"That's what I thought. Now if you were running the spaceport at Canalopsis, what would your own private opinion be?" "I don't know whether I should speak for publication," said Don. "It won't be official. I'll corroborate anything you say before it is printed, and so on. But I want an unofficial opinion, too. If you want this withheld, say so, but I still want a technical deduction to base my investigation on. I don't understand the ramifications and the implications of a missing ship. It is enough to make Keg Johnson's hair turn gray overnight, though, and I'd like to know what is so bad before I start to turn stones." "Well, keep it off the record until Canalopsis gives you the go-ahead. I can give you an opinion, but I don't want to sound official." "O.K. Do you suppose she was hit by a meteor shower?" "Doubt it like the devil. Meteor detectors are many and interconnected on a spaceship, as well as being alarmed and fused to the nth degree. Any trouble with them will bring a horde of ringing bells all through the ship which would bring the personnel a-running. They just don't go wrong for no reason at all." "Suppose that so many meteors came from all directions that the factors presented to the autopilot--" "No dice. The possibility of a concentration of meteors from all directions all about to pass through a certain spot in space is like betting on two Sundays in a row. Meteors don't just run in all directions, they have a general drift. And the meteor detecting equipment would have been able to pick up the centroid of any group of meteors soon enough to lift the ship around it. Why, there hasn't been a ship hit by a meteor in ten years." "But--" "And if it had been," continued Channing, "the chances are more than likely that the ship wouldn't have been hit badly enough to make it impossible to steer, or for the crew to shoot out message tubes which would have landed on Canalopsis." "Look, there's one thing I don't understand," said Doug. "Spacecraft are always dodging meteors, yet Venus Equilateral seems immune." "It's the velocity," explained Don. "Venus Equilateral is traveling at the same speed as Venus, of course. A spacecraft hits it up in the hundreds of miles per second. Say two hundred and seventy miles per second, which is about ten times the orbital velocity of Venus Equilateral. Then with a given dispersion of meteors throughout space, any spacecraft has ten times the possible chances of encounter because the ship covers ten times the volume in the same time. Besides, truly missing meteors is a hypothetical problem." "How so?"