Front matter (continued 3)

Again silence. McCauley could envision the scene at Repeater Two, to which his voice was transmitted by precisely the system of beam relay used on Earth to carry telephone messages across continents without wires. There would be two bulky, space-suited figures atop an irregularly level space from which the ground fell away on every side, a drop of thousands of feet. They would be in glaring sunlight from the lowest of low-hanging suns. Where it struck the metal of their space armor they would glitter blindingly. Where there was shadow, there would be the blackness of the pit. Overhead there stretched a black sky with a thousand million stars, and around and below them there would be long, angular, parallel ribbons of shadow with sharply defined sides and with beginnings but no ends. And there would be the moon sledge with the relay built solidly upon it, its runners chocked with stony debris so it would not slide or topple. There would be the two bowl-shaped beam reflectors, one pointing back to Repeater One—itself a moon sledge wedged in place upon a mountain—and the other to remoteness and to wildness and to night.

"You could come back as you went," said McCauley. "You could bring back the sledge, breathing air from its tanks on the trip. But if you did that, Farside would be out of communication during the coming night. That would have to be explained."

Again it seemed that he could see the faraway, motionless figures of the two men listening over their suit radios to the voice twice relayed before it could reach their ears.

"I would have to explain," said McCauley grimly, "that Lieutenants Kent and Holmes intended to murder each other, and each one threw away an air tank he expected the other man to use—but he expected to have plenty of air for himself! I would have to explain that Farside was isolated because two would-be murderers had outsmarted themselves and didn't have the guts to face the consequences!"

Kent's voice came from a speaker. He spoke from that distant mountain peak toward which darkness crept steadily.

"Look here, sir." His tone was defiant.

"If that sledge is brought back," said McCauley angrily, "I'll court-martial whoever comes back with it, even the two of you! If one of you comes back, there'll be a court of inquiry. Maybe you've worked out a pretty story of an accident for the survivor to tell. But you can't use it now, because I found the air tanks you threw away! If one of you comes back, the inquiry will end in a court-martial and a murder verdict!"

Holmes' voice, stiff and steady, was as defiant as Kent's had been.

"I take it, sir, that you're advising neither of us to come back. Very well, sir! We've a little matter to settle between us. We can settle that and the one who's left...."

"If neither of you comes back," rasped McCauley, "the inquiry into your deaths will inform an interested world that two officers—and supposedly gentlemen—of the Space Service were actually two smart, snide, shabby killers who overreached themselves! The Service will be proud to have it known that its officers try to murder each other by throwing away each other's air tanks. The Service will be very, very proud!"

The irony of the last words was corrosive.

"Sir...." The two voices spoke together, outraged and despairing. "Sir," panted Kent's voice, alone. "We'd no idea of anything like that, sir! We've always hated each other, but...."

His voice ended in a gulp. McCauley growled. A young officer can be very much of a fool, of course, but he can be desperately solicitous for the honor of the Service to which he is attached. McCauley spoke with icy precision.

"I am not concerned with your lives or your hatreds or your intentions. I am concerned with the good name of the Space Service. I order you both to come back here. Alive. Together. You will start immediately!"

A dazed silence. Then Kent said:

"But—you don't want us to bring the sledge...."

"And we haven't—" this was Holmes—"we haven't enough air to get back! How can we do it, sir?"

McCauley relaxed in his small cubbyhole of an office. Very privately he drew a breath of relief. But his tone remained stern.

"You will head for Repeater One. If you remember, my voice goes from the base here to Repeater One where it is relayed to Repeater Two. If I chose the proper frequency it would go on through Three and Four to Farside. Can you think of any advantage in being at Repeater One instead of Two?"

A long pause. Then Holmes' voice, dubious:

"It's nearer the base, sir. No more than three hours' travel, if that much. We could make it on one tank of air apiece, sir, and have the extra one for margin. We could make it to base from there, sir, if we were there. But we're not, and it's three hours' travel from here! We'd get there...."

"You would get there?" demanded McCauley ominously. "Or you will get there?"

"Will, sir." But the young officer's voice was bewildered.

"For your information," said McCauley curtly, "the Repeater One relay unit is exactly like the relay unit at Repeater Two. I may add that it is in bright sunshine, but will not be so indefinitely."—This was because McCauley remembered an air tank which had lain in shadow until its metal shivered brittlely when struck and the air inside it was a liquid. "It was carried to its position and mounted exactly as the relay for Repeater Two was. Now figure it out for yourself! If you still don't understand when you get to it, call me from there. Now get moving! Sunset's not far away."

He clicked off his microphone, but left the receiving unit on. The relay at Repeater Two would pick up suit-radio speech and relay it back, the pickup being from its all-direction antennae. McCauley heard mumblings. Then, very distinctly, Holmes spoke.

"Understand, I'm going to cooperate with you, getting to Repeater One, but that doesn't mean I like you any better!"

Kent said resentfully:

"I figured you'd have to fight me for the air to get back with. And you pulled the same trick on me! But we'll manage eventually...."

More mutterings. Then:

"Cripes! Let's get going!"

There were those peculiar noises which a microphone inside a space suit picks up and transmits. Breathings. Clankings. Sometimes the squeak of metal sliding on metal.

McCauley listened. Presently the noises faded and ceased. The two young space-suited officers had descended the mountain to where they were not in line of sight of the relay, and consequently it could not pick up their suit-radio communications to relay back to McCauley.

The communications officer tapped on the office door.

"We're through to Farside Base, sir," he reported. "The relay system's working splendidly. Farside just asked for an Earth Relay link to Lunar Base."

"Give it to 'em," said McCauley succinctly.

He waited, listening. He had Repeater One as well as Two set so it would retransmit any local pickup on helmet-phone frequency, but it was half an hour before anything but the peculiar singing murmurs of empty space came from the loud-speaker. Then he heard heavy breathing.

He heard a colloquy between Kent and Holmes, far away in the lunar mountains. They were evidently climbing somewhere, and part of the climb necessarily took them through deep shadow, where the temperature of the rock was down to night temperature. Their space suits could handle the cold for a certain length of time, but the teeth of one of the men were chattering before he came out into sunlight at the end of the climb.

McCauley heard Holmes say sarcastically:

"I needed that last pull. Want me to thank you for it?"

Kent's voice snapped as he answered Holmes.

"I did it solely because McCauley would court-martial me if I came in alone!"

A pause, then the remote, transmitted sound of space shoes on stone. Holmes spoke.

"There's a way I can kill you easily. All I need do is get myself killed."

He laughed without mirth, and Kent said bitterly, "Go ahea—" Then there was silence.

The communications officer brought McCauley a message from Lunar Base congratulating Grimaldi Base for completing the communications link between the two hemispheres of the moon.

"All right. Forget it," McCauley said.

He continued to listen. An hour went by. Then, without warning, there came an explosive "Look out!" There was a crash and then panting. Kent's voice rasped, "Have you gotten killed?" Holmes answered through clenched teeth. "Not yet. But how will I get out of here?" More clankings; more words, painstakingly devoid of solicitude on the one hand, or any amiable emotion such as gratitude on the other. McCauley could visualize exactly what was going on from the words. Holmes had fallen into a pothole, one of innumerable such mantraps scattered at random everywhere.

Kent got him out. Holmes grunted to indicate that he could do without more help. That was that. Minutes later, McCauley heard Kent say dourly:

"Three hours to Repeater One? We're over three hours now. How's your air?"

"All right," Holmes snapped. "When we get to that level place, we'll split the extra tank."

McCauley fretted. He could not know how far or how fast the two men were moving, off in that deadly waste of obstacles. Three hours had seemed a fair estimate. But plainly they'd had trouble.

Their voices cut off before they reached a spot where they could divide the air in the tank that had to be shared.

Then silence, for a long, long time. When McCauley heard any sound again, it was Holmes angrily calling to Kent, demanding that he say whether he needed help or not. And then for a full half hour McCauley listened to the sharp-voiced, sometimes abusive exchanges between the two. Kent had touched the keystone of an unstable rock slope. It gave way under him and went whirling downward in one of those infrequent, slow-motion moon avalanches that are unimaginable until one has seen them. Kent checked himself on the edge of a precipice over which the rolling stones fell in utter silence until after tens of seconds they struck and split, still noiselessly.

He could not get away. It was dangerous to help him, lest another avalanche be started. McCauley, listening, sweated as he glanced at a clock. But Holmes was helping Kent.

Later—much later—he heard clatterings and Kent's voice said snappishly:

"Well, here's Repeater One. McCauley said to come here. What do we do now? I've air for fifteen minutes more."

Holmes tried to speak, but couldn't. There were clankings.

"Doggone you," Kent snarled shrilly, "you cheated on the air! You didn't split even! Cripes!"

Then he panted, and suddenly there was a hissing sound, and gasps. McCauley's hands were tightly clenched as the sounds came to him from both faraway space-suit microphones. But at the hissing sound he relaxed.

A little later Holmes' voice came, astonished.

"That was it! He said that the relay here was exactly like the relay at Repeater Two. It's a sledge, and it was brought here by two men—and it has air tanks that they breathed from while they traveled! Kent, you hooked me to the air. The pressure's way up! We can refill our suit tanks and the spare!"

Kent said waspishly:

"So I noticed. Get your tank full-up and let me have my share.... McCauley said to call him from here if we needed to. What say?"

"McCauley can go to blazes!" rumbled Holmes. "It's not two hours from here to the base. If we fill up on air, we can get there before sunset. To heck with McCauley!"

In the commanding officer's cubbyhole at Grimaldi Base, McCauley relaxed again in his chair. His expression went from strain to contentment. He reached over and flipped off the receiver.

The deep, dark, abysmally black night had fallen. Low down at the western horizon Earth hung, blue-green and glamorous, just above the crests of many ring mountains. It was a little past first quarter, and it gave only the faintest of light to the tortured and splintered rock formations outside Grimaldi Base. When Earth was full, there would be bright earthlight on the moon, and the moon's surface would look much stranger than any painter of fantastic pictures could imagine.

Inside the base, McCauley was going toward his office when a hand touched his arm. It was Kent. He looked forbidding and grim.

"I'd like to speak to you, sir," he said formidably.

McCauley waved him into the tiny office and closed the door.

"What's it all about?" he asked. He touched a switch and a desk light glowed. He touched another, but nothing in particular seemed to happen. "I've forgotten," he said mildly, "any unpleasant things I may have felt it necessary to say a few hours ago."

"It's Holmes, sir," said Kent, his lips tightly pressed together. "He didn't play fair, sir. When we split that extra air tank he cheated on it. He gave me more than he took himself. And when I was stuck with an avalanche ready to finish me any second, he...."

His voice rose shrilly. He complained bitterly that Holmes had saved his life at least four times.

"He had to," McCauley pointed out. "I said I'd court-martial whichever of you came in, if one came in alone."

"That's the devil of it," said Kent bitterly. "He didn't do it that way! He didn't do it grudgingly. Doggone him, he made me ashamed! If it weren't that I'm hanged if I'll ask any man to overlook things like I've done to him—and he's done to me—if I wouldn't be asking him to overlook so much, I'd...."

McCauley waited. But Kent did not finish. Instead he said savagely:

"As a matter of self-respect, sir, I have to report that Holmes ought to be commended officially for several acts beyond the call of duty, sir—and for a man he hates and who has hated him. That's all, sir!"

He turned to go out.

"Hold it!" McCauley spoke sharply. "You will listen to something. This is an order!" He threw a switch and said: "I recorded your recommendation, Kent. But you will listen to this!"

There was that minute whirring noise a tape recorder makes when it's beginning its run. Kent stiffened. A voice came out of a speaker. But it was not Kent's voice, it was Holmes'. And Kent, staring, heard Holmes saying stiltedly and urgently that Kent had behaved in a highly admirable manner that rated official commendation. He'd risked his life for Holmes on several occasions, and if it weren't that he wouldn't ask any man to forgive him things like he'd done to Kent....

McCauley snapped off the recorder. The sound ceased.

"Holmes came in here first," said McCauley dryly. "His and your recommendations will have due attention. And I'm not going to suggest that you go and shake hands with him, but I think he might like it."

Kent's mouth opened and closed.

"B ... but ..." he stammered.

"Get out of my office!" roared McCauley. "I've got work to do!"

5

(It seemed there wasn't much left to do in the way of space pioneering. There was a Space Platform, and there were bases on the moon, and drone ships had been out to Mars and sunward past Venus. There were new and better fuels, and the problem involving the Van Allen belts of highly charged atomic particles seemed to have been solved. It looked as if the rest of the job of conquering space would be just plain, slogging hard work of a strictly routine nature. This process would be improved a little, and that would be developed a little further, and progress toward the stars would be made by inches. But things never work out simply. There is always something unexpected and usually disastrous turning up. Just when things looked brightest, somebody worked out the causes of solar flares and devised a way to predict them. It looked like a neat and unimportant triumph of pure theory. But when it was closely examined, it meant that the end of all space travel was approaching.)

They called Colonel Ed McCauley back from the moon when Doctor Bramwell peevishly refused to go along with the Venus shoot unless the assigned crew was fired and replaced by more respectful men. The top brass felt that McCauley might be able to get along with Bramwell and get the job done. It was a highly necessary job. There was a sun-flare maximum coming up, but if the Bramwell-Faraday screen could be improved enough, it might not matter. Men might continue to occupy the Space Platform, and activities at the bases on the moon might continue. All the men now in space might not have to return to Earth to stay until the flares died down—if they ever did. In effect, if the Bramwell-Faraday screen could be built up to adequate strength, man's conquest of space might continue. If the screen couldn't be built up, space travel must stop.

And Doctor Bramwell was the key man in the project. He'd devised the screen in the first place, and was more likely to be able to improve it than anyone else. But he was not an amiable person. So, since he was a civilian and couldn't be given orders, when he said peevishly that he would not go along with the original crew, the men first assigned to the Venus shoot were removed—swearing luridly—and Colonel Ed McCauley came back from the moon to see what he could do.

He had one interview with Bramwell, and was very respectful. Part of the respect was genuine, and part was diplomacy. Bramwell did have one of the two or three best brains on Earth, but his personality gave McCauley reason to be disturbed.

After the interview he consulted higher-ranking officers. He did not think Bramwell was psychologically qualified to take part in the Venus shoot. He thought the scientist would do better work if he stayed home and directed somebody on the ship by tight-beam radio. McCauley spoke forcefully. But Bramwell happened to have a near-monopoly of the kind of brains that were required. And the psychological factor that made McCauley doubtful made the doctor as temperamental as any prima donna. The high brass knew all the reasons for McCauley's protest. But if Bramwell felt himself pushed aside, he'd sulk. If he sulked, he wouldn't do his best work. And his best work was an essential. So McCauley was ordered to make do with Bramwell somehow.

McCauley shrugged dubiously. He asked for Major Randy Hall to be assigned as his second-in-command. Randy gloated when his appointment came through, but McCauley shook his head gloomily.

"There's no reason to feel good about it," he told Randy dourly, in the almost completed Venus ship. "I'll be glad if you go along, but that's not the idea. You're appointed to be the man who'll be fired if Bramwell demands it."

Randy blinked. The cramped, inconvenient, gadget-filled interior of the Venus ship looked glamorous, when you thought of where it was going and what had to be done in it.

"The fact is," said McCauley, "—and the big brass knows it—the fact is that Bramwell's scared. He's terrified at the idea of going out into space. But he's ashamed to admit it. He'd rather die than let anyone know he's in a panic. He's probably trying to keep from admitting it even to himself. So he's making trouble to delay the moment of truth. He's trying to keep from facing the fact that he either has to go or else admit he won't."

"He's afraid of going?" asked Randy incredulously.

"Just as some people are afraid of heights, or spiders, or income-tax forms," said McCauley distastefully. "There's nothing disgraceful about being scared. If he'd only admit it, he could fight it or accept it. In either case he'd be all right. But he insists to himself that he's not only a brainy man but a normally courageous one. So he insists he'll go, and he won't let anybody go in his place, but he can't make himself believe he'll go. So he sets up all sorts of obstacles—crazy ones—ridiculous ones. He doesn't realize it, but he may subconsciously be trying to postpone the shoot until it's too late to make it. If that happens he won't have to face the fact that he's scared."

Randy grimaced.

"And you expect me...."

"To keep him busy," said McCauley. "Try to fix things so that it'll be take-off time before he realizes it. Keep him away from me so he can't pick a quarrel and insist that I be fired. Make yourself the one he'll insist he can't stand, when what he can't stand is the trip."

Randy grimaced again.

"You're a rat," he said resignedly. "But suppose I charm him so he doesn't insist that I be thrown out?"

"Fine!" said McCauley. "There'll be a crew of only two, with him as the third. I'd rather have you than anybody else. But Bramwell's devising excuses for refusing to go. You could be one excuse."

"I'll polish some apples," said Randy, "and fearlessly mixing metaphors, I'll beard him in his den. Maybe I can get so popular he won't want anybody fired."

"Good luck to you," said McCauley skeptically. "You'll need it!"

He plunged into the remaining preparations for the shoot, and Randy went to take over the job of keeping Bramwell from meeting the various people who passionately wanted to have nothing to do with him.

The basic problem the Venus shoot was to attack was at once simple but apparently hopeless. From time to time the sun displays "flares"; these are violent upsurgings of its photosphere, not in the nature of sunspots but somehow associated with them. A flare may begin without obvious warning and in fifteen minutes become monstrously violent, throwing off highly ionized fragments of molecules at the highest speeds material particles can attain. Some of these particles, in time, reach Earth; magnetic storms and auroral displays are the consequences of their arrival. They are harmless to people who live at the bottom of the planet's ocean of air.

But they are not harmless to the crew of a ship in space, or to the staff of that combined way station and observatory which is the Space Platform, or to the occupants of the bases on the moon. The Space Platform itself was set in orbit only three thousand miles out from Earth because of the Van Allen belts of just such particles that have been swung into paths around the earth and form invisible rings more or less resembling the visible rings of Saturn. At three thousand miles out these particles are not deadly. Farther out they are.

It was not until the Bramwell-Faraday screen was devised that it became possible for a man to land upon the moon. With the screen, a man could survive passing through the Van Allen belts in screened ships and set up moon bases. But the margin of safety was not great. It was enough, but barely so.

The Venus shoot was planned because this state of affairs would not last. Astrophysicists had developed a system for predicting solar flares. Then they'd found evidence and, later, proof that the flare frequency was due for an enormous and probably permanent rise. Dense clouds of flare particles would be released. The Van Allen bands would be intensified. Within a year, any man who went beyond Earth's protecting atmosphere could expect to get a fatal dose of radiation burns within an hour's exposure, a flare particle being "radiation" in the same sense as the particles thrown off by radioactive materials. The Bramwell-Faraday screen had to be improved, or else. And the only way to know that it was improved was to try it against stronger and stronger streams of the deadly particles until it failed—or worked. Which meant that somebody had to go out to where flare particles were abundant.

So McCauley labored on the ship that was already nearly set to dive sunward. It would be equipped with the screen that had made Earth-moon travel possible. It would have on board Bramwell, who'd designed the screen to begin with. It would plunge into flare-particle radiation of such intensity that the ship's crew might survive—with the present screen on full—but this was by no means certain. The ship would dive sunward to Venus, swing around that planet, and drift back out to the orbit of Earth. On the way, Bramwell would try to adapt his screen to protect the ship and himself in it. It was a highly melodramatic proceeding, and Bramwell looked very heroic.

But he was a most unpleasant man. Having met him, McCauley estimated his personal attractiveness as much less than one-tenth the personal charm of an irritated skunk.

Ten days after his assignment to the Venus shoot, Randy came to McCauley with a sort of grim humor in his expression.

"I took Bramwell over the ship," he said. "Since he's going to live and work in it, he thought he ought to see it."

"That's reasonable," admitted McCauley.

Randy held up his hand and ticked off on his fingers.

"Item. He drinks a glass of orange juice, a large one, every night before retiring. A supply of orange juice must be provided."

"All right," said McCauley. "Anything else?"

"Item," said Randy. "He is extremely annoyed by noise. He must have a working area that is lined with soundproof material and has a soundproof door so he can have absolute quiet."

McCauley grunted.

"If you can think of anything quieter than space with one's rockets off.... But okay. What else?"

"Item. He suspects he's allergic to the vegetation in the air-freshening system," said Randy. "I promised it would be checked."

"We'll make impressive allergy tests for him," said McCauley. "If that's all...."

"It isn't," said Randy. "He wants a bunk with a hard mattress. He won't use the acceleration chair except for take-off."

McCauley stared.

"But didn't you tell him?..."

"I," said Randy wryly, "am polishing apples. I want to go on this shoot even if he does, which means I want to go very badly. No. I didn't tell him that in free-fall flight with no gravity a steel plate is as comfortable as a down pillow. Why start an argument with a man in a blue funk?... He showed me the reference library he insists he has to take with him. It weighs eight hundred pounds."

"There," said McCauley, "he has to lose! We can't take eight hundred pounds of excess weight. We simply can't do it!"

Randy grinned.

"I showed him a moon-base microfilm reader and offered him the equivalent of four tons of books on half a dozen reels. He couldn't refuse to buy. He only named half a dozen book titles not already on film, and they're being filmed now."

"Anything else?"

"Not so far," said Randy. "He's scared and ashamed of being scared. I don't think he'll actually get up nerve enough to back out, but I'm sure he'll never get the nerve to go. When he finds out the actual take-off time I look for trouble."

"What kind?"

"Maybe hysterics," said Randy. "I'm almost sorry for the guy, but not quite. A man with his brains ought to face the fact that he feels timid, and either fight it or admit it. Especially, a man ought to realize that other people can tell what's the matter with him."

McCauley considered, frowning.

"For your information only," he said, "take-off will be 1400 hours Tuesday, neither plus nor minus. We'll have to stop at the Platform to refuel, and the Platform has a schedule. We'll need to swing very close to Venus for its pull to change our course, and Venus has a schedule. And we'll need to meet Earth farther along in its orbit, and Earth has a schedule. None of them can be changed to humor Bramwell's psychological idiosyncrasies. We take off at 1400 hours Tuesday!"

But Randy shook his head.

"Oh, oh! Friend Ed, we're in trouble!"

"He won't go?"

"He won't go," said Randy. "I'm just learning how to handle him. I believed I could trick him into committing himself so firmly that he'd go, no matter how much something inside of him was screaming that it didn't want to. But Tuesday's too early. I don't think there's a chance to get him either to go or admit he won't. Not by Tuesday."

"That's too bad," said McCauley grimly. "We need him for our crew—him or a reasonable facsimile. Do you know what they used to do when they needed sailors?"

"Pressed them," said Randy. "Press gangs grabbed them. But that was the law then. It isn't now."

"I wasn't thinking of a press gang," said McCauley. "Much more often, a man got shanghaied. We've got to have that souped-up Bramwell screen!"

More days passed. Doctor Bramwell announced firmly that he would not be ready to take off on the Venus shoot on Tuesday at 1400 hours. It was pointed out to him that all the computations for the Venus shoot were based on that time for departure. Doctor Bramwell said firmly that he would not be ready to leave at that time. It was suggested that he name someone who could take his place and work out the improved screen, of course on the basis of his advice and suggestions tight-beamed out to the Venus ship. Doctor Bramwell said indignantly that nobody else was capable of doing his work. But he would not be ready to depart at 1400 hours on Tuesday.

There was a complete impasse. He was immovable. The shoot had to be made at a certain time. He refused to be ready at that time. Preparations for the shoot went on. He calmly and ponderously ignored them.

At 1400 hours on Tuesday a hundred and eighty feet of streamlined, fire-spouting metal plunged skyward from Cape Canaveral. At eighty thousand feet, the first stage dropped off; at seventy miles, the second stage. The third stage, which was the Venus ship, went whipping on out into space. It circled Earth once, gradually overtaking the Space Platform as it floated serenely in emptiness three thousand miles out from the Earth's surface. With tiny, finicky jettings of rocket fuel, and the use of steam-jets for final maneuvering, McCauley brought the Venus ship into contact with the Space Platform.

There was swift and efficient action. Men in space suits swarmed out of the brilliantly sunlit, faceted artificial moon. They connected fuel hoses and topped off the Venus ship's tanks. They floated a second-stage unit out and bolted it in place. They painstakingly got a giant first-stage unit out of the ship lock and set it where it belonged. At the Space Platform, the Venus ship regained the fuel and the ability to accelerate that it had used up getting there.

One and a quarter hours after contact, McCauley reported back to Canaveral that all was well, that Doctor Bramwell was in excellent condition and making no complaints, and that all instruments and equipment had functioned perfectly during the trip from Earth. Then he backed the reenlarged Venus ship away from the Platform.

There was a long, long pause while he adjusted the nose of the ship with micrometric accuracy to an exact, particular spot and made sure that it stayed there. The ship had drifted a good mile from the Platform when he stabbed home the rocket-firing button.

As usual, the instantly following sensation was that of a roof falling in on one and several other roofs falling in on top of it. The Venus ship accelerated for seventy-eight seconds, its nose pointed sunward. McCauley'd set the rocket timer for that length of firing.

When the rockets died, he floated weightless in a ship which had no weight. His head tried to split wide open and let his aching brains run out. His hands were puffy and swollen. His eyes felt as if they were on fire. Beside him, Randy groaned and then growled.

"Doggone the man who invented rockets," said Randy painfully.

"See how Bramwell's doing," grunted McCauley. "I've got to see how we made out."

His headache went slowly away as he checked the ship's line of motion against Earth, growing small behind him, and Venus and the sun ahead. It was reasonably satisfactory. He checked the ship's velocity by the inertia computer and by a tight-beam query back to Earth. His query went back on microwave with a beautifully accurate piezocrystal regulating his frequency. His speed could be determined by the Doppler effect. Both the inertia computer and the Doppler reading indicated that his velocity would need a slight boost later. A time and duration of rocket firing would be computed. So far, though, so good.

"We'd better set up housekeeping," said McCauley. "How's Bramwell?"

"Pulse and respiration okay," reported Randy. "But I bet he busts a button when he wakes up."

McCauley eased out of his acceleration chair. He ached in every bone and muscle from the effects of the two successive take-offs. But he cast an accustomed eye about the ship. It was not a big ship, and Bramwell's stipulated soundproof cabin took up a large part of it. It was, actually, not much more than an oversized moonship. But there were features to be arranged that the short-voyage ships from Earth to moon did not bother with.

McCauley floated over to the packed-up air system. In a space voyage up to a week in length, it is as economical of weight to carry air as to purify it. But the Venus shoot would last much, much longer than a week. So McCauley unpacked the air system. The vegetation had been padded lest it be bruised or broken in the take-offs. He set up the unit and started the hydroponic pump. Randy adjusted the drinkables unit. McCauley set out meals to thaw, in readiness for dinner. Randy put the sanitary facilities and the waste-disposal unit in operation. In effect, the ship had had to be decommissioned as a livable vessel while it was being flung out from Earth as a projectile. Now, in far space and going even farther, the two men transformed it into one of those specialized environments that supply men in emptiness with everything they require except day, night, weight, up, down, normal sounds, and a feeling of belonging where they are.

One homey touch appeared before the recommissioning of the ship was complete. McCauley opened a very small box and took from it an infinitesimal yellow object that stirred as he handled it. It was a tiny canary which had been stowed in the equivalent of a canary-sized acceleration chair. Now it struggled desperately in his hand.

"You'll do, Mr. Perkins," said McCauley. "You're all right!"

He put the panting little creature—Mr. Perkins—into a cage hardly larger than itself. It let out a bewildered chirp when he released it. It struggled wildly, in panic because there was no up or down. McCauley captured it and put its groping claws against the perch. They gripped it. He set up a curiously intricate device inside the cage.

"He'll do," he said in satisfaction. "And it looks as if his food-and-water system is going to work, even in no-gravity. That was a job to design!"

He checked two larger devices with extreme care. One was the flare-particle counter, designed to make an audible click for every hundred, every thousand, or every ten-thousand flare-particle penetrations registered. McCauley set it for hundreds. It clicked every three or four seconds, which was a high concentration but still within the tolerance limit. The other device was the oxygen-supply flutter valve. The plants in the air system would absorb carbon dioxide from the air as the men's breaths produced it, and release oxygen to replace it. But it was not quite a hundred per cent replacement. From time to time more oxygen had to be added from storage tanks to keep the air volume constant and the oxygen percentage right. The flutter valve took care of all this. It made a curiously irritable, buzzing sound when it worked.

The ship went on. Ahead and off to the right lay the steady, last-quarter crescent of Venus. Above and below and on every hand there were stars. Nobody on Earth ever sees the stars as they appear in space. At the bottom of Earth's atmosphere, the keenest eye can see no more than three thousand stars at any one time. Out here one could count as many in a circle no larger than the sun's disk. They shone in innumerable colors. The Milky Way was not a filmy mist across the heavens, but a ribbon of jewels set in pure light; Earth was a glamorous blue-green gem with white spots at its top and bottom, and the moon was a shining smaller circle.

Randy looked outside, as McCauley did. Then Randy yawned, to hide the awe that every man feels when he looks upon the immensity that men impertinently intend to conquer.

"Well, now," said Randy. "We're well started and maybe a bit of a nap is sensible. Anyhow, Bramwell's sleeping sweetly. Should I loose him?"

"Wait till he wakes," said McCauley. "Things feel pretty good," he added.

Randy was silent, and they savored the feel of the ship together. It was strictly a feeling for technically-minded men. There were innumerable instruments, and all of them registered well within the limits of what it was proper for such instruments to read. The ship was on course, floating in immensity. It had ample reserves of fuel. It had left the Space Platform with all its take-off-from-Earth fuel replaced. Besides, having been launched from the Platform at the proper instant, it had the Platform's orbital speed converted to sunward velocity and reinforced by blasts from the new first-stage booster which was not yet fully expended. The replaced second-stage had not been touched, and there was a third stage in reserve. The air system was functioning. The oxygen flutter valve made a consoling noise toward the ship's stern. It sounded like a staccato Bronx cheer. There was plenty of oxygen stored under tremendous pressure. There were resources of food. And there was all the equipment that Bramwell could possibly need for the development and replacement of the ship's present Bramwell-Faraday screen, so that men could stay in space and go farther and farther from home.

It was while they felt the fine contentment of men with a job to do and the material for doing it that Bramwell awoke. At the beginning he was starkly bewildered. He remembered drinking his glass of orange juice the night before. But he remembered nothing more until he found himself trussed up in an acceleration chair, in no-weight, in space, in the one situation he'd been unable to nerve himself to face.

When he realized what had happened to him, he went into blind, screaming, fighting hysterics.

They were three days on their way when McCauley said patiently:

"I've told you. You can use the communicator back to Earth and protest that you were kidnaped. You can arrange for us to be arrested when we return. But we can't turn back. It isn't possible. I wouldn't if I could. Anyhow you're not nearly as scared as you were. You can think straight, now, certainly! And you can see how ridiculous you'll look if you become known as the man who had to be shanghaied for a space trip because he'd neither the nerve to go nor the intestinal fortitude to admit the fact and let another man try to do his work. If you want to be known as a complete ass, you can. But do you?—Do you want to be known as an utter ass?"

Bramwell glared at him. Nobody can stay panicked for days on end. If a man had had a Damoclean sword hanging over his head for days, he'd wind up accustomed to it. He wouldn't like it, but he couldn't stay scared. Fear is an emergency mechanism to increase the pulse rate and release adrenalin and tone the muscles for combat or flight. It is inherently a limited response. It has a maximum duration.

And Bramwell was now past the limit of the time a man can stay hysterically terrified. He didn't like space. He didn't like no-weight. But most devastatingly and bitterly—now that he was no longer terrified—he was ashamed. McCauley and Randy had seen him in babbling, incoherent frenzy. His dignity was utterly gone. And he hated Randy and McCauley poisonously because they'd seen what he would not admit to himself—that he was afraid. It was humiliation to face them. It was an intolerable rasping-raw of his vanity to be in their presence. They knew he'd been afraid and that he'd bluffed to hide it. They'd seen him crack up when he found himself in space. He was shamed beyond endurance. Therefore he raged, and therefore he hated them irreconcilably.

McCauley went on as patiently as before:

"You can do your work now, and it will never be known that you had to be forced to it like a scared little boy. Or you can not do it, and it won't get done, and the history books will say that men once started for the stars but had to come home because Doctor Bramwell's pride prevented him from working on the problem he was the only man who could solve."

Randy, watching, nodded to himself. McCauley was doing a good job of argument. That last "only man who could" was flattery, and Bramwell ought to respond to it.

"I shall charge," said Bramwell spitefully, "that you two prevented me from doing my work by imposing impossible working conditions on me!"

"Name possible ones," said McCauley patiently, "and you'll get them if they're available."

The canary, Mr. Perkins, chirped from its cage. The bird was upside down in relation to Bramwell, but it seemed to have adjusted admirably to the conditions of space travel.

"The soundproofed room," said Bramwell triumphantly, "is ridiculously small. I need more space. But above all I need quiet! I need to be isolated from the society of fools and from noises I cannot endure!"

Mr. Perkins chirped again. The canary was still bewildered, but at least it could see now, and it'd found out how to get at its food and water, and it felt quite cheerful.

"... And you might start," rasped Bramwell, "by strangling that blasted canary! I abominate canaries!"

"Things are looking up, Ed," Randy said cheerfully. "There can't be anything very much wrong with a man who hates dogs, children, and canary birds!"

But McCauley had begun thoughtfully to examine the layout of the interior of the ship.

They were two weeks on the way toward Venus. The flare-particle counter clicked every second and a half. The sun's disk, ahead, was appreciably larger and Venus was a thinner crescent than before. Earth was a small object, though still larger than Venus, and the moon was very small indeed. At this distance the Space Platform was, of course, invisible. But the changes inside the ship were more marked than those outside.

The interior of the ship was now divided into two parts. McCauley and Randy had pulled down the small cubicle made of soundproofing material that had been built for Bramwell to work in. They had used the same material to wall off a full half of the ship. There was a door in the wall, and part of the air-freshening system operated through sound baffles so that the air in the walled-off space was changed, quite silently, with the same regularity as the air in the forward end of the ship, where McCauley and Randy did their work.

But McCauley was vaguely disturbed. It had developed gradually, but he did not feel right. Even though he could not become physically exhausted in a total absence of gravity, he felt dull and weary. There were measurements of flare-particle frequency to be recorded, both from outside the ship where the Bramwell-Faraday screen did not operate, and from inside where it did. The figures were curiously difficult to copy. But there was no reason for him to feel weak and stupid. The air system worked perfectly. The food was adequate. The ship moved steadily, silently, perfectly on its way at a certain number of miles per second, which was increasing a trifle because of the sun's gravitational field. Everything seemed perfect. But he didn't feel right. Randy was not himself, either. And Mr. Perkins sang only half-heartedly.

The canary began, now, what started out to be a beautifully executed trill, but which died away after half a dozen tremolos.

"Mr. Perkins isn't in good voice today. What's troubling him?" Randy spoke with a certain effort.

McCauley concentrated on the report he was filling out. He shook his head and looked again; he was startled.

"Look here!" he said sharply. "We had the screen on when we left the Platform. It kept out the radiation when we went through the Van Allen belt. But now we're nearer the sun. Stuff's coming through the screen! It's been coming through for days! And we haven't noticed it! What's the matter with us?"

"I wouldn't know," said Randy listlessly.

"We're not on the ball," said McCauley. "We've got to do something about this!"

He rose from his chair. It took but the slightest of effort, and he floated free. He reached out his hand to the wall and directed the motion of his whole body. He approached the soundproof barrier that now divided the ship into two separate parts. He caught a handhold on the door and knocked.

Minutes later the door opened. There was no gravity, so Bramwell did not stand in the opening. He floated there, scowling. He and McCauley faced each other, very much like swimmers, except that they swam in air.

"Radiation's coming through the screen," said McCauley. "It shouldn't. Not this early, anyhow. Shouldn't something be done? I'm ordered to consult you about all adjustments of the screen."

He was vaguely dissatisfied with himself for asking. He should not have to ask anyone for instructions. He was ordered to in this case, but decisions were his job.

"Turn it up!" said Bramwell peevishly. Then he seemed to notice that he had not been actively unpleasant. He moved quickly to correct the omission. "How many times," he demanded furiously, "have I told you not to disturb me! Noise upsets me! Leave me alone! Isn't it enough that I have to share the ship with clods, without having you bang on my door?" He glared around the forward part of the ship. Mr. Perkins sang again, a half-hearted attempt at a warble. "Noise! Noise! Noise!" rasped Bramwell.

He pulled the door shut. McCauley floated lethargically to the screen unit and made an adjustment.

Nothing important apparently happened, but something ceased to happen so often. The sharp, slightly irregular clicking of the particle counter seemed to stop. It was a full five seconds before it clicked again, six before it clicked a second time, and five before it clicked a third.

"I wish," said McCauley lethargically, "that I'd been a little more on the job. Why didn't we notice the radiation count going up, Randy?"

"Bramwell complains if we touch the side of the ship because it makes noises inside his sanctum," Randy answered. "Maybe we've been trying not to think for fear the noise would disturb him."

McCauley considered the comment carefully, which was itself an indication that he was not up to par.

"No," he said slowly, "it's not that. But we don't feel right. Maybe we'd better take our temperatures. It would be ghastly if we were getting sick! Bramwell couldn't feed himself, let alone get the ship around Venus!"

With some effort he found a clinical thermometer. But they did not have any fever. In fact, their temperatures were considerably lower than the 98.6° F. which is considered the norm for men in good health.

They were two weeks and five days on their way. McCauley shook his head to clear his mind. He reread what he had just written in the ship's log, vaguely puzzled because it did not seem to make sense. With enormous effort he checked each word and found that he had left one out here and another one there. With great determination he put them in. Somewhere in his mind there was a feeling that he needed to do something very urgently, but he could not think what it was.

"Randy," he said, and something in his brain noted that his voice was plaintive, "I can't seem to think straight! There's something I ought to do! What is it?"

Randy shook his head. He floated in the straps of his acceleration chair; not that the chair was needed, but because it held him still so that there was no possible chance of his striking against the unmuffled wall of the ship and so sending a solid-conduction sound back to Bramwell.

"I don't know," said Randy flatly. "I don't feel too bright myself."

The soundproof door of the after compartment opened. Bramwell came out. Somehow he looked pathetic and frustrated, but he essayed rage.

"I have to have silence!" he cried ferociously. "You are making noises! I cannot think! And I must think! I have to have silence!"

McCauley said numbly:

"I'm sitting here, and Randy's in his chair. There's no noise."

"There is noise, or why can't I think? You are doing something to keep me from thinking!... That canary! It has been singing! That's it! You must wring its neck so I can think!"

"No," said McCauley, "it hasn't been singing. It hasn't sung for a long time. It did, but it doesn't any more. Why?"

"Something is the matter!" insisted Bramwell desperately. "I'm stupid! I'm as stupid as you! And I must use my brains!"

"You've got everything we can give you," said McCauley without particular emphasis. "We can't seem to do our work right either."

"There is some new condition we do not know about," Bramwell said, in a sort of puny panic. "There is something in space which is working to destroy us! Here! Send this message back to Earth!" McCauley took the slip of paper on which words were written in an erratic, spidery hand. "But I think you are making noises!"

Bramwell pulled himself back into his soundproof half of the ship. The door closed behind him, but not quite in time to cut off the beginning of an agitated whimpering sound.

McCauley pushed the beam-on button. He should have checked the time, Earth time, to see if Canaveral were on the side of Earth from which it could pick up the beamed message from space. It wasn't, but he didn't think to check. He read, in a monotone, the message Bramwell had written out:

I feel the purpose impossible probable effect similar to X-rays with this is vital to further but I have no instruments.

Bramwell.

He was vaguely puzzled but he read it faithfully. Then, without checking for reception, he turned off the transmitter. He went back to the painful task of trying to make the ship's log entry at which he'd been working for a long time. He assured himself that though the message did not mean anything to him, they'd understand it back on Earth.

But they didn't. It didn't get back to Earth. The Venus ship had been pointed very accurately so that the parabolic reflector for the tight beam to Earth was perfectly aligned. But Bramwell had protested the faint, faint hum of the gyros which kept the ship pointed correctly. McCauley had turned them off. He'd meant to re-align the ship for each period of communication, but his mind was confused and he forgot.

Earth had received no message from the Venus ship for six days past. There was consternation in the Space Service.

It wouldn't have lessened any had Bramwell's message been picked up. He'd meant to say that he felt that achievement of the Venus ship's purpose was impossible because of something which doomed the men in it. He thought it probable that some previously unnoticed effect of radiation, perhaps similar to X-rays, was destroying their capacity to think. This effect should be studied. It was vital to further space exploration. But he had no instruments that could detect it.

They were three weeks out from Earth. The Bramwell-Faraday screen was turned up to full strength, and still the radiation counter clicked and clicked. It now indicated a higher frequency of radiation-particle penetration than was experienced in any of the Van Allen bands around Earth. Bramwell was a pitiable figure. Enough of his mental capacity remained to inform him of his intellectual degeneration. Now and again he popped into the forward part of the ship, trying to catch McCauley or Randy at some activity that was stealing his brain power away. When he failed to do so, he reacted with rages that would have been alarming except that he had not the energy for anything more than words.

McCauley struggled against a massive indifference. One part of his mind stood aside and knew that the occupants of the ship were doomed, but he could not care. Mr. Perkins no longer moved about its cage. Its feathers fluffed, the bird might be dead on its perch. McCauley tried painstakingly to write up the ship's log, but what he wrote was confused, meaningless. Even his handwriting grew steadily more illegible.

Then, at three weeks and one day, the leak alarms rang stridently. They made a frightful clamor all over the ship. The few compartment doors closed tightly.

"Leak," muttered McCauley to himself. "Prob'ly meteorite. Got to get in suit and fix leak...."

Fighting an overwhelming lethargy, he floated toward the space suit rack, missed it by yards, doggedly made his way back to it, and numbly began to get into a suit. Randy worked at the same task. He stopped to rest.

"Randy," said McCauley protestingly. "Get in suit! Leak!"

He himself was incredibly feeble. Had there been weight in the ship, he could not have lifted his helmet to his head. He settled it over his shoulders, but his fingers failed to turn the thumbnuts tight. Even so, there was the familiar feel of air blowing across his face.

Strength came to him. Not instantly, but with the first breaths of air from the suit tank his head seemed to clear a little. After more breaths, his hands moved assuredly. He began to realize the change in himself and gulped down deep lungfuls of the dry, curiously flat-smelling stored air.

Randy hadn't finished getting into his suit; he seemed to have gone to sleep. But when McCauley approached him in the space suit, Randy's eyes turned toward him incuriously.

McCauley thrust him into the space suit and clamped down the helmet. Randy suddenly stared.

"Something's been wrong with the ship's air!" snapped McCauley, feeling more like himself every second. "It's no good! Breathe deep, Randy! Breathe deep!"

Randy obeyed. His eyes cleared.

"Bramwell!" snapped McCauley. "Get him in a suit! He hasn't sense enough to do it himself!"

He flung himself at the control board. The leak was....

But there was no leak. The leak alarm had rung, but every pressure indicator in every part of the ship showed the same figure. It was.... McCauley gazed incredulously at the dials. The ship's interior pressure was 12.8 pounds to the square inch as against a normal 14.7. The difference was enough to set off the leak alarm, but a thinning of the air like this was not enough to cause the stupidity, the lethargy, the confused and helpless thinking which McCauley—marveling—realized had appeared during the past three weeks.

He heard a howling noise between the clamors of the gongs. It was Bramwell.

"You're making a noise!" wailed Bramwell. "I can't have a noise! I must have quiet...."

McCauley spoke crisply into the transmitter, sending a tight-beam message back to Earth. It would be minutes before it was received, as against the less-than-two-second lag in a message sent from the moon to Earth.

"We were suffering from oxygen starvation," said McCauley briskly. "The plants in the air-system's hydroponic garden absorbed carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen, but not quite cent per cent. There was a steady small loss of oxygen in the ship, caused by the use of oxygen as well as carbon by the growing plants. This small loss should have been made up by the addition of oxygen to keep the volume of the ship's air constant. But it happened that the oxygen flutter valve became jammed...."

He heard an explosive sigh of relief behind him, but he carefully did not look up at Bramwell. Bramwell was very silent these days, and he practiced extreme self-control. He realized now that he'd let too many things bother him. But he was still bothered, and horribly so, by the memory of his inability to make up his mind to face the journey in space, or to arrange for somebody to substitute for him, so he'd had to be shanghaied. He was even more bothered by the memory of his behavior when he found himself in a ship off for a swing in to Venus and out again. McCauley and Randy ignored these past happenings, and Bramwell would never be able to bring himself to mention them. But he was very much ashamed.

The thing that disturbed him most, however—the thing that made him extremely conscientious and extremely self-controlled—was the consequences of not facing things and of trying to cover up his own shortcomings. When he got over his hysterics he wanted to get even with McCauley and Randy by defying them. But he hadn't dared defy them openly. He'd been peevish and ashamed and humiliated. To him the bronx cheer of the oxygen flutter valve had seemed a mockery. But he still felt superior to pieces of machinery. So when the flutter valve went "Tht-tht-tht-tht!" at him, he angrily turned it off. And the human race almost had to stay on Earth forever because of it. The three of them came very close to dying.

McCauley continued talking matter-of-factly into the transmitter.

"As a result of the jammed valve, there was a steady lowering of the oxygen content of the air, but the carbon dioxide content did not increase. The air was getting closer and closer to pure nitrogen all the time, but we didn't notice, because a person feels suffocated by an excess of carbon dioxide rather than by a lack of oxygen. We were all dying quite comfortably when the leak alarm went off because the air pressure was dropping as the oxygen left us. When the alarm went off, we found the trouble and brought the oxygen concentration up to what it should be. We think there should be no more trouble. In fact...."

He stood up and handed the microphone to Bramwell. Bramwell hesitated a moment. Then he spoke.

"I have to report that the problem of a stronger Bramwell-Faraday screen field seems to be solved. This particular accident suggested a theory. Quite coincidentally, the theory resembled one aspect of charged-particle theory. It led to an idea. The new screen has a very gratifying reflex action which uses the velocity of the flare particles themselves to increase the screen's resistance. The charged particles are tricked into defeating themselves. I will have a detailed account of the theory and the apparatus shortly."

Mr. Perkins, in its cage against the wall, burst into song. The canary began with a trill and went on to a warble; then Mr. Perkins essayed a glocken. He accomplished it triumphantly. Bramwell scowled at it from habit. But then he carefully smoothed out his forehead as he handed the microphone back to McCauley. He nodded at the tiny cage.

"Not bad," he admitted. "Not bad at all!"

The Venus ship got back to its rendezvous with Earth some four months and eighteen days after take-off. At that time, this was the longest space journey ever made by man. But it was not only the longest trip. As a result of it, the reflex Bramwell screen had been developed along a new principle: The higher the velocity of a charged particle, the firmer the screen's resistance to its passage. Since the screen could stop even the highest-energy cosmic particles, the effect of such particles upon living matter could be determined by comparing exposed organisms—human beings and all other living things on Earth—to other organisms shielded from cosmic radiation. The ship, too, had made some close-range infrared photographs of Venus and prepared a fairly complete map of the planetary features underneath the cloud bank. The length of Venus' day was established. The....

It was a highly successful expedition from all standpoints.

But Randy insisted that the most remarkable result was the change in Bramwell. There was no doubt that Bramwell had one of the best brains in the solar system. Even when they disliked him most, both McCauley and Randy had respected his brains. But after Bramwell found out that they'd never refer to the way he acted before and immediately after he was shanghaied, the fact that he was so ashamed of himself improved him as far as human society was concerned.

He improved so much, in fact, that by the time they got back to Earth, McCauley and Randy were not much more polite to him than they were to each other.

Which was high honor.

6

(As a brand-new lieutenant, McCauley had been the first man to ride a rocket out of atmosphere. As a major, he was in the first piloted space craft to achieve an orbit and land again in one piece, and he helped to build the Space Platform. But it seemed likely that after he made colonel he was likely to be stuck with administrative tasks and go on no more trips. There was the affair of the Bramwell-Faraday screen, to be sure, but that was pure luck. He gloomily expected nothing more exciting than desk duty in some deadly tedious minor base upon the moon. But it happened that the asteroid Eros—very small, very irregular in shape, and very, very eccentric in its orbit—was due to pass close to Earth again as it went out from the sun. It had passed within two million miles of Earth in the 1930s, and nothing happened. But now McCauley was looking for an excuse to be more than a desk Colonel. He added up Eros and Mars and drone rockets, and the resources of the Space Service and a certain amount of imagination. He came up with something the Space Service had believed was still twenty years in the future. He'd worked out a way to get back from Mars. So he was assigned to try it.)

The Personnel Ship of the First Martian Expedition was within two million miles of Mars when McCauley missed his watch. Everything had gone along as predicted, up to that moment. The ship had taken off from Earth and headed outward for its rendezvous with the tiny asteroid Eros. It burned rocket fuel lavishly to get the necessary velocity for the journey. Then it floated interminably while Earth grew small and far away behind it, and the sun dwindled and its heat lessened. Then Eros appeared like the tiniest pinpoint of light, and the ship drew up to it and braked—it had very little fuel left for its braking—and touched, and then moored itself to the half acre of previously moored bales and cases and special drones that the asteroid had ferried out from Earth. The ship's crew went outside in space suits, each one separately tethered to the ship by a long cable. They began to check the condition of their waiting supplies. Everything had to be examined because it had lain—hung—rested for two years on Eros' surface in the network of cables and drill rods needed to hold it there. The condition of the stores was satisfactory. So Colonel Ed McCauley took a shower.

In its way, even that was an adventure. The ship, of course, had no gravitational field, and Eros was very small indeed. Of almost solid nickel-iron, it was five miles by two by three; and though it dwarfed the ship, its gravity pull was on the order of one five-millionth that of Earth. So taking a shower in a ship moored to Eros was something special. It meant holding fast to handholds in a furious fan-made gale that blew water against one and then blew it off and to a water collector where it could be filtered and sterilized and pumped around to the showerhead again. It was quite different from a bath on Earth, but McCauley was much refreshed. He toweled himself and put on his ship clothes again—and his watch was gone from the pocket he'd put it in.

It made no sense at all.

He was still looking for the watch in every corner of the compartment outside the shower tank, when Major Randy Hall came in, propelling himself in that extremely unlikely fashion which has to be used in zero gravity.

"Randy," said McCauley vexedly, "I've lost my watch."

"I lost mine a week ago," said Randy. He caught a handhold and pulled himself to a sitting position, resting on nothing whatever. "Hathaway lost his the week we started out. Fallon told me privately that somebody'd swiped his wallet only a day or so after we started out."

McCauley swung around to face him.

"That's nonsense!" he said angrily. "It's lunacy! Who'd want to steal in a space ship?"

"I thought it was lunacy, too," said Randy, "until a few minutes ago. Now I'm more credulous. From checking supplies outside, it appears that some very fancy small instruments are missing. A case was broken open. Since we tied up here."

McCauley stared at him. On the face of it, Randy's statement was flatly impossible. Personal character aside, it was unthinkable that a member of the Expedition should steal from another member or from its stores. Nobody could use a stolen article in a ship containing exactly five other men. Nobody could sell stolen goods to his fellow crewmen. And nobody could hope to take any loot back to Earth. If all went well, the men themselves might hope to get back to Earth at some problematic future time. But every ounce of Earth-bound cargo would be scientific material, mostly microfilm. Stolen goods couldn't be used or sold or taken back to Earth. Money itself wasn't worth stealing. Nothing was. Many millions of dollars' worth of equipment now outside the ship had lain unguarded and untouched for two years in empty space. Nobody had stolen any of it before. There was no sense in stealing it now.

But somebody was.

It was a serious matter because of its implications rather than the facts themselves. The First Martian Expedition needed everything its members could give it for the safety of them all. If somebody considered himself apart from the rest, if one member of the crew was willing to injure the others by stealing from them, the situation was very, very bad. In fact, having a thief among the six was like a serious accident occurring to the Expedition's equipment. It would be comparable to a vital defect in the miniature atom-pile which was to supply energy for them to live by when they reached Mars' surface.

In a sense, though, the Expedition itself was the result of an accident of a different sort. The first part of this coincidence was the fact that some two years earlier the asteroid Eros had passed close to Earth on its elongated elliptical orbit around the sun. Eros is one of those rock and metal fragments which are found most often in orbits between Mars and Jupiter. Some people maintain that they are fragments of a planet which exploded some hundreds of millions of years ago, and there is some evidence to back this view. For one thing, some circle the sun in extremely eccentric paths. Eros swings out at its farthest between Mars and Jupiter, but when nearest the sun it dives in between Earth and Venus. Sometimes—rarely—it comes close to Earth in its passage across Earth's orbit. This had happened two years ago.

The second part of the coincidence was the purely fortuitous fact that only two Earth-years later Eros would pass even closer to the planet Mars. The two accidents added up to an opportunity, when McCauley added rockets and other resources of the Space Service. And the Service seized it.

So two years ago Colonel Ed McCauley had landed a ship on the asteroid, then close to Earth. He'd led a work crew which drove drill holes into the asteroid's solid metal substance. They made anchorages to fasten supplies to, and McCauley'd anchored the supplies. Then he took his ship back to Earth. On the way he'd passed other ships going out to Eros. They also anchored supplies on it. In one hectic month, the Space Service unloaded on the tiny asteroid all the supplies and equipment—some two hundred-odd tons of it—that the First Martian Expedition would need not only on Mars, but in getting back from Mars, which was equally important. Then the Space Service waited.

Nearly two years later, but now some months ago, the ship that was now moored to Eros took off from Earth. Enormous amounts of fuel were required for the journey out to Mars. No ship could carry fuel for the trip and the landing, much less a return trip. But if a ship made a rendezvous with Eros when the asteroid was close to Mars, it could refuel from the stores waiting on Eros. It could guide drone rockets from Eros to landings on Mars, carrying more supplies. The drones would not even need to be ships. They could be mere outlines of ships, with motors and guidance systems, their cargo lashed to their framework. So the asteroid would serve as a cargo carrier for the supplies the Expedition required, and also as the landing craft needed to put them ashore on the red planet.

So far, everything had worked out. Very shortly the first of the drones would be sent off to land the first cargo near an oasis close to the summer pole of Mars. Others would follow till all had been sent out; then the ship, refueled, would leave Eros and overtake the equipment that had preceded it. Its crew would recover the landed rocket cargoes, set up a base, be well equipped and amply supplied for several months of Martian exploration, and then have adequate fuel for the voyage home. More than that, it would leave a base that was ready to function, and fuel for return flights, for a reasonable number of other ships in the future. In fact, the passage of Eros close to Earth and then to Mars had provided a freight service that meant the difference between men going to Mars and staying home.

But there was a thief among the six men making the first trip. There was McCauley and Randy Hall and Fallon and Brett and Soames. Hathaway was the meteorologist who would learn all that was to be known about Mars' atmosphere. Fallon was the atom-power mechanic. Brett and Soames had their specialties, but all had been trained in the remote control of drone rockets with their loads of precious material. All were needed.

"Hmmm," said McCauley, frowning. "You say Hathaway and Fallon lost things, the one a watch and the other a wallet. You and I ... I lost an electric watch. It runs on a battery the size of a pea. I never have to wind it." He looked up. "Are you sure Brett and Soames haven't lost anything?"

Randy looked curiously at McCauley.

"Come to think of it, Brett asked me if I'd seen his fancy gold pen. That was weeks ago. He uses an issue pen now. And I think—I think Soames was turning things upside down once, looking for some sort of gold luck-piece he carries. Yes. He did."

"I'll find the stuff," said McCauley, frowning, "but I'm bothered."

He looked out a port at the crew members on the surface of the asteroid. Randy followed his eyes. The four other members of the Expedition, in bulky space suits, worked busily in a landscape—or an Eros-scape—too fantastic to be real. All of them now accepted the view that Eros was an explosion-created fragment of something much larger, and that that something must have been remarkable. Nine-tenths of the surface of Eros was solid metal such as forms the core of all the heavier planets. Now, metal rods stuck here and there out of drill holes in the raw, glistening crystalline mass. Between the drill rods ran cables holding nets under which objects were tethered. There were drone rockets by the dozen, and bales and boxes and tanks seemingly by the hundred. They would drift away to nowhere but for the nets which held them fast. They'd been held thus during two years of unaccompanied, uneventful cartage from the orbit of Earth out to the orbit of Mars. Most of the stuff needed only to be sorted and loaded on the drones, which would take off under control by the drone-master keyboard on the ship. There was an enormous mass of supplies. There could be a loss of up to fifty per cent in transit without irreparable damage being done to the Expedition's purposes.

When Randy looked back from the laboring, space-suited figures outside, he was alone. McCauley had gone to the ship's small workshop, all of whose tools would be left in the base on Mars. Frowning, he connected a microphone and an audio amplifier and a headset and went back to explain to Randy. But Randy was no longer there. He'd gone outside to carry on as second-in-command. His business was largely finding things to worry about and telling McCauley, who made them turn out all right.

McCauley went purposefully through the ship with his microphone-amplifier unit, touching it here and there against the fabric of the vessel. The idea was perfectly simple. If there was a thief on board, he would certainly not keep his loot on his person or in his locker. He'd have a hiding place for it. The loot included McCauley's watch, which would not run down for months. And solid things conduct sound much better than air does. The ticking of a watch which can't be heard at five feet, in air, can be heard through fifty feet of wood or metal if the watch is in contact with the farther end.

So McCauley methodically listened for the ticking of a watch conducted through the metal of a spaceship. There was no one else on board. There was no operating machinery to make extraneous noises. Presently he heard the five-times-a-second click-click of his watch. He traced it to its loudest, unscrewed a floorplate, and found three watches, a very expensive gold pencil, and a luck-piece that was a gold coin some hundreds of years old. There were also three small and very expensive instruments that came from a smashed case on the asteroid.

McCauley put them in his pocket and went to the compartment that was his sanctum as commander of the ship. He pulled out the personnel report on one member of the crew. It was not believable.... Then he thought of something. He pushed the outside-communicator button.

"Fallon," he said, "report to the ship. A job for you."

He drummed on the desk before him as he waited for Fallon. This was a singularly unpleasant situation.

Fallon came in, still in his space suit. He opened the faceplate and grinned. He was an exuberant personality, this Fallon.

"Reporting in, Colonel."

Without a word, McCauley brought out the three watches, the instruments, the elaborate gold pencil, and the luck-piece. He picked out his own watch and the instruments and waved his hand toward the rest.

"Get these back where they belong," he ordered. "I'll take care of the instruments. Don't let anybody know they're being returned. Let it appear they've been found misplaced."

Fallon stared. Then he went white and licked his lips. But he said nothing.

"I found this stuff," said McCauley, "as soon as I looked for it. I knew you'd hidden it, because you said your wallet was gone and there was no wallet with the other missing stuff. You should have put it in with the rest of the loot, Fallon, if you wanted to be convincing."

Fallon stared.

"It's about as stupid a performance as I've ever heard of," said McCauley. "Why did you do it?"

Fallon swallowed. Then he braced himself and looked defiant. In a moment or two he managed a grin. It was a shaky grin, but he straightened up and then shrugged.

"Why should I tell you?" he said. "What can you do about it, anyway?"

"I can think of a few things," said McCauley.

"Name one!" said Fallon defiantly. "You can't kill me. You can't put me out of the ship, because that'd kill me. You can't lock me up, because you need everybody. You can't do anything! You might as well forget it! This trip was dull. I wanted some excitement. I thought there'd be a big fuss when things started to disappear. There wasn't. All right, I'll put the stuff back. But you might as well forget the whole business because you can't do a thing about it."

McCauley stiffened. Fallon was right. There wasn't anything he could do, in the ordinary sense of the word. He couldn't execute Fallon for theft. He couldn't imprison him. If he punished him in any way that aroused his resentment, Fallon could no longer be trusted, and any of the six men could destroy the other five simply by neglecting some essential duty assigned to him. In space, men have to trust each other and be worthy of trust in return. There is no room in unlimited emptiness for a man who arouses suspicion and antagonism among his shipmates solely for his own amusement. But Fallon had done just that. He was as dangerous as an atom bomb on the expedition to Mars. But whereas an atom bomb can be disarmed, nobody can disarm a man who chooses to play the fool.

Fallon picked up the objects McCauley had given him. He spoke with sudden truculence.

"Well?" he said. "What can you do? Just suppose I don't feel like giving these things back. I'm going to, but if I wouldn't do it, what'd you do?... You won't even tell the rest you caught me! You want the stuff put back without their knowing it was taken!"

"Yes-s-s," McCauley said very slowly. "That's right. I shan't tell the rest. I want things to go along smoothly, without squabbles or suspicions. But you want excitement, more than our job provides. You'll look for it in some other fashion now, won't you?"

Fallon said defiantly:

"I'll do what I feel like doing!"

"Yes," said McCauley, nodding. "You'll get your excitement regardless. You're as independent as a hog on ice, because you think that I can't do anything to stop you. Very well. I'll try to provide you with some excitement. You do what you please. I'll do what I please about it."

Fallon's eyes narrowed.

"You don't care what I do?" he demanded skeptically.

"I do care," McCauley told him. "You're the one who doesn't care. But I'll be able to make use of you somehow. All right; you can go, now."

Fallon hesitated, scowling. Then he went out. He was uneasy. He could have understood had McCauley threatened him, or flown into a rage, or possibly tried to appeal to a nonexistent loyalty to his companions or to the purposes of the Expedition. But McCauley had not reacted in any fashion that Fallon could understand.

Later in the day Randy consulted with McCauley.

"Funny thing happened," he said vexedly. "Fallon went around and gave Brett back his fancy gold pen. He said he'd taken it for a joke. He gave Soames back his luck-piece and Hathaway his watch. He explained that they were jokes, too. He gave me mine.... Did you get yours back?"

McCauley nodded. He explained what had happened. Randy blinked.

"But why didn't he just slip them back like you told him to?"

"He's worried," said McCauley. "I didn't threaten and I didn't reason with him. So he figures that I've something special in mind. So he wants to be on good terms with everybody but me. Now if I accused him of stealing, he could insist that he was joking and that he'd proved it."

"That's crazy!" said Randy.

McCauley did not contradict him. He shrugged. Presently Randy went out on the surface of Eros. A single incautious movement might send him floating off into emptiness except for the moorings to the drilled-in metal rods that anchored supplies and ship and crew alike. On the nickel-iron surface of the asteroid, to be sure, magnetic-soled shoes ought to hold a man down. But the emergency wasn't great enough to make depending on them necessary. Everyone kept himself anchored to a drill rod, and did not let go, anywhere, until another anchorage had been secured.

The five-mile-long and two-mile-thick mass that was Eros floated onward in its orbit. It rotated very slowly—its day was half an hour and its night was thirty minutes—and all the stars appeared in turn, including that nearest star which was the sun. The Milky Way spread incredibly across the sky. Earth was blue-green and a bare speck of a crescent—a crescent because it was to sunward, and a speck because it was well over forty millions of miles away. Mars, to the outward, was a perceptible disk the size of a quarter at forty feet. Already photographs taken on spaceships and sent back to Earth by scanning signal had disclosed features that even the giant telescopes on the moon had not detected. Randy claimed to have seen Phobos and Deimos with his naked eye, and perhaps he had. But most of the crew were too busy for more than an occasional glance out at Mars.

The supply items to be carried by each drone rocket had to be regrouped so that no one rocket would contain a disproportionate amount of any one kind of supplies. It was to be expected that some loads would be lost, so it was important to make sure that no one load, if it was not landed or recovered, would cause crippling shortages of this item or that.

There was, though, one bit of freight that would not be trusted to rocket transport. The fuel for the atom-pile would go on the ship, because if the ship did not land safely there'd be no Expedition, and if it landed safely, the atomic fuel would be essential. The thin air of Mars would have to be pumped up to the pressure required by the human body, and its oxygen would have to be concentrated. There would be need for heat during the bitter Martian nights. Power was necessary for human life on Mars. And only atomic power would be adequate.

The first drone rocket lifted off Eros when the asteroid was a million and a half miles from Mars. The rocket rushed ahead, dwindling until it could no longer be seen among the stars. It carried a tank of rocket fuel, a rocket motor, and a communications unit. That was all. The drone was not streamlined, not pretty. It was a skeleton with its drive at the tail, a shaft to tie the cargo to, and a television camera at its nose. The first loads shipped were relatively unimportant ones, so that initial disasters due to lack of experience would have the least serious consequences. When the asteroid was a quarter of a million miles farther on, more rockets were on the way. There were two near-disasters. The rockets were prepared for launching during the planetoid's half-hour "daylight," but they were launched when the launching site was away from the sun and toward Mars farther out. During daylight McCauley prepared one rocket for firing and returned to the ship. Later Hathaway went out to set off that "night's" salvo. The first rocket blew itself to bits when fired. Hathaway had a very narrow escape.

The men figured out, afterward, that in the utter cold of the planetoid's "night" the rocket motor had cooled to the brittle point of metal. When the rocket was fired, the frozen metal flew apart before it could warm up and thus restore normal strength throughout its thickness. McCauley berated himself to Randy, because he had not anticipated this fact. The rest of the salvo was held until "sunset" the next day, and was fired within five minutes of the coming of darkness, before the metal could cool to brittleness.

The other near-tragedy happened when a rocket took off and the flame splashed against a glistening metallic upcrop and licked fiercely at Soames' space-suited legs. He jumped convulsively, rose out of the flame before it could either cook his legs or melt down his space suit, and, gasping in horror, soared off and up to the length of his safety rope. The rocket went past him no more than a dozen feet away. Its exhaust could have burned him to a crisp, or at the least flashed his plastic faceplate. That was a very close call indeed.

Presently Fallon came looking for McCauley. The mechanic was coming off-shift and still wore his space suit. He opened the faceplate, grinning nervously.

"Look here, Colonel," he said ingratiatingly, "I've got something I want to say to you."

"Go ahead," said McCauley. He was still bitterly discontented with himself. Actually, Soames should not have been so near the rocket blast, but McCauley felt responsible because he hadn't ordered him specifically away.

"Soames had a pretty close call," said Fallon nervously.

"Yes," said McCauley curtly.

"Hathaway had another," said Fallon. "When that rocket blew, he could have been killed. He should've been."

"I know it," snapped McCauley.

"I ... I ..." Fallon hesitated. "Look, Colonel! We had a—disagreement. I acted like a fool. I want to apologize."

McCauley scowled. There were innumerable things to worry about, and Fallon was one of them. McCauley had taken the one line that might keep Fallon from making trouble. He'd scared him, and it seemed to have worked. But for Fallon to come to apologize was something else. It meant that his attitude had changed from almost mutinous defiance to panic.

"Forget it," said McCauley.

"I—didn't have you figured right," said Fallon shakily. "I thought you were ... just the usual kind of character. I ... I know better now. I'd—I'd like to ... well ... you're likely to need somebody to help you. Maybe you don't think so, but if you knew you could count on me...."

Fallon's voice practically clicked off, and McCauley realized that he was terrified. The man was afraid to say something, but he was more afraid not to.

"What would I need you for besides your duty?"

Fallon hesitated, licked his lips, and then said desperately:

"Soames and Hathaway—they almost got theirs. I've been thinking. If ... accidents happened to us ... to all but you...."

"Go on," said McCauley, frowning.

"We're ... sending most of the stuff to Mars," stammered Fallon. "B-but we're keeping the atom fuel on the ship. It's w-worth a lot. If something happened to most of us ... why ... two men could take the ship back to Earth and land it anywhere they wanted to. And if ... if a person had contacts, that atom fuel would be w-worth a lot. Millions."

McCauley was jolted.

"Suppose," he said grimly, "that you tell me the rest of your idea."

"Why ... why ..." Fallon tried hard to be ingratiating and confidential, but he couldn't make it. So he said harshly: "I'm going to tell you something. My name's Fallon, but I'm not the Fallon you think I am. I've got a brother. He was slated to come on this trip. I was in the pen. I broke out. They were close after me. I went to my brother for money and help. He's tried to help me before, tried to make me stay out of trouble. This time was the worst, but this time he wouldn't help me any more. It was too serious. So I ... slugged him and took his papers and his orders and reported for duty instead of him. I ... I guess he couldn't bring himself to turn me in, but he figured I'd be caught before take-off. But I bluffed it through!" Here a trace of pride came into his voice. "I bluffed it through, and I came on the trip in his place because there wouldn't be anybody hunting me out here."

McCauley did not display any feeling at all. That Fallon had committed a crime or crimes back on Earth—forty million miles away—meant nothing here. Not if he did his work. But....

"Well?" said McCauley.

"I'm telling you," said Fallon urgently. "You didn't tell the others that I'd lifted their stuff. You had to have a reason. Then Hathaway almost got it when that rocket blew. And Soames came close to frying in a rocket blast. There are too many queer things happening! You not telling the others on me, and then...."

McCauley sat perfectly still, staring at Fallon.

"It adds up," said Fallon defiantly. "There's millions in atom fuel here. If things happen to the others, you can get back to Earth and land anywhere, and if you've got contacts so you can sell the atom stuff...."

McCauley waited ominously. Fallon tried to go on, and could not. But his meaning was clear. In some twisted fashion he had worked out what he believed a logical explanation for McCauley's behavior to him. It implied that McCauley did not see the Mars expedition as a normal man would see it, but as an opportunity for the first space robbery in history and perhaps the most stupendous criminal coup since time began. It was true that the atomic fuel for the Mars reactor had a money value in the tens of millions. To McCauley, that fact would mean that it was something to be guarded and taken care of. But to Fallon, it was something to be stolen. And he thought McCauley saw it the same way.

"I suppose," said McCauley evenly, "that you've guessed that I plan to kill off the others and go back to Earth alone. Is that it?"

Fallon twitched nervously.

"It figures," he said desperately. "But you need another man to help! I told you who I am. I couldn't afford to double-cross you! I couldn't land this ship. But I could help a lot!"

"Yes," agreed McCauley with irony, "you could. So you want to throw in with me, eh?"

"Y-yes."

"All right," said McCauley. "You're in. You share in everything I do and everything I get out of it. It's a bargain."

"F-fine," said Fallon in a voice like a croak.

He'd try to believe it, but he wouldn't be able to be sure. He left. McCauley knew that he would quake and be terrified, and he would not believe in McCauley's intention to make him a partner in crime. But in his own view he couldn't do anything but try to bargain for his own life if—but he thought of it as when—McCauley murdered or abandoned the others in emptiness.

McCauley told Randy the whole business, of course. As second-in-command Randy needed to know everything.

"He's a swine," Randy said distastefully. "But it took nerve to try to bluff through our training period, with the voyage out here to follow it."

"He's in bad shape," said McCauley. "However he got started that way, he chose to be a crook at some time or another. He probably thought it was smart. It wasn't, but now he can't think the way a non-crook thinks."

Randy frowned, thinking.

"I believe," Randy said slowly, "that I'll explain to the others. He's with us and the way he thinks has to be allowed for. They won't let him know they're on to him.... I feel sorry for the poor devil. You will, too, when you think it over. They'll feel the same way."

McCauley nodded. Space is no place for the self-righteous or the intolerant. Charity is a requisite for the endurance of journey in emptiness, in closed tin cans with re-breathed air and enforced exasperating contact with other persons. The Mars Expedition members had been chosen for personality traits as well as technical competence. It was remarkable that Fallon had been able to imitate his brother's character well enough to avoid unmasking before take-off.

The work of the Expedition went on. In the half-hour day, the rockets for Mars were loaded and set up for firing. Immediately after darkness fell, they went streaking away from the small, misshapen asteroid. McCauley or Randy at the control board picked up their monitor signals one by one, verified their course and speed, and made such adjustments as would be needed to get them to the planet which men now ought to reach a good twenty years ahead of schedule. Near Mars, they'd be swung into orbit and landed one by one.

It became routine. But it was a hair-raising routine. There was a tissue-thin difference between the success and failure that meant life or death. What rest they took was in snatches. But things went along. Curiously enough, when Hathaway and Brett and Soames were told in confidence of Fallon's self-produced predicament, it amounted to easing the tension their continuous labor might have produced. They had something to think about besides the nerve-racking need for absolute accuracy and absolute care in all they did out of the ship. Crawling about under the cargo nets was harrowing. There were the stars. There was the feeling of absolute emptiness, into which their sensations assured them that they were falling unendingly.

But Fallon had no relief as the others did. He didn't have their purpose. They were risking their lives to accomplish something they wanted to do. That was why they were here. But Fallon was with them in flight from the law. He had only fear to sustain him.

Three-fourths of the rockets had been released. Nine-tenths. There were more than forty rockets aground on Mars and the ship was refueled, and already it would be possible to leave Eros and land on Mars and set up the base and do the work the Expedition was expected to do. They could do all this and then return to Earth. The rockets still in space and on Eros amounted to a margin beyond necessity, and every extra one that landed would increase the surplus of equipment and supplies.

And then Fallon got lost. He was never out of sight of the others, but he got lost. It was the rule, of course, for every man to have his own life line securely fastened to solidity. They were long life lines to permit movement about the cargo cache and the much-diminished heaps of stores. They were inconvenient, but they were starkly necessary. It was strictly forbidden for any man at any time not to be safely tethered. And....