The smell of the dead creature was all through the ship. Weaver closed his helmet against it; then, remembering that the air in his suit tank would not last forever, he lugged the corpse out to the airlock, closed the inner door on it, and opened the outer one.
It was hard for him to accept the obvious explanation of the Aurigean's death, but he finally came to it. He recalled something the guide had said about the Aurigeans' susceptibility to Earthly infections. That must have been it. That had been why the creature had bellowed and run to seal itself off from him. It was all his fault.
If he had not sneezed with his helmet open, the Aurigean would not be dead. He would not be marooned in space. And the other Aurigeans, down on Earth, would not be marooned there. Though they, he decided wistfully, would probably get home sooner or later. They knew where home was.
As far as he could, he made himself master of the ship and its contents. He discovered, by arduous trial and error, which of the supposed foods in the storerooms he could eat safely, which would make him sick, and which were not foods at all. He found out which of the control board's knobs and levers controlled the engines, and he shut them off. He studied the universe around him, hoping to see some change.
After nearly a month, it happened. One star grew from a brilliant pinpoint to a tiny disk, and each time he awoke it was larger.
Weaver took counsel with himself, and pasted a small piece of transparent red tape over the place on the telescreen where the star appeared. He scratched a mark to show where the star was on each of three succeeding "days." The trail crawled diagonally down toward the bottom of the screen.
He knew nothing about astrogation; but he knew that if he were heading directly toward the star, it ought to stay in the same place on his screen. He turned on the engines and swung the steering arm downward. The star crawled toward the center of the screen, then went past. Weaver painstakingly brought it back; and so, in parsec-long zigzags, he held his course.
The star was now increasing alarmingly in brightness. It occurred to Weaver that he must be traveling with enormous speed, although he had no sensation of movement at all. There was a position on the scale around the steering arm that he thought would put the engines into reverse. He tried it, and now he scratched the apparent size of the star into the red tape. First it grew by leaps and bounds, then more slowly, then hardly at all. Weaver shut off the engines again, and waited.
The star had planets. He noted their passage in the telescreen, marked their apparent courses, and blithely set himself to land on the one that seemed to be nearest. He was totally ignorant of orbits; he simply centered his planet on the screen as he had done with the star, found that it was receding from him, and began to run it down.