A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist by Ron Miller Page B

before her face like a pan of milk, seeming so close that if she had been a cat she could have lapped up every phosphorescent drop.
    The lactescent disk seemed to rotate slowly, like the plate of a lazy susan, as the spacecraft turned slowly on its axis. Gradually even this slight motion ceased as Hughenden halted the spin; Bronwyn heard the short, hissing bursts of the attitude jets.
    “It looks close enough to touch,” she said.
    “I only wish that were so,” replied Wittenoom. “We have tens of thousands of miles yet to go.”
    “So far?”
    “Only in distance. In time, only a day or two.”
    “It doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with it. It’s so pretty.”
    “No. We’re still too far to see anything with the naked eye. And of course, meteors would be invisible in the vacuum around us. That the moon is full doesn’t help, either. Hughenden, see if you can find the telescope.”
    The sour little scientist did as he was asked and propelled the instrument toward the professor as though he were launching a torpedo, adding ungraciously: “As soon as you’re finished sightseeing, I believe that there is work to do.”
    Beneath Bronwyn’s enhanced gaze, the surface of the moon was transformed. What had to her unaided eye appeared as smooth and featureless as soft, white cheese was now revealed as a confused mass of pits, craters and cracks, making the magnified moon resemble more a very old plate that had just been dropped onto a floor or, to maintain the original analogy, a dessicated and moldy wheel of cheese that had been allowed to sit forgotten too long on a shelf.
    “Professor!” she suddenly cried.
    “What is it?”
    “The moon just cracked! I saw it! A crack . . . it must be miles wide! It looked like someone had just broken a cookie!”
    “Let me see,” the professor replied, taking the telescope from her hands and peering into its lens. “Dear, dear . . . I hope that we will not be arriving too late.”
    “Too late for what?” she asked warily.
    “I hope that there’ll be still be a moon when we get there.”
    “And what happens if there’s not?”
    “Then our return to the earth becomes a highly complex problem in celestial mechanics.”
    “Not too complex, I hope.”
    “Well, it is a branch of mathematics that is somewhat outside my field.”
    “What about you, Doctor Hughenden?” Bronwyn asked.
    “What about me?”
    “How’s your celestial mechanics?”
    “Do I look like a mechanic?”
    “You look like a tick, but what does that have to do with my question?”
    “Princess!” admonished the professor.
    “I asked him a simple question and he knew perfectly well what I was talking about!”
    “All that I can tell you,” smirked the doctor, “is that I agree with Wittenoom: if the moon is destroyed before we arrive, then our return to the earth becomes problematical in the extreme.”
    “But why would that be? Why couldn’t we just turn around and go back?”
    “Things just aren’t that simple out here, Princess,” answered Wittenoom. “Everything is moving, nothing is still, and all of these motions are curved, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas, that sort of thing. Orbits are something like railroad tracks, you see. We’ve put ourselves on one that intercepts the moon. If the moon disintegrates, we will still continue on our track just as if it were still there. Unfortunately, we were counting on the presence of the moon and its gravity to alter our course, switch us to onto a spur, as it were, curving our path into a circle. From that new orbit we could easily arrange our descent onto the moon’s surface. Without the moon to deflect our path, we would simply continue to fly off into space.”
    “Why can’t we use our rockets to change our orbit? The ones we would have used to land and take off?”
    “Oh. Hm. I suppose that would be possible, but that’s where the problem of celestial mechanics comes in. How many of our rockets do we fire off? In what