"How many?"
"We have three miles of cable. As long as you can feel, taste, see,
smell or hear that rope anchoring you to home, you aren't lost."
"Three miles isn't good enough. We don't have enough fuel to change
sites that often. You can't use the drive in a gravitational field, you
know."
"What else can we do, Captain?" Nagurski asked puzzledly.
"You've said that the spaceship is our only protection from
transphasia. Is that it?"
Quade gave a curt nod.
"Then," I told them, "we will have to start tearing apart this ship."
* * * * *
Sergeant-Major Hoffman and his team were doing a good job of ripping
out the side of the afterhold. Through the portal I could see the
suited men expertly guiding the huge curved sections on their ray
projectors.
"Cannibalizing is dangerous." Nagurski put his pipe in his teeth and
shook his head disapprovingly.
"Spaceships have parts as interchangeable as Erector sets. We can
take apart the tractors and put our ship back together again after we
complete the survey."
"You can't assemble a jigsaw puzzle if some of the pieces are missing."
"You can't get a complete picture, but you can get a good idea of
what it looks like. We can take off in a reasonable facsimile of a
spaceship."
"Not," he persisted, "if _too_ many parts are missing."
"Nagurski, if you are looking for a job safer than space exploration,
why don't you go back to testing cosmic bomb shelters?"
Nagurski flushed. "Look here, Captain, you are being too damned
cautious. There is a way one handles the survey of a planet like this,
and this isn't the way."
"It's my way. You heard what Quade said. You know it yourself. The men
have to have something tangible to hang onto out there. One slender
cable isn't enough of an edge on sensory anarchy. If the product of
their own technological civilization can keep them sane, I say let 'em
take a part of that environment with them."
"In departing from standard procedure that we have learned to trust,
you are risking more than a few men--you risk the whole mission in
gambling so much of the ship. A captain doesn't take chances like that!"
"I never said I wouldn't take chances. But I'm not going to take
_stupid_ chances. I _might_ be doing the wrong thing, but I can see you
_would_ be doing it wrong."
"You know nothing about space, Captain! You have to trust _us_."
"That's it exactly, First Officer Nagurski," I said sociably. "If you
lazy, lax, complacent slobs want to do something in a particular way, I
know it _has_ to be wrong."