Walt smiled in a grim fashion. "Help!" he said. "We go on and on for years and years with no trouble—and now we've lost the third ship in a row."
"They claim that those things always run in threes," said Arden. "What are we going to do?"
"I don't know. We'll have to do something. Funny, but the one reason we must do something is the same reason why something can be done."
"I don't get that."
"With Channing on the Solar Queen, something can be done. I don't know what, but I'll bet you a new hat that Don will make it possible for us to detect the ship. There is not a doubt in my mind that if the ship is still spaceworthy, we can narrow the possibilities down to a thin cone of space."
"How?"
"Well," said Franks, taking the fountain pen out of the holder on the desk and beginning to sketch on the blotter, "the course of the Solar Queen is not a very crooked one, as courses go. It's a very shallow skew curve. Admitting the worst, collision, we can assume only one thing. If the meteor were small enough to leave the ship in a floating but undirigible condition, it would also be small enough to do nothing to the general direction of the ship. Anything else would make it useless to hunt, follow?"
"Yes, go on."
"Therefore we may assume that the present position of the Solar Queen is within the volume of a cone made by the tangents of the outermost elements of the space curve that is the Solar Queen's course. We can take an eight-thousand-mile cylinder out of one place—for the origin of their trouble is between Mars and Terra and the 'shadow' of Terra in the cone will not contain the Solar Queen."
"Might have passed close enough to Terra to throw her right into the 'shadow' of Terra by attraction," objected Arden.