"
"What?"
"Whenever I wanted anything," said Jones, "I wrote it out and gave a
memo to Babs. She attended to it."
"My system, exactly," admitted Cochrane.
"I wrote out a memo for her," said Jones unhappily, "asking for
star-charts and for her to get somebody to set up a system of
astrogation for outside the solar system. Nobody's ever bothered to do
that before. Nobody's ever reached even Mars! But I figured we'd need
it."
Cochrane waited. Jones showed him a creased bit of paper, closely
written.
"I wrote out the memo and put it in my pocket," said Jones, "and I
forgot to give it to Babs. So we can't astrogate. We don't know how. We
didn't get either star-charts or instructions. We're lost."
Cochrane waited.
"Apparently Al was mistaken in the star he spotted as our sun," added
Jones. He referred to the pilot, whom Cochrane had 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.
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