SS II
Kaiser let himself ease back in the pilot chair and rolled the tape thoughtfully between his fingers. Overhead and to each side, large drops of rain thudded softly against the transparent walls of the scout ship and dripped wearily from the bottom ledge to the ground.
"Damn this climate!" Kaiser muttered irrelevantly. "Doesn't it ever do anything here except rain?"
His attention returned to the matter at hand. Why the baby talk? And why was his memory so hazy? How long had he been here? What had he been doing during that time?
Listlessly he reached for the towel at his elbow and wiped the moisture from his face and bare shoulders. The air conditioning had gone out when the scout ship cracked up. He'd have to repair the scout or he was stuck here for good. He remembered now that he had gone over the job very carefully and thoroughly, and had found it too big to handle alone—or without better equipment, at least. Yet there was little or no chance of his being able to find either here.
Calmly, deliberately, Kaiser collected his thoughts, his memories, and brought them out where he could look at them:
The mother ship, Soscites II, had been on the last leg of its planet-mapping tour. It had dropped Kaiser in the one remaining scout ship—the other seven had all been lost one way or another during the exploring of new worlds—and set itself into a giant orbit about this planet that Kaiser had named Big Muddy.
The Soscites II had to maintain its constant speed; it had no means of slowing, except to stop, and no way to start again once it did stop. Its limited range of maneuverability made it necessary to set up an orbit that would take it approximately one month, Earth time, to circle a pinpointed planet. And now its fuel was low.
Kaiser had that one month to repair his scout or be stranded here forever.
That was all he could remember. Nothing of what he had been doing recently.