Yet, driven by the dull automatism of training and habit, he listlessly swung the stand with the ship's log over before him and noted his temperature readings. Then he critically reread what he had already written.
A few days ago, he had been using the gravitational field of the sun as a booster to help fling the little ship from Earth to Venus. In the mighty field, a space warp had funneled out, caught him, and sucked the ship toward the blazing maw.
The struggle to escape was a masterpiece of calculation. He had figured with such a nicety that his fuel had run out just at the moment the jet tubes at the rear became molten lumps on the ship's skin. He had escaped the warp. But it was a futile thing now, for the ship swung around the sun fuelless, inoperative, in a tight orbit that had a little initial inward momentum.
He had tried to radio for help, but radioing from where he was, was like trying to signal from the heart of an atomic bomb; if a signal got through, it would be only a part of the meaningless jabber of static that always came from here. And if the little black speck were seen, it would only be taken for a stray meteorite moving across the sun's incandescent face.
The ship was a little spherical world. It turned on its own axis once in an hour and twenty minutes. That was its little day. The orbit spiralled now a mere quarter million miles from the sun, one little year to two earth days. It moved closer at a rate that accelerated a few feet per second every second.
Eventually, said the impassive rows of equations in the log, the inward movement would stop, as keeping the same speed in a smaller circle, the ship's centrifugal force increased to set up an equilibrium. But that point would be three thousand miles below the sun's surface. The ship would never reach it. Jim MacDonald inhabited a doomed little world.
He chuckled. He even had a moon. The natural physical function of a few minutes before had left a jagged little chunk of ice swinging around the ship, outside the waste lock on the side away from the sun. But that wouldn't last long. It would pass into the hot light, and vanish in a puff of steam.
Now the plastic fittings of the compartment began to send up a nostril stinging stench. Jim leafed over a few pages in the log to the page printed at the top: ... Suggestions for redesign of space-ships.
Under his note, Enlarge cooling systems, he wrote, Replace urea formaldehyde plastics with metals, and insulate compartment thermometers from bulkheads.