Some of the starch seemed to run out of the younger man. He halted his march toward the controls and stared down at them doubtfully. Actually, little automatic piloting could be done on the down leg of a flight, but pilots were conditioned into thinking of the automatics almost reverently, ahead of anything else on the ship. It dated from the days when the ascension would have been physically impossible without such aid, and Murdock had felt the same for the first five years of piloting.
"Better strap in," he suggested.
Hennings dropped into the co-pilot couch while Murdock ran through the final check. The ship began swinging slowly about as the gyroscopes hummed, lining up for the return blast. "Ten seconds," Murdock announced. He ran a count in his head, then hit the blast lever gently. They began losing speed and dropping back toward Earth, while the station sailed on and away.
Then, with power off, there was nothing to do but stare at what was coming. It would still be night at Base, and even the sodium flares and radar beacons wouldn't be as much help as they should be in the storm. This time, they'd have to depend on lift, like a normal plane landing. It would be tough for any plane, for that matter, though possible enough in fully powered flight. But they had to come down like a glider. If there were any undetected strains in the wings....
"You came up without a tape?" Hennings asked suddenly.
Murdock grimaced, resenting the interruption to his brooding. He liked Hennings better as a cocky hero than as a worried young man. "A tape's no good for unpredictable conditions."
"Okay, if you say so," the younger man said doubtfully at last. He sat staring at the controls with an odd look on his face. Then surprisingly, he laughed and settled back loosely in his seat. "I guess maybe you don't need me, then."
He was snoring five minutes later. Murdock scowled at him, suspecting it was an act at first. Finally he shrugged and turned back to his worrying. He knew there'd been a good measure of luck to his take-off, in spite of all his careful efforts. He couldn't count on luck for the landing.
He could still put in an emergency call and ask to land at some large airfield out of the storm, in theory. But it would do no good. Hulda was blanketing too great an area; any other field would be so far from the farm that trucking the garbage back would be out of the question. He might as well have remained at the station. Besides, he was already on a braking orbit that would bring him near Base, and changes now would involve risks of their own.