Furthermore, and still more ominous, the ship’s transmitter also stopped working.

Helledahl turned from its disassembled guts. Despite all he could do with racks, bags, magnetic boards, he was surrounded by a zero gravity halo of wires, resistances, transistors, and other small objects. His moon face peered through it with an unwonted grimness. “I can find nothing wrong,” he said. “The trouble must be outside, in the boom.”

Captain Langnes, tall and gaunt and stiff of manner, adjusted his monocle. “I dare say we can repair the trouble,” he said. “Can’t be too serious, can it?”

“It can like the devil, if the radar goes out too,” snapped Helledahl.

“Oh, heavens!” exclaimed Winge. His mild, middle-aged features registered dismay. “If I can’t maintain my meteorite count, what am I out here for?”

“If we can’t detect the big meteorites in time for the autopilot to jerk us off a collision course, you won’t be out here very long,” said Bull. “None of us will, except as scrap metal and frozen hamburger.”

Helledahl winced. “Must you, Erik?”

“Your attitude is undesirable, Herr Bull,” Captain Langnes chided. “Never forget, gentlemen, the four of us, crowded into one small vessel for possibly two years, under extremely hazardous conditions, can only survive by maintaining order, self-respect, morale.”

“How can I forget?” muttered Bull. “You repeat it every thirty-seven hours and fourteen minutes by the clock.” But he didn’t mutter very loudly.

“You had best have a look outside, Herr Bull,” went on the captain.

“I was afraid it’d come to that,” said the engineer dismally. “Hang on, boys, here we go again.”

* * *

Putting on space armor is a tedious job at best, requiring much assistance. In a cramped air-lock chamber—for lack of another place—and under free fall, it gets so exasperating that one forgets any element of emergency. By the time he was through the outer valve, Bull had invented three new verbal obscenities, the best of which took four minutes to enunciate.

He was a big, blocky, redhaired and freckle-faced young man, who hadn’t wanted to come on this expedition. It was just a miserable series of accidents, he thought. As a boy, standing at a grisly hour on a cliff above the Sognefjord to watch the first Sputnik rise, he had decided to be a spaceship engineer. As a youth, he got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and afterward worked for two years on American interplanetary projects. Returning home, he found himself one of the few Norwegians with that kind of experience. But he also found himself thoroughly tired of it. The cramped quarters, tight discipline, reconstituted food and reconstituted air and reconstituted conversation, were bad enough. The innumerable petty nuisances of weightlessness, especially the hours a day spent doing ridiculous exercises lest his very bones atrophy, were worse. The exclusively male companionship was still worse: especially when that all-female Russian satellite station generally called the Nunnery passed within view.

“In short,” Erik Bull told his friends, “if I want to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, I’d do better to sign up as a Benedictine monk. I’d at least have something drinkable on hand.”