not met before.
"Anyhow we can't find it again. We turned the ship to look at some more
stars, and we can't pick it out any more."

Cochrane said:

"You'll keep looking, of course."

"For what?" asked Jones.

He waved his hand out the four equally-spaced plastic blister-ports.
From where he stood, Cochrane could see thousands of thousands of stars
out those four small openings. They were of every conceivable color and
degree of brightness. The Milky Way was like a band of diamonds.

"We know the sun's a yellow star," said Jones, "but we don't know how
bright it should be, or what the sky should look like beyond it."

"Constellations?" asked Cochrane.

"Find 'em!" said Jones vexedly.

Cochrane didn't try. If a moon-rocket pilot could not spot familiar
star-groups, a television producer wasn't likely to see them. And it was
obvious, once one thought, that the brighter stars seen from Earth would
be mostly the nearer ones. If Jones was right in his guess that his
booster had increased the speed of the ship by sixty to the fourth
power, it would have gone some millions of times as fast as the
distress-torpedo, for a brief period (the ratio was actually something
over nineteen million times) and it happened that nobody had been able
to measure the speed of that test-object.

Cochrane was no mathematician, but he could see that there was no data
for computation on hand. After one found out how fast an acceleration of
one Earth-gravity in a Dabney field of such-and-such strength speeded up
a ship, something like dead reckoning could be managed. But all that
could be known right now was that they had come a long way.

He remembered a television show he'd produced, laid in space on an
imaginary voyage. The script-writer had had one of the characters say
that no constellation would be visible at a hundred light-years from the
solar system. It would be rather like a canary trying to locate the
window he'd escaped from, from a block away, with no memories of the
flight from it.

Cochrane said suddenly, in a pleased tone:

"This is a pretty good break--if we can keep them from finding out about
it back home! We'll have an entirely new program, good for a
thirteen-week sequence, on just this!"

Babs stared at him.

"Main set, this control-room," said Cochrane enthusiastically. "We'll
get a long-beard scientist back home with a panel of experts. We'll
discuss our problems here! We'll navigate from home, with the whol