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"Jay Score" is a 7500-word short story by Eric Frank Russell, about a spaceship in distress that must make a pass dangerously close to the sun. The story was first published in the May, 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

The narrator is a crewman on the spaceship Upskadaska City, which is making a routine run from Earth to Venus, ferrying supplies and passengers. The crew includes tentacled Martians, who breath very little air, and whose job is to make repairs, though in their spare time they love to play chess. Also joining the crew is a new emergency pilot, a 6 foot 9 inch, businesslike crewman named Jay Score. While approaching the planet Venus, a meteorite punctures a section of the ship, causing an air leak. The hatches seal, and Jay Score rescues a crewman who got trapped in the leaking section. The meteorite damaged some of the ship’s systems, and by the time the Martians get them repaired, the ship has already passed Venus and is hurtling toward the Sun. Captain McNulty calls the crew and passengers together, and explains that the ship is going too fast to just turn around. Instead, they will try a “cometary”.

The stunt was a purely theoretical one frequently debated by mathematicians and astro-navigators but never tried out in grim reality. The idea is to build up all the velocity that can be got and at the same time to angle into the path of an elongated, elliptical orbit resembling that of a comet. In theory, the vessel might then skim close to the sun so supremely fast that it would swing pendulumlike far out to the opposite side of the orbit whence it came.

But the captain confesses that the chances of success are slim, and that someone will need to stay on the bridge to steer the ship. One of the Martians tries to volunteer, since Martians would have the best chance of surviving the tremendous heat of the sun, but the Captain has already chosen Jay Score for the job. Everyone else heads for an insulated cold room to ride out the storm. The captain comes into the cold room two hours later, haggard and blistered, and reports that if they can survive the next four hours, they will be out of danger.

Soon, even the cold room starts to overheat, and then the rockets falter. One of the Martians, Kli Yang, leaves the cold room to repair the damage, and then returns. The narrator passes out from the heat, and recovers a few minutes before the four hours are up. When that time expires, the temperature in the ship begins finally to fall, and they venture out of the cold room to check out the damage. They find Jay Score, just barely alive, blinded, burned and unable to speak. The ship returns to New York, where Captain McNulty and Jay Score are honored for their feat by induction into a special club: “To qualify for membership one had to perform in dire emergency a feat of astro-navigation tantamount to a miracle.” As the speakers honor the feat of Jay Score, the narrator describes Jay’s embarrassed reaction:

…the victim sat there, his restored eyes bright and glittering, but his face completely immobile despite the talk…But after ten minutes of this I saw J.20 begin to fidget with obvious embarrassment.

Don’t let anyone tell you that a robot can’t have feelings!”

Additional Notes

This story has been reprinted in, among other places, Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 3 (1941).

This was the first of four stories, later collected into the book Men, Martians and Machines (1955). Asimov writes that this was “the best robot story not written by myself since Helen O’Loy by Lester del Rey.”