I threw away that idea along with my half-used cigarette. It might very well be true, but how did that help now?
I had to think.
I was going after him, that was certain. Not only for humane reasons—he was the most important member of the crew. With him around, there were only two opinions, his and mine. Without him, I'd have endless opinions to contend with.
But it wouldn't do any good to go out no better equipped than he. There was no time to wait for tractors to be built if we wanted to reach him alive, and we certainly couldn't reach him five or ten miles out with our three miles of safety line. We would have to go in spacesuits.
But how would that leave us any better off than Quade?
Why was Quade vulnerable in his spacesuit, as I knew from experience he would be?
How could we be less vulnerable, or preferably invulnerable?
"Captain, you got nothing to worry about," Quartermaster Farley said. He patted a space helmet paternally. "You got yourself a self-contained environment. The suit's eye looks into yours at the arteries in the back of your eyeball so it can read your amber corpuscles and feed you your oxygen in the right amounts; you're a bottle-fed baby. If transphasia gets you seeing limburger, turn on the radar and you're air-conditioned as an igloo. Nothing short of a cosmic blast can dent that hide. You got it made."
"You are right," I said, "only transphasia comes right through these air-fast joints."