“Wisner, you’re an asterite born, and von Raaben has been one for a number of years. But I guess I’ll have to spell the facts out for you, Pilot d’Andilly. You’re kept like a fighting cock, because that’s the only way to attract men to your job. So you aren’t aware, I suppose, how thin a margin we asterites live on. Can you imagine what it means to carve a living from airless rocks? Sure, they’re rich in metal; atomic power is cheap and solar power is free; but what is there otherwise? Why raid Jupiter at such enormous effort, if we didn’t have to have those gases to form the basis of chemical synthesis, of our whole chemical industry, which equals our survival?

  “O.K. It’s barely possible that three ships working to-

  gether could grapple onto Hashimoto’s and haul him into clear space. I don’t believe they could, but I’ll grant a slight possibility. So if you did pull off that stunt, every boy on every asteroid would cheer himself hoarse for you, and every girl would fall into your arms, and every man would curse you for a pack of dangerous idiots. Because any operation which consistently gambled at those odds would soon go broke—and we’ve got to have the operation or the whole Republic dies.

  “Now do you understand?”

  D’Andilly’s look traveled wildly from one pilot to the other. Von Raaben’s face had congealed, Wisner’s fingers twisted together like snakes. But each of them nodded.

  After a time when no one spoke, Pearson turned his head toward Ben Judah. The captain stood unmoving, backed against the bulkhead. “Are we still in contact with Hashimoto?” the manager asked.

  “I believe so,” Ben Judah said dully.

  “Then I suggest you return to the radio room and offer him what consolation you can. If he has a co-religionist aboard—” Pearson had raised his prosthetic hand a little. He let it fall. The clatter was so loud that he jerked in his seat.

  “I wonder what happened to conk out Tom’s engine?” Wisner muttered.

  “We’ll never know,” the chief engineer said. “That compartment’s sealed off behind a rad shield, remember. It’s only cracked for direct inspection at refuelling time, every five years or so—Why am I telling you what everybody knows?”

  “I’ll have nightmares thinking it might happen any time, to me or . . . or anyone.”

  “Me, I shall have nightmares about Tom,” d’Andilly said. “Whirling so utterly helpless, yes, the helplessness is the real horror.”

  “He did not stop to think we could not get him out of orbit,” von Raaben said, “or he might not have bothered.”

  “Well, we could, if he’d gotten into clear space,” Wisner said. “Or, of course, if Jupe’s mass didn’t produce that kind of orbital speed.” His chuckle was without humor. “But then, if Jupe were a minor planet, it wouldn’t have an atmosphere worth exploiting, and this would never have happened in the first place.”

  “If we could slow him somehow,” von Raaben floundered. “By aerodynamic braking? No, he has no control surfaces, and with his engine dead—”

  D’Andilly sprang to his feet. His chair fell over backwards. “Mon Dieu!” he shouted.

  “Huh? What?” Startlement ran around the table.

  “Control surfaces!” d’Andilly chattered. He waved his arms and forgot to put his torrent of words in English.

  “Climb down from the mast, you nut,” Wisner exclaimed. “Do you have an idea?”

  “Oui . . . yes, yes . . . the balloon, nest-ce pas? Dump the gas out, make a drogue. Ha, quick, draw some plans, Monsieur I’ingenieur, time is a-wasteful!”

  “You’re crazy!” Pearson snapped. He, too, leaped up.

  “No, wait,” Ben Judah said. Hope kindled in his face. “I do know something about this. The first experimental spacecraft were retrieved in some such way. It might work. And it doesn’t look too risky to the men.”

  “You’d abort this whole cruise,” Pearson said. “Not to mention the whopping cost of the balloon. Even getting Hashimoto’s vessel back, we’d stick the Company for a terrific net loss.”

  “Economics can only go so far,” Ben Judah said.

  “But don’t you see?” Pearson’s voice turned pleading. “It’s not that I’m inhumane. Dollars and cents are nothing but shorthand for resources and human effort. And the Republic has only so much of either to go around. To us, an unprofitable operation is a socially evil one. We’ve got to operate under economic doctrine!”

  “Not every time.” Ben Judah’s eyes were no longer mild. “If these pilots are willing to go, they shall.”

  Pearson bit his lip. “All right,” he said. “Somebody has to take the blame of all the emotional morons. It may as well be me. I haven’t any family to ostracize. So I directly forbid any attempt.”

  “As captain, I overrule you.”

  “You can’t. This isn’t in your province.”

  “Isn’t it?” Ben Judah murmured. His officers, who had crowded close, moved nearer Pearson. The second mate laid a hand on the manager’s thin shoulder. “You heard the captain,” he said.

  Pearson shook himself loose, stumbled back to his chair and buried his face in his hands.

  Presently the gang went aft to begin work. Pearson raised his head. The cabin had grown very still again. Only Ben Judah remained, puffing his pipe at the opposite side of the table.

  “I’m sorry, Roy,” the skipper said.

  “I’m sorrier,” Pearson told him. “When we reach Ceres, I’m going to prefer charges of incompetence against you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to. How I don’t want to! But we can’t keep sentimentalists on the payroll, and we need an object lesson. It’s my duty to get you fired.” Pearson rubbed his live hand over his plastic jaw. His voice was empty. “What have I got to live for, except my duty?”

  The atmosphere of a high-gravity planet has a correspondingly high density gradient. Streaking downward, the scoopships hit perceptibly thick air—still thin even by Martian standards, but thick enough to matter at this speed—almost before the pilots realized they were about to do so. Then it was all their drug-stimulated bodies could do to maintain formation.

  There ought to be an art to this, d’Andilly thought amid thunder. Given time, an art could be developed, a whole profession of . . . droguedragging? His teeth gleamed behind his faceplate, a taut and short-lived grin. God grant this was the last as well as the first occasion the thing was tried!

  Mignonne reared like a whipped horse. The cable had pulled on her. D’Andilly applied sidewise field thrust. Give that line some slack or it’ll yank the guts out of her! But not too much slack, or you’ll lose control of the whole crazy package. Then you and your comrades may tumble into Jupiter, ready wrapped in a plastic shroud. Death as a shooting star sounds romantic, but any man of sense prefers to die in bed, at the end of a long and misspent life.

  “Whoa, there!” Wisner’s voice came to d’Andilly’s earphones, barely audible over the interference, the wind, and the cry of tormented metal. “You’re pulling on me now.”

  The Frenchman cast a glance outside. They were still so high that heaven was clear. Stars glittered inhumanly serene and a moon rode in an ice-crystal halo, turning the cloud layers far below into snow mountains. That Jovian horizon stretched further than a man could see, it did not lose itself in curvature but in mists and blacknesses. He saw his companion ships above him, Sky Thief to starboard and Seeadler to port—himself at the lowest point of an equilateral triangle—as shimmering curves where the light struck them, occulting shadows elsewhere.

  The cables trailing aft of the three vessels were harder to see. They’d been smeared with luminous paint; but in this howling, shuddering chaos, one’s head slapped back and forth in the helmet—Yes, there. Wisner’s line was too taut, von Raaben’s too slack. More by feel than brain, d’Andilly decided how he should adjust his own place in the formation.

  Mignonne groaned and lurched when he touched the controls. Her Emetts whined, nearly as loudly as the air she split at orbital speed, feeding energy into the drive field. Any change of course under these conditions was like slugging through a brick wall. Sweat stung the pilot’s eyes, half blinding him. His tongue was a block of wood and his nose full of his own stink. Vibration quivered his bones. Wind shrieked and hooted. Now and again there came a great flat smack of noise.

  But . . . so! He’d completed the shift. The dive proceeded more smoothly.

  The balloon snakedanced at the end of the cables. Deflated, slashed open, rolled in a sausage shape and stuffed into a long metal tube, the thing had not been hard to manage in space. But now when they slanted through atmosphere—D’Andilly hoped the plastic wouldn’t be damaged. But no, that stuff was intended for spatial conditions. The engineers had needed a laser torch to cut it.

  “Tom,” he said into his radio, for the dozenth time. “Tom, are you there? Do you read us?”

  We should be headed to intercept him, according to the last fix the mother ship relayed us. But anything can have happened. “Tom! Rescue party from Vesta Castle calling Mary Girl. Come in!”

  “He may have passed out,” said von Raaben’s tiny drowned voice in the earphones. “He may be dead.”

  “We’ll never find him without some kind of signal to home on,” Wisner predicted, through teeth clenched against shock waves. “Too big a search field, not enough light to see by.”

  Everything would have been easier on dayside and at a greater altitude, d’Andilly thought. His mind was buffeted into stupidity, able only to repeat the obvious, over and over. Where the air was thinner than here, less unpredictable variation of windage and density, adequate light, Tom would have been more readily seen as well as rescued. But preparing the drogue had been a maddeningly slow task, when one must stop and plan out every step. The rescuers had arrived very late. Perhaps too late. Mary Girl might already have taken the final plunge.

  If she wasn’t found within the next few minutes, the attempt must be abandoned. They were too near the burnup point. The instrument panel showed outside temperature rapidly rising. Soon the intake scoops would be redly glowing dragon mouths. And soon after that—

  “Hei! Dort!” von Raaben bellowed. “Eleven o’clock low, see him? There, I say!”

  “Jumping Judas, yes,” Wisner exclaimed. “I was wrong. We really and truly located him with our own bare eyeballs.” Crispness entered his tone. “O.K., Chuck, you still want to be squadron leader?”

  “Mais oui. Who is better qualified?” D’Andilly had now spotted the distant shape himself. With a pilot’s sense of dynamic relationships he gauged how to intercept, and issue his instructions. He knew that he was in fact not superior to his associates. But a single command was essential to co-ordinated effort.

  And they would have to do one all-time job of coordination!

  The three ships slewed about, fighting for every degree of rotation, and dove on Mary Girl. Relative velocities were not great, and they established position quickly. There they flew not far ahead of the wreck, which they surrounded by the tow lines. For a moment, then, a kind of stability prevailed.

  “Tom, can you hear me? Come in, Tom,” Wisner called.

  “Stow the conversation,” d’Andilly said. “Are you ready? Let’s brake a little . . . back, back, easy does it . . . not so fast, Krauthead . . . raise a bit, Bill . . . ah, we’re snagging him.”

  About halfway between ships and balloon, the three cables were linked by three connecting strands, which in turn supported a flexible metal net. Mary Girl was just behind that net. Inchmeal, struggling with a turbulence that threatened to tangle their lines and dash them together, the rescuers allowed the net to move more slowly than the wreck. The scoop nose entered; the mesh snugged close around; the fish was caught.

  “Everything seems O.K., true?” d’Andilly said. “Bien, let her go.”

  The hastily adapted hose mechanisms in Mignonne, Sky Thief, and Seeadler cast loose. The tow lines whipped backward. A radio instruction went to a small package in the balloon’s container. It detonated. The metal peeled away. As the furious thrust of air entered its folds, the parachute opened.

  D’Andilly brought his staggering ship under control, glanced back, and forgot all else in his awe. High over the stormclouds that looked like white mountains, a transparent hemisphere with a ghostly moon-shimmer across its surface began to bloom. Ever wider it swelled, until d’Andilly thought surely the fabric must rip across and release the shooting star.

  But the fabric held. Expanding that elastomer took a great deal of energy, which Mary Girl supplied from her velocity. She started to fall more steeply, but at a fast-diminishing rate. Decelerating under power to keep pace, d’Andilly found himself under almost three gravities, besides Jupiter’s own pull. Well, that shouldn’t be too hard on Tom’s body for the short time it must continue.

  His live body, one hopes. “Tom, are you there? Do you read us?”

  The four ships fled on eastward. They crossed the sunrise line and saw long light, the color of roses, across endless vapor fields. The dwarfed sun climbed higher for them. They descended toward the clouds, until they saw lightning lick its chops.

  But by that time nearly their whole speed had been lost. The wreck was parachuting quite gently. It was downright anticlimactic when they closed in on Mary Girl and grappled fast. A second radio command ignited thermite cartridges on the cables and burned them loose from the net.

  Engines strained skyward. Looking aft, d’Andilly saw the parachute seized by a wind and sent fluttering in the direction of a thunderhead a thousand kilometers tall. Jupiter wants revenge, he thought weirdly. Well, to hell with him. We’ll be back.

  After a while, stars crowded a clear darkness. A great silence opened up. The planet seemed no more than some painted backdrop. D’Andilly shook himself gingerly, as if afraid that the bruised flesh would drop off. But no permanent harm seemed done. “Let’s go into orbit,” he said. His voice sounded odd to him, heard through ears that still tolled. “I want to board and see how Tom is.”

  He dreaded what he might find.

  “Shucks,” said Wisner, with a shaken catch of laughter, “I can tell you that. I can see into his cockpit from here. He’s waving and shaking hands with himself like a lunatic. Nothing wrong with him.”

  Joy jumped in d’Andilly.

  “It must just be that his radio went out,” von Raaben said. “With a dead engine he was depending on the emergency accumulators for everything, and I think they must be drained. Come on, let us take a sight and lay a course and get back as fast as possible. I want some beer.”

  “Beer you shall have,” d’Andilly warbled, “all the beer you wish, you foam-at-the-mouth Boche, beer in Jupiter-sized steins until it cataracts from your ears. Provided, of course, that I get as much cognac.”

  He adjusted thrust vectors according to navigational directions. The three ships and their load moved toward rendezvous. D’Andilly could almost taste the liquor now. He filled his cockpit with hoarsened song.

  “. . . ‘Que donn’rez vous, la belle,

  Pour le voir revenir?’

  “Aupres de ma blonde

  Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon,

  Aupres de ma blonde

  Qu’il fait bon dormir!”

  The Vesta Castle throbbed with energy, accelerating homeward.

  Captain Ben Judah wreathed his head in smoke and squinted at a tiny spar. With much care he brought it to the clipper foremast and held it in place a moment until the glue began to set. His inner eye visualized this Witch of the Waves as a real thing, soon to be commissioned, to raise her cloud of sails and ride the wind across the world. Gulls wheeled above, no whiter than the wake she cut through infinitely blue water. . . . He sighed. One might as well face facts. Romance had long died out of the universe.

  There was diffident knock. He laid down his tweezers and said, “Come in.”

  Roy Pearson shuffled through. Ben Judah was shocked at the man’s drawn appearance. “Hello, there! What the blazes have you had afoot?” he asked, as heartily as he was able. “Taking your meals in your cabin like that, the past half dozen watches. If I hadn’t been so busy getting us under weigh, I’d have come to see what ailed you.”

  “Oh, save it.” Pearson lowered himself to the edge of the bunk and stared between his knees at the deck. His voice was hardly audible. “You know why I kept out of sight.”

  “Come, now. Nobody’s angry at you for giving advice that turned out to be mistaken. You should know your pilots better than that. They might crow a little, as they well deserve to, but nobody that extroverted can nurse a grudge. Even Tom Hashimoto remarked at mess, when he’d heard the story, that in your place he’d have done exactly as you did.”

  “It isn’t that.” The voice grew louder, saw-edged. “It’s you. I thought I could be smug about filing my complaint. But it’s no use, I can’t be.” Pearson achieved an upward glance. “But I’m still going to do so,” he said. “I’ve got to. If we don’t stand by doctrine, how many other young men will die, or be crippled?”

  “Well, for everything’s sake!” Ben Judah broke into laughter. “Is that what was eating you? Roy, Roy, we need you for comic relief. Haven’t you heard the C.E.’s report on the salvaged vessel?”

  “N-no. What—” Pearson tried to rise, but his legs wouldn’t obey.

  “He made a cursory inspection, and found immediately what had caused the trouble. In the engine, of course. Sulfuric acid fumes had corroded the crosslinkages between reactor and geegee generator.”

  “Where in confusion did it come from?”

  “That’s clear, too. There have been similar incidents in the past, Mac tells me, involving other kinds of machinery. You see, steel is usually pickled in sulfuric acid, and some of the acid seeps in, gets right in between the crystals. Then, in a sealed environment like that engine compartment, and under the encouragement of nuclear radiation and stray field-drive impulses . . . the acid leaks out again. Very, very slowly, but it does. Precautions had been taken against that type of thing, but evidently they weren’t thorough enough. You recall Mary Girl is one of the oldest scoopships in service. She’d had a long time for the effects to accumulate.”