 What would have happened if Charley had not been on the ship?
Illustrated by Schoenherr The wind howled out of the northwest, blind with snow and barbed with ice crystals. It screamed over the top, whirled snow in a dervish dance around the hollow there, piled snow into the long furrow plowed ruler-straight through streamlined hummocks of snow. The sun glinted on black rock glazed by ice, chasms and ridges and bridges of ice. It lit the snow slope to a frozen glare, penciled black shadow down the long furrow, and flashed at the furrow's end on a thing of metal and plastics, an artifact thrown down in the dead wilderness. Nothing grew, nothing flew, nothing walked, nothing talked. It's well on the cards that I'm all in one piece and not broken up at all, though I don't see how it could happen. This suit's got a built-in recorder, I might as well use it. You probably know we're back and wonder what went wrong. Luck got me a place in the Whale . If I were ten years older, it would have been an honor, being picked for the first long jump in the first starship ever. "You'll want to know if the ship worked. We got lined up between Earth and Mars, you'll remember, and James pushed the button marked 'Jump'. Two months later your time, one second later by us. There was never anything wrong with the Whale till right at the end and even then I doubt if it was the ship itself that fouled things up. Matt Hennessy, from Farside Observatory, back of the Moon, just back from a proving flight cum astronomical survey in the starship Whale . Whoever you are who finds this tape, you're made. You'll find you can name your price and don't take any wooden nickels. Walking, talking natives on a blue sky planet with 1.1 g gravity and a twenty per cent oxygen atmosphere at fifteen p.s.i. The odds against finding Chang on a six-sun survey on the first star jump ever must be up in the googols. We were able to show them our sun, in their telescopes. When I say they, I mean a ten-man team of them. "Two, they brew a near-beer that's a lot nearer than the canned stuff we had aboard the Whale . People who talk English, drink beer, like jokes and beat me at chess or table-tennis are people for my money, even if they look like tigers in trousers. Maybe that ten per cent extra gravity put us off our strokes.
 The crew would likely have made it home alive
 He would not have been able to correct the navigation error  The crew would have had to find a different way to manipulate chance  The mission would have ended in the same way  The crew would likely have made it home alive