As Captain Paul Bonnet and Lieutenant Bill Riley took their places in the ship, Major Rogers explained that the craft had been equipped with a small parachute to be used just before the lifeboat crashed in dropping a message to authorities that Outpost 53 had been attacked and that reinforcements were needed.
"After you drop the message, you men are on your own," the major explained.
"You mean we're to try to get out of it, if we can?" asked Captain Bonnet dryly. "Humph!"
A few minutes later the lifeboat's rockets roared and the craft soared upward through Venusian clouds to deliver a message to Terra.
Captain Bonnet watched the rockets drain the fuel tank on the takeoff. His gravity gauge told him that he was going to make it. Once beyond Venus and nosed toward the earth, which was approaching conjunction, no more fuel would be needed. The ship would be seized by terrestrial gravity and brought home. There would be a period of uncomfortable warmth as the sides of the ship became red hot in the earth's atmosphere. A few moments of frantic work dropping the parachute over some populous region of the earth, and then a crash that would mean the end.
Each man had gone over the details of what he was to do. Each man had told himself that there was no end to this trip except death, yet each man hoped that in some way he could avoid the final disaster. If there were only some way a space ship could be landed without fuel!
"It's no use," Captain Bonnet said. "Up to the end of the Twentieth Century, when all problems dealing with space navigation were worked out, excepting space flight itself, all of the experts agreed that there was no practical way of landing a space ship. It wasn't until the Twenty-first Century that the spiral landing orbit was discovered and it took another century to discover the Rippler force method of landing a ship intact."
"At least the Rippler method's out," Lieutenant Riley said dryly. "We'd have to have fifty gallons of fuel to land a fourteen-valve lifeboat on its rocket jets."
"Even the spiral landing orbit would require twenty-five gallons," Captain Bonnet pointed out. "Both methods are out. We've got about two gallons of rocket fuel in the tank and we'll need most of it in the cooling system to keep us from burning up until we can drop the message."