"That will do!" snapped Breadon angrily. He stared at the bandy-legged
little redhead. "You mean the radio was broken?"
"It wasn't helped none. The tubes was made out of glass, and glass
don't bounce so good."
Greg Malcolm said thoughtfully, "Sparks, can't you fix it?"
"Well, mebbe. But not in five minutes. Maybe not in five years. I won't
know till I get going on it."
Breadon frowned.
"I'll handle this, Malcolm," he crisped. Again to the radioman, "Well,
you get to work on it immediately. And as soon as you get it fixed,
send out an SOS advising the patrol where we are--"
"Speaking of which," insinuated Sparks, "where are we?"
Breadon glared at him wrathfully.
"Why--why on one of the satellites of Saturn, of course. Any fool can
see that!"
"O.Q. But does any fool know which one? Or shall I tell you it's Titan?
And when you know that, then what? Titan wasn't named that on account
of it was a pimple. It's a big place. What'll I tell the Patrol? _SOS.
Stranded in the middle of we-don't-know-where, somewhere on Titan,
maybe._ They'll be hunting for us till we've got whiskers down to our
knees."
Breadon's irate look vanished. He looked stricken. He said, "I--I don't
know. We have a compass--"
Once again it was Gregory Malcolm who entered into the conversation. He
had been toying, almost absentmindedly, with a funnel taken from the
skiff's stores. Into this he had poured a small portion of water; his
right forefinger was pressed to the bottom of the tube, closing it. He
said, "I can answer part of that question now. Enough to cut the search
in half, anyway. We're in the northern hemisphere of the satellite."
Maud Andrews looked at him sharply as if noticing him for the first
time in her life.
"How," she asked, "did you know that, Malcolm?"
* * * * *
Greg said, "Watch this." He released his finger at the base of the
funnel gently, carefully, taking care not to shake it. The captured
water swirled and trickled through the opening. Greg said, "Notice the
direction in which the water whirlpools? Clockwise. On the northern
hemisphere of any normally revolving heavenly body, water released
from a basin, funnel, container of any sort, swirls in that direction.
In the southern hemisphere it swirls counter-clockwise. Maybe you've
noticed in bathtubs, or--"
Breadon said impatiently, "Never mind the speeches, Malcolm. A very
clever bit of reasoning--if it's true. Do you think you can figure out
our exact latitude and longitude from that?"
Greg met his gaze levelly.
"Not from that," he said, "nor from anything else. Perhaps you've
forgotten that latitude and longitude are artificial inventions of
man's, based in one case on an imaginary 'equator,' and in the other on
an arbitrarily appointed 'line,' like Greenwich.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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