 What happened to the Whale?
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. Luck got me a place in the Whale . 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 . 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. We were able to show them our sun, in their telescopes. Look more like cats than people, but they're people all right. "One, they learned our language in four weeks. 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. It was more that we all seemed to make silly mistakes when we played them and that's fatal in chess. Of course it's a screwy situation, playing chess with something that grows its own fur coat, has yellow eyes an inch and a half long and long white whiskers. I nearly broke my neck on that butter-slide he fixed up in the metal alleyway to the Whale's engine room. "My last sight of the Minnow was a cabin full of dead and dying men, the sweetish stink of burned flesh and the choking reek of scorching insulation, the boat jolting and shuddering and beginning to break up, and in the middle of the flames, still unhurt, was Charley. "My God, it's dark out here.
 The Whale came out of its star-jump in the wrong position. It then crashed into the Pacific.
 Charlie sabotaged the deuterium fusion drive. The drive shut down, and the Whale crashed into the Pacific.  The ion rockets on the Whale exploded. It then crashed into the Pacific.  The Cazamian laser exploded, causing the Whale to crash down into the Pacific.  The Whale came out of its star-jump in the wrong position. It then crashed into the Pacific.