Not that he regretted the time spent, once it was safely behind him. With judicious embroidering, he had a lifetime supply of dinner-table reminiscences. More important, he could take his pick of Earthside jobs. Such as the marine reclamation station his countrymen were building off Svalbard, with regular airbus service to Trondheim and Oslo. There was a post!

Instead of which, he was now spinning off beyond Mars, hell for leather into a volume of space that had already swallowed a score of craft without trace.

He emerged on the hull, made sure his life line was fast, and floated a few minutes to let his eyes adjust. A tiny heatless sun, too brilliant to look close to, spotted puddles of undiffused glare among coalsack shadows. The stars, unwinking, needle bright, were so many that they swamped the old familiar constellations in their sheer number. He identified several points as asteroids, some twinkling as rotation exposed their irregular surfaces, some so close that their relative motion was visible. His senses did not react to the radiation, which the ship’s magnetic field was supposed to ward off from the interior but which sharply limited his stay outside. Bull imagined all those particles zipping through him, each drilling a neat submicroscopic hole, and wished he hadn’t.

The much-touted majestic silence of space wasn’t evident either. His air pump made too much noise. Also, the suit stank.

Presently he could make sense out of the view. The ship was a long cylinder, lumpy where meteor bumpers protected the most vital spots. A Norwegian flag, painted near the bows, was faded by solar ultraviolet, eroded by micrometeoric impacts. The vessel was old, though basically sound. The Russians had given it to Norway for a museum piece, as a propaganda gesture. But then the Americans had hastily given Norway the parts needed to renovate. Bull himself had spent six dreary months helping do that job. He hadn’t been too unhappy about it, though. He liked the idea of his country joining in the exploitation of space. Also, he was Americanized enough to feel a certain malicious pleasure when the Ivan Pavlov was rechristened in honor of St. Olav.

However, he had not expected to serve aboard the thing!

“O.K., O.K.,” he sneered in English, “hold still, Holy Ole, and we’ll have a look at your latest disease.”

He drew himself back along the line and waddled forward over the hull in stickum boots. Something on the radio transceiver boom…what the devil? He bent over. The motion pulled his boots loose. He upended and went drifting off toward Andromeda. Cursing in a lackluster voice, he came back hand over hand. But as he examined the roughened surface he forgot even to be annoyed.

He tried unsuccessfully to pinch himself.

An hour convinced him. He made his laborious way below again. Captain Langnes, who was Navy insisted that you went “below” when you entered the ship, even in free fall. When his spacesuit was off, with only one frost burn suffered from touching the metal, he faced the others across a cluttered main cabin.