"Then you'll be interested to hear that Spaceman Quade took a suit and a cartographer unit. He's out there somewhere, alone."
"The idiot!" I yelped. "Everyone needs a partner out there. Send out a team to follow his cable and drag him in here by it."
"He didn't hook on a cable, Captain," Wallace said. "I suppose he intended to go beyond the three-mile limit as you demanded."
"Shut up, Wallace. You don't have to like me, but you can't twist what I said as long as I command this spacer."
"Cool off, Gav," Nagurski advised me. "It's been done before. Anybody else would have been a fool to go out alone, but Quade is the most experienced man we have. He knows transphasia. Trust him."
"I trusted him too far by letting him run around loose. He needs a leash in more ways than one, and I'm going to put one on him."
For me, it was a nightmare. I lay down in my cabin and thought. I had to think things through very carefully. One mistake was too many for me. My worst fear had been that someday I would overlook one tiny flaw and ruin a gem. Now I might have ruined an exploration and destroyed a man, not a stone, because I had missed the flaw.
No one but a reckless fool would have gone out alone on a strange planet with a terrifying phenomenon, but I'd had enough evidence to see that space exploration made a man a reckless fool by doing things on one planet he had once found safe and wise on some other world.
The thought intruded itself: why hadn't I recognized this before I let Quade escape to almost certain death? Wasn't it because I wanted him dead, because I resented the crew's resentment of my authority, and recognized in him the leader and symbol of this resentment?