There followed a good deal of work up in orbit, readying the ship, and a shakedown cruise lasting some weeks. When he finally got pre-departure leave, Bull broke every known traffic law and a few yet to be invented, on the way to Marta’s home. She informed him tearfully that she was so sorry and she hoped they would always be good friends, but she had been seeing so little of him and had met someone else but she would always follow his future career with the greatest interest. The someone else turned out to be a bespectacled writer who had just completed a three-volume novel about King Harald Hardcounsel (1015-1066). Bull didn’t remember the rest of his furlough very clearly.

* * *

A shock jarred through him. He bounced from the hull, jerked to a halt at the end of his life line, and waited for the dizziness to subside. The stars leered.

“Hallo! Hallo, Erik! Are you all right?”

Bull shook his head to clear it. Helledahl’s voice, phoned across the life line, was tinny in his earphones. “I think so. What happened?”

“A small meteorite hit us, I suppose. It must have had an abnormal orbit to strike so hard. We can’t see any damage from inside, though. Will you check the outer hull?”

Bull nodded, though there was no point in doing so. After he hauled himself back, he needed a while to find the spot of impact. The pebble had collided near the waist of the ship, vaporizing silicate shell material to form a neat little crater in a barnacle hummock. It hadn’t quite penetrated to the ferroplate. A fragment remained, trapped between the rough lumps.

Bull shivered. Without that overgrowth, the hull would have been pierced. Not that that mattered greatly in itself. There was enough patching aboard to repair several hundred such holes. But the violence of impact was an object lesson. Torvald Winge was almost certainly right. Trying to cut straight across the Asteroid Belt would be as long a chance as men had ever taken. The incessant bombardment of particles, mostly far smaller than this but all possessing a similar speed, would wear down the entire hull. When it was thin enough to rip apart under stress, no meteor bumpers or patches would avail.

His eyes sought the blue-green glint of Earth, but couldn’t find it among so many stars. You know, he told himself, I don’t even mind the prospect of dying out here as much as I do the dreariness of it. If we turned around now and somehow survived, I’d be home by Christmas. I’d only have wasted one extra year in space, instead of more than three—counting in the preparations for this arduous cruise. I’d find me a girl, no, a dozen girls. And a hundred bottles. I’d make up for that year in style, before settling down to do work I really enjoy.

But we aren’t likely to survive, if we turn around now.

But how likely is our survival if we keep going—with the radiation shield failing us? And an extra two years on Holy Ole? I’d go nuts!