Lifeboat

With the spaceliner Eurydice's nuclear reactor near explosion point and Captain Collingwood on the sick list, what started as a routine voyage to Ganymede suddenly goes wrong in almost every other possible way. Mercer, the new-boy Medical Officer, is responsible for herding anxious passengers into the dinky three-person plastic survival pods that lack proper controls and, without adequate insulation, soon become overheated. After quite some time in the space-travel game, it seems odd to me that nobody has designed a better 'lifeboat' or found how to regulate the internal temperatures of these vital craft. Having said that, however, White never wrote a more vivid novel about people under extreme stress (not excepting The Watch Below).