The Ether Eddy
I jerked down the result-lever of my Merton Calculator, and the rattle of its gears was loud in the deserted reaches of Flight Control Headquarters. The flight-graph imprinted itself on the space-chart, the thin red line that would guide the newly launched Phobos on her maiden voyage to Venus. I glanced through the transparent quartz wall at her tremendous bulk, vague on the vast tarmac of New York’s Spaceship Terminus in the brooding dark of 3 a.m.
PhobosThe graph line I had just traced jogged erratically, a million and a half miles out, detouring the Phobos’ course a hundred thousand miles. That hump was why I was here, alone in the crystal hive. At midnight the message had pulsed in on the infrared ray from the domed air-cell on the Moon where gaunt men ceaselessly scan
