’s more junk in Mote Beta’s Trojans than has ever been reported in another system. It’s a wonder they haven’t all collected to form a pair of moons—”
“Have you found the habitable planet yet?”
“Not yet,” said Buckman, and faded off the screen. That was three hours after breakout.
He called back half an hour later. “Those Trojan point asteroids have very high albedos, Captain. They must be thick with dust. That might explain how so many of the larger particles were captured. The dust clouds slow them down, then polish them smooth—”
“Dr. Buckman! There is an inhabited world in this system and it is vital that we find it. These are the first intelligent aliens—”
“Dammit Captain, we’re looking! We’re looking!