Into the Sea of Stars Read Online Free PDF Page B

His was no longer dry his tory—it was the information that would be the center of their lives for the next three years.
    "Could more units have left afterward?" Richard asked.
    "Possibly. And just that question shows the problems of this quest. There is only one absolute given in this whole scheme. Six hundred and twelve units did pull out of near-Earth orbit and one hundred and eleven others pulled out from various deep-space orbits, including three asteroid mining-survey colonies.
    "But the data stops the day the war started, when the tracking facilities on the Moon and Mars were knocked out. So there is the potential that approximately seven hundred other units, which were preparing to abandon Earth orbit, did indeed abandon orbit."
    "So that increases our odds tremendously?" Ellen asked cautiously,
    "Yes, from next to impossible to almost next to impossible. And I'm not being sarcastic. You see, the Co pernicus site did have the initial trajectory data. In fact, for the units that left several years before the war, the data are pretty darn good, since they had time to do some pinpoint tracking.
    "So here we have the raw data of seven hundred-odd colonies to start with, that's great. However, did you ever stop to think"—and Ian was talking in general, but every one could sense that it was directed toward Shelley— "just how big it is out there?"
    She smiled wanly and nodded. The stares of the other three focused on her, and she could feel the hostility grow ing as each one thought about the fact that it was the overzealous young student who had pulled them from their more-comfortable niches and sent them to synchron ous orbit.
    "It's not that bad," she said meekly.
    "Not that bad!" Stasz interjected. "My hand to God, for I speak the truth, it's merely numbing in size.
    "How far could they have gone?" he asked, shifting his gaze from Shelley back to Ian.
    "Not far. It's estimated that their drive systems at best could take them up to point-one light. Therefore, a max imum of 112 light-years out. That gives us a cubic volume of .. .let me see."
    "Nearly ten million cubic light years." Ellen said softly, obviously proud that she could outdo them all in a little exercise of mental calculation.
    "Therefore," Ian responded, "I present our problem— where do we start? We shall be looking for approximately seven hundred units in an area of ten million cubic light- years."
    "Can't we eliminate a good part of that?" Richard asked.
    "I think so," Stasz interjected. "The fifteen stars nearest to Earth have already been checked out—without any sign of refugee colonies. That eliminates nearly a hundred craft right there, since their trajectories carried them that way. Now, it is of course possible that they went to those systems, slingshoted around them, and went off on tangent trajectories ,, thereby making predictions of their whereabouts more difficult."
    "And I think we can also eliminate two hundred or so colonies because the data we have on them indicates that they would not have survived the journey for long."
    "Why so, Dr. Lacklin ?" Shelley asked, curiosity overcoming her desire to hide.
    "The answer is simple. We are dealing with closed ecosystems. There is a certain amount of free hydrogen available in interstellar space, and if you could accelerate up to ramjet velocities that would be useful, but outside of the propulsion systems, the colonies had to be one hundred percent closed."
    "I'm not sure that I follow you," Ellen admitted.
    "Well, let us say that a colony had a ninety-nine point nine percent reclamation rate for all combinations of ox ygen. Let's say that across a time period of X , point one percent of the total oxygen supply is lost due to faulty reclamation, leaks, and such. Now, point one is not bad for any vessel if X equals one year. But look at the simple math—in one thousand years, unless another oxygen sup ply was found, the colony would be dead. Now, this equa tion applies to every resource: