"Yes but--"
"No buts, my young friend. I'll be on the line. Anything goes wrong,
you turn on the winch and I'll be wrenched right back in."
"We'll be orbiting into sunlight and--"
"Forget it, I'll be back on time. There are only two universal laws,
son--get happy and stay happy." He shut the door, put on his suit and
ordered a compression recycling. As soon as it was completed, he jetted
himself through the escape hatch.
* * * * *
Again he was back very quickly but this time, as soon as the helmet
came off, he whipped out a specimen slide from an inner pocket,
waved it gaily through the talc cloud (_again_, he had left the box
unadjusted!) and slipped the slide into a portable pocket microscope.
He gripped the scope in his eye like a monocle and stood spellbound for
five minutes until with a shout of joy he let the little electronic
cylinder drop into his hand. "I'm going back out," he said.
"But, Captain Hartley, you'll get caught on the heating surface."
"Open the cockpit door!" As soon as he came in, he sat down at the
controls and lifted the craft off. "See, Cramer, I can think straight,
too, under the influence. You were right this time and I've listened."
Then he switched to hover.
"We're not going back _again_, sir, are we?"
"Of course," Hartley grinned. "After all, I made the same mistake you
did. Twice I've let the temperature of the specimen box dekelvinise!"
Despite his continuing sense of well-being, Cramer felt uneasy, but
there was nothing he could put his finger on so he didn't protest.
Anyway, he could see Hartley would not be swayed now from whatever was
his strange purpose.
A few hours later they settled back on the asteroid and the Captain
went out once more. Cramer tried to watch what he was doing but Hartley
was too huddled over the fault he was working for much to be seen. An
hour later he came back in, and made some fix notations in his log book
as soon as his suit decompressed.
They took off immediately. "This time the box stays locked," he said,
pointing at the lid dial which showed the tiny atomic power unit inside
was keeping the core's contents at Kelvin 90. Then he radioed the
mother ship for a directional beam and locked the craft on automatic
pilot. He glanced thoughtfully at his assistant. "When we come in
_I'll_ make the report."
"But I know that's standard, Captain, I learned it the first month at
the academy."
"Just wanted to make sure you remembered. How do you feel, Will?"
"Perfect."
"No after effects! Same with me!" He thumped Cramer's back in a
hail-fellow-well-met spirit and Cramer thought, _Not such a bad guy
sometimes_.
* * * * *
But, of course, that little outburst of camaraderie had to stop short
as soon as they debarked inside the mother ship. The _Solar Pioneer_
was strictly spit-and-polish, all twelve hundred feet of it, and as
they came out of the scout craft hangar, there were brisk salutes
to be exchanged and data registration books to countersign. General
Chisholm, a natty man with brightly burnished swagger stick to match,
was personally on hand to greet them.
"Anything of interest to report, Captain?" he snapped.
"Fairly routine, sir." He gave Cramer a silencing glance.
"That's the trouble, Captain, the whole voyage has been. You're the
last craft in so we're heading back to Earth now."
Hartley held out the specimen box. "We spotted a good landing
asteroid--one side flat as a mesa. Composition fairly similar to
granite and mica."
"Nothing else?"
Cramer started to open his mouth but Hartley broke in; "Nothing, sir,"
he answered.
"The white stuff, sir," said Cramer, holding chin and stomach in.