Holy hopping Ole!

“Shields!” roared Bull.

“What?” said Langnes through the echoes.

“We’re shielded! We can turn back! Right now!”

* * *

When the hubbub had died down and a few slide rule calculations had been made, Bull addressed the others.

“It’s really quite simple,” he said. “All the elements of the answer were there all the time. I’m only surprised that the Chinese never realized it; but then, I imagine they used all their spare moments for socialist self-criticism.

“Anyhow, we know our ship is a space barnacle’s paradise. Even our barnacles have barnacles. Why? Because it picks up so much sand and gravel. Now what worried us about heading straight home was not an occasional meteorite big enough to punch clear through the skin of the ship—we’ve patching to take care of that—no, we were afraid of a sandblast wearing the entire hull paper thin. But we’re protected against precisely that danger! The more such little particles that hit us, the more barnacles we’ll have. They can’t be eroded away, because they’re alive. They renew themselves from the very stuff that strikes them. Like a stone in a river, worn away by the current, while the soft moss is always there.

“We’ll get back out of the Belt before the radiation level builds up to anything serious. Then, if we want to, we can chisel off the encrustation. But why bother, really? We’ll soon be home.”

“No argument there,” smiled Langnes.

‘‘I’ll go check the engines prior to starting up,” said Bull. “Will you and Torvald compute us an Earthward course?”

He started for the doorway, paused, and added slowly: ‘‘Uh, I kind of hate to say this, but those barnacles are what will really make the Asteroid Belt available to men.”

“What?” said Helledahl.

“Sure,” said Bull. “Simple. Naturally, we’ll have to devise protection for the radio, and redesign the radiation screen apparatus, as the skipper remarked. But under proper control, the barnacles make a self-repairing shield against sandblast. It shouldn’t be necessary to go through the Belt on these tedious elliptical orbits. The space miners can take hyperbolic paths, as fast as they choose, in any direction they please.

“I,” he finished with emphasis, “will not be among them.”

“Where will you be?” asked Winge.

But Erik Bull was already headed aft to his work. A snatch of song, bawled from powerful lungs, came back to the others. They all knew English, but it took them a moment to get the drift.

“ ‘…Who’s that knocking at my door?’ Said the fair young maiden.
‘Oh, it’s only me, from over the sea,’
Said Barnacle Bill the sailor.
‘I’ve sailed the seas from shore to shore,
I’ll never sail the seas no more.
Now open up this blank-blank door!’
Said Barnacle Bill the sailor.”

To Jack Williamson

Judge this: the gathering of dreams that grew
Across the span of half a century,
Called out of space and time by one who knew—
Knew well, and knows—what miracles must be
Where stars and stars hold back the outer night
In radiance, begetting worlds and souls.
Longed has his vision raised beyond our sight,
Light-years, to find adventures, hopes and goals.
Imagination likewise dares the deeps
And danger of our future and our past,
Man’s fate; and if man laughs or shouts or weeps,
Still in these tales we see ourselves at last.
On Earth, from which the questing ships depart,
No bard among us bears a higher heart.