Part 2

But just the same he was almost weak from the reaction to the ending of his fears about what the doctors might decide. He looked at his watch. Just about on schedule. Over in a corner somebody with a headphone and chest mike was marking off items on a list he had before him. He said, "Telemeter circuits," and paused. A voice evidently sounded in his headphones, because he made a checkmark with his pencil. Then he said, "Tracker circuits," and waited, and made another checkmark. As McCauley walked on to where his voice was drowned out, he was still saying toneless things into his chest mike and making checkmarks after unhearable replies.

Randy closed the door of the cubicle where McCauley would put on the grav-suit. It was skin-tight and festooned all over with stray bits of equipment. Randy helped him get into it.

"Lucky son-of-a-gun!" he said conversationally. "How do the Irish get all the breaks?"

"Clean living," McCauley told him, "and a drag with the top brass."

It wasn't so, of course. Not the top brass part, anyhow.

His arm caught in the right sleeve and Randy helped him straighten it. There were peculiar tubes built into the fabric. They were all hooked to a grav-valve that would let compressed air into them at a suitable pressure to tighten the suit and fight the tendency of his blood and inner organs to be left behind when his bones and flesh were accelerated by the full thrust of the rocket. A man wasn't built to stand the acceleration he had to take. But the grav-suit would make up the difference.

He turned slowly around, and Randy inspected everything with the jealous care of somebody who'll never forgive himself if anything goes wrong. Presently he said:

"Flip it--but be careful!"

McCauley touched the test-stud. The tubes expanded. The suit tightened. It felt as if it were going to try to squeeze his whole body out through the neck. He lifted his hand and the squeezing stopped. Randy screwed up the test-stud so it couldn't flip on by accident. He felt of the chute-pack that was part of the suit, with the wide straps that went around McCauley's body and thighs. He checked the four trailing cables--each with a different-shaped plug on its end--that would pass along all the suit-instrumentation news to the telemeter transmitter.

Then Randy nodded worriedly and gave McCauley a cigarette.

"It looks okay," he said. But he fretted.

"Everything's okay," said McCauley.

He puffed contentedly. When the cigarette was half-smoked, somebody tapped on the door.

"You can get aboard, Lieutenant."

McCauley stood up. Randy opened the door for him and he went ambling clumsily through the blockhouse toward the exit. He heard a toneless voice say: "Crash wagon two"; then the man listened and made a checkmark. Somebody else snapped: "Tell the idiot that we're trying to keep him out of range of a few tons of hardware that'll be coming down out of the sky presently. Sit on his head!" That would be the official response to the civilian motorist's objection to being kept safely off the test site when a shoot was on.

McCauley went on out into the open air. He felt weighty and clumsy and cumbersome. He went around the blockhouse and into the blazing sunshine. The fueling crew was finished, but they hadn't left. They waited to watch him go aboard. There was a ladder leaning against the Aerobee. McCauley plodded heavily to the foot of it. He put his foot on the first rung and turned to Randy.

"Here I go."

"Yeah," said Randy. He didn't smile. He couldn't. But he did have a fine air of nonchalance as he said, "See you soon."

There was no handshake. It would have been too much like saying good-by. McCauley started up the ladder.

It was a long climb; and three-quarters of the way up, with all the assorted gimmicks and the clumsy chute-pack banging against his buttocks, he began to breathe fast. Once he stepped on a trailing cable. He looked down and was annoyed to find that the height bothered him--a man who would presently be up many miles higher than any man had ever been before. And this was only tens of feet, yet he felt giddy! He didn't look down again.

He reached the door in the nose-cone and climbed in. He'd practiced it. He felt easier when he was inside. Up here, on top of several tons of rocket fuel, he felt safer because there was a floor under him. He grimaced at the foolishness of it. Rocket fuel is highly explosive; a rocket works because a continuous explosion is taking place in its engine. But McCauley felt safer sitting on enough hydrazine and nitric to blow him to atoms than coming up a narrow, springy ladder.

Laboriously he settled himself. The acceleration chair had been tailored to fit him in this suit. He got the trailing cables clear and made himself comfortable. Then he waited. He could stir a little, but not much. It was, of course, extremely comforting to be able to move his feet in even limited swings.

The nose-cone door darkened. Somebody reached in and plugged the cables into their proper sockets. He hauled straps from nowhere and buckled them.

"Here's your helmet, Lieutenant," he said.

"Thanks," said McCauley.

He put it on. Air began to flow past his face and he knew that all the gadgets in his suit were hooked in, and that back in the blockhouse they could count his breaths and tell how deep they were, they were getting a continuous cardiogram to tell how his heart was working, and they had a running record of his blood pressure. If he panicked now they'd know it. The man outside the nose-cone door poked around like a hen fussing over a solitary chick. McCauley wished he'd go away. A voice sounded in the helmet earphones.

"_Checking phones. Do you hear me?_"

"Sure," said McCauley. "I hear all right."

The phones clicked and were silent. The nose-cone door closed and McCauley was alone. Somehow he felt naked, because he knew that everything he felt and almost everything he thought was going on record via telemeter in the blockhouse. It was dark here.... No, two small electric bulbs were glowing. One was a spare. He saw the stuff laid out for later.

He knew what went on outside, but it was what was going on inside him that disturbed him. He didn't want the instruments in his suit to report anything wrong. He wanted to do this job right! For that reason he was consciously patient while he knew that men clinging to the launching tower were pulling away the last-minute cords that had been reporting everything functioning just right. Then everybody'd be getting out of the way. The Aerobee stood silent and still above a concrete pit filled with water. Somebody would use a last few seconds to coil up a cable that should have been put away before. In seconds now, though, everyone would pop out of sight. Over by the mountains they'd be working the trackers there to make sure they were all right. There'd be the warning blast. It ought to be about now. Ten--nine--eight--

A voice came into the helmet phones.

"_Forty seconds more, Lieutenant. Everything's going fine so far!_"

McCauley had a momentary impulse to try to make some crack or other that would be appropriate, express how he felt, and so on. But he didn't feel as he'd expected to. And anything like that would sound like showing off. So he just answered matter-of-factly:

"That's good."

He waited. And waited. And waited. And waited.

The voice in his helmet phones said abruptly:

"_Ten seconds ... Nine ... Eight ... Seven ... Six ... Five ... Four ... Three ... Two ... One...._"

During the last second McCauley remembered to put his arms in the armrests, because the acceleration was going to be all he could take. _All._ If his arms hung down, the blood would engorge his fingers and swell them to uselessness. He was already scrounged down in place, and he had his chin in the chinrest of the helmet--the whole helmet had a fitting to support it--so if he blacked out his tongue wouldn't slide back down his throat and strangle him.

Something hit him. It hit him all over at the same instant, as if he were being slammed in a million places by a million six-ounce gloves all at once. Something grabbed his legs and squeezed his belly and blew air in his face, and the roar was numbing, but he didn't remember hearing it begin. He'd expected all of it but he reacted by quite automatically getting raging mad. He knew he was on the way up and he felt thrilled and furious and he hurt all over, simultaneously.

It was agony, but if he could have grinned he'd have done it. Everything had gone off all right! Nothing was wrong! It was too late for anything to stop the shoot now! It was happening!

His stomach felt terrifically tight against the corset-like front of the grav-suit. The legs squeezed--hard! That puff of wind was extra air pressure to protect his lungs. He suffered, and he was half blind, and he fought for breath, but that extra air pressure helped a lot. All the blood tried to come down out of his brain and his cheeks sagged and his ears would have flopped down if it weren't for the headphones holding them flat against his head.

Suddenly things were easier. The booster'd burned out and dropped off. McCauley remembered to grunt, to say that he hadn't lost consciousness in the first intolerable getaway acceleration. The two small electric bulbs had seemed to turn reddish. He made a mental note to mention it presently. The pressure was still monstrous. He seemed to weigh tons--actually he did weigh an appreciable part of one--but his weight was less than it had been. That first slamming was the take-off, lasting barely seconds though it felt like long minutes. This second-stage acceleration would last more than a minute. It would seem like hours.

It did. McCauley's muscles were already getting weary of lifting his whole chest for breathing when a voice said in the phones: "_Beautiful shoot! Beautiful! Everything's going fine!_" He grunted in acknowledgment. It would be too much effort to talk. Also he felt an obscure anger, which was his body's reaction to the unreasonable suffering imposed upon it. A little green light flashed, and he was supposed to grunt at it, and he did.

He grunted a second time when it flashed again. Quickly. A third and fourth and fifth time. Something would be learned from the quickness with which he could respond to signals during this second-stage thrust. A pause, and the green light flashed and kept on flashing too fast for him to respond, and he said, "Cripes!" very wearily. Then it stopped.

The roaring went on and on, and abruptly there were violent coughings below. Instantly his head tried to split wide open because the acceleration ceased between two heartbeats, while his heart kept on trying to pump blood against a static head which was many times normal, and suddenly there was no static head at all. There was no gravity to be pumped against. There was no weight to anything. Then his heart tried to adjust to that, and it skipped beats, and all his insides that had been dragged downward now rose up and tried to climb out of his throat.

He gagged and swallowed.

"Okay!" he panted. "In free fall! The light changed to reddish but it's back to normal. I feel fighting mad. Over."

"_First puzzle_," said a brisk voice in the headphones.

McCauley reached out into the arrangement of objects before him. He took out a puzzle. It wasn't complicated, but he had to recognize it and then remember how to do it. He tossed it aside, finished, and his working time was undoubtedly recorded. The voice said:

"_Name two things in the same class among these: robin, shovel, tree, ibis, shark._"

McCauley answered. Again the time was noted. This was straight IQ stuff, to see how soon and how well his brain was functioning after the beating he'd taken in the booster-stage take-off and the second-stage acceleration of the rocket itself. He knew what it was all about, even when they told him to solve puzzle six, and then four, and then asked more silly questions. He responded as well as he could, with no idea how good that was. But he felt a great irrational anger and indignation. When he was asked to recite a paragraph of prose he'd memorized for the exact purpose of reciting it, on demand, he recited it. But he was unreasonably angry. It was his body's response to the suffering just past.

Presently he snapped:

"Doggone it, I want to see something!"

"_Go ahead_," said the voice from the ground. "_But keep on talking. It doesn't matter what you say. Talk._"

He pressed the button that slid the port shutters aside. The shutters were necessary. There'd been terrific heat outside when the nose-cone flung upward through the denser lower atmosphere near ground level. He looked eagerly out.

For a moment he couldn't speak. He saw the horizon as an almost white line against a star-specked black sky. It was curved! There were innumerable flecks of whiteness--they'd be clouds--below him; they grew thicker farther away. He saw the ocean, which was hundreds of miles away. The world visibly tilted downwards, downhill away from him. He looked below and it was paradoxically a bowl. Quite close he saw a fleeting, rushing, tormented spurt of vapor which vanished instantly. It was a steam-jet correcting yaw or spin or tumbling, up here where the air was so thin that the fins themselves could take no grip on it.

Years ago, when a WAC corporal made the first flight up to the then incredible height of two hundred and fifty miles, the machine turned end for end five times as it rose, and its tumbling made no difference. It was practically in a vacuum. McCauley was higher than that, already. But this Aerobee pointed straight, balanced by little puffings of steam. It didn't even rotate.

He could see stars all around, and then he turned to the one filtered port and looked at the sun through it. It was a monstrous brilliance, with writhing fire-fringes around its edges. He saw Mercury off to its right. It was the first time in his life that he'd ever seen that planet, and he'd had to get out of the atmosphere to do it. Not one person in ten thousand has ever seen the sun's closest satellite, even as a tiny speck of light in the sky. But McCauley saw it, not hidden by the daytime sky. There was no air here to speak of. At this height a man not in a pressure-tight cabin, trying to breathe what few molecules of air were present, would die in thirteen seconds because of anoxia and explosive decompression. He'd die no more quickly out between the galaxies.

"_Keep talking_," said the voice in the headphones. "_Keep talking, man!_"

McCauley found himself stammering. What he said wasn't particularly coherent, and he knew his taped speech would be studied to find out exactly what mental state he was in. The headphones asked questions. Could he see this? Could he see that? He answered yes and no. The voice asked him to write something. He did, not looking at it. He stared out at the monstrousness of the universe, with Earth merely a dimpled gigantic ball below him.

He had no weight, but he did not notice. He gazed and gazed and exulted, and absent-mindedly obeyed the orders which came insistently to his ears. He wanted to saturate his mind and his memory with the sight that nobody had ever seen before, except in pictures taken at this height by robots.

Presently the sky wasn't totally black with innumerable tiny lights in it. It was a deep, dark purple. The stars seemed fainter. He said so.

"_Right_," said the voice in his helmet. "_You reached peak altitude minutes ago. You're well on the way back down, now. We're going to turn the rocket over._"

He realized the absolute silence about him by the fact that now he heard trivial, insignificant noises. Steam-jets came on--hydrogen peroxide sprayed into a catalysis chamber where it broke down instantly into steam and gas. The product rushed out the fin-tip jets. The universe visibly turned upside down; the sky was down beyond his feet, and the singular, unfamiliar object which was Earth could be seen only when he craned his neck to look upward.

He felt no difference, of course. He'd had no weight before, and he had none now. The appearance of Earth changed so gradually that he didn't really realize that he was approaching it. But he knew it in his mind, and he resented bitterly that he had passed the high point of this achievement and was now bound back toward the commonplace, the ordinary.

He made an effort to become his normal self. "Now I suspect I'm getting scared," he said wryly into his helmet mike. If he admitted it he'd be ashamed and so could fight it. But he found that he wasn't really scared. He was apprehensive, as one is when approaching a dentist's chair. He felt reluctant, because he knew that after he got down he'd be due for ghastly, tedious days during which the doctors would go over him almost with microscopes to hunt for sputters--the burned, exploded patches that would show up where cosmic-ray particles not slowed by air went through his body. There shouldn't be any, but there could be some. Robot instruments said no sputters. But a man had to come up here to make sure.

He felt something--a featherweight of pull toward the pointed tip of the nose-cone. The rocket had hit air which slowed it enough so he noticed it. He was astounded that he'd come back so far so fast. True, he was still almost unthinkably high by the standards of other men, but he'd been out in space!

Earth was deplorably near. At twenty miles up--a hundred-odd thousand feet--the processes for landing him should begin. He settled himself in his seat against what was coming.... He suddenly realized that he'd been talking, though he didn't remember what he'd said. Undoubtedly, though, he'd said everything that came into his head. He stopped. The headphone voice said encouragingly, "_You're okay!_"

"So far!" he answered.

There was the story about the optimist who fell off a skyscraper. Twenty stories earthward he saw someone looking out a window and called, "Everything's fine so far!" Yes....

There was an explosion and he started. Then others. They came from small, half-pound explosive charges set at carefully chosen places on the rocket. They were there to wreck its streamlined shape; to make it an irregular, dynamically inefficient object which would offer enormously increased resistance to its own fall through the air. Technically it was considered that the terminal speed-of-fall of the shattered rocket would be less than that of a man falling free without a parachute. What was that? A hundred and fifty miles an hour, or a hundred and twenty? McCauley tensed himself.

It seemed that something broke loose. The rocket reeled. It plunged. It turned end over end and McCauley was flung intolerably this way and that against the straps that held him in his seat. A wallop nearly snapped his neck. But this was the way it was supposed to be. Streamlined, the rocket would have struck nose-first and buried itself in small fragments in the sandy soil below. This way....

It mushed. It wabbled. It tumbled as crazily as a maple leaf and as dizzily. McCauley steeled himself to endure it. "_Sixteen more miles of this!_" he thought.

But it was nearly over. There was another flash of explosive, this time nearby, and the nose-cone flew violently apart and a blast of wind hit him. Then there was a thump--a terrific thump--and a no less bone-shaking bump, and his acceleration seat was ejected and he was flying free through nothingness. Then the straps miraculously came loose and he was turning end for end; Earth and sky were playing merry-go-round in all directions simultaneously, while something ungainly and monstrous writhed crazily away from him and toward the agile Earth. And then there was a jolt and a jerk and another jerk....

He swung widely, but right-side up, beneath a perfectly commonplace government-issue parachute a mere three miles high. He was sore and bruised and shaken and dizzy, but everything was perfectly all right. He'd been ejected from the falling rocket just as instruments had been ejected hundreds of times before, and an ordinary parachute had opened to let him sink tranquilly and safely to the ground, just as it had done with the instruments.

He was remarkably close to solidity now. He got his breath and saw the mountains and the vast, ridged, sun-baked, mesquite-dotted ground of the rocket site. He could see the officers'-quarters building where he'd had breakfast this morning. He spotted the blockhouse, with the spindling launching tower from which he had departed so recently.

Then he saw a trail of dust flowing across the ground below. It was the pickup gang. He'd been tracked every second, and they'd be underneath when he touched ground. Randy would be there, and the other men who'd give their eyeteeth to have taken his place. But they'd be gloating because he'd gotten back all right. They'd be grinning, swearing, exultant, overjoyed....

It suddenly occurred to McCauley that it would be intolerable if they weren't glad. He didn't feel proud himself. He hadn't done anything. He'd just gone for a ride that they'd made possible. But all the same he was filled to bursting with the goodness of what had happened.

He saw the whole thing in perspective now. Swinging below the parachute, he could estimate with fine precision just what had taken place. It had become possible for a man to go up to the edge of emptiness, to where he could look with his own eyes upon the sun and stars in their own unshielded splendor. And because a man could do it, a man had to.

And he'd been the man.

He felt overwhelmingly good as he settled, swaying, under the white blossom of nylon cloth, with the pickup gang streaking in half a dozen vehicles toward the place where he would land. Long plumes of yellow dust followed each one.

Earth came floating up to meet him.

_2_

(When Ed McCauley was still a reasonably young officer, there were many commonplace things that hadn't been done yet. Satellites circled the earth from west to east and across both poles and with other assorted orbits. There were artificial satellites in orbit even around the sun, and every so often somebody put up a new one for some new purpose. There'd been a landing on the moon--by robot--and a robot station there spasmodically reported temperatures and cosmic-ray frequency, and a surprising number of moonquakes.

But even so, many things hadn't yet been done. Man had circled the earth in capsules, but not yet had any man lifted his own rocketship from Earth and set himself in orbit. Still less had any man risen into space as the captain of his ship and brought it back to earth. Until such a thing was done, it would be absurd to speak of spaceships. Missiles, yes. Satellites, yes. But a ship had to take off and land on its own before men could say there is such a thing as a spaceship.)

Young Major McCauley arrived at Quartermain Base in an Air Transport ship which stopped briefly to drop him off and toss out a mail sack which was instantly taken in charge by two side-armed noncoms and hauled away. Then the Transport ship bellowed vociferously and took off across the incredibly level pebbly plain, lifted and retracted its wheels, and soared up into the infinitely blue sky of this part of the world. It left McCauley standing in a vast emptiness, except for unimpressive base buildings. He felt singularly lonely.