The Martian Way and Other Stories

Sucker Bait Chapter Four

The scientific complement of the Triple G. were few in number for the job they had to do, and, as individuals, young. Not as young as Mark Annuncio, perhaps, who was in a class by himself, but even the oldest of them, Emmanuel George Cimon (astrophysicist), was not quite thirty-nine. And with his dark, unthinned hair and large, brilliant eyes, he looked still younger. To be sure, the optic brilliance was partly due to the wearing of contact lenses.
Cimon, who was perhaps overconscious of his relative age, and of the fact that he was the titular head of the expedition (a fact most of the others were inclined to ignore) usually affected an undramatic view of the mission. He ran the dotted tape through his fingers, then let it snake silently back into its spool.
"Run of the mill," he sighed, seating himself in the softest chair in the small passengers' lounge. "Nothing."
He looked at the latest color photographs of the Lagrange binary and was impervious to their beauty, Lagrange I, smaller and hotter than Earth's own sun, was a brilliant green blue, with a pearly green-yellow corona surrounding it like the gold settling of an emerald. It appeared to be the size of a lentil or of a ball bearing out of a Lenser ratchet A short distance away! (as distances go on a photograph) was Lagrange II. It appeared twice the size of Lagrange I, due to its position in space. (Actually, it was only four fifths the diameter of Lagrange I, half its volume, and two thirds its mass.) Its orange red, toward which the film was less sensitive, comparatively, than was the human retina, seemed dimmer than ever against the glory of its sister sun.
Surrounding both, undrowned by the near-by suns, as the result of the differentially polarized lens specifically used for the purpose, was the unbelievable brilliance of the Hercules cluster. It was diamond dust, scattered thickly, yellow, white, blue, and red.
"Nothing,'" said Cimon.
"Looks good to me," said the other man in the lounge. He was Groot Knoevenaagle (physician; short, plump, and known to man by no name other than Novee).
He went on to ask, "Where's Junior?" then bent over Cimon's shoulder, peering out of slightly myopic eyes.
Cimon looked up and shuddered. "Its name is not Junior. You can't see the planet, Troas, if that's what you mean, in this damned wilderness of stars. This picture is Scientific Earthman material It isn't particularly useful."
"Oh, space and back!" Novee was disappointed.
"What difference is it to you, anyway?" demanded Cimon. "Suppose I said one of those dots was Troas. Any one of them.
You wouldn't know the difference and what good would it do you?"
"Now wait, Cimon. Don't be so damned superior. It's legitimate sentiment. We'll be living on Junior for a While. For all we know, we'll be dying on it."
"There's no audience, Novee, no orchestra, no mikes, no trumpets, so why be dramatic? We won't be dying on it. If we do, it'll be our own fault, and probably as a result of overeating." He said it with the peculiar emphasis men of small appetite use when speaking to men of hearty appetite, as though a poor digestion were something that came only of rigid virtue and superior intellect.
"A thousand people did die," said Novee softly.
"Sure. About a billion men a day die all over the Galaxy."
"Not this way."
"Not what way?"
With an effort, Novee kept to his usual drawl. "No discussions except at official meetings. That was the decision."
"I'll have nothing to discuss," said Cimon gloomily. "They're just two ordinary stars. Damned if I know why I volunteered. I suppose it was just the chance of seeing an abnormally large Trojan system from close up. It was the thought of looking at a habitable planet with a double sun. I don't know why I should have thought there'd be anything amazing about it."
"Because you thought of a thousand dead men and women," said Novee, then went on hastily, "Listen, tell me something, will you? What's a Trojan planet, anyway?"
The physician bore the other's look of contempt for a moment, then said, "All right. All right. So I don't know. You don't know everything either. What do you know about ultrasonic incisions?"
Cimon said, "Nothing, and I think that's fine. It's my opinion that information outside a professional man's specialty is useless and a waste of psycho-potential. Sheffield's point of view leaves me cold."
"I still want to know. That is if you can explain it."
"I can explain it. As a matter of fact, it was mentioned in the original briefing, if you were listening. Most multiple stars, and that means one third of all stars, have planets of a sort. The trouble, is that the planets are never habitable. If they're far enough away from the center of gravity of the stellar system to have a fairly circular orbit, they're cold enough to have helium oceans. If they're close enough to get heat, their orbit is so erratic that at least once in each revolution, they get close enough to one or another of the stars to melt iron.
"Here in the Lagrange System, however, we have an unusual case. The two stars, Lagrange I and Lagrange II, and the planet, Troas (along with its satellite, Ilium), are at die corners of an imaginary equilateral triangle. Got that? Such an arrangement happens to be a stable one, and for the sake of anything you like, don't ask me to tell you why. Just take it as my professional opinion."
Novee muttered under his breath, "I wouldn't dream of doubting it."
Cimon looked displeased and continued, "The system revolves as a unit. Troas is always a hundred million miles from each sun, and the suns are always a hundred million miles from one another."
Novee rubbed his ear and looked dissatisfied. "I know all that. I was listening at the briefing. But why is it a Trojan planet? Why Trojan?"
Cimon's thin lips compressed for a moment as though holding back a nasty word by force. He said. "We have an arrangement like that in the Solar System. The Sun, Jupiter, and a group of small asteroids form a stable equilateral triangle. It so happens that the asteroids had been given such names as Hector, Achilles, Ajax, and other heroes of the Trojan War, hence-Or do I have to finish?"
"Is that all?" said Novee.
"Yes. Are you through bothering me?"
"Oh, boil your head."
Novee rose to leave the indignant astrophysicist but the door slid open a moment before his hand touched the activator and Boris Vernadsky (geochemist; dark eyebrows, wide mouth, broad face, and with an inveterate tendency to polka-dot shirts and magnetic clip-ons in red plastic) stepped in.
He was oblivious to Novee's flushed face and Cimon's frozen expression of distaste.
He said lightly, "Fellow scientists, if you listen very carefully, you will probably hear an explosion to beat the Milky Way from up yonder in Captain's quarters."
"What happened?" asked Novee.
"The Captain got hold of Annuncio, Sheffield's little pet wizard, and Sheffield went charging updeck, bleeding heavily at each eyeball."
Cimon, having listened so far, turned away, snorting.
Novee said, "Sheffield! The man can't get angry. I've never even heard him raise his voice."
"He did this time. When he found out the kid had left his cabin without telling him and that the Captain was bullyragging him-Wow! Did you know he was up and about, Novee?"
"No, but I'm not surprised. Space-sickness is one of those things. When you have it, you think you're dying. In fact, you can hardly wait. Then, in two minutes it's gone and you feel all right. Weak, but all right. I told Mark this morning we'd be landing next day and I suppose it pulled him through. The thought of a planetary surface in dear prospect does wonders for space-sickness. We are landing soon, aren't we, Cimon?"
The astrophysicist made a peculiar sound that could have been interpreted as a grunt of assent. At least, Novee so interpreted it.
"Anyway," said Novee, "what happened?"
Vernadsky said, "Well, Sheffield's been bunking with me since the kid twirled on his toes and went over backward with space-sickness and he's sitting there at the desk with his damn charts and his fist computer chug-chugging away, when the room phone signals and it's the Captain. Well, it turns out he's got the boy with him and he wants to know what the blankety-blank and assorted dot and dash the government means by planting a spy on him. So Sheffield yells back at him that he'll stab him in the groin with a Collamore macro-levelling-tube if he's been fooling with the kid and off he goes, leaving the phone activated and the Captain frothing."
"You're making this up," said Novee. "Sheffield wouldn't say anything like that."
"Words to that effect."
Novee turned to Cimon. "You're heading our group. Why don't you do something about this?"
Cimon snarled, "In cases like this, I'm heading the group. My responsibilities always come on suddenly. Let them fight it out. Sheffield talks an excellent fight and the Captain never takes his hands out of the small of his back. Vernadsky's jitter-bugging description doesn't mean there'll be physical violence."
"All right, but there's no point in having feuds of any kind in an expedition like ours."
"You mean our mission!" Vemadsky raised both hands in mock awe and rolled his eyes upward. "How I dread the time when we must find ourselves among the rags and bones of the first expedition."
And as though the picture brought to mind by that was not one that bore levity well after all, there was suddenly nothing to say. Even the back of Cimon's head, which was all that showed over the back of the easy chair, seemed a bit the stiffer for the thought.