Wilson had lost.
Doggedly he said, "We'll loaf it out for the next hour. We'll go on as though this hadn't happened. We'll prepare for a recoverage of the grid."
They all nodded and left, but the step of each had lost its spring, and voices had lowered to funeral rumbles. Some even whispered.
Commodore Wilson swore at the closed door.
The hour passed with the slow interminable drag of eternity itself. It was the complete uncertainty of the result, the angering fact that not a single thing could be done until that hour had passed, and even then there was a high possibility that nothing could be done at all. So long as the hourly signal came in, there had been solid knowledge of the survival of the lost party.
This had been a sort of haphazard thing. There had been times before when a lifeship party had missed sending the signal because of fatigue, and had finally sent their signal late. Suggestions were always cropping up that the signal be entirely automatic, clock-timed. These ideas were claimed to be impractical since a timed, automatic signal only meant that the lifeship itself was still lost in space, and not that any aboard it were alive.
A full, two-way infrawave system would have been the answer; if a full two-way system could have been installed in a lifeship, still leaving room in the little space can for things essential to the sustenance of human life.
Ocean lifecraft are equipped with hooks and lines for catching fish, with gizmos for making water from the salt ocean drinkable. Air is free. Waste products are cast overboard.
In space there are no fish to catch, no salt ocean to purify, no air but that within the tiny can and its high-pressure air flasks. There is a supply of water and a small refining plant to distill waste products, not at all efficient, but adequate for a few days. But the bulk of the food and water and all of the air necessary to maintain life filled up a large percentage of the small volume of a lifeship.