into the letter. I put the letter
aside and wondered what else I could do to kill time. I got out some
of the film plates I'd made of the surface of Mars. Of course I had
transmitted them all to Lunar Base, but it would have been nice if I
could have delivered the original plates. I studied them for a while
but didn't find anything I hadn't seen before. Well, I had done my job
at least. I had orbited Mars, I had the glory of being the first
American to do that. I had dropped the instrument package and
transmitted all the data I could get back to Lunar. My only failure
would be in not bringing back the ship.

I remembered a conversation I'd had at the last International Space
Symposium in Geneva. A buddy of mine and I had taken out one of the
Soviet cosmonauts and got him drunk. He was a dignified sort of drunk,
a Party member who told long, pointless Russian jokes with an
unwavering, serious expression. He sat sideways on the bar stool,
holding his glass of vodka between two fingers and staring straight
ahead. He said one thing that I had never forgotten.

"Do you know why we are ahead of you in space?" he had said, staring
with dignity at the tall blonde at a nearby table. "It is because of
your bourgeois sentimentality. You do not like risking men. You build
a skyscraper in New York to house some insurance company. Two or three
construction workers are maimed or killed on the job. One of your coal
mines collapses and fifty men are trapped. Yet, look. You are afraid
of losing men in space because of what the people at home might think.
So you are too conservative, you avoid risks. So we are ahead of you.
We send out a ship with three men aboard when you would risk only one.
We are not sentimental, that is all. That is why we are ahead of you."
He ordered another drink and stared into the mirror for several
minutes, letting us think that over. Then he went on.

"Yes, you are less scientific than we, less logical. Yet that is your
advantage, too. You are more alert to the unprecedented, the
unpredictable. You are always ready for the Wild Chance, the
impossible possibility. You expect the unexpected. You hope for the
hopeless. Being sentimental, you have imagination."

His words came back to me. The unpredictable, the wild chance, the
impossible possibility. That was all that could save me now. But what?
Maybe another meteor would come along and plug the hole the first one
had made. No. I had to think my way out of