“Be quiet!” snapped Langnes.

“The Chinese turned around, and look what happened to them,” underlined Winge. “We must try something different, however hopeless it too may look.”

Bull braced his heavy shoulders. “See here, Torvald,” he growled, “what makes you so sure the Chinese did head back under power?”

“Because they were never seen again. If they had been on the predicted orbit, or even on a completed free-fall ellipse, one of the ships watching for them in the neighborhood of Earth would have—Oh.”

“Yes,” said Bull through his teeth. “Would have seen them? How do you know they weren’t seen? I think they were. I think they plugged blindly on as they’d been ordered to, and the radiation suddenly started increasing on a steep curve—as you’d expect, when a critical point of fouling up was passed. I think they died, and came back like comets, sealed into spaceships so crusted they looked like ordinary meteorites!”

The silence thundered.

“So we may as well turn back,” said Bull at last. “If we don’t make it, our death’ll be a quicker and cleaner one than those poor devils had.”

Again the quietude. Until Captain Langnes shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, gentlemen. But we go on.”

“What?” screamed Helledahl.

The captain floated in the air, a ludicrous parody of officerlike erectness. But there was an odd dignity to him all the same.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I have a family too, you know. I would turn about if it could be done with reasonable safety. But Professor Winge has shown that that is impossible. We would die anyhow—and our ship would be a ruin, a few bits of worn and crumpled metal, all our results gone. If we proceed, we can prepare specimens and keep records which will be of use to our successors. Us they will find, for we can improvise a conspicuous feature on the hull that the barnacles won’t obliterate.”

He looked from one to another.

“Shall we do less for our country’s honor than the Chinese did for theirs?” he finished.

Well, if you put it that way, thought Bull, yes.

But he couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud. Maybe they all thought the same, including Langnes himself, but none was brave enough to admit it. The trouble with us moral cowards, thought Bull, is that we make heroes of ourselves.

I suppose Marta will shed some pretty, nostalgic tears when she gets the news. Ech! It’s bad enough to croak out here; but if that bluestocking memorializes me with a newspaper poem about my Viking spirit—

Maybe that’s what we should rig up on the hull, so they won’t ignore this poor barnacled derelict as just another flying boulder Make the Holy Ole into a real, old-fashioned, Gokstad type ship. Dragon figurehead, oars, sail…shields hung along the side…hey, yes! Imagine some smug Russian on an Earth satellite, bragging about how his people were the first into space—and then along comes this Viking ship—

I think I’ll even paint the shields. A face on each one, with its tongue out and a thumb to its nose—