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Jones waved his hands. "I didn't think we could ever find you again. We were sixty light-years away when that booster effect died out. Then Doctor Holden got on the communicator. He got Earth. The astronomers back there located us and gave us the line to get back by. We found the planet. Even then I didn't see how we'd pick out the valley.
He had traveled 47 light-years he couldn't remember how many billions of miles that was. Even so, it was only the tiniest hop-skip-and-jump in the measureless vastness of space. The ship was streaking toward Procyon, a sol-type star, bright yellow; the three planets, Alpha, Beta and Gamma, ringed like Saturn and veiled in shimmering layers of cloud, swung against the night.
Unless they've dematerialized it, that means about ten billion light-years as an absolute minimum. Think about that for a minute!... I've just got a kind of a hunch that maybe they don't belong in this Galaxy at all that they might be from some other Galaxy, planet and all; just riding around on it, as we are riding in the Skylark. Is the idea conceivable to a sane mind, or not?"
He had never used them against people who had done nothing to deserve such treatment, and he didn't really want to. He didn't have any choice, though. He would do whatever proved to be necessary to accomplish his objectives. Three weeks, five planetfalls, and almost 1500 light-years of routine checking later, Nevan discovered his quarry's name: Kiyoshi Owajima.
Not the firmament as we know it for that hot blue sun and Nevia, her one planet-child, were many light-years distant from Old Sol and his numerous brood but a strange and glorious firmament containing not one constellation familiar to earthly eyes.
"This is going to be a job, Mart," he went back to it as soon as they were seated in the airboat, flying toward "home." "I can nail them, with an increasing shift in azimuth, up to about thirty thousand light-years, but after that it gets awfully hard to get the right shift, and up around a hundred thousand it seems to be darn near impossible gets to be pure guesswork.
"I think you must realize that it was a difficult decision to make." His thoughts went back, across long months of time and longer light-years of space, to the day when that decision had been made. The Decision Colonel Sebastian MacMaine didn't feel, that morning, as though this day were different from any other.
Why? No one knew. The Aristarchy occupied nearly all the planets of the galaxy that could be inhabited by Man; that much The Guesser had been told. Just why Earth-type planets should occur only within five thousand light-years of the Galactic Center was a mystery to him, but, then, he was no astrophysicist.
There might, though, be one or more of those singular, conical, hollow-topped cairns sheltering silicon-bronze plates, which constituted the evidence that Plumies existed. The Niccola went sunward toward the inner planets to see. Such cairns had been found on conspicuous landmarks on oxygen-type planets over a range of some twelve hundred light-years.
The extremely small angle subtended by this enormous disk is explained by the great distance of the star, which is about 160 light-years. That is to say, light travelling at the rate of 186,000 miles per second spends 160 years in crossing the space that lies between us and Betelgeuse, whose tremendous proportions therefore seem so minute even in the most powerful telescopes.
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