The space between galaxies was not devoid of stars; they were merely thinly scattered—so scattered, in fact, that none would have been visible ahead of the ship to Keaflyn's unaided eyes. The Kelkontar's sensors were picking up radiation from some two dozen that were bright enough and near enough to detect. These were displayed on the viewscreen.
But compared to the interior of the galaxy, this was emptiness.
If life created the universe, thought Keaflyn with some amusement, why did it put so much space in it? What was it all good for, when life itself showed so strong a preference for the confines of small planets?
"Mark," said the ship, "the binary we're approaching has curvilinear motion."
"You mean, besides the motion of the two stars around each other?" Keaflyn asked hopefully.
"Yes. Their mutual rotation was evident shortly after I detected their separation. And now, after two hundred light-years of approach, it is becoming evident that they are orbiting as a pair, and very slowly, about a still-invisible body."
"Hey! That could be it!" yelped Keaflyn, thinking of Locus, back in the galaxy, and its star, Sol-Locus.
A system containing a Locus type body had to be a prodigy. A star could capture (or be captured by) such a planet, but since a Locus body was stationary in space, the star could not swing it in an orbit. The star itself had to do the orbiting or else move on. It was a case of the tail wagging the dog, and wagging it very slowly. The far more massive star proceeded about its little primary in a barely noticeable creep, completing its circle in something over four thousand Earth-years. The original relative motion of planet and star had to have been almost that slow; otherwise the capture could not have occurred. Thus, if the binary the ship was now approaching was orbiting something so slowly that the motion had required two hundred years to reveal itself, and the primary was so small as to remain unseen from this distance, then they had probably found a second Locus! Better make that Locus2, Keaflyn decided.
And Locus2 it really was, he discovered as the ship moved into the system. The final light-hours of approach, with sensors studying the small planet, found no slightest indication of motion. Like Locus1, it was an airless globe of stone, approximately Mars-size.
"I presume nobody's around," said Keaflyn, "but try to raise someone on the comm, just to be sure.
"Okay, Mark."
Keaflyn almost hoped someone would respond to the ship's call, even an ardent Sect Dualer. It was one thing to have a high degree of self-sufficiency, but something else to be several thousand light-years from the nearest known living being. True, his ship could talk to him, but a vocal computer was not really company. Neither was his Neg.
He hadn't planned to do his stability-probing in this kind of solitude. Tinker had intended to accompany him. They had planned on it for a couple of lifetimes. But the plan had been disrupted by the Brobdinagia disaster. The explosion of that interstellar liner had killed Tinker's nine-year-old body, and even though her ego-field had promptly found itself a new infant, she was still only an eleven-year-old child in her present body. The decade Tinker had lost in the crash left her at least six years short of proper mating age, and thinking back to his meeting with her on Terra, Keaflyn realized that he hadn't been especially disappointed by that at the time. After all, he had thought then what was a mere six or eight years? He could wait for her to grow up. Also, his pleasure-impress had been influencing him strongly at that time, and he had tended to be entertained by the comic aspects of his and Tinker's predicament.
It seemed less funny now as he gazed out at the lifeless globe of Locus2. He felt isolated. Even if he were back in the galaxy, the drab thought came to him, he would still be a man alone. Except, maybe, for Tinker and Alo Felston. Perhaps they were still friends he could turn to, but after the Resistant Globe debacle he certainly couldn't count on any others, not even the Arlan Siblings, who had promised their aid any time he needed it in fighting his Neg. From what Penchat had told him, the Arlans were now siding with the Sect Dualers.
Why not beat it back to the galaxy right now, to Tinker's home on Danolae? He could at least kiss her and bounce her on his knee and talk to her . . .
"Damn!" he gasped suddenly, starting out of his blue funk. That lousy Neg! It had really found an opening through which to throw an emotional punch at him. It had had him going for a minute there. Self-pity, of all things!
The realization helped him push back the Neginduced emotion which, as before in a similar circumstance, had tried to stop him from continuing his research project. "Kelly," he said, "pick out a landing site with a reasonable ground temperature and set down. Probably the twilight band, wouldn't you say?"
"Right, Mark. An unshaded twilight area should be suitable. You will not find the radiation from the binary troublesome at this distance."
"Good."
The ship spiraled down to a smooth-surfaced plateau of unbroken stone, while Keaflyn suited up. A slight thud told him when they touched down.
"I'm cycling out, Kelly. Send the supplies and equipment out after me, according to plan."
He went through the lock and stepped down to the stone of Locus2. He wondered briefly if he were the first being ever to touch this world, but that was a question of no importance, and he had work to do. Besides, he now had a severe headache. The Neg, having been thwarted when it hit him with an emotion, was now coming back with a psychosomatic, something more difficult for Keaflyn to think his way out of. And he hadn't bothered to equip his vacsuit to feed him aspirins.
He grimaced and began setting up his temporary shelter and experimental equipment as the Kelkontar fed the cases through the lock. The shelter, with its anti-meteor screens, was more elaborate than he expected was needed here. There were no signs that the surface of Locus2 had ever been subject to particle bombardment. When the job was done, he went back into the ship for aspirin and a ship-cooked meal, then outside once more, to make precise adjustments in preparation for the first test.
"I'm about ready, Kelly," he announced at last. "Take off for my zenith."
"Okay, Mark," the reply sounded inside his helmet. The Kelkontar lifted away, and Keaflyn threw back his head to watch the ship diminish out of sight before turning his attention to the tracking sensors.
When the ship was five light-minutes up, he said, "Okay, Kelly, turn on your light and start the data flow."
"Light and data flow, on, Mark."
Keaflyn waited out the five minutes, then peered upward, wondering if the laser beam from the ship would be bright enough for his eyes to see at this distance. Several more seconds passed. Then an indicator flashed on the control panel at Keaflyn's side. The laser beam had registered. Somewhat more than ten seconds later, the flash went off. Another ten-seconds-plus interval, and it came on again. The cycle repeated a dozen times, then the flash began to flicker uncertainly.
"You're out of range now, Kelly," Keaflyn called.
"Head back down."
"Right, Mark. Reversing direction."
The ship, using no warp for the duration of the experiment, would take a while slowing to a standstill and then getting back into range of the instruments. Keaflyn went into the shelter, removed his helmet, and took two more of the aspirins with a glass of Terratea. In a moment he felt better, either from the medication or because the Neg, discovering its inability to defeat him, was slacking off. When the ship was due back in range, he rehelmeted and returned to the control panel outside.
Shortly the ten-second laser beam bursts were being received once more and were precisely measured for frequency and propagation speed. As the ship was now approaching, the bursts lasted for something less than ten seconds at the receiving end.
"Now braking, Mark," the ship announced after a few minutes had passed.
"Okay. Swerve off and get set for the tangent run,"
Keaflyn directed.
This involved another wait while the Kelkontar moved off a few hundred million miles to a position on Keaflyn's horizon, then lined up on a course that would enable it to pass at high speed directly over the observation site.
Once more, measurements would be made of frequency and propagation of a laser beam transmitted by the ship, this time under conditions that would—for a split-second—bring transmitter and receiver to within one hundred meters of each other, and with the transmitter very near the Locus2 surface.
The experiment was carried out as planned, the ship zipping past Keaflyn's position so fast that his senses did not register it at all. "Was it a good run, Kelly, directly overhead?"
"Yes, Mark. I passed fourteen meters to your left at an altitude of ninety-three meters."
"Good enough. Come on in and pick up my data. Then we'll see if we have to do anything over."
Shortly thereafter the ship dropped to the ground by the observation site, and Keaflyn carried his reels of recorded information aboard and fed them into the ship's computers. There his data was compared with information the ship had recorded of its own movements relative to the site. Several minutes passed before the ship announced:
"Calculations are complete, Mark. The results indicate no deviation from straight addition-of-velocities. My velocity corresponded precisely at all times to the difference between the velocity of the received laser signal and the normal speed of light."
"No relativistic effects crept in at all?" demanded Keaflyn. "Not the slightest trace of the time-space contraction?"
"None at all, Mark."
"Humpf! Well, that's that, I suppose," muttered Keaflyn. "No fuzziness in the data?"
"The readings were quite clear, Mark, on the order of two hundred times more precise than in any earlier similar experiment."
Keaflyn nodded. His methodology in the study of stabilities involved, basically, just that: testing with equipment far more precise than previously used, in an effort to find a trace of instability in the stabilities . . . some slight tendency toward the behavior of normal matterenergy objects. He had spent the most of two previous lifetimes searching out those ultra-accurate means of testing and getting the needed equipment fabricated. And in the case of Locus2, at least, all he had proved was that the stability held up to a couple of additional decimal points.
On that body, light being received from a moving source did not obey the law of relativity. Light speed there was not a constant. If the source were approaching the planet, its light would have the additional velocity of the approach. If the source were moving away, its speed would be subtracted from that of its light.
Why?
Well, that was the way this particular stability worked. No better explanation than that had been found. Presumably it had something to do with the motionlessness of Locus; it was fixed in space. Other objects moved relative to Locus, but Locus moved relative to nothing. So, no relative motion, no relativistic effects.
Probably, Keaflyn mused, his experiment had proved just how firmly fixed in position Locus2 really was.
And, come to think about it, his methodology of seeking traces of instability had not worked on Lumon's Star, either. What he had discovered there—warpicles—pertained to the nature of that particular stability, not to its limitations.
But completely unintentionally, he had been instrumental in revealing a limit to the resistance of the Resistant Globe of Bensor-on-Bensor. The Globe could be nulled by mind, provided both contralife and normlife mind were included in the action.
"One thing we did find out, Kelly," he consoled himself, "is that there is more than one Locus, and there could be a whole gridwork of them." He paused in his work of repacking his test equipment. "By the way, does this one have a magnetic field?"
"Yes, Mark."
"Pointed back at Locus1, I bet."
"No. The magnetic poles form a line perpendicular to our line of approach," the ship said.
"Um. That makes sense, I suppose. If the poles were in line, that would indicate nothing more than a string of Locuses. But if every other one has its poles at a 90–degree angle, that implies squares and cubes . . . a grid, in short. Tell you what, Kelly. After we get you loaded, we'll follow up the magnetic line of this one, and see if we can hit a Locus3 at the same distance as Locus1. That'll prove we have a three-dimensional grid, won't it?"
"Not beyond argument, Mark.."
"But substantially." Keaflyn worked in silence for several minutes. Then he said, "The proof would be more substantial if we found a Locus3 at the proper distance on a line perpendicular to the magnetic fields of both Locus1 and Locus2. Right?"
"Yes, that would be more convincing."
"Then that's the line we'll take, straight out from this one's magnetic equator, and ninety degrees away from our line of approach from Locus."
Locus3 was there, where he had predicted it would be. It was fortunate that the Kelkontar knew the precise line to follow and the distance at which to search, because this Locus had no sun and could easily have been missed if they had not known just where to look. Again Keaflyn spent a few hours on the ground, running a series of tests similar to those done on Locus2, to verify that this dark little world was a true Locus body. When he was aboard the ship once more, he said, "That's enough Locuses to satisfy me, Kelly, and by the time we get back to civilization you'll be about due for a check-up and resupply. So head for home."
"For Bensor, Mark?"
"From this distance, it wouldn't matter by many degrees which system you aimed at," chuckled Keaflyn.
"No . . . not Bensor. Let's go to Danolae."
"Okay, Mark."
Getting his ship checked out and its consumables replenished was going to require cooperation—something the average citizen could take for granted on any known world of humanity. But Keaflyn had a hunch he was going to need the help of special friends to get that chore handled.
And certainly Tinker and Alo Felston were still friends. If they weren't. . .
He shrugged and giggled. Of course they were his friends! They had to be.
He dismissed the thought, gulped two aspirins, and got busy putting his findings on the Locuses into publishable form.