He read the notation aloud to the others.
"What do you suppose it means?" he asked.
"Could be that rough terrain and unstable rotation make a take-off impossible," Harald suggested.
Merrill's eyes narrowed. "I don't think so. Some of the other asteroids have been difficult enough that way. No, there's something different about Hidalgo. Maybe it's some kind of deadly radiations. I've thought a lot about it."
"You knew this all the time? Why didn't you say something about it?"
Merrill's habitual shrug was expressive. "It couldn't have mattered. Where else is there to go? I didn't think of it before you mentioned Hidalgo because I had no idea where it would be. In a way, I'm glad we're going there. You see ... my father commanded that charting expedition which was never heard from again. Now maybe I'll find out at last what really happened."
Norman lost all sense of time. The flight through space assumed the elastic dimension of nightmare.
He went aft again and checked with the radiation-fighters. There, the fight was going on in the engine room. It was at best a delaying action. Men dropped where they stood and were carried out. The lucky ones died of frightful burns where radioactive metal had spit through joints in their armor.
The speaker rattled inside his helmet as he addressed Failles. "If it spreads to the outside armor plates of the hull, we're done," he said.