Come on, come on!

He was no longer reading, just skimming over the hand-written lines.

There it was!

The date he had been forced to memorize as a schoolkid, and underneath it:

1640 hours. Rec’d. Deimos’s met. warning re: cloud headed our way from Jupiter perturbation of the Leonids. Cloud approaching on a collision course at vel. 40 km/sec. MW confirmed. PM alert sounded for crew. Despite persistent reactor leakage of 0.42 roentgen per hour, full-thrust escape maneuver on a course approximating Orion delta.

New paragraph:

1651. Im—

The rest of the page was blank.

No marks, no scribbling, no ink stains—nothing except for the final vertical stroke of the letter m, dipping down in willful defiance of the rules of good penmanship.

This wobbly, several-millimeters-long extension, breaking off the text to wander aimlessly across the white expanse of paper, told the whole story: the crash on impact, the exploding decompression, the shrieks of men at the moment their throats and eyeballs burst…

But Momssen’s ship had a different name. What was it called?

It was unreal. A ship almost as famous as Columbus’s, and he couldn’t remember the name of it!

What was the name of that ship, Momssen’s last ship?

He hopped over to the bookshelf. The fat volume of Lloyd’s Shipping Register seemed to plunk down right into his hands. A word that began with C. Cosmonaut? No. Condor? Not it, either. A longer name… the title of a play… a hero, a knight…

He flung the book down on the desk and squinted at the walls. Hanging between the chart cabinet and the bookshelf were some instruments: a hygrometer, a radiation counter, a carbon-dioxide gauge…

He scrutinized each of them, turning them this way and that. Not one inscription. They looked brand new, in fact.