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Considering the high background radiation that the nearby nebula continued to send through the system, the supernova at full blossom must have been sufficiently powerful to strike creatures dead where they stood.

However, native life was not the only thing they had to guard against. There was also the possibility that the Broa had established a presence in the system, either for scientific or commercial purposes -- such as mining mineral deposits. Yet, though they had gone in with every sensor at maximum gain, they detected no energy source beyond the rhythmic radio noise emanating from the giant cloud behind them. Nor had they detected a gravity wave that would indicate a nearby stargate in operation.

At first, they had been relieved when their sensor sweeps came back negative for two days running. Then they began to worry. For not only was the Hideout System devoid of alien intelligence, it seemed equally devoid of human intelligence. Of the other ships of the expedition, there was no sign.

“Hardly surprising,” Dan Thompson, the ship’s chief astronomer and Mark’s nominal boss, had said when Mark asked him about the negative results on the third day after their arrival in the system. “A star system is a big place. Hell, we are just now getting to the point where we can identify Hideout’s planets, and a planet is infinitely larger than the biggest starship.”

“I would have thought our telescope sweeps would have found the planets by now.”

Thompson had chuckled. “Typically, an astronomical telescope has a field of view of about half-a-degree, which means that you are looking at about one five hundred thousandth of the area of the sky. Worse, even though we have the fastest computers in existence, there is so much data on the sensor chips that it takes several seconds to read each one. That means that we can only sweep so fast. We will be at this for another half a week unless we get lucky and stumble across something that shows either a disk or a half-disk. Once we find a few planets, we’ll be able to plot this system’s ecliptic and things will go faster.”

Mark had nodded. In Sol System, the “ecliptic” was the plane in which the Earth orbited the sun, and to a lesser extent, all of the other planets. That all of a system’s planets must lie close to the same plane was one of the basic tenets of astrophysics. Stars and planets both formed when an interstellar dust cloud collapsed under the influence of its own gravity. As the cloud contracted, it began to rotate in order to conserve its angular momentum. As the contraction continued, the cloud formed a large sphere at its center and a much thinner “accretion disk” around its middle. The sphere contracted until it became a star (or didn’t), and the disk broke up into smaller clumps of matter, which eventually became the star’s planets. Since they all formed from the same disk, all planets orbited in approximately the same plane -

the system’s ecliptic.

The problem was that the orientation of the ecliptic is random from star to star; the result of local conditions in the primordial cloud at the time the system first coalesced. There was no unifying principle to align them in space as the magnetic domains align in a piece of lodestone. Thus, when a starship arrived in a new system, it had no clue as to where to find the plane of the planets, and accordingly, was forced to scan the whole sky ahead looking for them.

Once a minimum of two planets were identified, however, the task became infinitely easier. As a favorite geometry teacher had once informed Mark, “three points determine a plane,” and with one star and two planets located, that was all the computers needed to map out the ecliptic. From then on, the telescopes could sweep a narrow corridor of space, looking for more planets.

They had found Brinks on the fifth day of their search. A world twice the size of Earth, it orbited some 500 million kilometers from Hideout and possessed a moon even larger than Luna. Mission parameters called for the fleet to rendezvous at the planet closest to the center of the temperate zone in any system where they found themselves. Brinks had proven to be nearly perfectly situated in that respect. Its orbit practically bisected the zone where temperature assured that water was liquid.

As they continued their approach from the outermost reaches of the Hideout System, the
Ruptured
Whale
swept past both of the outer system gas giants - Bonnie and Clyde - and above a largish asteroid belt that orbited between the two. Mark knew that the asteroid belt in the Solar System was the result of Jupiter’s overpowering gravitational pull, and he wondered what complexities were involved when two such giants contended for the same set of loose rocks.

Unlike the voyage out from Earth, the approach to Brinks had been mercifully short. That was because Captain Landon had ordered the
Ruptured Whale
to make the approach at more than 100 kilometers per second, some five times the speed at which the planet orbited its star. It had been a dive that would have made any hawk proud. Nor had it been as foolhardy a maneuver as it might first appear. For, not only would they arrive at the planet within days instead of months, keeping their speed up meant that they had a good chance of escape should they encounter an alien craft.

They had not encountered one, of course. There was no life in the system other than aboard the human starships and as one wag had commented on the outbound trip, “You call this
living
?”

That the approach was necessary at all was the result of the laws of transluminal physics. They had dropped sublight on the outskirts of the star system where space was agreeably “flat.” To dive more deeply into Hideout’s gravity well would have been dangerous. The stardrive’s field might have imploded, releasing all of its hellish energy into the ship. Mark had seen what a collapsing drive field could do in terms of destruction when he viewed the recordings of
Magellan
’s brief combat with the Broan Avenger.

That was one recording that he would as soon have missed seeing; yet it held a morbid fascination for him. Every time he watched it, his eyes clouded up when Jani’s tangled mane appeared on the screen. At least, she had not been afraid. Death had come too quickly for fear. Just seconds before the end, he had watched the auxiliary comm channel that had recorded Jani’s expression throughout the quick, deadly fight. His sister had looked excited and curious, but never afraid.

For that he was eternally grateful. Now if he could only get the nightmares to stop!

“Damn the Broa to hell!” he muttered to himself as the landing craft descended across the sun-baked, airless plain of Sutton, arrowing for the place where the expedition had built their home away from home.

#

The tunnels the construction crew had drilled into
Sutton
were four meters square and wide enough for four people to walk abreast, or they would have been had they not been jammed with packing crates of all descriptions. As it was, he was barely able to maneuver through clutter that looked like someone would shortly be erecting the barricades of Paris for a revival of
Les Miserables
.

He made his way through the organized chaos until he reached the compartment that he shared with Lisa.

He found her there, still in her sleeping tights, conversing with Sar-Say in the Broan trade language.

“Greetings, my partner in attempted procreation,”
she said as he walked through the door.

He walked over to her and kissed her on the errant strand of blonde hair that she was forever brushing from her eyes. “
Greetings, female, someday to be of my clan and sept. How goes the
perspiration?”

“I think you mean “
respiration,
’” she said conversationally, switching to Standard.

“I know what I said,” he replied. “I asked ‘How goes the work?’ Hello, Sar-Say.”

“Hello, Mark,” the pseudo-simian answered without looking up from the screen he and Lisa had been studying when Mark entered. The Taff showed no ill effects from his brush with death on the outbound voyage, but had developed a new respect for electricity.

“In that case,” Lisa replied, “the work is going crappy. Not a peep on any of the long-range sensors or a twitch out of the gravity wave detectors yet. How was the ship?”

“Starting to look deserted,” he replied. “Just about everyone is down here, burrowing into this God-forsaken rock.”

“Don’t speak ill of our new home. At least we have more room here than in our compartment aboard ship. Besides, they are going to get the ice heaters working one of these weeks. We will have all of the fresh water we can possibly use and I will be able to give up that damned sponge!”

He gazed at the pouting expression with which she accompanied her complaint and could not help laughing. She looked almost as comical as Sar-Say. Except she had done it on purpose. The Taff could not help the way he looked.

“What do you say about that, Sar-Say?”

Yellow eyes locked with his and he replied, “I will be happy for the water because we must drink it to survive. However, what you humans see in immersing yourself in liquid is one of the mysteries that I have yet to comprehend. Give me a warm box of sand to sift through my fur any day.”

Mark nodded. “The beings who originally crewed the
Ruptured Whale
used hot sand, too. What did you call them?”

“They were Vithians, inhabitants of the planet that I had visited earlier. And yes, they use hot sand for cleaning their bodies, although with an additive that we Taff find distasteful, a chemical that smells rancid to us.”

“To each his own,” Mark said absentmindedly before realizing that it was probably a sentiment that was not widely voiced among the Broan stars. To the Broa, the sentiment would be “to everyone, our own.”

He wondered if Sar-Say even got the reference.

He did not have time to find out. Lisa said, “We have made some progress today. I think we have adjusted this three-dimensional model of the nebula to match the orientation found in Sar-Say’s painting of the Sky Flower Nebula.”

“Interesting,” he responded, looking over Sar-Say’s shoulder. The screen showed a phantom image of the Crab Nebula superimposed over Sar-Say’s painting. What’s the point?”

“If we know which side he was looking at, we can get a rough line of direction on the Zzumer sun, of course. If I haven’t screwed up and Sar-Say’s memory is still good, we should find them more or less in the direction directly opposite the Galactic Center.”

“How far in that direction?”

Lisa frowned and bit her lip, a mannerism of which he doubted that she was aware. In any event, he found it fetching.

“Not sure. We can guess, of course. Considering all of the constraints on the problem, I would suspect that they are somewhere between one and two hundred light-years from here.”

“Why those limits?”

She shrugged. “Logic. If they had been closer to the supernova than 100 light-years, their world would have been sterilized as thoroughly as Brinks…”

Mark nodded. Just to satisfy monkey curiosity -- their own and Sar-Say’s -- Captain Landon had sent an expedition down to the planet to check it out. Sure enough, it had once had life on it. The surface was covered with the toppled remains of continent-wide forests and the seas still harbored a few small swimming things. These latter lived in the narrow layer between where the radiation was filtered out by the sea and the depth to which Hideout’s rays penetrated. One of
Magellan
’s biologists had captured a few specimens and had been happily researching them in his spare time.

“… And if they were much farther than 200 light-years distant, then the nebula wouldn’t be so prominent in their night sky.”

“Seems reasonable,” he agreed. “Can’t you pin it down more closely using Sar-Say’s recollection of the Sky Flower Nebula?”

“Wish we could. Unfortunately, the size of objects in the sky is highly subjective. The problem is that there is nothing with which to compare their scale. Didn’t you ever do that silly experiment with Luna in high school?”

“What silly experiment?”

“You know how large the full moon looks when the moon is just rising, right?”

He nodded.

“Next time we are home and the full moon is rising, face away from it, bend over, and look at it between your legs.”

“You mean upside down?”

“Exactly.”

“Other than getting me into an undignified position, what would that prove?”

She laughed. “Try it! You will be surprised. That giant ball rising from out of the sea looks the same size between your legs as when it is high in the sky. The harvest moon is an optical illusion caused when your brain has the horizon to use as a reference. The brain perceives the moon larger than it really is.

“The same thing is true of the Sky Flower Nebula. Sar-Say saw it high in the sky. He had nothing to relate its size. As a result, he really can’t give us a quantitative idea of its true size.”

“That true, Sar-Say?”

The Taff made the gesture that Mark had learned was his equivalent of a shrug. “I am afraid that it is, Mark. Lisa and I have discussed this point extensively, and unfortunately, my brain plays the same tricks of sight as your own.”

“How about just telling us how far it is from the Zzumer world to the Sky Flower Nebula? Surely your guides told you that.”

Some alien emotion crossed Sar-Say’s features. When he spoke, it was with great seriousness. “I am afraid that no one told me, nor would it have done much good if they had. The Zzumer, like you humans, measure distances in light-years -- Zzumer years, of course. Since I do not know the orbital period of their planet around its star, I cannot convert Zzumer light-years into human light-years.”

“That would have made it too easy, I guess,” Mark muttered. “So we look for the Zzumer star somewhere between 100 and 200 light-years from here in the direction opposite Galactic Center.

Perhaps I can talk the boss into running a survey of that region of space.”

“Would you?” Lisa asked. “We know the Zzumer sun is a K-spectral class. There cannot be that many off in that direction. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“More than you might think,” Mark replied. “Do you have any idea how many K-Class stars are within 200 light-years of Sol?”