Lucky Starr and John Bigman Jones had congratulated each other when they passed Saturn’s orbit; every mile after that would be uncharted territory, as neither had been so far from the Sun before in their lives. They had passed Uranus and Neptune later on, but at a distance; at this point Pluto in its orbit was well above the ecliptic – a full seventeen degrees.

For Lucky, it had not been six months since the harrowing experience he’d had on Vesta¹, when he’d been forced to endure the publicity of being paraded as a witness against Earth in Sirius’s maneuverings to become the dominant power in the galaxy. The plan had backfired on the then-leader of the Sirian outpost on Titan, Sten Devoure. He had left the Vesta Conference in disgrace, and the Sirian base had been dismantled.

Chief Councilman Hector Conway, one of Lucky’s adoptive fathers², had broken the quiet solitude of Lucky’s vacation and semi-involuntary withdrawal from active Council of Science duties. Lucky had chosen not to give any interviews to the occasional reporters who requested such, would not allow anyone into his apartment in International City except for his friend Bigman, Chief Councilman Conway, or Section Director Augustus Henree.

Conway spoke. “It’s been some months since I saw you last, David.” He rarely used Lucky’s real name, but he sensed the somber mood and spoke with more gravity than usual.

“I know, Uncle Hector, I know. Quite frankly, that business on Vesta has made it difficult for me. I can’t work effectively, since I can’t go undercover anymore. Bigman’s feeling the same way; he keeps wondering what we’ll do now.”

“Speaking of the little fellow, where is he?”

“He’s not here or at the other apartment in New York – he took a spaceliner to Mars, actually.”

“Mars?!”

“Yes, Mars. He still knows some of the farmboys, wants to see his home planet for a while, I guess. He left about a month ago and I occasionally get messages from him on the visiphone.”

“Aren’t you ever here when he calls?”

“Actually, I am, but I’ve left the call signaller off since Bigman left.”

“I was wondering why I couldn’t contact you the last little while. It’s actually part of why I came out here in person – to see if you were all right.”

Lucky couldn’t help but smile. “I am fine, Uncle Hector. I’m just missing the old days, I guess.”

“Well, that’s most of what I came here to talk to you about. You know that Gus hasn’t really been around in the last few years.”

“Yes. I remember I last saw Uncle Gus many years ago, when that business with the pirates^† was going on. Does he still smoke that pipe?”

“I’m glad you still remember him. And to answer you, he quit when he went to Pluto.”

“Pluto?!”

Conway smiled. “Part of why you didn’t know was Gus’s wish to leave you undisturbed; another part was that he left not long after that incident you and Bigman had with Urteil, that sidekick of Senator Swenson’s³ – he took the lesson to heart about having Congressional members trying to advance their own political agendas by pretending to be honestly concerned about the waste of taxpayer money – so the fewer people that knew that the Section Director of the Council, my right-hand, had personally gone to oversee a project, the better. And finally, Sirians. We wanted to keep security very tight on this Pluto project.”

“I see. What was Uncle Gus overseeing on Pluto that required security even tighter than that on the Agrav^‡ project?”

“I’m glad you remember that too, because what happened there was precisely what we wanted to avoid on Pluto. As it happened, we were extremely fortunate that relatively few men were involved in a project on such an out-of-the-way planet, and that none were permitted pets of any kind.

“In any case, Lucky, the basic facts are these: for the last several years, we have been developing an ambitious early-warning system of unmanned detection satellites. It’s called Project Snowflake. The satellites are to be in stable orbits around the sun; not all will be in the plane of the ecliptic. The object is to create a grid of these satellites all orbiting the sun at a distance roughly intermediate between Uranus’s and Neptune’s orbital radii; that’s over two and a third billion miles.

“These satellites will, in theory, warn us if any Sirian ships ever approach the solar system. The reason we are not having them orbit with radii outside Pluto’s aphelion is because the energy we expend to get them out there and maintain them increases enormously as the distance to them increases. Ideally, we’d use what the Sirians didn’t take off Titan, rebuild that base and use it as a command post for those satellites, but Pluto will be serving as the temporary headquarters for now.

“The other reason we feel we can have them in orbits closer to the sun is that the Solar Fleet has provided us with technical data that show that the Fleet’s response time is not appreciably decreased past a certain distance from the sun without reaching the point of diminishing returns, and that point is not much past Uranus’s orbital radius – the military, after all, has to scramble the fleet, ready the ships, issue the correct orders and notify the right people anyhow.”

Lucky, having sat down during Conway’s recital, chewed his lip for a second or two and asked, “Aside from the logistical difficulties of manufacturing low-maintenance satellites to detect inbound hyperspatial jumps and of getting them into orbit, have there been other problems slowing this project down?”

The Chief Councilman brushed his silvery hair back as he exhaled and nodded. “I want you to get Bigman and go out there. We’re experiencing unusual delays in getting some critical components working reliably. One of them is the apparatus we use to detect the minute changes in hyperspace that happen just before a ship enters real space. The other is ensuring that the detection apparatus doesn’t mistakenly respond to ships within our solar system that might undertake small hyperspatial jumps.

“The detection problem can be solved by keying all satellites to filter out energy signatures for common ships of Earth manufacture; we believe the Sirians, or indeed any other planet of the fifty colonies, do not have the desire to undertake the exhaustive effort of retooling their military fleets’ hyperatomics to mimic the signatures of Earth-manufactured engines. The keying will just require a lot of work and a method for updating the database as new engines come on-line. But it’s still important and the detector is not working as reliably as it should.

“In essence, Gus and I believe someone, or some group of people, is slowing this project down. One problem is that due to the exacting specifications to which we have to manufacture these satellites, it isn’t a situation of simply pinning down one man and say, ‘Why are you not working to your full potential?’

“The other problem is that we have made a deliberate effort, unlike in the Agrav project, to do full background checks on each individual being recruited to work on Pluto, and to limit the general knowledge that Project Snowflake is going on, for reasons of interstellar security. If it were known that we were developing such an early-warning system. Sirius might feel tempted to strike before we had one in place. So we can’t just send people away and bring in new men.”

Lucky said, “I take it you and Uncle Gus instituted the system of background checks before it was discovered the Agrav project was compromised?”

Conway nodded.

“But am I also correct in assuming that the background checks have been made even more stringent?”

Again a nod from Conway.

“Is there anything the background checks might not uncover?”

“The major thing they won’t uncover is the mental workings of each man. That is forever unknown to us. It is true that we got each man’s consent to the Psychic Probe before they were hired on, but the Probe is not foolproof and for the short usage we allowed, the most accurate data it gave was each man’s general emotional makeup, not what underlying thought processes occured.”

“All right then. I’ll get the Shooting Starr out from storage and subether Bigman that we’re on another mission. Uncle Gus can brief me on details before I go in trying to troubleshoot Project Snowflake.”

Lucky sprang up from his chair and seized the older man’s hand and shook hands vigorously. After the Chief Councilman left, he got on the visiphone to contact Bigman.

¹ - See Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn
² - See David Starr, Space Ranger
³ - See Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury
† - See Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids
‡ - See Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter

To be continued…

Disclaimer: The characters and situations in this story are the legal property of the Estate of Isaac Asimov. This story is in no way intended as a challenge to that ownership, and is offered solely for entertainment purposes.