Men into Space by Murray Leinster — Read

(As a brand-new lieutenant, McCauley had been the first man to ride a rocket out of atmosphere. As a major, he was in the first piloted space craft to achieve an orbit and land again in one piece, and he helped to build the Space Platform. But it seemed likely that after he made colonel he was likely to be stuck with administrative tasks and go on no more trips. There was the affair of the Bramwell-Faraday screen, to be sure, but that was pure luck. He gloomily expected nothing more exciting than desk duty in some deadly tedious minor base upon the moon. But it happened that the asteroid Eros -- very small, very irregular in shape, and very, very eccentric in its orbit -- was due to pass close to Earth again as it went out from the sun. It had passed within two million miles of Earth in the 1930s, and nothing happened. But now McCauley was looking for an excuse to be more than a desk Colonel. He added up Eros and Mars and drone rockets, and the resources of the Space Service and a certain amount of imagination. He came up with something the Space Service had believed was still twenty years in the future. He'd worked out a way to get back from Mars. So he was assigned to try it.)

The Personnel Ship of the First Martian Expedition was within two million miles of Mars when McCauley missed his watch. Everything had gone along as predicted, up to that moment. The ship had taken off from Earth and headed outward for its rendezvous with the tiny asteroid Eros. It burned rocket fuel lavishly to get the necessary velocity for the journey. Then it floated interminably while Earth grew small and far away behind it, and the sun dwindled and its heat lessened. Then Eros appeared like the tiniest pinpoint of light, and the ship drew up to it and braked -- it had very little fuel left for its braking -- and touched, and then moored itself to the half acre of previously moored bales and cases and special drones that the asteroid had ferried out from Earth. The ship's crew went outside in space suits, each one separately tethered to the ship by a long cable. They began to check the condition of their waiting supplies. Everything had to be examined because it had lain -- hung -- rested for two years on Eros' surface in the network of cables and drill rods needed to hold it there. The condition of the stores was satisfactory. So Colonel Ed McCauley took a shower.