"How long will it take?" he asked. "Will we make it back to Earth before—" His voice thickened. "—before we smother to death?"
Tom Headley shrugged. "It'll be tight," he said slowly. "We'll be on half oxygen-rations the full trip back. But it can be done; I went three months on half-rations once—and then got drunk on Earth's air for two days after I landed."
"To hell with you and your fancy trips!" The madness was building again in Caxton's mind. "You've been everywhere—but you ain't been here; you don't know what Uranus is like, nobody does."
He lunged to his feet, pressed close to the port. His breath clouded the quartzite pane, and he polished the glass impatiently.
"Look at that," he said thinly. "That's the place we were going to explore; that's the place where it is so cold and the pressure so great, air collapses and can't be breathed. We were going to do what the early explorers failed to do; try to find life and minerals. They failed because their space suits could not stand the cold. Now we'll be marooned there because a damned meteor busted our stern rockets all to hell!"
"Don't blame me for that," Headley said, and instantly regretted the words.
"Okay!" Caxton spun back to his seat. "I let the force-screen die for a couple of hours while I slept. But don't think I'm taking the blame for the whole mess, even at that. This was your screwy idea."
Headley nodded. "If we succeed, our reputations will be big enough to gain us backing for almost anything." He grinned, and some of the fear was gone from his mind. "Hell, what if we are cooped up here for a few days? I'll fix the rockets, we'll do a bit of exploring, and then high-tail it back for more oxygen. We'll live in vac-suits and save our air; and the suits hold enough rations to last us for three months."
"And if the rockets aren't fixed?"
Tom Headley forced the thought from his mind. "They'll be fixed," he said quietly.