“Well?” barked Helledahl. “What is it?”

“As the lady said when she saw an elephant eating cabbages with what she thought was his tail,” Bull answered slowly, “if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Of course I would!” said Langnes. “Out with it!”

“Well, skipper…we have barnacles.”

A certain amount of chemical and biological apparatus had been brought along to study possible effects of the whatever-it-was that seemed to forbid spacecraft crossing the Asteroid Belt. The equipment was most inadequate, and between them the four men had only an elementary knowledge of its use. But then, all equipment was inadequate in zero gravity, and all knowledge was elementary out here.

Work progressed with maddening slowness. And meanwhile the Hellik Olav fell outward and outward, on an orbit which would not bend back again until it was three Astronomical Units from the sun. And the ship was out of communication. And the radar, still functional but losing efficiency all the time, registered an ever thicker concentration of meteorites. And the ’tween-decks radiation count mounted, slowly but persistently.

“I vote we go home,” said Helledahl. Sweat glistened on his forehead, where he sat in his tiny bunk cubicle without touching the mattress.

“Second the motion,” said Bull at once. “Any further discussion? I move the vote. All in favor, say, ‘Ja.’ All opposed, shut up.”

“This is no time for jokes, Herr Bull,” said Captain Langnes.

“I quite agree, sir. And this trip is more than a joke, it’s a farce. Let’s turn back!”

“Because of an encrustation on the hull?”

Surprisingly, gentle Torvald Winge supported the skipper with almost as sharp a tone. “Nothing serious has yet happened,” he said. “We have now shielded the drive tubes so that the barnacle growth can’t advance to them. As for our communications apparatus, we have spare parts in ample supply and can easily repair it once we’re out of this fantastic zone. Barnacles can be scraped off the radar arms, as well as the vision parts. What kind of cowards will our people take us for, if we give up at the first little difficulty?”

“Live ones,” said Helledahl.

“You see,” Bull added, “we’re not in such bad shape now, but what’ll happen if this continues? Just extrapolate the radiation. I did. We’ll be dead men on the return orbit.”

“You assume the count will rise to a dangerous level,” said Winge. “I doubt that. Time enough to turn back, if it seems we have no other hope. But what you don’t appreciate, Erik, is the very real, unextrapolated danger of such a course.”

“Also, we seem to be on the track of an answer to the mystery—the whole purpose of this expedition,” said Langnes. “Given a little more data, we should find out what happened to all the previous ships.”

“Including the Chinese?” asked Bull.

Silence descended. They sat in mid-air, reviewing a situation which familiarity did nothing to beautify.

Observations from the Martian moons had indicated the Asteroid Belt was much fuller than astronomers had believed. Of course, it was still a rather hard vacuum…but one through which sand, gravel, and boulders went flying with indecent speed and frequency. Unmanned craft were sent in by several nations. Their telemetering instruments confirmed the great density of cosmic debris, which increased as they swung further in toward the central zone. But then they quit sending. They were never heard from again. Manned ships stationed near the computed orbits of the robot vessels, where these emerged from the danger area, detected objects with radar, panted to match velocities, and saw nothing but common or garden variety meteorites.