The Hellik Olav was well past Mars, acceleration ended, free-falling into the Asteroid Belt on a long elliptical orbit, when the interior radiation count began to rise. It wasn’t serious, and worried none of the four men aboard. They had been so worried all along that a little extra ionization didn’t seem to matter.
But as the days passed, the Geigers got still more noisy.
And then the radio quit.
This was bad! No more tapes were being made of signals received—Earth to one of the artificial satellites to Phobos to a cone of space which a rather smug-looking computer insisted held the Hellik Olav—for later study by electronics engineers. As for the men, they were suddenly bereft of their favorite programs. Adam Langnes, captain, no longer got the beeps whose distortions gave him an idea of exterior conditions and whose Doppler frequency gave him a check on his velocity. Torvald Winge, astronomer, had no answers to his requests for data omitted from his handbook and computations too elaborate for the ship’s digital. Per Helledahl, physicist, heard no more sentimental folk songs nor the recorded babblings of his youngest child. And Erik Bull, engineer, couldn’t get the cowboy music sent from the American radio satellite. He couldn’t even get the Russians’ Progressive jazz.
Furthermore, and still more ominous, the ship’s transmitter also stopped working.
Helledahl turned from its disassembled guts. Despite all he could do with racks, bags, magnetic boards, he was surrounded by a zero gravity halo of wires, resistances, transistors, and other small objects. His moon face peered through it with an unwonted grimness. “I can find nothing wrong,” he said. “The trouble must be outside, in the boom.”
Captain Langnes, tall and gaunt and stiff of manner, adjusted his monocle. “I dare say we can repair the trouble,” he said. “Can’t be too serious, can it?”
“It can like the devil, if the radar goes out too,” snapped Helledahl.
“Oh, heavens!” exclaimed Winge. His mild, middle-aged features registered dismay. “If I can’t maintain my meteorite count, what am I out here for?”
“If we can’t detect the big meteorites in time for the autopilot to jerk us off a collision course, you won’t be out here very long,” said Bull. “None of us will, except as scrap metal and frozen hamburger.”
Helledahl winced. “Must you, Erik?”
“Your attitude is undesirable, Herr Bull,” Captain Langnes chided. “Never forget, gentlemen, the four of us, crowded into one small vessel for possibly two years, under extremely hazardous conditions, can only survive by maintaining order, self-respect, morale.”
“How can I forget?” muttered Bull. “You repeat it every thirty-seven hours and fourteen minutes by the clock.” But he didn’t mutter very loudly.
“You had best have a look outside, Herr Bull,” went on the captain.
“I was afraid it’d come to that,” said the engineer dismally. “Hang on, boys, here we go again.”
* * *
Putting on space armor is a tedious job at best, requiring much assistance. In a cramped air-lock chamber—for lack of another place—and under free fall, it gets so exasperating that one forgets any element of emergency. By the time he was through the outer valve, Bull had invented three new verbal obscenities, the best of which took four minutes to enunciate.
He was a big, blocky, redhaired and freckle-faced young man, who hadn’t wanted to come on this expedition. It was just a miserable series of accidents, he thought. As a boy, standing at a grisly hour on a cliff above the Sognefjord to watch the first Sputnik rise, he had decided to be a spaceship engineer. As a youth, he got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and afterward worked for two years on American interplanetary projects. Returning home, he found himself one of the few Norwegians with that kind of experience. But he also found himself thoroughly tired of it. The cramped quarters, tight discipline, reconstituted food and reconstituted air and reconstituted conversation, were bad enough. The innumerable petty nuisances of weightlessness, especially the hours a day spent doing ridiculous exercises lest his very bones atrophy, were worse. The exclusively male companionship was still worse: especially when that all-female Russian satellite station generally called the Nunnery passed within view.
“In short,” Erik Bull told his friends, “if I want to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, I’d do better to sign up as a Benedictine monk. I’d at least have something drinkable on hand.”
Not that he regretted the time spent, once it was safely behind him. With judicious embroidering, he had a lifetime supply of dinner-table reminiscences. More important, he could take his pick of Earthside jobs. Such as the marine reclamation station his countrymen were building off Svalbard, with regular airbus service to Trondheim and Oslo. There was a post!
Instead of which, he was now spinning off beyond Mars, hell for leather into a volume of space that had already swallowed a score of craft without trace.
He emerged on the hull, made sure his life line was fast, and floated a few minutes to let his eyes adjust. A tiny heatless sun, too brilliant to look close to, spotted puddles of undiffused glare among coalsack shadows. The stars, unwinking, needle bright, were so many that they swamped the old familiar constellations in their sheer number. He identified several points as asteroids, some twinkling as rotation exposed their irregular surfaces, some so close that their relative motion was visible. His senses did not react to the radiation, which the ship’s magnetic field was supposed to ward off from the interior but which sharply limited his stay outside. Bull imagined all those particles zipping through him, each drilling a neat submicroscopic hole, and wished he hadn’t.
The much-touted majestic silence of space wasn’t evident either. His air pump made too much noise. Also, the suit stank.
Presently he could make sense out of the view. The ship was a long cylinder, lumpy where meteor bumpers protected the most vital spots. A Norwegian flag, painted near the bows, was faded by solar ultraviolet, eroded by micrometeoric impacts. The vessel was old, though basically sound. The Russians had given it to Norway for a museum piece, as a propaganda gesture. But then the Americans had hastily given Norway the parts needed to renovate. Bull himself had spent six dreary months helping do that job. He hadn’t been too unhappy about it, though. He liked the idea of his country joining in the exploitation of space. Also, he was Americanized enough to feel a certain malicious pleasure when the Ivan Pavlov was rechristened in honor of St. Olav.
However, he had not expected to serve aboard the thing!
“O.K., O.K.,” he sneered in English, “hold still, Holy Ole, and we’ll have a look at your latest disease.”
He drew himself back along the line and waddled forward over the hull in stickum boots. Something on the radio transceiver boom…what the devil? He bent over. The motion pulled his boots loose. He upended and went drifting off toward Andromeda. Cursing in a lackluster voice, he came back hand over hand. But as he examined the roughened surface he forgot even to be annoyed.
He tried unsuccessfully to pinch himself.
An hour convinced him. He made his laborious way below again. Captain Langnes, who was Navy insisted that you went “below” when you entered the ship, even in free fall. When his spacesuit was off, with only one frost burn suffered from touching the metal, he faced the others across a cluttered main cabin.
“Well?” barked Helledahl. “What is it?”
“As the lady said when she saw an elephant eating cabbages with what she thought was his tail,” Bull answered slowly, “if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Of course I would!” said Langnes. “Out with it!”
“Well, skipper…we have barnacles.”
A certain amount of chemical and biological apparatus had been brought along to study possible effects of the whatever-it-was that seemed to forbid spacecraft crossing the Asteroid Belt. The equipment was most inadequate, and between them the four men had only an elementary knowledge of its use. But then, all equipment was inadequate in zero gravity, and all knowledge was elementary out here.
Work progressed with maddening slowness. And meanwhile the Hellik Olav fell outward and outward, on an orbit which would not bend back again until it was three Astronomical Units from the sun. And the ship was out of communication. And the radar, still functional but losing efficiency all the time, registered an ever thicker concentration of meteorites. And the ’tween-decks radiation count mounted, slowly but persistently.
“I vote we go home,” said Helledahl. Sweat glistened on his forehead, where he sat in his tiny bunk cubicle without touching the mattress.
“Second the motion,” said Bull at once. “Any further discussion? I move the vote. All in favor, say, ‘Ja.’ All opposed, shut up.”
“This is no time for jokes, Herr Bull,” said Captain Langnes.
“I quite agree, sir. And this trip is more than a joke, it’s a farce. Let’s turn back!”
“Because of an encrustation on the hull?”
Surprisingly, gentle Torvald Winge supported the skipper with almost as sharp a tone. “Nothing serious has yet happened,” he said. “We have now shielded the drive tubes so that the barnacle growth can’t advance to them. As for our communications apparatus, we have spare parts in ample supply and can easily repair it once we’re out of this fantastic zone. Barnacles can be scraped off the radar arms, as well as the vision parts. What kind of cowards will our people take us for, if we give up at the first little difficulty?”
“Live ones,” said Helledahl.
“You see,” Bull added, “we’re not in such bad shape now, but what’ll happen if this continues? Just extrapolate the radiation. I did. We’ll be dead men on the return orbit.”
“You assume the count will rise to a dangerous level,” said Winge. “I doubt that. Time enough to turn back, if it seems we have no other hope. But what you don’t appreciate, Erik, is the very real, unextrapolated danger of such a course.”
“Also, we seem to be on the track of an answer to the mystery—the whole purpose of this expedition,” said Langnes. “Given a little more data, we should find out what happened to all the previous ships.”
“Including the Chinese?” asked Bull.
Silence descended. They sat in mid-air, reviewing a situation which familiarity did nothing to beautify.
Observations from the Martian moons had indicated the Asteroid Belt was much fuller than astronomers had believed. Of course, it was still a rather hard vacuum…but one through which sand, gravel, and boulders went flying with indecent speed and frequency. Unmanned craft were sent in by several nations. Their telemetering instruments confirmed the great density of cosmic debris, which increased as they swung further in toward the central zone. But then they quit sending. They were never heard from again. Manned ships stationed near the computed orbits of the robot vessels, where these emerged from the danger area, detected objects with radar, panted to match velocities, and saw nothing but common or garden variety meteorites.
Finally the Chinese People’s Republic sent three craft with volunteer crews, toward the Belt. One ship went off course and landed in the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco. After its personnel explained the unique methods by which they had been persuaded to volunteer, they were allowed to stay. The scientists got good technical jobs, the captain started a restaurant, and the political commissar went on the lecture circuit.
But the other two ships continued as per instructions.
Their transmission stopped at about the same distance as the robot radios had, and they were never seen again either.
After that, the big nations decided there was no need for haste in such expensive undertakings. But Norway had just outfitted her own spaceship, and all true Norwegians are crazy. The Hellik Olav went out.
Winge stirred. “I believe I can tell you what happened to the Chinese,” he said.
“Sure,” said Bull. “They stayed on orbit till it was too late. Then the radiation got them.”
“No. They saw themselves in our own situation, panicked, and started back.”
“So?”
“The meteorites got them.”
“Excuse me,” said Langnes, obviously meaning it the other way around. “You know better than that, Professor Winge. The hazard isn’t that great. Even at the highest possible density of material, the probability of impact with anything of considerable mass is so low—”
“I am not talking about that, captain,” said the astronomer. “Let me repeat the facts ab initio, to keep everything systematic, even if you know most of them already.
“Modern opinion holds that the asteroids, and probably most meteorites throughout the Solar System, really are the remnants of a disintegrated world. I am inclined to suspect that a sudden phase change in its core caused the initial explosion—this can happen at a certain planetary mass and then Jupiter’s attraction gradually broke up the larger pieces. Prior to close-range study, it was never believed the asteroidean planet could have been large enough for this to happen. But today we know it must have been roughly as big as Earth. The total mass was not detectable at a distance, prior to space flight, because so much of it consists of small dark particles. These, I believe, were formed when the larger chunks broke up into lesser ones which abraded and shattered each other in collisions, before gravitational forces spread them too widely apart.”
“What has this to do with the mess we’re in?” asked Bull.
Winge looked startled. “Why…that is—” He blushed. “Nothing, I suppose.” To cover his embarrassment, he began talking rapidly, repeating the obvious at even greater length:
“We accelerated from Earth, and a long way beyond, thus throwing ourselves into an eccentric path with a semi-major axis of two Astronomical Units. But this is still an ellipse, and as we entered the danger zone, our velocity gained more and more of a component parallel to the planetary orbits. At our aphelion, which will be in the very heart of the Asteroid Belt, we will be moving substantially with the average meteorite. Relative velocity will be very small, or zero. Hence collisions will be rare, and mild when they do occur. Then we’ll be pulled back sunward. By the time we start accelerating under power toward Earth, we will again be traveling at a large angle to the natural orbits. But by that time, also, we will be back out of the danger zone.
“Suppose, however, we decided to turn back at this instant. We would first have to decelerate, spending fuel to kill an outward velocity which the sun would otherwise have killed for us. Then we must accelerate inward. We can just barely afford the fuel. There will be little left for maneuvers. And…we’ll be cutting almost perpendicularly across the asteroidal orbits. Their full density and velocity will be directed almost broadside to us.
“Oh, we still needn’t worry about being struck by a large object. The probability of that is quite low. But what we will get is the fifteen kilometer-per-second sandblast of the uncountable small particles. I have been computing the results of my investigations so far, and arrive at a figure for the density of this cosmic sand which is, well, simply appalling. Far more than was hitherto suspected. I don’t believe our hull can stand such a prolonged scouring, meteor bumpers or no.”
“Are you certain?” gulped Helledahl.
“Of course not,” said Winge testily. “What is certain, out here? I believe it highly probably, though. And the fact that the Chinese never came back would seem to lend credence to my hypothesis.”
* * *
The barnacles had advanced astoundingly since Bull last looked at them. Soon the entire ship would be covered, except for a few crucial places toilfully kept clean.
He braced his armored self against the reactive push of his cutting torch. It was about the only way to get a full-grown barnacle loose. The things melded themselves with the hull. The flame drowned the sardonic stars in his vision but illuminated the growths.
They looked quite a bit like the Terrestrial marine sort. Each humped up in a hard conoidal shell of blackish-brown material. Beneath them was a layer of excreted metal, chiefly ferrous, plated onto the aluminum hull.
I’d hate to try landing through an atmosphere, thought Bull. Of course, that wouldn’t be necessary. We would go into orbit around Earth and call for someone to lay alongside and take us off…But heading back sunward, we’ll have one sweet time controlling internal temperature…No, I can simply slap some shiny paint on. That should do the trick. I’d have to paint anyway, to maintain constant radiation characteristics when micrometeorites are forever scratching our metal. Another chore. Space flight is nothing but one long round of chores. The next poet who recites in my presence an ode to man’s conquest of the universe can take that universe—every galaxy and every supernova through every last, long light-year—and put…
If we get home alive.
He tossed the barnacle into a metal canister for later study. It was still red hot, and doubtless the marvelously intricate organism within the shell had suffered damage. But the details of the lithophagic metabolism could be left for professional biologists to figure out. All they wanted aboard Holy Ole was enough knowledge to base a decision on.
Before taking more specimens, Bull made a circuit of the hull. There were many hummocks on it, barnacles growing upon barnacles. The foresection had turned into a hill of shells, under which the radio transceiver boom lay buried. Another could be built when required for Earth approach. The trouble was, with the interior radiation still mounting—while a hasty retreat seemed impossible—Bull had started to doubt he ever would see Earth again.
He scrubbed down the radar, then paused to examine the spot where he had initially cut off a few dozen samples. New ones were already burgeoning on the ferroplate left by their predecessors—little fellows with delicate glasslike shells which would soon grow and thicken, becoming incredibly tough. Whatever that silicate material was, study of it should repay Terrestrial industry. Another bonanza from the Asteroid Belt, the modern Mother Lode.
“Ha!” said Bull.
It had sounded very convincing. The proper way to exploit space was not to mine the planets, where you must grub deep in the crust to find a few stingy ore pockets, then spend fabulous amounts of energy hauling your gains home. No, the asteroids had all the minerals man would ever need, in developing his extraterrestrial colonies and on Earth herself. Freely available minerals, especially on the metallic asteroids from the core of the ancient planet. Just land and help yourself. No elaborate apparatus needed to protect you from your environment. Just the spaceship and space armor you had to have anyway. No gravitational well to back down into and climb back out of. Just a simple thrust of minimum power.
Given free access to the asteroids, even a small nation like Norway could operate in space, with all the resulting benefits to her economy, politics, and prestige. And there was the Hellik Olav, newly outfitted, with plenty of volunteers—genuine ones—for an exploratory mission and to hell with the danger.
“Ha!” repeated Bull.
He had been quite in favor of the expedition, provided somebody else went. But he was offered a berth and made the mistake of telling his girl.
* * *
“Ohhhh, Erik!” she exclaimed, enormous-eyed.
After six months in space helping to rig and test the ship, Bull could have fallen in love with the Sea Hag. However, this had not been necessary. When he had returned to Earth, swearing a mighty oath never to set foot above the stratosphere again, he met Marta. She was small and blond and deliciously shaped. She adored him right back. The only flaw he could find in her was a set of romantic notions about the starry universe and the noble Norwegian destiny therein.
“Oh, oh,” he said, recognizing the symptoms. In haste: “Don’t get ideas, now. I told you I’m a marine reclamation man, from here on forever.”
“But this, darling! This chance! To be one of the conquerors! To make your name immortal!”
“The trouble is, I’m still mortal myself.”
“The service you can do—to our country!”
“Uh, apart from everything else, do you realize that, uh, even allowing for acceleration under power for part of the distance, I’d be gone for more than two years?”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“But—”
“Are you afraid, Erik?”
“Well, no. But—”
“Think of the Vikings! Think of Fridtjof Nansen! Think of Roald Amundsen!”
Bull dutifully thought of all these gentlemen. “What about them?” he asked.
But it was a light summer night, and Marta couldn’t imagine any true Norwegian refusing such a chance for deathless glory, and one thing sort of led to another. Before he recovered his wits, Bull had accepted the job.
There followed a good deal of work up in orbit, readying the ship, and a shakedown cruise lasting some weeks. When he finally got pre-departure leave, Bull broke every known traffic law and a few yet to be invented, on the way to Marta’s home. She informed him tearfully that she was so sorry and she hoped they would always be good friends, but she had been seeing so little of him and had met someone else but she would always follow his future career with the greatest interest. The someone else turned out to be a bespectacled writer who had just completed a three-volume novel about King Harald Hardcounsel (1015-1066). Bull didn’t remember the rest of his furlough very clearly.
* * *
A shock jarred through him. He bounced from the hull, jerked to a halt at the end of his life line, and waited for the dizziness to subside. The stars leered.
“Hallo! Hallo, Erik! Are you all right?”
Bull shook his head to clear it. Helledahl’s voice, phoned across the life line, was tinny in his earphones. “I think so. What happened?”
“A small meteorite hit us, I suppose. It must have had an abnormal orbit to strike so hard. We can’t see any damage from inside, though. Will you check the outer hull?”
Bull nodded, though there was no point in doing so. After he hauled himself back, he needed a while to find the spot of impact. The pebble had collided near the waist of the ship, vaporizing silicate shell material to form a neat little crater in a barnacle hummock. It hadn’t quite penetrated to the ferroplate. A fragment remained, trapped between the rough lumps.
Bull shivered. Without that overgrowth, the hull would have been pierced. Not that that mattered greatly in itself. There was enough patching aboard to repair several hundred such holes. But the violence of impact was an object lesson. Torvald Winge was almost certainly right. Trying to cut straight across the Asteroid Belt would be as long a chance as men had ever taken. The incessant bombardment of particles, mostly far smaller than this but all possessing a similar speed, would wear down the entire hull. When it was thin enough to rip apart under stress, no meteor bumpers or patches would avail.
His eyes sought the blue-green glint of Earth, but couldn’t find it among so many stars. You know, he told himself, I don’t even mind the prospect of dying out here as much as I do the dreariness of it. If we turned around now and somehow survived, I’d be home by Christmas. I’d only have wasted one extra year in space, instead of more than three—counting in the preparations for this arduous cruise. I’d find me a girl, no, a dozen girls. And a hundred bottles. I’d make up for that year in style, before settling down to do work I really enjoy.
But we aren’t likely to survive, if we turn around now.
But how likely is our survival if we keep going—with the radiation shield failing us? And an extra two years on Holy Ole? I’d go nuts!
Judas priest! Was ever a man in such an ugh situation?
Langnes peered at the sheaf of papers in his hand. “I have drafted a report of our findings with regard to the, ah, space barnacles,” he said. “I would like you gentlemen to criticize it as I read aloud. We have now accounted for the vanishing of the previous ships—”
Helledahl mopped his brow. Tiny beads of sweat broke loose and glittered in the air. “That doesn’t do much good if we also vanish,” he pointed out.
“Quite,” Langnes looked irritated. “Believe me, I am more than willing to turn home at once. But that is impracticable, as Professor Winge has shown and the unfortunate Chinese example has confirmed.”
“I say it’s just as impracticable to follow the original orbit,” declared Bull.
“I understand you don’t like it here,” said Winge, “but really, courting an almost certain death in order to escape two more years of boredom seems a trifle extreme.”
“The boredom will be all the worse, now that we don’t have anything to work toward,” said Bull.
The captain’s monocle glared at him. “Ahem!” said Langnes. “If you gentlemen are quite through, may I have the floor?”
“Sure,” said Bull. “Or the wall or the ceiling, if you prefer. Makes no difference here.”
“I’ll skip the preamble of the report and start with our conclusions. ‘Winge believes the barnacles originated as a possibly mutant life form on the ancient planet before it was destroyed. The slower breakup of the resulting super-asteroidal masses gave this life time to adapt to spatial conditions. The organism itself is not truly protoplasmic. Instead of water, which would either boil or freeze in vacuo at this distance from the sun, the essential liquid is some heavy substance we have not been able to identify except as an aromatic compound.’ ”
“Aromatic is too polite,” said Bull, wrinkling his nose.
The air purifiers had still not gotten all the chemical stench out.
Langnes proceeded unrelenting: “ ‘The basic chemistry does remain that of carbon, of proteins, albeit with an extensive use of complex silicon compounds. We theorize the life cycle as follows. The adult form ejects spores which drift freely through space. Doubtless most are lost, but such wastefulness is characteristic of nature on Earth, too. When a spore does chance on a meteorite or an asteroid it can use, it develops rapidly. It requires silicon and carbon, plus traces of other elements; hence it must normally flourish only on stony meteorites, which are, however, the most abundant sort. Since the barnacle’s powerful, pseudo-enzymatic digestive processes—deriving their ultimate energy from sunlight—also extract metals where these exist, it must eliminate same, which it does by laying down a plating, molecule by molecule, under its shell. Research into the details of this process should interest both biologists and metallurgists.
“ ‘The shell serves a double function. To some extent, it protects against ionizing radiation of solar or cosmic origin. Also, being a nonconductor, it can hold a biologically generated static charge, which will cause nearby dust to drift down upon it. Though this is a slow method of getting the extra nourishment, the barnacle is exceedingly long-lived, and can adjust its own metabolic and reproductive rates to the exigencies of the situation. Since the charge is not very great, and he himself is encased in metal, a spaceman notices no direct consequences.
“ ‘One may well ask why this life form has never been observed before. First, it is doubtless confined to the Asteroid Belt, the density of matter being too low elsewhere. We have established that it is poisoned by water and free oxygen, so no spores could survive on any planet man has yet visited, even if they did drift there. Second, if a meteorite covered with such barnacles does strike an atmosphere, the surface vaporization as it falls will destroy all evidence. Third, even if barnacle-crusted meteorites have been seen from spaceships, they look superficially like any other stony objects. No one has captured them for closer examination.’ ”
He paused to drink water from a squeeze bottle. “Hear, hear,” murmured Bull, pretending the captain stood behind a lectern.
“That’s why the unmanned probe ships never were found,” said Helledahl. “They may well have been seen, more or less on their predicted orbits, but they weren’t recognized.”
Langnes nodded. “Of course. That comes next in the report. Then I go on to say: ‘The reason that radio transmission ceased in the first place is equally obvious. Silicon components are built into the boom, as part of a transistor system. The barnacles ate them.
“ ‘The observed increase in internal irradiation is due to the plating of heavy metals laid down by the barnacles. First, the static charges and the ferromagnetic atoms interfere with the powerful external magnetic fields which are generated to divert ions from the ship. Second, primary cosmic rays coming through that same plating produce showers of secondary particles.
“ ‘Some question may be raised as to the explosive growth rate of barnacles on our hull, even after all the silicon available in our external apparatus had been consumed. The answer involves consideration of vectors. The ordinary member of the Asteroid Belt, be it large or small, travels in an orbit roughly parallel to the orbits of all other members. There are close approaches and occasional collisions, but on the whole, the particles are thinly scattered by Terrestrial standards, isolated from each other. Our ship, however, is slanting across those same orbits, thus exposing itself to a veritable rain of bodies, ranging in size from microscopic to sand granular. Even a single spore, coming in contact with our hull, could multiply indefinitely.’ ”
“That means we’re picking up mass all the time,” groaned Bull. “Which means we’ll accelerate slower and get home even later than I’d feared.”
“Do you think we’ll get home at all?” fretted Helledahl. “We can expect the interference with our radiation shield, and the accumulation of heavy atoms, to get worse all the time. Nobody will ever be able to cross the Belt!”
“Oh, yes, they will,” said Captain Langnes. “Ships must simply be redesigned. The magnetic screens must be differently heterodyned, to compensate. The radio booms must be enclosed in protective material. Or perhaps—”
“I know,” said Bull in great weariness. “Perhaps antifouling paint can be developed. Or spaceships can be careened, God help us. Oh, yes. All I care about is how we personally get home. I can’t modify our own magnetic generators. I haven’t the parts or the tools, even if I knew precisely how. We’ll spin on and on, the radiation worse every hour, till—”
“Be quiet!” snapped Langnes.
“The Chinese turned around, and look what happened to them,” underlined Winge. “We must try something different, however hopeless it too may look.”
Bull braced his heavy shoulders. “See here, Torvald,” he growled, “what makes you so sure the Chinese did head back under power?”
“Because they were never seen again. If they had been on the predicted orbit, or even on a completed free-fall ellipse, one of the ships watching for them in the neighborhood of Earth would have—Oh.”
“Yes,” said Bull through his teeth. “Would have seen them? How do you know they weren’t seen? I think they were. I think they plugged blindly on as they’d been ordered to, and the radiation suddenly started increasing on a steep curve—as you’d expect, when a critical point of fouling up was passed. I think they died, and came back like comets, sealed into spaceships so crusted they looked like ordinary meteorites!”
The silence thundered.
“So we may as well turn back,” said Bull at last. “If we don’t make it, our death’ll be a quicker and cleaner one than those poor devils had.”
Again the quietude. Until Captain Langnes shook his head. “No. I’m sorry, gentlemen. But we go on.”
“What?” screamed Helledahl.
The captain floated in the air, a ludicrous parody of officerlike erectness. But there was an odd dignity to him all the same.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I have a family too, you know. I would turn about if it could be done with reasonable safety. But Professor Winge has shown that that is impossible. We would die anyhow—and our ship would be a ruin, a few bits of worn and crumpled metal, all our results gone. If we proceed, we can prepare specimens and keep records which will be of use to our successors. Us they will find, for we can improvise a conspicuous feature on the hull that the barnacles won’t obliterate.”
He looked from one to another.
“Shall we do less for our country’s honor than the Chinese did for theirs?” he finished.
Well, if you put it that way, thought Bull, yes.
But he couldn’t bring himself to say it aloud. Maybe they all thought the same, including Langnes himself, but none was brave enough to admit it. The trouble with us moral cowards, thought Bull, is that we make heroes of ourselves.
I suppose Marta will shed some pretty, nostalgic tears when she gets the news. Ech! It’s bad enough to croak out here; but if that bluestocking memorializes me with a newspaper poem about my Viking spirit—
Maybe that’s what we should rig up on the hull, so they won’t ignore this poor barnacled derelict as just another flying boulder Make the Holy Ole into a real, old-fashioned, Gokstad type ship. Dragon figurehead, oars, sail…shields hung along the side…hey, yes! Imagine some smug Russian on an Earth satellite, bragging about how his people were the first into space—and then along comes this Viking ship—
I think I’ll even paint the shields. A face on each one, with its tongue out and a thumb to its nose—
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.”