Rereading "Escape From Orbit"

Poul Anderson, "Escape from Orbit" IN Anderson, Time And Stars (London, 1970), pp. 81-100.

A previous reading of this story:

Escape From Orbit
Commuting

Also relevant to commuting:

Alien Superiority, Physical Or Moral?

"...the sky darkened until it was an infinitely deep Bonestell blue..." (p. 81)

I had no idea what "Bonestell" meant and am glad that I stopped to google it.

Wister has to get out of bed and go into the hall to answer the phone: no bedside phone or mobile. Wister's boss has to phone several colleagues successively instead of sending a group text.  (I know that our communications technology did not exist when this story was published in 1962. I am merely contrasting Anderson's projected future with our real one. We are now in the future with respect to 1962.)

"Make haste slowly, he told himself." (p. 82)

Anderson could have used the Latin: Festina lente.

The emergency is that three men are stuck in orbit around the Moon. This sounds like very near future sf but then we learn that these three have previously been to Mars and back, like the hero of Anderson's Shield. This story is somewhere between categories (i) and (ii) in the previous post.