We got the first seven of the new Lowell class ball-and-girder "space-only" ships—the "cannonballs"—and modified the daylights out of three old Von Brauns, for landing purposes.
The crew was the joker. We had to have forty people trained specifically to make the observations and investigations that would justify the trip. Most of the operating crews either didn't have enough training or lacked it entirely. The crews that had started training when we first saw this jump coming weren't ready to be trusted farther than Ley.
So we set up four-couple crews; two old and two new, much against our better judgment. It worked out better than anybody had seriously expected, but somehow, even after three years in the same can, eight never became quite as nearly one as four had been.
Helene Donnelly wasn't sleeping much, either. Not a sound came from the bunk above me. Normally she was a rather restless sleeper.
She would be thinking the same things I was; in spite of her relative inexperience, she knew the score. She would be half-consciously looking for me to "do something," even though she knew there was nothing I could do that she couldn't handle just as well.
Damn the guy that decided to implant that tendency in the younger crew members!
I wished there was something I could do to reassure her enough to nullify the effect, but there was nothing. She knew the score.
She knew that mechanically we would either make it or not make it.
She knew that it was psychologically impossible for two people conditioned to married life in space to continue to exist in sanity in any other relationship.