flew the first and last ship around Venus, and brought back the report that settled that mystery—dust. Those were the old days; the days of two-couple crews and the old faithful Canfield class three-steppers—the "cans."

The days, too, of the satellite-hopping Von Brauns—each of which consisted of a Canfield crew can stuck on the end of a six-hundred-foot winged javelin with two dozen times the cargo space of a Canfield. The "super-cans."

Just four of us then; myself and Mary and Ted and Belle Leonard. Four who might just as well have been one.

Then Mars.

Not that we were ready for it; just that it was a financial necessity to the rest of the project, with Venus eliminated from the picture. Taxes kept us in space. The scientific value of Ley and Goddard and Luna City wasn't enough for the tax-paying public. They didn't want ice cream; they wanted a chocolate sundae, with all the trimmings. Apparently our public relations people couldn't tell them that the fact that we could get that far in eight years, without an accident, did not necessarily mean that we were in a position to shoot for Mars.

So we shot for Mars.

Ships were no problem, of course. A Canfield could have made it from Goddard to Mars and back, and wouldn't even have needed its third stage to do it.

We got the first seven of the new Lowell class ball-and-girder "space-only" ships—the "cannonballs"—and modified the daylights out of three old Von Brauns, for landing purposes.

The crew was the joker. We had to have forty people trained specifically to make the observations and investigations that would justify the trip. Most of the operating crews either didn't have enough training or lacked it entirely. The crews that had started training when we first saw this jump coming weren't ready to be trusted farther than Ley.

So we set up four-couple crews; two old and two new, much against our better judgment. It worked out better than anybody had seriously expected, but somehow, even after three years in the same can, eight never became quite as nearly one as four had been.

Helene Donnelly wasn't sleeping much, either. Not a sound came from the bunk above me. Normally she was a rather restless sleeper.

She would be thinking the same things I was; in spite of her relative inexperience, she knew the 

 Prev. P 5/15 next