Feeling foolish at the useless act of writing that which no one would ever read, Jim swung the log away. His tongue peeled from the roof of his mouth like a strip of adhesive tape and he dragged across the compartment for a drink. Glancing toward the sun, he held his aluminum cup under the spout and pressed the hot button gingerly. Although the windows on that side were blanked out almost purple, the sun's horizon glared through in a heaving mass of leaping gassy prominences.
Jim turned away, his face wrinkling into a grimace. Across the compartment a little cabinet held a pistol. It would be a simple sane thing to walk across there, take out the pistol and bring this to a sudden stop. He stepped toward it, then turned away ashamed. Spacemen didn't think like that.
Ahead of the ship something flared into incandescent brilliance. Waves of force pounded on the front, the deck heaved. Jim sprawled on his face and skidded over under the instrument panel, his cup clattering along beside him.
The deck scorched his hands and face. He wriggled out and dragged himself up to the chair, clinging tightly. But it was all over. He stood for a moment, waiting, then sat down.
Experimentally he caressed his burned face. Looking out the windows he tried to see some cause for the shock. Then he realized his moon was gone. It had passed out of the deep shadow into the penumbra of the ship and had been instantly vaporized. The shock had been its dissociated molecules pummeling the front of the ship.
He would have to be careful. If that could have passed directly into the full light instead of through the half shadow of the penumbra, the front of the ship might have caved in, softened as it was to near plasticity. Jim reached for the log again, but his hand stopped in mid air. With the spaceman's sensitivity to changes of state, he knew something was wrong. Something had changed in the shock of the moon's explosion.
He puzzled it over, but his heat befuddled brain refused to grasp things. He scanned all the instruments on the panel, but saw nothing unusual. At one side, he had a little tracer going, little drum turning with a needle scribing a red line. On it he had set the increase in the sun's pull against time to describe a curve. He examined this curve. The red line had changed direction suddenly; the sun's pull was increasing faster.
"Dammit!" he said. The force of the explosion in front had slowed him and shorn off some protective centrifugal force. Now he picked up points on the new curve, set down equations, and found he would die some twenty hours sooner than he had expected.
His mind began to revolt at the training that made him go on like this. The turning of the ship now showed him only the face of the sun. He looked at it a while, then shrugged his shoulders in disgust. Slowly he got up and walked toward the gun cabinet. The little door swung open as he pressed the button and he stared at the holstered weapon.