* * * * *
I've been in space a long time.
Eleven years. And five years in training before that. I flew the third
ship around the moon and the second to land on it. I flew one-sixth of
the materials that built _Ley_, the first "stepping stone" satellite,
and one-twentieth of those that went into _Goddard_, the second. I
didn't bother keeping track of how much of Luna City got there in my
ship. I flew the first and last ship around Venus, and brought back
the report that settled that mystery--dust. Those were the old days;
the days of two-couple crews and the old faithful _Canfield_ class
three-steppers--the "cans."
The days, too, of the satellite-hopping _Von Brauns_--each of
which consisted of a _Canfield_ crew can stuck on the end of a
six-hundred-foot winged javelin with two dozen times the cargo space of
a _Canfield_. The "super-cans."
Just four of us then; myself and Mary and Ted and Belle Leonard. Four
who might just as well have been one.
Then Mars.
Not that we were ready for it; just that it was a financial necessity
to the rest of the project, with Venus eliminated from the picture.
Taxes kept us in space. The scientific value of _Ley_ and _Goddard_ and
Luna City wasn't enough for the tax-paying public. They didn't want
ice cream; they wanted a chocolate sundae, with all the trimmings.
Apparently our public relations people couldn't tell them that the fact
that we could get that far in eight years, without an accident, did not
necessarily mean that we were in a position to shoot for Mars.
So we shot for Mars.
Ships were no problem, of course. A _Canfield_ could have made it from
_Goddard_ to Mars and back, and wouldn't even have needed its third
stage to do it.
We got the first seven of the new _Lowell_ class ball-and-girder
"space-only" ships--the "cannonballs"--and modified the daylights out
of three old _Von Brauns_, for landing purposes.
The crew was the joker. We had to have forty people trained
specifically to make the observations and investigations that would
justify the trip. Most of the operating crews either didn't have enough
training or lacked it entirely. The crews that had started training
when we first saw this jump coming weren't ready to be trusted farther
than _Ley_.
So we set up four-couple crews; two old and two new, much against
our better judgment. It worked out better than anybody had seriously
expected, but somehow, even after three years in the same can, eight
never became quite as nearly one as four had been.
* * * * *
Helene Donnelly wasn't sleeping much, either. Not a sound came from the
bunk above me. Normally she was a rather restless sleeper.
She would be thinking the same things I was; in spite of her relative
inexperience, she knew the score. She would be half-consciously
looking for me to "do something," even though she knew there was
nothing I could do that she couldn't handle just as well.
_Damn_ the guy that decided to implant that tendency in the younger
crew members!
I wished there was something I could do to reassure her enough to
nullify the effect, but there was nothing. _She knew the score._
She knew that mechanically we would either make it or not make it.
She knew that it was psychologically impossible for two people
conditioned to married life in space to continue to exist in sanity in
any other relationship.
"Recombination" had been pounded into us since we first began training.
We were lucky in a way. There was only one possible recombination.
Yeah, lucky.
Helene Donnelly was a good kid, the best. But she was just that. A kid.
If we didn't make it, she'd never live to be old enough to vote. She'd
been in training since she was fourteen.
I'm almost thirty-five. I don't look it--space doesn't age you that
way--but it's all there.
I could have recombined with Belle Leonard. It would have been awkward,
but I could have done it. Helene could have recombined with Ed Travis
without too much trouble.