Synopsis
    It is the early 1980's. After a period of dangerous cutbacks, the space program has been
revived in the form of an internationally cooperative six party effort, to take advantage of the
1983 launch window and make a manned, three-year, round-trip spaceflight and landing on Mars.
Providing "Marsnauts" (the name is the result of a compromise between the US. and Russia) to
the three-man crews of the two ships, are the United States: TADELL (TAD) HANSARD; Great
Britain: DIRK WELLES; the Pan-European Community of Nations: BERN CALLIEUX; Russia:
FEODOR (FEDYA) ASTURNOV; India: BAPTI (BAP) LAL BOSE; and Japan: ANOSHI
WANTANABE.
    These countries are also represented by diplomatic representatives, known as Deputy
Ministers for the Development of Space (Britain: SIR GEOFFREY MAYENCE; Pan-Europe:
WALTHER GUENTHER; Russia: SERGEI VARISOV; India: MAHADEV AMBEDKAR; and
Japan: MASAHARU TATSUKICHI—plus their US. opposite number who goes under the
comparative title of Undersecretary for the Development of Space, ex-newsman JEN WYLIE.
    As the story begins, the diplomatic representatives have just had lunch with the Marsnauts in
their prelaunch quarters, the Operations and Checkout Building, Cape Kennedy. Upon boarding
the bus that takes the politicos from the Operations and Checkout Building, JEN uses a phone in
the bus to call WARNER (WARN) RETHE, the U.S. Presidential Press Secretary, and asks if he
can talk to President PAUL FANZONE about something that is presently concerning TAD
HANSARD, who is the senior co-captain of the Mars mission (FEDYA ASTURNOV is the junior
co-captain).
    TAD is concerned that the load of scientific experiments required of the Marsnauts is too
heavy for the safety of the mission, particularly during the first six weeks of the flight. He is trying
to get word of this through JEN to the President, so that the six world powers involved can
negotiate among themselves and reduce the number of experiments—in which a great deal of
national self-interest and pride is concerned.
    The President, however, cannot talk to JEN at the moment. The best the press secretary can
offer is the hope of a chance for JEN to talk with the Chief Executive at the Presidential reception
near the spaceport that evening, when FANZONE will be present in person. The President has
otherwise avoided appearing on the Cape Kennedy scene, the political situation being delicate
since the flight is from U.S. grounds. Technically, JEN is his representative on the scene in all
things.
    That evening before the reception, JEN ' s girl friend, ALINDE (LIN) WEST, appears at the
hotel where he and the other political representatives are quartered. He must leave her there
while he goes to the reception.
    At the reception, JEN suggests that TAD talk to FANZONE. But nothing seems to come of it
until the reception is over, when he is held back from leaving for several minutes by
WARNRETHE, so that FANZONE can talk to him.
    FANZONE tells JEN bluntly that as U.S. President he is the last of the six political groups'
leaders to suggest a reduction in the experimental work load on the 'nauts. This is because the
U.S. already has too large a share in the Mars mission to begin with; and because, from a political
standpoint, the mission itself is secondary to the international cooperation necessary to getting the
people of the world to fund basic research that will relieve power and food shortages and clean up
a disordered (if momentarily peaceful) Earth. FANZONE admits his own interest in space
development for its own sake; but says it must take a serving role to politics on Earth, and he
must operate from that standpoint.
    Blocked of help from the President, JEN approaches BILL WARD, the Mars Launch Director,
on the next morning, which is the morning of the launch. BILL admits that NASA is also aware
that the experimental work load is dangerously heavy, but says that those who work in the space
effort have struggled to keep the program alive, and daren't be the first to risk popular criticism
of it now, by offending national pride. BILL cites a time when Kennedy workers were offered the
choice of taking ruinous cuts in salary or resigning their jobs; and says the first duty of the
workers is to keep the program alive for the sake of future launches, even if it means endangering
this one.
     Frustrated, JEN sees the shuttle launched, with no change in the work load.
     Meanwhile, aboard the shuttle itself, TAD is considering what he must do, now that he has
been unable to get help to reduce the work load. He is still turning the matter over in his mind as
the shuttle delivers him, ANOSHI, and BAP to Phoenix One, the first of the two ships making the
trip, and then goes on to deliver FEDYA, DIRK and BERN to Phoenix Two.
     He and his crew activate Phoenix One. FEDYA and the others do likewise aboard Phoenix
Two. They are ready to make their space launch from Earth orbit, into the long coasting orbit
around the sun that will bring them into Mars orbit, nine months hence.
     Both ships are flanked by two nuclear boosters, each with its own pilot. At the given signal,
the boosters fire, and Phoenix One and Two are lifted toward Mars. . . .

    Part 2

    V

     Twenty-eight minutes later, the pressure of acceleration ceased; and Tad floated lightly in the absence
of gravity upon his acceleration couch. On either side of him, Anoshi and Bap would be gravityless as
well. A lightness that was from something more than just the lack of gravity seemed to touch Tad. He felt
free and in command, at last.
     "Phoenix One to booster shuttle pilots," Tad said into his helmet phone. "Is firing completed?"
     "Booster Shuttle One," said a voice tinged with the accents of the western plains. "Firing completed."
     The free feeling still lifted inside Tad. He pushed it aside. There was no time for that, now.
     "Booster Shuttle Two," added another voice. "Firing completed."
     "Thank you, gentlemen," said Tad. He reached out a gloved hand and changed channels. "Mission
Control. This is Phoenix One. Both booster shuttles have ceased firing."
     "Roger, Phoenix One." The voice of Mission Control came drawling back at him almost before his
last words were uttered. "You're in injection orbit, right on the button. Phoenix Two's right there with
you. If you want to take a look to starboard there, about ten kilometers out, you ought to be able to
catch the sun on her."
     Tad turned his helmet with some little effort to stare out the glass port to his right. For a second he
saw nothing but stars against the blackness of airless space. Then there came a slow, bright flash that
seemed to burn for about half a second before vanishing. A moment later it was repeated.
     "Looks like they're yawing just a bit, there," said Tad.
     "Nothing to trouble about, Phoenix One," Mission Control said. "Phoenix Two advised they're
smoothing it out with steering jets. You all ready to say good-bye to your booster shuttles?"
     "All ready," said Tad.
     "You have the go-ahead, then, Phoenix One," said Mission. "Effect separation from booster
shuttles."
     "Roger," said Tad. He returned to the frequency on which he had been talking with the pilots of the
two nuclear booster shuttles, strapped one on each side of Phoenix One.
     "This is Phoenix One again," he said. "All ready to separate. Shuttle One and Two, also ready?"
     "Shuttle One ready."
     "Shuttle Two ready."
     The answers were immediate.
     "Firing release charges," said Tad. "Three, two, one . . . fire!" With the last word his gloved finger
came down on the button setting off the explosive charges which released the heavy bonds banding
Phoenix One to her two booster shuttles. There was a dull thud from what seemed behind them in
Phoenix One; and Tad reached up to activate a view of the shuttles on his pilot's screen, looking back
from a sensor camera-eye mounted near the front of the spaceship.
     Full in the sunlight, looking as if they were below the underbelly of Phoenix One, the two shuttles
appeared to be falling away, separating as they went. A couple of flashes from further off told of the
sections of banding, tumbling in the sunlight as they moved away at the higher speed imparted to them by
the explosive charges releasing them. The support shuttles themselves were departing from Phoenix only
on the small push of steering thrusters. Now, as Tad, Bap and Anoshi watched, each shuttle slowly
revolved end-for-end, so that they faced in the opposite direction to which Phoenix One was still facing.
     The two had lifted Phoenix One to Mars-injection orbit—that point from which she would now
begin her nine-month coast to the next point where she would fire her nuclear engines to fall into a close
orbit around Mars. Now they were dwindling in the screen, looking almost tiny. It was jarring to think
that with their separation, plus the fuel they had expended, the Mars mission had already spent the
greater part of its mass—just for the initial departure from Earth orbit. Tad felt the diminishment almost
like a personal loss.
     A little over half an hour ago, Phoenix One had weighed approximately one million six hundred
thousand pounds. Now, with the departure of the two booster shuttles, that weight was down to six
hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds. By contrast, at the time Phoenix One reached Mars, she
would have lost only an additional twenty-five thousand pounds—down to six hundred and fifty thousand
pounds. Life support and consumables plus fuel needed for mid-course correction would be the reason
for the twenty-five thousand pounds that would be spent ...
     Bap was murmuring something incomprehensible, his voice a low tone over the helmet phones.
     "What, Bap?" Tad asked, turning his head to look at the other's couch.
     Bap broke off. His helmet was facing out a port at the dwindling booster shuttles.
     "What? Sorry, Tad," he said. "Just remembering something from the Bhagavad-Gita—"The Song
Celestial." In English it goes something like . . . Today we slew a foe, and we will slay our other enemy
tomorrow! Look! Are we not lords . . .?"
     "Hm-m-m," said Tad. The quotation seemed to have no application to the departure of the shuttles
or their present situation. But there was no understanding Bap.
     I should learn to keep my thoughts to myself in my head, Bap was thinking, a little ruefully. No
point in telling them that what I quoted was part of the speech of the Unheavenly Man, as
Krishna delineates him. But it would have made no more sense to Tad and Anoshi if I had. Still, it
is true. We are very lordly here with our nuclear engines and our mission plans, close to Earth.
But out there close to Mars we will be small and insignificant. No, no point in trying to explain
what I meant or felt. To the English anything religious must be immediate and personal ...
     Not, Bap corrected himself, that Tad is English. But yes, he is, in the sense I use the word. Tad is
distorted English, as Dirk over there on Phoenix Two is undistorted English. And the English do
not understand such thoughts as I was thinking. Neither the English nor the American English
understand. Would Anoshi? Not really; and in that sense, he is tinged with an English sort of color
also. Even I am tinged with English, because I am conscious of though rejecting, what it is to be
Englished. Truthfully, we are all alike, Tad, Anoshi and I.
     Possibly that is part of it. I love Tad—nonsexually, of course—Bap grinned in his helmet. One
always has to make that distinction when thinking in English. Why am I thinking in English?
Because I am thinking about English—rather, about some quality I call "English." No, I have a
great affection for Tad. Once, long ago, it might have been that we rode to battle on horseback
together, swords at our waists. And Anoshi, also. It is not sheer accident that the three
swashbucklers among the six of us should find ourselves in one ship. Over in Phoenix Two, they
are in common of a different breed and cloth, once one ignores all their national differences. Even
Dirk, who is English, is not-English in that sense . . . I am becoming whirled about with words.
The words are losing me among them. I should stop thinking and return my, attention to duty ...
     Outside, the booster shuttles were now pointing away at an angle from Phoenix One.
     "Booster Shuttle One to Phoenix One," said the phones in the helmets of Bap, Tad and Anoshi, "So
long, and good luck."
     "So long, Phoenix One," said the different voice of the Shuttle Two pilot, "good luck to y'all."
     "Same to you," said Tad. "So long."
     Bright fire, barely visible in the sunlight of space, spurted from the jets of the two shuttles. They
seemed to hang there a moment, not moving; then they began to shrink, at first slowly, then more and
more rapidly, until they were suddenly gone.
     Somewhere off the starboard of Phoenix One, Tad knew, the two booster shuttles of Phoenix
Two would also be retro-firing to head homeward into Earth orbit again.
     "Mission Control," said Tad, punching up the Mission Control frequency on the console before him.
"Our booster shuttles have just taken off. We're now ready to restore Phoenix One to an active status."
     "Roger, Phoenix One," came back the voice of Mission Control. "We copy that. You're now going
to restore Phoenix One to active status. Your next communication with us will be 1600 hours, according
to schedule."
     "Roger," said Tad. "Copy, 1600 hours. Over and out for now, then."
     "Over and out, Phoenix One," said Mission Control.
     Tad switched back to communication with his two crewmates.
     "O.K.," he said. "Let's get this ship unbuttoned and back in full operation."
     He sat up on his couch and the other two rose with him. Still in their suits, they turned to the business
of bringing the ship around them up to operating conditions.
     Primarily, this meant restoring the operational and life-support systems of the ship, which with the
exception of the biomedical lab, had been under storage conditions for the last nineteen days, since
loading had been completed of the two Mars mission ships which had been constructed in orbit. Chief of
these systems was the five-psi nitrogen-oxygen operating atmosphere of those sections of the ship where
the three of them would live and operate without suits, closely followed in importance by the thermal
control systems and the power distribution systems. Plus all the related mechanical activities of the ship
that would enable them to live and work aboard her for three years, until they saw Earth orbit again. In
his mind's eye Tad saw the duties to be done like soldiers standing at attention, waiting to be dealt with.
     The three of them raised their couches into control position, and went to work on the consoles before
them where primary controls for all the systems were located. One by one, the small red sensing lights
began to burn in signal that the systems were up to full operational level. Then, one by one, for the benefit
of the ship's automatic log recorder as well as for their own, each of them went verbally through a
checklist of the systems he had brought to full activity.
     "... and all systems full on," said Tad aloud, finally winding up the checklist. "Phoenix One in
completely active operating status. All right, let's start our visual check of the decks."
     He led the others as they got to their feet and headed toward the tube running through the center of
all four of the ship's decks and giving access to each of them. In the absence of gravity, and still in their
spacesuits, they bumped somewhat clumsily against each other, opening the door to the access tube and
entering it. Tad went first, pulling his way along the tube—in the direction that "down" would be, once
Phoenix One and Phoenix Two were docked together and rotated to provide a substitute for gravity
until he reached the door opening on B Deck. This was the first deck below A, the control deck they had
just left; like A it consisted of a doughnut-shaped space, 'the outer wall of which was separated from the
skin of the ship only by insulation and a network of thermal tubes designed to balance interior
temperature between the heat of that side of the ship in direct sunlight and the chill of that side in the
shade. The interior wall of B Deck, like that of all the decks, was the wall of the access tube.
     "Home," said Anoshi, cheerfully, when they had all emerged on B Deck. And, in fact, that was what
it was.
     Unlike A Deck, which was all open space with the control consoles and other equipment spaced
about its floor, B Deck was partitioned. Three of the spaces enclosed by partitions were the individual
cabins, somewhat more spacious and deserving of their name than the individual "sleeping compartments"
in Skylab.
     "Look," said Anoshi. "Nameplates already up on each door. No danger forgetting where you sleep."
     Tad looked. What he saw had not been specified anywhere in the original plans, or part of any of the
mockups of B Deck he had encountered back on Earth. A solemn black nameplate had been attached to
the door of each cabin—a small, almost impish, touch on the part of those who had finished off the
interior of the spaceship. The nameplates were unnecessary. Long ago, the three had decided which
cabin would be whose among the three of them. But they were a little bit of human decoration, a going
away semi-present from some of the ground workers. He felt the emotion behind the nameplates in spite
of himself; and reading the tone behind Anoshi's words, understood that Anoshi—and undoubtedly Bap
as well—felt it, too.
     "Well, let's check them out," said Tad, to break the spell.
     Each stepped into his own cabin, the magnetism of the soleplates on their boots switching on and off
with each flexing of instep above it—so that it was a little like walking across a kitchen floor where
something sticky had just been spilled. The rooms checked out; and they met again outside them to step
together into the wardroom.
     The wardroom—dining and recreation quarters alike for the three of them—took up nearly a third of
the space on B Deck.
     "I'll check storage and waste compartments," said Tad. "Meet you down at C Deck."
     He went next door to the small consumables storage compartment where immediate supplies of the
food and drink they would consume in the wardroom were packed. The storage compartment checked
out, and he moved on to the waste management compartment. The strict utilitarianism of the waste
management compartment that had been tested out in Skylab had undergone some improvement
here—in looks, if nothing else. But the basics remained. Equipment had to be available for the biomedical
monitoring of the three men's body wastes—although on Phoenix One automatic equipment took over
most of the job. In addition there had to be disposal capabilities for a mass of things, from food
containers to damaged tools or parts and discarded uniforms, which it was easier to throw away than
launder under space conditions. Again, happily, automatic machinery took care of the freezing and
dumping of these wastes through a channel leading to an air lock in the unpressurized section aft.
     With the waste management compartment checked out, Tad went on down to C Deck and the four
different lab and workshop sections that made use of the space there. Anoshi and Bap were still checking
the C-Deck equipment, so Tad went on alone to D Deck.
     The fourth and final deck was packed solid with stores and equipment. Much of the equipment was
that which was connected with the experimental programs to be engaged in by the mission during its first
four weeks of coast to Mars, while public interest was still high. Tad looked at the ranked cartons
grimly.
     These Mars mission vessels had been designed originally to carry double the crew they had
now—six men per ship. Now they barely had convenient room for three. Part of the crowding was due
to the proliferation of basic research itself—the larger countries, at least, had finally begun to wake up to
the need for it, under the demand by their peoples for new technological answers to large natural
problems of air, water- and land. But the larger reason for Phoenix One and Phoenix Two being so
overloaded with research equipment and problems was political.
     Jen Wylie had failed him in getting the list reduced. That left no one to turn to but himself. And Tad
had done some tall thinking in the last twenty-four hours. In fact, he had come up with a possible way of
saving the men and the mission. Only he would need at least some help—and the only one he could turn
to for it was Fedya.
     He would talk to Fedya at the first chance. Meanwhile—he shoved the matter from his mind and
came back to the immediate job. A quick check took D Deck past inspection—and beyond D was only
the Mars biolab, sterilized and sealed at present. From the Mars biolab forward to Control Deck A
constituted the so-called "shirtsleeve" area of the ship. Familiar as he was with it from training with the
mock-ups of the individual spaces, Tad could not help feeling a new sensation of being constricted and
enclosed. This was the life zone—these four and a half decks—of Phoenix One. Outside of that zone,
and its duplicate on Phoenix Two, there was no place where life was possible without a spacesuit
between here and the Earth they had just left. Beyond the biolab and the unpressurized section
surrounding it there was only the hundred-and-sixty-foot section of the single nuclear shuttle, their main
engine, that would not be fired until they had reached Mars and it was time for them to drop into a close
orbit around the red planet. Forward of the nuclear shuttle, the life zone plus the unpressurized
compartment beyond A Deck holding the unmanned probes and the MEM, the Mars Excursion Module,
made up the remaining hundred and ten feet of the spacecraft. In less than fifty-six feet of that hundred
and ten, he, Anoshi and Bap would spend most of their next three years living and working.
     It was cramped, it was not beautiful—but it was their ship, it was his ship. And he would bring it
through. Buoyant, Tad turned and made his way back up the access tube to A Deck where Bap and
Anoshi were already waiting for him. The A-Deck chronometer showed 1400 hours exactly.
     "Visual check of Phoenix One shows everything A-O.K.," Tad informed Cape Kennedy. It still
seemed a little odd to him to be reporting to Kennedy at this point instead of to Mission Control at
Houston NASA. Tad's experience in space dated back before 1977 when the last and most serious
economy cut had reduced the NASA installation at Houston to a shadowy establishment. In theory
NASA headquarters was still there. In reality, only a few administrators and a planning division still
occupied the few buildings NASA made use of at the once-busy installation. Mission Control for the
Mars flight would be at Kennedy throughout the trip.
     "Roger. We copy. Visual check Phoenix One, all O.K."
     "So," said Tad, "unless you can think of a good reason for us not to, we'll start getting out of our suits
now."
     "Hold that desuiting for a moment, will you, Phoenix One?" said Mission Control. The helmet
phones fell silent.
     "Now," said Anoshi, "they'll send us back to run a white glove around the compartments for dust,
before desuiting."
     "Not dust," said Bap. "Gremlins. There is nothing worse than gremlins in your control systems. An
EGW—an Extended Gremlin Watch—must be kept in operation at all times—"
     "O.K., there, Phoenix One," said Mission Control, coming suddenly to life again, "you may proceed
with the desuiting."
     "Good enough," said Tad. "Copy. We'll begin desuiting."
     It was not quite as much of a problem getting out of the spacesuits as it was getting into them; but it
was still an awkward and lengthy process that only in theory could be easily performed by the spacesuit
wearer, alone. In practice, a good deal of helpful hauling and tugging by extra pairs of hands was
welcome. Tad, as spacecraft commander, had the privilege of being the first to be helped out of his suit;
after which he helped to free first Anoshi, then Bap.
     The emptied spacesuits went into a storage compartment, leaving the men in the undersuits that were
designed to match with the many connections and entry points of the spacesuits.
     "Go ahead," Tad told the other two. "I'll be ready to man the first shift." Standing orders called for
one of the three-man crew to be dressed ready to don his spacesuit at all times. The other two were free
to shift to CWG's, Constant Wear Garments. Bap and Anoshi disappeared down the access tube; and
Tad seated himself in his acceleration couch, now in control position, to inform Mission Control that they
were now ready to begin docking maneuvers with Phoenix Two.
     "Roger. We copy that," said Mission Control. Have you got position figures of your own yet?"
     "In process," said Tad. He was squinting through the sextant lens of his console at a composite view
of the Sun, the North Star and Earth, seen simultaneously through three different sensor eyes on the
outside of the ship. His right hand twisted knobs until the three lines intersected at centerpoint on the lens.
Then he punched for the onboard computer, lifted his eye from the lens and looked at the computer
screen.
     "I'm in reference grid cube JN 43721, Kennedy," said Tad.
     "Copy. Grid cube JN 43721. How's your radar, Phoenix One?" Tad looked at the radar screen
with its sweeping line of light and the intersecting blip in the upper right quadrant.
     "Fine," said Tad. "Phoenix Two looks to be not more than sixteen kilometers off."
     "Thanks, Phoenix One. That checks with our data. Stand by for plane, bearing and distance."
     "Standing by," said Tad.
     While he waited, Bap and Anoshi came back up to the Control Deck.
     "Say again?" Tad asked, for the sound of their return had obscured some of the figures Mission
Control had just begun to give him.
     Mission Control repeated itself, giving Tad first the angle to the longitudinal axis of Phoenix One of
the plane which enclosed both spacecraft, then the bearing and distance of Phoenix Two from Phoenix
One within that plane. Tad reached for the control buttons of the cold gas steering jets used to maneuver
his ship. A docking maneuver between the two vessels in space was too chancy to he trusted to any
computer.
     "All right, Mission Control, I copy," he said. "Phoenix One to Phoenix Two, if you are holding
stationary, I will approach for docking."
     "Holding stationary, Phoenix One," came back the calm voice of Fedya. "Come ahead."
     Tad's fingers descended on the controls of the steering thrusters. Out beyond the glass viewing port
to his right, the little reflection of Phoenix Two was lost among the lights of uncounted stars. In the
ceaseless glare of the Sun, through the airless distance between them, six hundred and seventy-five
thousand pounds of Phoenix One tilted, turned, and drifted toward the six hundred and seventy-five
thousand pounds of Phoenix Two under the necessity of coming together with a touch so light that it
would not have dimpled the bumper of a four-thousand-pound vehicle back on Earth's surface.

    VI

     Phoenix Two, seen from Phoenix One, as Phoenix One approached her, was at first only a slightly
brighter point of light among the surrounding stars for some minutes, then only a glare-spot for some time
more. Not until Phoenix One was finally quite close did she appear to change suddenly from a
light-reflection to a spacecraft. Actually, it was as only half of a spacecraft that she appeared in the
forward view screen; because, lying nearly bow-on to the approaching Phoenix One, as she now was,
her other half was swallowed up in the perfect darkness, that was shadow in airless space, so that she
looked as if she had been divided longitudinally by an enormous bandsaw.
     The motions of Tad's fingers on the controls of the steering thrusters were practiced, familiar ones.
Still he felt the prickle of sweat on his face and at the back of his 'neck. He was as conscious of the
whole two hundred and seventy feet of craft about him as a man might be of his own car while
maneuvering it into a parking place.
     He approached Phoenix Two slowly, bow to bow, the great bell-shaped ends of the forward
sections, the space probes and their individual MEMs in airless readiness, now creeping toward each
other like blind leviathans about to touch in greeting. Beyond the circular metal lip of each of those ends
were six feet of the light metal scaffolding enclosing half of the zero-G lab pod and the cryotex tube
leading back into the D Deck of each ship. The two scaffoldings must take the impact of meeting; and
also they must interlock to hold the two ships together. It would be upon their joined structure that the
strain would come when the two ships were rotated around their common central point, where the
completed pod would sit, to provide a substitute gravity for the men aboard both crafts.
     Twelve meters from dock-point," Tad said aloud for the benefit of Mission Control, "ten meters . . .
nine . . . eight . . ."
     Phoenix Two seemed to loom above the viewers of the forward screen, as if she was falling upon
her sister ship.
     ". . . three meters . . . two," said Tad, "one . . . docked!
     What sounded like an unreasonably loud and prolonged clang rang through both ships. A red signal
light, unlit until now, was burning to the right of the console in front of Tad, signaling that the two
scaffoldings had locked correctly and were holding.
     Tad sat back in his seat with a sigh.
     "All O.K., Phoenix Two?" he asked.
     "All O.K.," Fedya's voice answered.
     "Phoenix One to Mission Control," said Tad. "Docking accomplished. Are we clear to send a man
EVA from each ship now to activate outside equipment and secure?"
     "We copy docking accomplished," said Mission Control. "Tad, will you hold off on EVA for the
moment? We'd like to run another position check on the two of you now that you're docked together."
     "Be our guest," said Tad.
     There was a short period of silence from Mission Control.
     "All right, Phoenix," said Mission Control, coming back to life again. "Your position shows no
discernible drift as a result of the docking maneuver. You may EVA and activate exterior equipment
whenever you're ready."
     "Roger," said Tad. He looked to his left, at Anoshi, who nodded. "Anoshi will EVA for Phoenix
One."
     "Dirk will EVA for Phoenix Two," said Fedya's voice.
     "Roger. We copy. Anoshi to EVA Phoenix One, Dirk to EVA Phoenix Two," Mission Control
agreed.
     Anoshi got up.
     "Back into harness," he said. He disappeared down the access tube.
     Bap touched the button on the communication headband above his ear, cutting off the microphone on
the slender arm that curved around to the edge of his mouth.
     "Good for you, Tad," he said softly. "Anoshi wanted to be first man out. Did you know that?"
     "No," said Tad. "Besides, he's first out because he's the astronomer here. The cameras are his." So it
was true about Anoshi—he had not known but he had suspected.
     A little silence fell. A few minutes later, Anoshi came back out of the access tube, wearing his space
suit underwear. He went across to the spacesuit locker and got his suit out. Tad and Bap helped him into
it, and fastened to his belt the tools he would need and the film packs for the cameras he would be
activating.
     "All set," said Anoshi, over the communication circuit. He went forward to the inner door of the air
lock.
     The air, lock let him into the airless space containing the Mars Excursion Module and the unmanned
planetary probes that would be sent down to Mars. He went forward alongside the two-meter height of
the cryoflex tube that would later provide a shirtsleeve conduit to the pressurized section of the
zero-gravity pod between the ships and exited through the hatch in the end wall. He found himself among
the light metal scaffolding that had joined with the scaffolding from Phoenix Two to dock the two ships
together.
     There was no spacesuited figure from Phoenix Two in sight yet, so Anoshi turned and walked from
the hatch, the magnetic soles of his boots sticking and yielding alternately to the outside surface of the end
wall until he came to the edge of the ship's hull, proper, some twenty feet away. He stepped over the
foot-high end-rim of the hull onto the cylindrical metal of the hull itself. Above him all the stars of the
universe revolved solemnly as he went from the surface he was on to one at right angles with it. It was
like a man stepping around the edge of a box from one flat side to the other.
     He walked down the hull.
     There were twelve recording star-cameras for him to check out and load, five fixed, three with
automatic programmed movements and four which could be manipulated from inside the ship. There was
the laser mirror to erect and align; and the solar cell holders to erect for the solar cells experiment. But, as
he walked slowly along the ship, Anoshi was thinking only secondarily of these things. Alone, of all the six
now between Earth and Mars, he had been ashamed not to be more than he was. He had wanted to be a
true astronaut, a cosmonaut; not just a spacegoing scientist.
     There were only two real 'nauts aboard: Tad and Fedya. Anoshi and the other three were merely
scientists with 'naut training. For Bap, Bern and Dirk, this difference did not seem to matter greatly. What
counted with them, apparently, was that they were here, on any terms. But Anoshi had wanted more
than that; and only a trick of timing had forbidden it to him.
     Unlike the other three, he had intended to be a 'naut—a true 'naut in the space program of Nippon.
But that program had not gotten to the point of developing its own experienced astronauts at the time that
this mission was conceived and instigated.
     That was why it was so important that he be out here alone as he was now—he interrupted his
thoughts and knelt to check and load the first of the outside cameras. His gloved hands worked clumsily
but surely and the loading section of the camera opened, black with shadow, before him. He loaded it,
closed it and rose to his feet again. By the time he came back from this mission there would be nothing
concerned with the ship that he would not have done. Anything any one of the others was to do aboard,
he would find a way to do also, officially or privately. That was his goal and he would see it
accomplished.
     Moving on to the next camera now, he saw that Phoenix Two had disgorged her own spacesuited
figure.
     Anoshi finished the cameras and moved on to set up the solar cells in their holder. They made up a
square panel standing almost as tall as himself above the hull of the ship. By contrast when—twenty feet
farther aft of the cells—he lifted the copper laser mirror into erect position and peeled the protective
coating from its carefully polished surface, the mirror stood barely thigh-high and was no more than a
square foot in area. Miracle of science, thought Anoshi, fondly, handling it. Tiny, to serve eventually as a
target for a coherent light beam all the way from Earth to Mars.
     The laser mirror was small, but massive, with its heavy cooling fins at the back. He locked it in
upright position and engaged its base with the control housing below it that would enable it to be aligned
from within the ship. Then, finished at last, he rose and headed toward the scaffolding and the pod.
There, he waited for Dirk to join him.
     The scaffolding consisted of two heavy rod-like sections diametrically opposite each other around the
circle of the rim of the end-wall of each ship. They held the two vessels a little under ten feet apart; and
had been so designed that the rods of matching sections clung magnetically to those of the opposite ship
as the vessels had come together. Magnetism and inertia still held them together, but the two ships were
merely drifting at the moment. The rods had to be clamped tightly together to take the strain that would
come upon them when the two 675,000-pound masses were rotated about their jointure to provide
gravity for both ships.
     The clamps were built into the rods. Working in silence Dirk and Anoshi pulled them into position
and dogged them down by hand. Then, when that was done, they moved to the center of the space
between the now locked-together spacecraft and began to seal the two halves of the no-gravity pod that
was approached by the cryoflex tubes from each ship.
     The sealing was a simple matter on intersandwiching several specially treated layers of the rubbery,
fantastically strong cryotex fabric along the lines of jointure. Once these layers were laid in contact, an
electric current sent through the fabric from either ship would hold the layers together in a bond more
than capable of containing the pressure of the ships' atmosphere. Shutting off the current would unseal
them again when the ships needed to separate. Of course, only one half of the pod would have
atmosphere and be connected to the tubes that now made a shirtsleeve passageway from one ship to the
other. The other half, beyond its impermeable wall, was to be left airless, enterable only by someone in a
spacesuit through a simple hatch in its side.
     "Done," Anoshi announced over the common phone circuit of both ships. "Run the current through
the pod fabric, pressurize and you're all set."
     "Done, indeed," said Dirk's voice in the earphones. "Phoenix Two, pay no attention to any unofficial
reports from Phoenix One personnel. This is your own co-worker announcing everything A-O.K."
     "We copy," Tad's voice said. "Copy," said Fedya. "Come on back inside, Dirk."
     "I," said Anoshi, "am returning inside, Phoenix One. My apologies for taking so long; but there was
some bystander in a spacesuit that kept getting in my way."
     "Dreadfully crowded out here in space, nowadays," said Dirk.
     They waved to each other and stumped off toward their respective hatches in the end walls of their
ships.
     By the time Anoshi was back inside A Deck, Tad had started the ships rotating about their common
center to provide about half a gravity. "Down" was not actually down, now. Tad, seated at his console,
had finished passing the word to Mission Control and was inviting Fedya over for a visit.
     "We're scheduled for a down period now, anyway," he was saying over the phone circuit. "Come
across and spend half an hour with me and a cup of coffee. We'll go over the schedule together."
     Fedya nodded, looking back at him from the phone screen.
     "I'll be over in five minutes," he said.
     Five minutes later, punctually, the hatch in the ceiling of A Deck, just beside the access tube, opened.
Fedya climbed easily down the handholds on the outside of the tube until he reached the deck. He
looked around.
     "Bap?" he asked. "And Anoshi?"
     "In their compartments," Tad said, getting up from his console. "They're going to get some sleep."
     "Dirk and Bern are down, also," said Fedya. He carried a folder of schedule sheets under his arm.
Now he held them out. "Do you want to compare these with yours?"
     "No," said Tad. "We can just work with yours. Besides, there's something else I want to talk to you
about, privately."
     He led the way to the access tube. They climbed down to B Deck and went in to take a table in the
wardroom by the dispensers. Tad got them both cups of coffee.
     "Something else beside the schedule?" Fedya queried gently, when they were seated.
     "Not really beside," said Tad. He looked at Fedya. "Mission knows we're scheduled too tightly."
     "We can only try," said Fedya.
     "No," said Tad, "we can do better than that. We can keep the schedule. I've got a notion," said Tad,
"Only, I'll need a lucky break—from one other man. Maybe I should say an unlucky break."
     He looked at the long brown fingers Fedya had wrapped around his coffee container.
     "Someone on Phoenix Two," said Tad, "would have to have a minor accident—to his hand, say.
Enough to bar him from working in a spacesuit.
     "Not the sort of accident that would slow him down on his share of the duties inside his ship," said
Tad. "Just enough to keep him from going out. To make up for what he can't do, the man from our ship
would do both, now that they're docked. Meanwhile the man with the bad hand could be picking up the
overload of work inside his own ship."
     "And how will the man on the other ship find time to do double duty outside?" Fedya looked closely
at him. "This man—yourself?"
     Tad nodded.
     "Don't ask me how," he said grimly. "In fact, don't ask anything. Forget we had this little talk. But I
tell you the program can be kept and completed, if I just have that one bit of help."
     Fedya's eyes held with his. They sat, looking at each other. That Fedya understood, Tad had no
doubt. That he would help, was another question. It was up to him; all up to him, now.

    VII

     Day Two on the spaceship (Day One being the day of the launch that had ended with the talk
between Tad and Fedya and sleep for all six 'nauts) began according to a clock set at Eastern Standard
Time, at six a.m. Tad woke with the feeling that he had had a succession of not too pleasant dreams and
a restless night. It was a feeling he had been expecting, however. The first night in no-gravity or an
abnormal gravity—and that aboard the ship, imparted by the spinning of the docked vessels, was about
one-half normal gravity—tended to disturb sleep patterns. If he adapted according to average human
responses charted previously, Tad could expect to get back to sleeping normally in about a week.
     He sat up on the edge of his bed and glanced at the bargraphs for Phoenix One on the table beside
it.
     He was scheduled for S-H/K, Systems Housekeeping, immediately after breakfast; and both Bap
and Anoshi were involved likewise in continuing duties until after lunch—at which time they would begin
setting up the specific experiments in the various labs of the ship. He got to his feet with some little effort
and headed for the waste management room.
      He was the first one in to breakfast. Bap and Anoshi had yet to take their turns at getting weighed
no-gravity style. Tad inflated the dining pod about their dining area, then stepped through the pod hatch
to sit down at his place at the serving table and turned on the vacuum fan. There was a slight murmuring
as the fan started to draw air through the filter in the pod wall and from the pod into the particle collector.
There were as yet no floating food particles in the air of the pod for the collector to collect; but it was
doing its duty nonetheless.
      Tad punched for coffee, and a carefully measured amount poured into the container at his place. The
bargraph for the day, which he knew by heart, floated before his mind's eye, as he considered what was
to be done before the next sleep period. He found himself beginning to view the upcoming shipboard day
with increasing enthusiasm.
      The sticky sound of the entrance to the dining pod being unsealed brought his head around. Anoshi
was climbing in, followed by Bap, who turned to reseal the pod entrance behind him. They both sat
down at the table; and Tad came fully awake, looking at them.
      "How'd the sleep go?" he asked.
      "Not bad," said Anoshi. Bap laughed. He was the one wearing spacesuit underwear today.
      "I was chased by elephants," he said. "And the lead elephant was being ridden by our Mission
Director, Nick Henning."
      "Did he catch you?" Anoshi asked, punching for a stream of hot tea into his own container.
      "I am here to tell the tale," said Bap, waving his own container before he filled it. He looked around
the pod and then at Tad. "Cozy little breakfast nook. I wonder if they had some ulterior motive in penning
us up like this for meals, besides the collecting of floating particles of food from the air? The original
Spacelab got along without this."
      "And its crew inhaled a lot of stuff over a ninety-day period," Anoshi said. "Remember all the worry
over 'space pneumonia' in men—"
      "And women," said Bap.
      "—And women who should have been free from virus infections?"
      "Of course I remember," said Bap. "But I am also considering the effect of this enforced intimacy
three times every twenty-four hours on the human mind."
      He, like the other two, had been punching for and receiving heated, pre-packaged foodstuffs from
the table slots before him; and he was already eating. Now he waved a disposable plastic fork/knife in
the air.
      "What if I become violent some breakfast and cut your throats?" he said.
      "You'd have all the work to do by yourself from then on," said Tad. He changed to a more serious
tone. "You're going to begin solar observations for flares in your first period after this meal?"
      "Right away," said Bap. "I'll be using Numbers One and Two remote cameras as telescopes. Maybe
I'll get some good pictures, if there's anything to take."
      "Kennedy's due to warn us if a large flare crops up early in the flight, the way they've been
predicting," Tad said. "It'd be something if we could spot it as soon as they do—or even before."
      "We will," Bap said. "I promise we will."
      They finished their breakfast, reduced the pod, and Tad took the scraps of uneaten food, the
packaging and the other discardables to the waste management room to be carefully weighed and
disposed of. Just as the body wastes of the Marsnauts had to be measured and weighed, so their food
and liquid intake had to be measured and recorded with every meal. This was Medical Experiment 122,
on the schedule. Then Bap went to his camera telescopes, Anoshi got out the aerosol collector to take a
sample of the ship's air and discover what loose particles were afloat in it, in spite of the meal table pod,
and Tad went to Systems/Housekeeping.
      This early in the voyage, there were few housekeeping or equipment repairs to be made. Tad
covered all four decks of the life zone of the ship within a short time, then went directly to the master log
of Phoenix One.
      The master log was pretty much what its name implied. It was to Phoenix One what a ship's log was
to an ocean-going vessel, with the complication that Phoenix One's log (and that of Phoenix Two, for
that matter) included not only the commander's record of the voyage, day by day, but all recordings of
data made on that day, which he was able to review on a computer screen before him and correct or
amend with a keyboard and a light-pencil. The records of Day One of the mission, launch-day, were
now waiting Tad's attention.
     When he had disposed of the log, Tad went out to find Anoshi at work in the C Deck lab space that
would be his for his astronomical records. Face bent over the 45-degree-angled viewing plate, Anoshi
was studying one of the photos he had evidently just taken of the solar corona. He was too wrapped up
in his work to notice Tad; who went on across to the exercise section of C Deck to see Bap there, in full
spacesuit, working at the taskboard in Mode C of the experiment dealing with daily physical exercise by
each of them.
     Mode C was constant physical exercise for twenty minutes wearing a spacesuit. Mode B was similar
work without a suit; and Mode A was twenty energetic minutes on an exercycle or jogging treadmill.
Space-Lab experience had shown how necessary exercise was to the health of humans away from
normal gravity. Though hopefully not absolutely necessary, thought Tad grimly as he watched Bap,
remembering his plans if Fedya should decide to cooperate. Bap, engrossed in the heavy work and the
uncomfortable spacesuit, did not notice Tad watching any more than had Anoshi.
     Tad took the access tube and went up to B Deck. It would be time for lunch in less than half an
hour.
     The diplomats sat in their hotel watching TV coverage of that day's mission press conference.
     ". . . Our first piece of information today," said the NASA official on the TV screen, addressing the
press conference, "is that because of Nick Henning's illness, Bill Ward, here—" he nodded to Bill, sitting
upright beside him at the long table cluttered with microphones and closeup camera eyes, "will be taking
over as Mission Director. You've all met Bill before—"
     "Have we?" asked Mahadev Ambedkar.
     "You remember," said Jen Wylie. "Bill Ward was the man who came in after the Marsnauts' luncheon
to take us out to the shuttle launch pad."
     "Ah, yes," said Mahadev.
     He, Jen, Sergei Varisov, and Walther Guenther, the Pan-European Deputy Minister of Science, sat
close together in the lounge area of their quarters. They had just finished lunch. Later that afternoon, they
were scheduled to hold a conference of their own for the press.
     "... absolutely, on schedule." Bill Ward was already answering a question from the floor. "So far
everything has gone exactly as expected. The ships are now docked and the 'nauts are into their first rest
period, according to the schedule. —Yes?"
     He nodded, pointing at a different section of the press seats. A thin, dark-haired young man stood
up.
     "Can you tell us—" his accent was French, "if there are any times when the schedule does not
operate? Any holidays, or relaxation periods for the Marsnauts? And if so, when these holidays are on
the schedule?"
     He sat down again.
     "As far as we know, there aren't any holidays in space," grunted Bill. There was a small stir and
chuckling among the press crowd. "To answer your question, there's no period that isn't accounted for on
the schedule, from the time the mission was launched to the time of its return to Earth orbit, three years
from now. The schedule itself does call for open periods; both to relieve the 'nauts from routine, and to
ensure that any overscheduling gets caught up. There are no such open periods in this first thirty days,
however. As you know, this is when communications with the two ships are at their best; and we want to
take the maximum advantage of that. —Yes? Next!"
     The TV camera moved to focus on another questioner.
     "It is like climbing a mountain, I suppose," said Varisov thoughtfully. "But like climbing a very big
mountain, like that one in the Himalayas that is the highest in the world, which to climb with an expedition
must take months. There may be days of occasional rest along the route. But any celebration, any
vacation, must wait until the full job is done—"
     He broke off. Sir Geoffrey Mayence, his face politely expressionless, had just joined them, taking a
seat. His eyes moved over them, from Varisov to Guenther, to Mahadev, to Jen and finally back to
Varisov again.
     "Not interrupting anything, am I?" he said. He looked at Sergei Varisov.
     "Not at all," said the Russian Deputy Minister, reaching out to turn the voice volume down on the TV
set.
     "That's good," said Sir Geoffrey. He glanced again at Jen, then back to Varisov. "Wouldn't want to
be the unwanted guest. We don't see much of you—ah—Wylie."
     "Sorry," said Jen. "One of my special duties is to hassle with the press for the Administration. I have
to keep running out on errands to do with that."
     "Yes. Well, duty first," said Sir Geoffrey, with a shrug. "Wouldn't you say so, Softy?" he went on,
turning confidentially to Varisov.
     "Oh yes, duty," said Varisov.
     "And old Muddle, here," said Sir Geoffrey, turning to Mahadev. "You know what duty can be like, I
think? You were with Softy, here, and me at the first Pan-European Conference—was that before your
time, Tommy?"
     "No," said Guenther, with a small cough. "I was there. I was pretty junior, then, though. The rest of
you weren't likely to notice lower-echelon types like myself."
     "Don't tell me you were caught up in that business when the French presidential motorcade got
routed clear off the road to Liege and came in three hours late?"
     "Oh yes," said Guenther, laughing.
     "Where were you when that was going on, Twigs?" asked Varisov, looking interestedly at Sir
Geoffrey.
     "Twigs was in the bar of the Number One Hotel," said Mahadev.
     "Wasn't I?" said Sir Geoffrey, almost triumphantly. "I was there from one to nearly four, getting
wound like an eight-day clock. I must have had fifteen Manhattans—that bartender there had a special
touch with Manhattans. I—oh, leaving us, Wylie?"
     "I've got a phone call I have to make," Jen said. "I just remembered it."
     "Ah, well," said Sir Geoffrey, "see you a bit later on, then."
     He watched Jen move off down the corridor and step into his own suite of rooms. His face changed,
became businesslike.
     "What's the latest news you've heard?" Varisov was looking at him, keenly.
     "Well, now," said Sir Geoffrey briskly, looking back at him. "Nothing in particular. I've been having a
small talk with Ceilly Welles, the wife of our 'naut. You remember her, I'm sure. It seems she was being
interviewed by this girl friend of young Wylie's—the girl friend belongs to some magazine in the States
here—and it came up that Wylie had some sort of talk with this Bill Ward who just got pushed up to
Mission Director. Talked to him just before the shuttle lifted with the 'nauts."
     "Why?" asked Mahadev. "Why should the U.S. Undersecretary talk to the Director of our mutual
mission?"
     "Ward wasn't Mission Director then, of course," Sir Geoffrey said. "Only Launch Director."
     "What did they talk about?" Guenther asked.
     "Who can tell?" said Sir Geoffrey, blandly. "There's that topic, though, that both Wylie and Hansard,
the U.S. 'naut, were worked up about. Hansard wanted the experiment schedule cut."
     "I don't remember any offer by the NASA people to cut their no-gravity experiments in cryogenics,"
murmured Guenther.
     "The U.S. public would hardly stand for the deletion of that, do you think?" said Mahadev. "There is
great popular interest here in the dream of keeping sick or aging relatives in stasis until medical repairs
can be effected."
     "No, they'd hardly want to cut those experiments in which their own scientists are concerned, and to
which their people as a whole are attracted," said Sir Geoffrey. "I'd be afraid myself that any cut in the
mission experiments would be aimed at the research in which the scientists of our countries are
concerned."
     "We would certainly not want to give up any of our necessary research plans merely to favor the
Americans," said Varisov.
     "Or in any case?" Sir Geoffrey said, looking at him significantly. Varisov looked back.
     "In fact, no," Varisov said. "In any case, those experiments in which the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics is involved are directly concerned with our efforts to feed our people. Not nonsense like the
preserving of useless and worn-out citizens, but plant biochemistry that could result in a nitrogen-fixing
wheat, to flourish in our northern fields, and feed our people."
     "The solar cell research," put in Mahadev, "holds the one promise of bringing necessary power to my
country's population. Even if the other powers involved would be agreeable to sacrificing some of their
experiments on the mission schedule, we could not agree to the solar cell experiments being halted." He
spread his hands. "Literally, we could not. My government would be out of power in a week, possibly."
     "And I assure you," said Guenther, "Pan-Europe will not sit quietly under any attempt to curtail our
mission experiments into the chemical development of memory and intelligence."
     "Now, now," said Sir Geoffrey, a little irritably. He was curled up on the base of his spine in his chair,
rubbing his chin. "No point in our sitting around making speeches at each other. The point is, what might
we do about it?"
     "A word to the press," said Guenther.
     "No—no," said Sir Geoffrey and Varisov at once, so that it was almost like one man talking.
     "Never turn the press loose if you can help it," said Sir Geoffrey. "Couple of lines of poetry about
that: You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the British journalist. But seeing what the man
will do, unbribed, there's no occasion to . . . And that goes for journalists of all nations. There's no
stopping them, once they're after something."
     "Also," said Varisov, "there are repercussions with our home governments to consider."
     "For my part," said Sir Geoffrey with his eyes half-closed in thought, "I believe I'll just have a word
with some of their people I know in Washington. I've already done that; but maybe I didn't come down
quite heavily enough."
     "I may do some talking, myself," said Varisov.
     "Perhaps we should discuss the whole matter right now, in detail," said Ambedkar, gently.

    VIII

     The fact that the mission was on Eastern Daylight Time made for coincidences. After the second
meal
     period of Day Two aboard Phoenix One and Two at just about the time the Deputy Ministers back
on Merritt Island were sitting back to sip on coffee following lunch, thousands of miles deep in space, the
Marsnauts were finishing their own lunch. Anoshi was scheduled for Systems/Housekeeping. Bap and
Tad were due to go to work setting up experiments in the labs, including the atmosphere and
null-atmosphere lab sections of the no-gravity pod between the two ships.
     During the days just before the 'nauts had boarded Phoenix One and Phoenix Two, both ships had
been on a standby basis as far as internal systems went—with a single exception per ship. The exception
in each case was a sealed lab section on C .Deck, within which atmospheric pressure and normal
temperature had been maintained for the benefit of the so-called "live" subjects—ranging from field mice
down through brine shrimp, fruit flies and flatworms, to simple molds and spores. The seal on this lab had
been broken when the lab was opened during their first visual inspection of the ship after the 'nauts
boarded her and brought her up to working order. But the experimental subjects themselves had been
left until now in the care of the automatic machinery that had kept them nourished and alive since they had
been put aboard by the supply and fitting crews from Kennedy.
     Now, Tad and Bap left the majority of the subjects still in the formerly sealed lab. But certain of them
were immediately to be transferred—to the plant genetics lab, the biomedical lab and the two sections of
the pod. Tad and Bap worked together to set up the plant genetics and the biomedical lab sections; but
when it came to the pod, while Bap could reach the inside section through the cryotex tube connecting
with it and Phoenix Two, Tad had to suit up and EVA, going outside the ship to enter the airless, cold
part of the pod from the hatch opening to space that lay in the perpetual shadow between the two
locked-together and revolving ships.
     The work was both difficult and clumsy in a spacesuit; but the spores and cultures which Tad carried
to the outer pod were contained in trays that even heavy gloves could handle with some dexterity. One
by one, Tad fitted these trays into the shelves and racks built into the airless section of the pod, working
in the illumination from the pressurized section, showing through the milky, yielding cryotex wall between
the two parts. The blurred shadow he saw coming and going beyond that wall as he worked would be
Bap, at work there, Tad thought.
     —Unless it was Dirk or Fedya from Phoenix Two. Each ship was due to supply some materials and
live subjects to the pod experiments. Primarily, it was the U.S. experiments on cryogenics that would be
taking up space in the pod compartments. Although both the 'green-thumb' paranormal plant-response
tests of the English, and the biorhythms experiments of the Japanese, were represented here. In essence,
these were experiments which had been pioneered in the Spacelabs. But they would be taking place
under different conditions here; in that they were both farther from the sun, and subject to a skidding,
sidewards motion—too light to be consciously felt as gravity—that was caused by the two ships wheeling
about their joined common center where the pod sections were.
     Tad finished his work and left. So far, no one from Phoenix Two had showed up to bring that
spacecraft's trays of experimental materials to the outer pod—which was a little strange. If Tad
remembered the bargraphs for Phoenix Two correctly, someone from that ship ought to have been out
here at the same time he was.
     Tad returned to the inside of Phoenix One, and the air lock. He emerged into A Deck and began
desuiting. Anoshi was there, waiting for him, and helped him off with the suit.
     "Bap's over in Phoenix Two," said Anoshi, as soon as Tad's helmet was off. "Fedya had an accident
with some oxygen tanks top pling over in one of the labs. It seems he's hurt his left hand."
     Tad and Fedya sat opposite each other at a wardroom table. This time it was the wardroom of
Phoenix Two; and it was Tad who had brought the bargraphs that were spread out on its surface.
Fedya's left hand, wrapped in gauze bandaging, rested upon some of these. Bern and Dirk had been with
them up until a moment ago. Now, for the first time since Tad had come over from Phoenix One with
the bargraphs, he and Fedya were alone. Tad glanced at his hand.
     "How bad is it?" he asked, in a low voice.
     "As I told you when you first came over," said Fedya, emotionlessly, "bruised, that's all."
     Tad nodded.
     "All right," he said, turning to the bargraphs and pushing a sheaf of them across the table to Fedya,
who picked them up with his uninjured hand. "Here's how I think we'd better handle it. One man takes
care of the outside section of the pod and all EVA duties for both ships. I've juggled the other schedules
to spread the work load out as a result of this; and the parts of your own schedule that you won't be able
to do one-handed."
     Fedya studied the bargraphs for several minutes while Tad sat in silence. Then he looked across the
table at Tad.
     "The work load is all right over here," he said. "But over on Phoenix One, you're the one who's
picking up the extra work that I am being relieved of."
     "Not directly," said Tad.
     "No," said Fedya, "not directly. But it amounts to two hours of work of which I'm relieved, and
nearly an hour apiece off the schedules of Bern and Dirk. While over on Phoenix One, you personally
pick up four extra hours of duties—and I mean you personally."
     Tad looked grimly at him.
     "As Mission Commander," he said, "I've got more independent duties and more free time than
anyone else. I'll be absorbing those four hours into that free time."
    "You know," said Fedya, "that's neither true nor possible."
    "It's possible," said Tad.
    "How?"
    Tad sat back in his chair.
    "As you told me when I first came over," he said, coldly. "Your hand's bruised, that's all. I won't ask
you about it again."
    Fedya sat for a long second without saying anything.
    "All right," he said, then, "I won't ask how you plan to make this work. But what makes you think
Mission Control will accept it?"
    He waved his right hand at the bargraphs and the penciled changes Tad had made upon them.
    "They'll have to," Tad said. "They've got no choice now. Out here, if it really comes down to it, no
one can give us orders but ourselves. And if they got excited about it, that would be bad publicity for the
mission."
    Fedya nodded slowly.
    "But you'll need help," he said. "You can't do all that alone."
    "No help," said Tad, flatly. "And no discussion."
    He reached out and swept the bargraphs back into a pile in the middle of the table.
    "And I have no choice, either?" said Fedya.
    "That's right," said Tad. He got to his feet, pushing back his chair from the table. "Don't spend your
time thinking about me. You know we're all overscheduled, here. It may not seem so bad the first week
or two. But by the third week, that lack of repair and down time is going to be piling up. You'll all five be
putting in three of four hours more a day than you're scheduled for. We both know that. I'm just taking
on my extra hours now, in accordance with an amendment of the schedules."
    "And a week and a half or two weeks before the rest of us," said Fedya, softly.
    "I tell you, I can absorb most of that extra duty," said Tad. He still kept his voice pitched low. "I'll be
in better shape than any of you, three weeks from today."
    "You will not," said Fedya. "And that is something else we both know."
    But, before he could finish speaking, Tad had already turned and left the wardroom. Fedya heard
him entering the access tube on his way back through the cryotex lane to Phoenix One. Soberly, Fedya
rose, took the bargraphs from the table under his arm and headed toward his own sleeping
compartment.

    IX

     "I just don't like it," said Bill Ward.
     "Don't like what part of it?" Nick Henning asked. He was sitting up in the bed of his private hospital
room, looking as if his massive coronary attack of sixteen days ago had never occurred, let alone like a
man who was four days out of extensive heart surgery. Bill Ward had dropped in to visit him. The private
room was a pleasant one, looking east, and the flowers on the windowsill looked crisp and well
watered.
     "Any part of it," Bill said, sitting massively upright in the sunlight on the visitor's chair by the bed, his
face more irascible than usual under the skullcap of his close-cropped gray hair. "I didn't want your job in
the first place, damn it!"
     "I didn't stick you with it," Nick said. "The thought was you were the best bet to keep Tad in line,
that's all."
     "Keep him in line!" Bill made a small convulsive movement as if he wanted to get up and pace around
the room, but would not indulge himself. "The fact a man's a friend doesn't mean you're going to have
more luck keeping him in line—it means you're going to have less." He hesitated. "You don't know the
worst of it. That Undersecretary of Science for the Development of Space—Jen Wylie—came to me the
very morning of Day One, before launch. He wanted me to do something personally about the work
schedules for the 'nauts, aboard the ships."
     Nick frowned. They had been keeping him on a strict diet since the ambulance had brought him in;
and he had lost weight. The frown made his round face fall into wrinkles that had not shown in earlier
days.
     "And you've never told anyone about this?"
     "For God's sake!" exploded Bill. "Isn't it enough of a mess already? We know those boys are
over-scheduled during this first thirty days of the mission. Washington knows it. Every involved
government knows it; and we all sit here like the three monkeys, with our paws over our eyes, noses and
ears—see no evil, hear no' evil, tell nobody about the God-damned evil!"
     "This is something that falls outside our area," said Nick.
     "That's what everyone says. What it boils down to is nobody wants to be the one to tell the king the
bad news."
     "The king?" Nick stared at Bill.
     "You know what I mean—the billions of so-called common people out there who're treating this
thing as if it were a show put on for their benefit and a promise of an end forever to war and trouble and
not enough to eat," said Bill. "Can't the damn fools see that the same old political backbiting and
pully-hauling is going on just the way it always did—only now it's centered around this mission? Anyway,
I almost did what Wylie asked."
     Nick's eyelids came down to narrow his gaze and his eyes steadied on Bill.
     "Good thing you didn't."
     "Good for who? For Tad—for those others up there?" said Bill. "It's not good for them."
     "This is something that just happens to be bigger than just an ordinary space mission," said Nick. "It's
tough on them, being out in the front trench; but they're just going to have to take it—there's no way we
can help them."
     Bill flashed an angry look at him.
     "You know what I mean!" said Nick. He made an effort to hold the tone of his voice down to a
reasonable level. "The whole space program's at stake. It's been at stake ever since each country
involved started loading the mission up with their pet experiments.
     Right from the beginning it's been the choice of giving the mission more than it could handle or face
the accusation that NASA was trying to hog the show. That's still the situation unless the 'nauts
themselves, or someone else, speak up first."
     He stopped speaking. Bill Ward sat scowling and silent.
     "Don't tell me you're thinking of sticking the U.S.'s neck out on this?" Nick said, slowly.
     "Not yet," said Bill, still scowling. "But there was that accident on Day Two to Fedya's hand. All
right, it turned out not to be anything important. But that's space out there; and things can happen when
the men exposed to it get too tired or physically eroded. Remember the two Russian cosmonauts on the
Soyuz Mission that reached the ground dead? Dead because of a mechanical error that wouldn't have
been made, if they hadn't been suffering the effects of being too long in no-gravity without proper drugs
or exercise?"
     "But you aren't thinking of doing anything about this situation on your own hook, are you?" persisted
Nick.
     "Not yet," muttered Bill. "Not yet."
     Day Twenty-two: Tad woke with a convulsive jerk; and lay in the dark, unable for the moment to
remember where he was or what the time was now. His body ached for more sleep, yearned for it like
some dessicated desert plant yearning for rain. For the moment he was aware of only two things: that
instinct-deep, desperate need for sleep; and the fact that he was disoriented, lost in darkness with nothing
to cling to but the grim urgency that had driven him out of the cave of slumber back to wakefulness.
     Then it came back to him.
     Day Twenty-two: he looked at the illuminated face of the clock on his bedside table and the hands
stood at 3500 hours. Eleven p.m. Bap and Anoshi would be asleep by this time, sleeping the heavy,
drugged sleep of the exhausted. For him, after a two-hour nap, there were his personal medical tests and
the log book to deal with.
     He lay still for a few moments in the darkness, gathering his will to rise. At first thought, the effort
involved in getting up seemed impossible. He felt like someone chained hand and foot to the bed by
fatigue while before him, sensed but invisible, loomed the ever-growing stack of work to be done. Every
day he attacked that stack, that mountain, with superhuman efforts; but every day, at the end of the day,
it was higher. A little more time had been lost from the overall schedule. One more impossibility had been
added to those already required of him. And the next day another would be added.
     He shoved the self-defeating image from him. Follow your nose, he told himself. Keep the eyes in
close focus on the immediate grindstone. Look at the total of things and you'll never make it. Besides, for
him, the current day was not yet over. He had only allowed himself a two-hour nap while Anoshi and
Bap dropped safely off to sleep. There were two more hours of work yet for him, before he could come
back to this bed where he was now. Up—he forced himself to throw back the single cover and sit up,
swinging his legs, over the edge of the bed. For a second he slumped there; then with another convulsive
effort he was on his feet, headed toward the waste management room and the shower.
     The shower was beautiful. He stood, leaning and braced against the metal walls of the narrow,
upright cubicle, letting its endlessly recycled and filtered four gallons of water beat endlessly down upon
his naked body, driving some heat and life into his bones. Bless the water that never quit. To heat it, he
was burning ship's power for a period of time beyond the normal interval, but to hell with that. They had
power to spare and he was a piece of machinery that needed an infusion of energy to get it operating.
Warmed, at last, to something like working temperature, he staggered out of the cubicle and headed
back to his sleeping compartment to dress.
     Dressed, he went into the wardroom and dropped down at the dining table, punching for a cup of
coffee. Drinking it, he stared with unfocused eyes at the wardroom bulkhead opposite, where the
dartboard hung, sprouting the feathered darts from someone's last game. Now that he was this far back
into a waking mode, he did not really know how alert he was. Sometime in the past weeks he had lost his
sense of feeling whether he was tired or not. Undoubtedly, he was tired. But all he felt, sitting at the
wardroom table, was a sort of leaden brightness. The effective modes for him were no longer awake or
asleep; but operative or inoperative.
     It was, he thought as he sat drinking the coffee which was pleasant for its heat but no longer much
use as a stimulant to him, a question how far Anoshi and Bap had also descended down this road to
exhaustion on which he himself was now far advanced. If he could not judge his own condition any more,
it was certain that he could not trust himself to judge them. Of course, he had started to bear the work a
good week and a half before the gradual accumulation of lost time on a too-crowded schedule had begun
to drive them to extra hours of effort. From that, he should be able to count on their still having reserves
of energy that he had already squandered. Of course, he would be going to work on the log in a minute,
and in the results of their daily physical checks, there should be some clue. But it was hard to be certain
...
     He would get to work any minute now. But first, one more cup of coffee ...
     . . . Ah-hah! Caught you at it, thought Tad, staring at his coffee container. His hand had just
automatically reached out and refilled the container from the metered spout under his name on the
wardroom wall against which the table faced. Thought you'd con me into sitting here while I drank a
third cup, did you, he said to his hand. Well, it won't work.
     Carefully, not spilling a drop, he poured the contents of the cup down between the bars of the drain
under the spout, to be metered there also and deducted from the intake total the spout had been adding
up for him in the log. He got up and went out of the wardroom.
     He took the access tube to A Deck and went to the log console. Dropping heavily into the seat
before it, he punched up the Day Twenty-two figures and began his study of them.
     The recorded work schedule was by this time strongly at odds with the bargraphs of the projected
work schedules aboard Phoenix One; and undoubtedly the same thing was true aboard Phoenix Two
where Fedya kept the log. Meal periods had shrunk to as little as fifteen minutes on occasion, and there
were no open spaces between duties or experiments where one 'naut had a few minutes to wait until
another could join him for a two-man activity. The Systems/Housekeeping periods were down to no
more than five minutes. Finally, to top the matter off, the record showed the whole day running up to half
an hour late into the normal beginning of the sleep period between 2100 and 2200 hours.
     That much obvious increase of the work load and added use of time could stand in the official
record. It was not an impossible situation, on paper—or rather, on the screen of the log here and back at
Cape Kennedy. But on the other hand, it was not a true record of the situation, either.
     What did not show on the record was the real trouble. For example, all three of them aboard
Phoenix One had fallen into the habit of what they called "doing the chores"—rising an hour and a half to
two hours early to do any number of things that did not involve use of the recording equipment aboard
and which consequently did not show up on the log.
     Tad punched the log screen to focus in on the running physical statistics on the three of them aboard.
The overwork was showing up as a weight loss for both Anoshi and Bap in the mass experiment
     M149. Bap had lost eight pounds and Anoshi five as of Day Twenty-two's weighings. Neither of
those were unreasonable figures. Tad decided to leave them as they presently appeared on the record.
Experiment M119 showed some calcium and nitrogen loss by both men; but again it was not so great a
loss that it appeared threatening. M107—Negative Pressure—that experiment which required a 'naut to
sit in a device covering him to the waist and fastened there with an airtight seal while air was exhausted
below the ambient 5 psig showed some cardiovascular changes that were not good.
     Tad drummed his fingers on the lower edge of the console, debating with himself. It was one thing to
stick his own neck out; but something entirely different to risk major damage to the other two. How many
days were left? Eight, to finish the first thirty-day period; after which the schedule was to be cut almost in
half. Risk it with Bap and Anoshi, he decided, for a few days longer. He left the M107 figures as
entered.
     He went on through the other checkpoints on the two men—heart rate, blood pressure,
vectorcardiograms. The true figures on these would pass. The time and motion studies, on the other
hand, showed Bap and Anoshi declining again—they had dropped sharply in performance in the last
three days. In this case, Tad made slight corrections of the record, improving their marks slightly. So
slightly, in fact, that nothing was risked, either way; but enough of a change so that if, for any reason, he
wished to improve the record of their performance tomorrow, it would not seem like a sudden change.
     He left the log records dealing with Bap and Anoshi, and went to those dealing with himself.
     For a moment he sat, merely staring at these. It had been a number of days since he had first begun
to believe the evidence of his own physical deterioration as reflected in the records. Each day he
corrected them to keep them in the same range as the records of his two crewmates; and each day the
correction had become more unbelievable. It was true he was averaging no more than four hours sleep
out of the twenty-four and working at least two hours more than the others; but it was hard to credit that
difference with causing him to fall apart as the record showed.
     Of course, he knew what the real reason was. He had known and figured on it before he ever spoke
to Fedya about incapacitating himself. Tad's plan had been to use Fedya's injury as an excuse to juggle
the work schedules of all six of them so that he himself would pick up a potential extra four hours of
activities and each of the rest would have his load lightened by a potential forty-eight minutes apiece. One
of the four extra hours Tad would eventually need to put in was to be an hour of activity after Bap and
Anoshi were asleep—and he had deliberately thrown his schedule out of phase with theirs to explain why
they might wake to find him up and around when they were resting.
     But the other three hours he had intended to save by simple cheating—by not doing certain
scheduled activities in which he alone was concerned and faking the log records to show them as done. It
had been a difficult problem to find three hours of activity that he felt could be omitted without
endangering the mission and his crewmates. But he had done it—thanks mainly to the eighty minutes he
had saved by completely skipping his daily exercise period.
     He could not have done this aboard the Skylab. There, all such exercise required two men—the
participator and the observer. But one of the points NASA had yielded on as the experiments piled up
for the mission, was the requirement that all exercise be observed. Tad had only needed to place his
exercise period at the end of his day's schedule, after Bap and Anoshi were asleep, and then ignore it
completely, except for recording fake evidence of it in the log.
    It had been a calculated risk. Early in the period of manned spaceflight, it had been discovered that
bodies designed for gravity deteriorated rapidly in a no-gravity situation. A few days without gravity were
enough to do noticeable damage. The Skylabs with their complete lack of gravity and long terms of duty
by the men aboard them, had come up with an answer to this—heavy and prolonged daily exercise.
    The two ships of the Mars mission, docked together and spinning, were not without gravity, even if it
was a gravity less than half that of normal. There had been evidence to show that a full gravity might not
be what was necessary to keep the human body in normal good condition. Even a light gravity might be
able to do it. Tad had gambled on this being so . . . but there was no denying the evidence he had been
forced to correct daily for the last two weeks in the logbook. Even in a light gravity, exercise was
necessary. He had deliberately avoided exercise and the effects on his body were piling up.
    But there was no going back now, or no changing his plans, even if he had wanted to. With a weary
breath, he picked up a light pencil and began to correct his test figures to more healthy-looking ones
    "Yes," said the voice of Bap behind him. "You see, I was right."
    Tad dropped the light pencil and spun about in the chair. He was braced to see Bap and Anoshi; but
what he did see was worse. The man with Bap, the one to whom Bap had spoken, was Fedya.

    X

    "How long has this been going on?" asked Fedya.
    "What're you doing here?" demanded Tad.
    Fedya ignored him. He took one long step forward to level with Tad's chair and looked down at the
log imaged on the screen.
    "Hold on there—" Tad tried to spin around to face the console; but Fedya pushed him back again
and Bap caught him, holding on. "What the hell—"
    His voice was thick; and his legs, when he tried to get to his feet against Bap's holding arms, were
without strength. Fedya stood looking past him at the log records for a long moment; then he stepped
back and Bap let go of Tad.
    "I'm senior—" Tad began. Fedya broke in on him.
    "You're a sick man," he said. "A seriously worn out and sick man. Bap, take a look at the figures on
him in the log."
    Bap stepped past Fedya in his turn. This time, Tad made no attempt to stop the log from being seen.
He sat in his chair, glaring at Fedya.
    Bap said something softly but emphatically, in a language Tad did not understand. He stepped back
from the console and turned to Tad, reaching out to close the fingers of his left hand upon the pulse in
Tad's left wrist and gently lifting one of Tad's eyelids with the fingers of his right hand. Then he let go of
the eyelid; and a moment later took his hand from the pulse.
    "Tad," he said, looking down at Tad and shaking his head. "Tad!" Tad glared up at them like a
cornered wild dog.
    "Cut it out!" he said, harshly. "You're not going to do anything. You tell Mission Control about me,
and you'll blow everything wide open."
    Bap looked at Fedya.
    "That's true enough," Bap said. "But he can't go on like this." "No," said Fedya. His dark eyes were
boring into Tad. "So this was the way you thought you could get around the overload of activities? How
could you try something so impossible?"
    "Go to hell!" said Tad, savagely. "If the gravity had been enough, I'd have been all right. It's just the
lack of exercise that's got to me."
    Fedya glanced questioningly at Bap, who shrugged with his eyebrows.
    "Probably," said Bap. He looked back at Tad. "Anyway, as the closest thing to a physician on this
mission, I'm personally ordering you to bed until further notice."
    "There're things to be done," said Tad. "Nobody but me can do them."
     "They can wait ten hours," said Bap. "Even falsifying that record can wait ten hours."
     "What'll you tell Mission, when they ask to have it relayed to them tomorrow morning?"
     "That they'll have to wait," said Fedya. "And meanwhile—" he turned and walked over to seat himself
at the command console, "we'll put them on notice that our activities schedule has to be cut,
immediately."
     He flipped the communication switch and pushed the lasercom control buttons.
     "This is Phoenix One," he said into the mike grid of the console before him. "Phoenix One. This is
Fedya, calling Mission Control from Phoenix One. Come in, Kennedy."
     The screen before him blurred with color and after a short time lag resolved itself into the features of
a thin-faced communications engineer with the ranked consoles of Mission Control behind him.
     "This is Mission Control," he said. "This is Mission Control receiving you loud and clear, Phoenix
One. What's up, Fedya?"
     "I want to talk to the Mission Director," Fedya said. "I must talk to Bill Ward, immediately . . ."
     "… left him there, locked in the closet." Sir Geoffrey wound up his story and the group about him
laughed. One laugh in particular, that of the Princess Malahede, rang clearly across neighboring
conversations. It was the kind of laugh that would. Sir Geoffrey winked at her in appreciation. Not a bad
figure on the old horse, he thought—and instantly realized that once again he was sailing dangerously near
his limit on drinks. It was damned annoying for someone who used to be able to drink all night and the
next day without showing it. He would just have to quit for the evening, even though there were at least a
couple of more hours to go. Not a bad figure—Lord save the hungry blind!
     "But what happened to the man?" asked the dumpy little woman—wife of Bill Ward, the Mission
Director.
     "Happened? Haven't any idea," said Sir Geoffrey. "May still be there in the closet, for all I know."
     More laughter. A man came up and pulled Bill Ward aside, speaking to him in a low voice.
Something to do with the mission? Probably not, thought Sir Geoffrey. He began a new story, as Bill
Ward beckoned his wife to join him and the man who had just come up; and the three of them
disappeared into the crowd.
     Bill waited until they were well away from anyone who might overhear, before turning to his wife.
     "Nothing desperate," he said. "But the 'nauts want to talk to me about something. I'll have to run back
to Mission Control. Can you get a taxi home?"
     "Oh, someone will give me a ride," she said. "Don't worry about me." She looked up at his tall,
thick-waisted figure concernedly. "Don't forget you need your sleep."
     "Of course, of course!" Bill said. "Don't wait up for me, though."
     He turned and walked swiftly off toward the hotel entrance next to the parking lot before she could
give him any more good advice. She had fussed over him ever since Nick Henning's heart attack. He
found his car in the parking lot and headed back to the Cape.
     It took him nearly forty minutes to get there, in spite of the relatively empty, after-midnight highways.
But ten minutes after he had arrived, he had talked to Fedya.
     "Where's Tad?" asked Bill. "Can I talk to him?"
     There was a small delay, even at the light speeds of the laser communication beam, before the lips of
Fedya's face in the screen moved, and Fedya's voice was heard, answering.
     "He's asleep," said Fedya, "and he has a tranquilizer in him. He can't talk to you now."
     "There's something you're not telling me," said Bill.
     "No," said Fedya. "What more do you need to know? The activity load is too heavy. All of us are
worn down by it. Tad was so worn down he was ready to collapse."
     Bill thumbed a pile of log duplicate sheets that had been brought to him while he had been talking.
     "According to these, Tad—" he was beginning; when a thought woke in the back of his brain.
Quietly, he pushed the sheets aside. "You're asking Mission Control to cut the experiment list?"
     "Yes. They can cut it," said Fedya. He paused. "Or they can face the fact that certain work will be
left undone for lack of time in which to do it."
     "How—" Bill's voice surprised him by its hoarseness. He cleared his throat and tried again. "How
soon do you want an answer?"
    "Twenty-four hours," said Fedya.
    "Oh, now look here!" said Bill. "Cutting that list involves checking with various governments—your
own for one. You can't mean twenty-four hours!"
    "They can take as much time as they like," said Fedya. "But starting immediately, on both ships, we
will only do what there is time for us to do in a normal day's work-period."
    "That's not—" began Bill, and broke off as a paper was pushed into his hand by someone standing
nearby. He read it and laughed. He looked back into the screen at Fedya.
    "Saved by the bell," he said. "Guess what? We've just got word of a solar flare that's due to hit you in
five hours and thirty-eight minutes. Did you get that?"
    "I heard you," said Fedya. "We copy. A solar flare is due to reach us in five hours and thirty-eight
minutes. I assume you mean a flare large enough for us to run the Lasercom tests."
    "Of course," said Bill. "And running those tests lets you drop everything else, so as to concentrate on
them. You'd better get started separating Phoenix One and Phoenix Two, and put as much distance
between the two ships as you can. Meanwhile, I'll pass along your request for a cut in the activities
schedule."
    "Good," said Fedya. "Phoenix Two will speak to you again just before separation to lock
communications contact with Phoenix One for the duration of the LCO tests. Over and out."
    "Over and out," said Bill. The screen went blank. Bill sat back in his chair, gazing at the unlit surface
for a long moment before he seemed to shake himself out of his brown study and look about for the
person who had handed him the note about the flare.
    "Who gave me that?" he asked. "And how bad's it going to be?"
    "I did," said the communications engineer on duty, Al Ciro, leaning in toward him. "And it's going to
be rough."
    Tad leaped suddenly to full wakefulness out of deep sleep as if someone had shot a cannon off at his
bedside. He lay listening, but there was no sound. He felt lightheaded but alert. Only his body was still
numb with exhaustion. He forced it up into a sitting position on the edge of the bed . . . and floated off the
bed surface entirely into the air.
    There was no gravity.
    Phoenix One and Phoenix Two were no longer docked together and rotating.
    In that moment he heard it again—the noise that had roused him from sleep. It was the heavy clang of
metal against metal, somewhere forward in the ship—it sounded as if it might be on A Deck almost
directly over his head.
    Tad jerked himself out of the bed; and pulled himself through the gravityless environment to the hatch
of the access tube, then along the access tube up to A Deck, and out onto A Deck. He saw Bap and
Anoshi manhandling thick metal-sandwich panels into position around the control consoles. As he
emerged from the access tube they finished locking the one they held into place against the line of panels
already up to the left of the consoles; and Bap saw him.
    "Awake, Tad?" Bap said. "I was just coming down to get you. We've got a solar flare coming—in
fact, it's already here."
    "A flare?" The information jolted out of Tad all the anger that had been building up in him at not being
wakened before this. For a second his mind was full only of the situation that a large solar flare implied.
Then his anger returned with a rush. "Why'd you let me sleep this long?"
    "We were doing all right without you," said Anoshi. "The radiation index is already starting to rise;
and we're all buttoned down outside, except for the Lasercom—and that's matched with the LCO mirror
on Phoenix Two."
    "Where is Phoenix Two?" Tad asked.
    "Fedya's moved her a good hundred and forty kilometers off. We've both said our last words for the
moment to Mission Control. Now, as soon as we get the storm cellar set up, we'll be all ready to ride it
out. You'd better get dressed."
    "Dressed?" Tad recognized suddenly that he was wearing nothing but standard onboard duty clothes.
Anoshi and Bap were dressed in the undersuiting that went with their spacesuits, including even
biomedical sensors and the semi-bulky EMU urine collection systems about their crotches and waists. He
looked at the new panel the two were now picking up—the last one to be put in place to surround the
control system. The panels made up a specially protected area which the 'nauts themselves referred to as
"the storm cellar."
     "How soon should we be inside?" Tad asked.
     "The next fifteen minutes, to be amply safe," panted Bap. In no-gravity, the panels lacked normal
weight; but their mass and inertia made them problems to handle. "I'll be back up in ten," said Tad.
     He turned and went hurriedly down the access tube to B Deck. He got into his undersuiting,
swallowed a hot cup of coffee in the wardroom, made a hasty visit to the waste disposal room and was
back up the access tube and into the storm cellar within the time limit he had given. He entered through
the gap where the last panel of the cellar stood ajar; and he pulled it closed into its fitting with the
adjoining panel behind him.
     Bap and Anoshi were already on their acceleration couches. The spacesuits for all three men were
racked beside their consoles. Tad pulled himself over to his own couch and belted himself down on it so
that he would not float loose. He was once again clear-headed; but the heavy sleep he had just had had
reawakened his appreciation of what bodily tiredness meant. He was like a live mind in a
nearly-unconscious carcass.
     "How long was I out?" he demanded.
     "Nearly six hours," said Anoshi. "We got word of the flare when Fedya told Mission Control about
cutting the activities schedule; about an hour after Bap put you to bed."
     "And Fedya took Phoenix Two off? We're still holding course?" Tad asked.
     "Right. Right on both counts," said Anoshi.
     "How intense a flare?"
     "The forecast Kennedy gave us was upwards of twelve thousand BeV at Earthpoint," said Anoshi.
"That should push it right up near the end of our scale."
     He pointed at Phoenix One's outside counter. Twelve thousand billion electron volts was more than
three-quarters of the way up its line of measurement. Right now the needle hung just above the bottom
pin.
     "Are we all buttoned up?" Tad said. "Did you get the live subjects from the labs into the safety
room?"
     "All of them, including the plants from the atmosphere section of the pod. All the films out of the
outside cameras—everything. Relax, Tad," said Bap, cheerfully. "Everything's done. We didn't miss your
presence at all."
     "You hope!" snapped Tad. He was still fighting his exhaustion-deadened body; and Bap's usual
humor irritated instead of amusing him. He turned to the communications section of his console and
punched buttons to call Phoenix Two on the LCO.
     Color swirled and became the face of Fedya. It was clear and sharp; but then it should be. To the
laser beam carrying it between the outside copper mirror on Phoenix Two to the duplicate mirror on
Phoenix One, a hundred and forty kilometers was no distance at all compared to the work it would
finally be called on to do, maintaining communications between Cape Kennedy and the mission, once it
was arrived at Mars. Theoretically, even the billions of electron volts—the storm of proton and electron
particles thrown off by the solar flare following its first burst of electromagnetic radiation—should not
disturb it, at this short distance. But that was one of the matters that the mission was about to test. Both
ships had aligned their outside laser mirrors on each other, putting them out of contact with
Earth—except for radio communication; and radio communication, even with the more powerful
equipment aboard Phoenix One, which was to do the long-range tests once the mission reached Mars
orbit.
     "Fedya?" said Tad, the second Fedya's face was identifiable. "You did talk to Kennedy about cutting
the schedule?"
     "I spoke to Bill Ward," Fedya answered. "I told him that in any case, we could none of us do more
than there was time to do in the normal waking hours, from now on."
      "Good," said Tad. His mind jumped to another problem. "About the log—"
      "I said nothing."
      "Good. You had a last word with Mission Control before realigning your LCO mirror?"
      "Yes," said Fedya. "I called them to say we'd reached our distance of one-forty klicks from you; and
that we would open communication again as soon as the particle storm was safely past its peak. Estimate
is, that should be at least fifteen hours from the time of my last transmission to them."
      "All right," said Tad. "How's everybody over there?"
      "Just lovely," said the voice of Dirk, before Fedya could answer. "Snug as bugs in our storm cellar
here."
      Fedya smiled a little.
      "You too?" he asked Tad.
      "Affirmative," said Tad. "We'll leave the communications channel open for metering purposes. Feel
free to talk to us at any time."
      "We will," said Fedya. "Over and not out."
      "Over and not out to you," said Tad.
      Fedya's face moved away from view of the screen on Phoenix Two, which now showed a portion
of storm cellar paneling and the paneling overhead of A Deck. Tad leaned back on his couch against the
pull of the strap.
      "Maybe I'll take a nap," he said, "as long as there's nothing more we can do right now. Yes, I think
I'll . . . take . . ."
      And he began to dream almost immediately, that Phoenix One had reached Mars. She was buried
deep in sand; and the sand, despite all they could do, was finding small cracks and fissures in her hull,
through which it came, silently and inexorably trickling into the ship ...
      There was no sound to the solar storm, raging through the vacuum about the ship, and even through
the ship itself. There was no sound, vibration, color or apparent motion. There was only the needle
climbing on the BeV meter. It climbed slowly to twelve thousand million electron volts . . . and continued
upward while the three in the storm cellar of Phoenix One watched, and waited, and waited some more;
occasionally talking back and forth with Phoenix Two.
      "Look—" said Anoshi, finally.
      He was pointing at the BeV meter. The other two looked. It took a second to make sure that they
were not seeing simply what they hoped to see.
      "It's backed off, all right," Tad said. "Just barely. But it's backed off. Phoenix Two—"
      He turned to the communications mike and the screen of the LCO. But the view of the panels and
ceiling enclosing the command area of their sister ship was no longer showing on the screen. Instead, the
screen showed a slowly drifting and changing pattern of random colors.
      "Now what?" muttered Tad. His fingers went to the controls of the LCO, while he repeated himself
into the mike grid. "Phoenix Two. Phoenix Two. Come in, please. Phoenix One calling Phoenix
Two. Do you read me, Phoenix Two? Do you read me? Phoenix Two, this is Phoenix One. Come in,
Phoenix Two . . ."
      The colors continued to drift, unresolved. Tad reached out and turned the gain up on the console
speaker; but all that resulted was a louder rush of background static.
      "Either their LCO's out, or ours is," said Anoshi.
      "Shouldn't go like that," said Tad, under his breath.
      "What?" Anoshi asked.
      "I said—" Tad raised his voice, harshly, "it shouldn't go like that—in just a short time, and so
completely out."
      He turned and flipped back the cover of the recording strip on the LCO, pulling out a long tongue of
paper with five parallel lines running lengthwise on it—running steadily until, some eight inches from where
Tad's hand grasped it, the straight lines broke into a wild up-and-down marking that continued back into
the recorder.
     "Went out suddenly, a little over three minutes ago," Tad said. He looked at the others. "Were either
of you watching the screen then?"
     Bap and Anoshi both shook their heads, watching him.
     "Well, it must be our unit," Tad said. "Either that, or Phoenix Two is deliberately transmitting
nonsense. Now why would our LCO hold up beautifully all through the storm and then go on the blink
the minute the storm started to back off'?"
     He looked at the BeV meter. The needle was now perceptibly down from the high peg against which
it had been resting. Bap glanced up at the ship's chronometer, high on the console.
     "The storm was stronger than they forecast," Bap said, "but it's slackening off before they forecast it.
We should have an hour or more of heavy particle bombardment to wait out yet."
     "As long as the storm fades, I'm not going to ask why," said Tad; and was startled for a second by
the near-anger in his voice. Get hold of yourself he said, internally. You're becoming as touchy as
nitroglycerine. —Becoming? Or have you been like this these last couple of weeks and been too
tired to realize how you were acting with Bap and Anoshi?
     However, there was no spare time for emotional self-examination now. The point to concentrate on
was that the LCO was malfunctioning. He looked once more at the BeV meter. There was a red line
near the bottom of its scale; and a blue line below that. Once the indicator needle fell below the blue at
the bottom of the scale, it would be safe for a man in a spacesuit to engage in EVA—extravehicular
activity—outside the ship.
     "As soon as we get below the red," he told the other two, "we can check everything right up to the
point where the system goes out through the hull to the positioning controls of the mirror. Meanwhile, we
can at least check the console part of the system. And I suppose we might try the radio—just for luck."
     He reached out as he finished speaking; and keyed in the radio system to the mike and the speaker.
But at the first touch of the volume control, the torrent of static that poured in on their ears ruled out any
possibility of communication by radio with Phoenix Two.
     "Long shot," he said; and made himself grin at Anoshi and Bap. "All right, give me a hand at getting
the front panel of this console off and we'll start checking the LCO."
     They went to work. But that part of the system which was checkable within the area of the storm
cellar was relatively easy to check; and it was not long before they had proved that there was no
malfunction in the system as far as they could reach it. They replaced the front panel of the console and
Tad looked at the BeV meter. Its needle was already below the red line.
     "Dropping beautifully," said Tad, getting to his feet. "All right, let's break out of this storm cellar and
check the system as far as we can the rest of the way inside."
     Bap and Anoshi also rose. But Anoshi was frowning at the BeV meter.
     "I agree with you," said Bap, although Anoshi had not said anything. "It's not what they told us to
expect—the storm dropping off this soon and this fast."
     Tad felt the sudden gorge of his earlier irritation and rage boil up automatically, like a sour vomit taste
in his throat.
     "Have you got some suggestion for checking on the situation?" he asked Bap. "We can't raise
Phoenix Two, let alone Mission Control."
     Bap merely frowned slightly, his dark brows joining in a single black line above his fatigue-darkened
eyes, apparently more puzzled than provoked by Tad's words and the edge in Tad's voice.
     "We could sit tight for a few more hours," he said. "Phoenix Two was the one who moved off from
us. All we have to do is wait and she'll be rejoining us, if the storm's down and all communications are
out."
     "And if she's in trouble on her own?" Tad demanded. "What if she's in worse trouble than we are;
and needs us to contact her and get word back to Mission Control?"
     He did not wait for Bap to answer, but walked directly to the last panel that had been put in place to
seal the storm cellar. He broke the seal loose and pushed the panel back, stepping into the open part of
A Deck.
     "All right," he said, heading for the access panel that would allow them to begin tracing the LCO
system beyond the area that had been enclosed by the storm cellar. "Somewhere along here we'll find the
malfunction."

    XI

     However, when they got the last access plate off, the LCO wiring checked O.K. right up to the inner
skin of the bird.
     "That's it," said Tad, disconnecting the leads from the test unit and putting the access plate back,
fist-thumping it into its own tension-held position. "It's had to be in the positioning motor unit for the
mirror outside, then, just the way I said. The storm was heavy enough to knock out any outside
electronic components."
     "The positioning drive is shielded," said Bap. "That whole housing below the mirror is shielded."
     "Not enough," said Tad. "Not enough by a damn sight. Or maybe you think we overlooked
something inside; and the trouble's not out there after all?"
     He stared at Bap. Bap's dark face was honed now by tiredness to the sharpness of an axe blade
chipped out of gray flint. There was no more humor left in him. Anoshi was equally pared down, and
silently watching them both.
     "I mentioned the shielding, only," Bap said. "Of course, it must be outside."
     "Right then," said Tad, his voice back to an impersonal note. He turned and led the way toward the
central ladder tube; and they went up the metal rungs to the Control Deck again. Tad checked the needle
on the radiation graph. It was down now, on a good thirty-degree slope of fall; still above the blue line by
an inch or so, but plunging.
     "All right," said Tad. He checked the radio; but only the mindless blare of static roared from the
control console speaker. "I'll EVA and have a look at the trouble outside where it lives."
     "We're not in the blue, yet," said Bap. "And there's Mission Control to consider—we should check
with them before an EVA."
     Tad looked at him again.
     "No," put in Anoshi. "Until the storm dies down there's no reaching Mission Control on the radio.
And maybe Phoenix Two's had the same trouble. Without a radio she can't reach us—or Mission. At
least we have a chance of reaching Mission by radio in a day or two—even if the LCO's are out for
good, for both of us. We could lose Phoenix Two, meanwhile."
     "All right," said Bap, still standing, looking back at Tad. "But you're the commander. I'll go—or
Anoshi."
     "I'm the commander. I'm going," said Tad.
     He headed toward the ladder tube.
     "We're not in the blue yet," Bap said.
     "I heard you the first time you said that," Tad answered without stopping, without turning. "By the
time I'm suited up and ready, it'll be down. That's a classic curve for flare activity, there on the graph. Tell
you what, though—" he had to turn to face the other two as he began to back down the ladder, "the
sensor eyes are working all right. Keep the picture on by Hatch Three. I'll wait to go out until you tell me
we're under the blue line. O.K.?"
     "O.K. Real fine," said Bap. "I'll keep the picture lit by Hatch Three and advise you when we're under
the blue line."
     "Right," said Tad. "And keep a radio and LCO watch in case Phoenix Two or Mission comes back
in again."
     "Will do," said Anoshi.
     Tad went on down the ladder, out of sight of the two still on the Control Deck.
     Over in Phoenix Two, a check of the Laser Communications System was also in progress; but with
different results.
     "There could be trouble outside," Bern said.
     Fedya merely shook his head. They were in the Control Area of Phoenix Two and while the other
two stood behind him, Fedya was seated at the test board of the LCO.
      "Not likely," said Dirk. "We'd have trouble lights somewhere. It's got to be the LCO over on
Phoenix One."
      Fedya's long, thin fingers drummed thoughtfully on the edge of the test board. Of the three on
Phoenix Two, he showed his fatigue the least. Above his white coverall collar his grave, handsome face
looked not so much tired as remote and considering, as if this was only another theoretical problem to be
worked out on the finite squares of the chessboard.
      "No radio," he said, turning the speaker sound up momentarily with its roar of static. "No LCO with
One." He turned the speaker sound down again. "Very well. Let us see if we can make contact with
Mission Control. Contact will prove our LCO is operational; and we can get word about One to
Control."
      He looked up at Dirk.
      "Dirk," he said. "You stay on the radio and try to raise Phoenix One that way, while I work the
LCO into contact with Kennedy."
      Tad was sweating by the time he was sealed into his spacesuit by the Hatch Three air lock on the
bottom deck; and the suit temperature controls went automatically to work to dry him off; so that he felt
hot and chilled at the same time—a feverish sort of feeling.
      He remembered suddenly that he should have had Anoshi follow him down to check him out in the
suit before he went EVA. He had not thought of it; and evidently it had not occurred to Anoshi, either. It
was not really necessary; but the fact they had both forgotten was another symptom of the
bone-tiredness that was afflicting them all when it should not—that, and the sweat he had worked up
getting suited, were both warning signals from their body systems. That was one of the bad effects of
fatigue—it not only impaired judgment and put your temper on hair-trigger, it walled you off from the
people around you. You could not spare the energy to remember that they were as worn out, as
mistake-prone, as you were; and everything they did wrong irritated you ...
      Tad suddenly realized he had been standing by Hatch Three for some little time, holding the test kit
he would take outside to check the LCO. He spoke into his suit phone.
      "Bap? You've got me on screen, haven't you?"
      "On screen. Right," came back Bap's voice.
      "What's the matter? Are we still above the blue line on the graph?"
      There was a little silence before Bap answered.
      "No. Just below, now. But the curve's flattening out a bit. I wanted to give you a bit of margin below
the blue line."
      "Never mind margin. The line is below the blue?"
      "Below the blue. Right."
      "Then I'm going out," said Tad. "Light up the outside sensor eye from Hatch Three, if you can; and
keep me in sight. I'll stay on tether."
      "Sorry, Tad. Hatch Three sensor not responding. Maybe you better keep talking and we'll record."
      "Roger," said Tad. "I've already got the inner air lock door open on Hatch Three . . . I'm in the air
lock now and the inner door is closing. Evacuation of air lock ... Do you read me?"
      "Read you fine," Bap's voice said. "And we copy that."
      "All right," said Tad. "Outer air lock door now opening. I'm on my way out, tether behind me . . . all
the way out, now. I'm pulling extra length of the tether out so I'll have plenty of line to let me reach the
mirror."
      "O.K. Copying," said Bap.
      "I'm going to stop this conducted tour for a minute or two," Tad said, panting. "Running out of breath.
I'll get back to chatting with you in a few minutes when I start down along the hull toward the mirror."
      He fell silent, pulling out the last of the tether-cable that not only tied him securely to Hatch Three and
the ship, but also contained his main primary air and phone lines. Damned mess, he thought, sweating
inside his helmet. His magnetic shoe soles practically welded him to the skin of the spacecraft. His
chances of getting separated from the ship were one in a million. So much easier if he had come out here
untethered, simply with backpack oxygen for what would not be more than twenty or thirty minutes work
.. .
     "Give us a word, Tad." It was Bap's voice sounding in his helmet. "Just so we know you're still with
us."
     "I'm here. Hold on. Talk to you shortly . . ." Tad said.
     He gathered up his tether and began the clumsy shuffle down along the hull toward the small, upright,
square shape of the LCO mirror, outlined by stars alone. He was in darkness—Bap had changed the
attitude of Phoenix One enough to put the slanted bulk of the ship between him and the sun; and so give
him that much extra protection against radiation.
     All right, thought Tad, good enough. Play it safe if you like, Bap. The only problem might be
uncovering the mirror mount and testing out its positioning motor's components in the dark. But he had
the work light at his waist. Try it, he thought, anyway.
     "All right," he said aloud over his phone to the two inside the ship. "I've reached the mirror. Now I'll
see about getting the cover off the motor mount."
     "Reading you fine and clear," answered Bap's voice. "We copy that–you're going to take off the
motor mount cover, now."



      "Going to try," muttered Tad Tensing his leg muscles, he pullet himself and the clumsy suit about him
down on its knees before the motor mount. He switched on his belt light. The motor mount cover with its
four recessed bolts appeared just before him.
      He got the socket wrench from his tool belt and went to work to loosen the bolts.
      "Talk," said Bap in his ear phones. "Talk to us in here, Tad.'
      "Sorry . . ." Tad said, short-winded. "Too much, out here to do. Let you know. Soon as I
get–something done."
      He worked on. Eventually he got the bolts loosened and the coves off. Inside was the neat tangle of
components and connections. He opened the test kit he had brought and his gloved fingers clumsily
picked up the leads, one, then the other, and pulled them out to attach to the motor components.
      "I've got the motor mount cover off," he said aloud, suddenly remembering Bap. "I'm starting to test
now."
      "We copy that," said Bap.
      Time went by.
      "Some news here for you," said Bap's voice, unexpectedly. "Phoenix Two's getting through to us a
little on radio. Lots of static, but every so often they come through clear. I've been talking back to them
on our radio, telling them about our LCO trouble, but they don't seem to read me too well."
      "How're their communications?" asked Tad, working away.
      "Say again?" Bap asked.
      "How's the LCO over on Two? Did it go out like ours did?"
      "Negative," said Bap. "They're all right. They're trying to make LCO hookup back with Mission
Control. As I say, I've been trying to tell them what's happened to ours, but they aren't reading me too
well—don't think they've got it, yet."
      "Keep trying," said Tad. "Roger," answered Bap.
      Tad went on testing.
      "There's an AJK4191 out here," he said, "and both AJK6OL's acted like they were out at first, but
they're both responding, now. It's the signal amplification that's gone out. The motor was getting the
messages but it couldn't do anything with them. —Also an M84B connector, also an AJK4123 are out.
Check stores, will you, and make sure we've got replacements?"
      "Roger. Will do," said Bap. "I copy, search stores for an . AJK4191, M84B connector, and an
AJK4123. Anoshi's going to check. I'm still. trying to get our story told over the radio to Two."
      "O.K." Tad straightened up his cramped knees, rising erect in his suit, held by the soles of his feet
firmly to the hull of the spacecraft. "I'll hold here while Anoshi looks at stores. Let me know what he
finds."
     "Roger," said Bap. "How are you feeling?"
     "Like twenty hours more sleep," answered Tad. "If you don't mind, I'll just hang here and take it easy
until Anoshi gets back with the word on those replacements."
     "You do that," said Bap. "The next voice you hear will be Anoshi's."
     The suit phone went silent. Tad hung there weightless, letting himself float in his suit, anchored by the
magnetic soles. He was so weary he felt empty inside; but just for the moment not having to do anything
was infinitely pleasurable; and on the heels of such pleasure came something like a moment of sanity.
     He felt ashamed of the way he had undoubtedly been chewing on Bap and Anoshi. It might have
been unconscious reaction to fatigue on his part, but it had been hard on the other two men, nonetheless.
Actually, he admitted to himself now, he had been indulging himself, like the selfish head of a family who
says, "I'm important. I can take my temper out on you because I'm important. But you can't take your
temper out on me."
     I've got to quit this, he told himself now, or we'll never finish the trip.
     And Mission Control, he thought, had better trim that priority list on the experiments; or I'll do
it for them. We can't take it. None of us can take it.
     —And no reason we should. We're out here now and when you get right down to it, we're the
men who go and do. We listen to them when we're on the ground We do everything they say. But
out here, we're like fish in the water while they're back there on dry land. In the long run we've
got to tell ourselves what's best for us to do.
     He thought of the fact that they were all alike, in a way—all six of them in the two ships. Never mind
the fact they all came from different cultures, different languages. Out here that was so damn small—that
kind of difference. Out here it was like the hunting party in strange territory—really strange territory. And
they were all here because they wanted to be here—really wanted to be here. Not just like someone
who thinks it'd be something special to go out into space.
     That's why we're all alike here, Tad thought, and all of us so different from those back there.
We've got to be different if we're going to live. And they've got to be different back there, because
they've never come out here to know what it's really like.
     Tad hung in his suit and lifted his faceplate to the stars.
     "All right," said Anoshi's voice in his helmet. "Tad, we've got the replacements. I've brought them to
Hatch Three. You want to come back and get them? Or how about my going out and putting them in?"
     Tad heard him; but his mind held the words off from registering for just a moment longer while he
looked at the stars. He would answer in a second; but just for the moment, he wanted to finish his look
and his thought.
     Oh, you beautiful, he said silently to their lights all around him, oh, you damn beautiful, beautiful,
universe ...
     In the first screen at Mission Control, Al Ciro, the Mission Communications Engineer, was watching
the image of Fedya. It was a little wavery, but recognizable; and the voice that came through was only
slightly mush-mouthed by uncertain beam linkage.
     ". . . had it over the radio, finally, from Bap," Fedya was saying.
     "You mean now?" It was Bill
     Ward, pushed in beside the Communications Engineer. "You mean Tad went out there as soon as
their meter went under the blue line?" Bill jerked his head aside to speak to one of the engineers standing
about. "Get me an estimate on that." He turned back to the screen. "When did you hear, there on
Two?"
     There was the short wait as Bill's words, even at light-speeds, traveled the great distance to Phoenix
Two.
     "Radio contact has been bad until just now," Fedya said. "Evidently Bap was trying to tell me all
along that their LCO motor control had been knocked out by the storm; but I didn't understand him until
now. Evidently Tad went out as soon as their BeV showed it was safe to do so."
     "And he's been out since? Get on that radio!" Ward said. "Call Phoenix One and tell Bap to get Tad
back in there. There was a burp of increased flare activity only twenty minutes or so behind the trough of
that first dip in radiation. Get on it!"
     Bill stopped speaking. Before Fedya could answer, the engineer Bill had asked a moment before for
an estimate came back with a piece of paper. Bill snatched it, glanced at it; and stepped back from the
screen toward the outskirts of those standing nearby.
     He looked up at the glass observation booth at the back of the Mission Control room, then around
him until his eyes fell on Al Ciro. He reached out, hooked his finger in Al's shirt pocket and drew Al to
him.
     "That's Wendy Hansard up there, isn't it?" he muttered. "What did you say before you came down
here, just now?"
     "I? Nothing," said Al. "Just that I'd find out what was going on and come back up to tell her." He
stared at Bill Ward. "What is it?"
     "Oh, Christ!" said Bill. "Christ!"
     Grimacing, he stared at the paper in his hand, scratching at his chin with one finger, briefly and
furiously.
     "She would be here!" Bill said. "This, of all times!" He looked at Al.
     Al stared.
     "Outside the ship? You mean he'll have been burned by that flare burp?" Al asked. "Bad?"
     "Bad," said Bill. He stared at Al for a second. "Very bad. If he's been out there the way it sounds . .
."
     His voice trailed off. He glanced back up at the booth.
     "And there's Wendy!" he said. "And Christ, Christ, I've got to go talk to her. I've got to tell her—that
just while she was standing here, waiting to hear about him . . ."
     He stopped speaking. His big hands fell limply to his sides, one of them still holding the paper.

    TO BE CONCLUDED