"Pardon, Captain, but would you say we also lacked initiative?"
"I would," I answered levelly.
"Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and
a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone."
"The idiot!" I yelped. "Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a
team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it."
"He didn't hook on a cable, Captain," Wallace said. "I suppose he
intended to go beyond the three-mile limit as you demanded."
"Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what
I said as long as I command this spacer."
"Cool off, Gav," Nagurski advised me. "It's been done before. Anybody
else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most
experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him."
"I trusted him too far by letting him run around loose. He needs a
leash in more ways than one, and I'm going to put one on him."
* * * * *
For me, it was a nightmare. I lay down in my cabin and thought. I had
to think things through very carefully. One mistake was too many for
me. My worst fear had been that someday I would overlook one tiny flaw
and ruin a gem. Now I might have ruined an exploration and destroyed a
man, not a stone, because I had missed the flaw.
No one but a reckless fool would have gone out alone on a strange
planet with a terrifying phenomenon, but I'd had enough evidence to see
that space exploration _made_ a man a reckless fool by doing things on
one planet he had once found safe and wise on some other world.
The thought intruded itself: _why_ hadn't I recognized this before I
let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted
him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and
recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment?
I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very
well be true, but how did that help now?