Free Children of the Comet by Donald Moffitt Page B

go over the numbers one more time.”
    Joorn patted his belly in mock dismay. Not that he had much of a belly to speak of. At the age of ninety-five—almost halfway through a normal human lifespan—his stomach was still as flat and hard as it had been at eighty.
    â€œAgain?” he said. “Last week you told me I personally outmassed the entire Virgo Cluster. I can’t imagine what the ship and all its people weighs by now.”
    Alten frowned. “There’s something fishy about Karn’s data. According to my original calculations, turnaround time should have been a week ago.”
    Joorn became serious. “Did you adjust for the new estimates for the expansion of the Universe in the last one and three-quarter billion years?”
    â€œYes, of course.”
    â€œAnd the rate of increase of the expansion discovered by Karn’s bright young men?”
    Alten showed his exasperation. “Father, be serious.”
    â€œWell, then, it’s the zig zag.”
    â€œWe don’t zig zag. You know that. We’d keep losing gamma. We have to keep accelerating in a straight line, with one course correction at the halfway point to allow for the change in position of the Milky Way relative to our signposts.”
    â€œSo our signposts do the zig zagging.”
    â€œYou could put it that way. The galaxies rush apart not because they’re rushing apart but because the Universe is expanding. And expanding faster than the speed of light at the magic boundary—something that Karn and Oliver choose to ignore, brilliant as they’re supposed to be. Relativity still holds at the local level. The Milky Way and the Local Group remain gravitationally bound to the Virgo Cluster, as distant as they are from it—or, as some of the ancient diehards liked to put it, the Local Group was actually a ‘part’ of the greater Virgo Cluster.”
    Joorn glanced at the forward viewscreen. It was filled with a Doppler-adjusted representation of a brilliant galaxy, 3C-295, less than two hundred thousand light-years away, closer than the Magellanic Clouds had once been to the Milky Way.
    â€œLet’s take a look at our flag post galaxy the way it really is,” Joorn murmured. “Right now, we’re seeing it as a co-moving object.”
    His fingers danced over the console, and the screen showed them a vertical smear of mashed multicolored light that was squeezed between the two blind spots that almost filled the screen fore and aft. “I’m cheating a little bit,” he said. “We’re seeing it as a rattlesnake might see it—otherwise the red shift would be too extreme.”
    Alten nodded. “From here we draw a straight line to the Milky Way, which we can see now. After more than four billion years of expansion and galactic drift since we left Earth, the signposts we started out with are scattered on either side of the line, so we ignore them. The Milky Way itself has drifted along with its co-moving companions, of course, but I’m allowing for that, and we can make another small adjustment when we’re within spitting distance.”
    â€œSo what’s your problem?”
    Alten frowned. “There’s something wrong. We should have passed 3C-295 a week ago. I tried to tell Karn about it, but he just told me to recheck my figures. I did that and got the same answer. Karn told me you can’t argue with the navigation data and to talk to Oliver about it.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œI got the usual runaround. A ship can’t have two captains and two navigators and all that. Karn has his team of dedicated cosmologists, and they’re fully competent. You’ve got only me. Maybe it’s time for you to retire as captain. After more than twenty years of running ship operations, Oliver can handle the final run.”
    Joorn’s lips tightened. “Karn might have something to say about that. We had a