Another Earth

Whatever it was that had happened in the test, it badly needed a good explanation.
Lieutenant Colonel Philip Snow, Flight Surgeon, USAF, and Test Director of the Aero-Medical Laboratory, was pacing the study floor in his quarters, asking himself for the dozenth time in the past half-hour: What had happened to Richardson during the test that afternoon?
He was no stranger to problems. He had been living with them for the past few years, and they had been problems the like of which had never before challenged the ingenuity of man. For he was the head of a small community of men, scientists like himself—medical specialists of all kinds, psychologists, electronic technicians, physicists, pressure engineers, mathematicians and so on, each one of them an acknowledged expert in his particular field—who had worked together with one end in view: to send a man into space and bring him back safely to Earth again. To put it more excitingly: to enable man to take his first step toward the conquest of the universe.
The result of their labors to date was the Capsule, a bottle-shaped contraption which occupied the center of the laboratory floor.
It wasn't very big; just big enough to contain a man enclosed in a spacesuit, lying on a couch surrounded by instruments. But there wasn't a square inch of the capsule itself, the spacesuit, and the instruments which hadn't presented innumerable problems, the solving of which had been the result of endless research and theorizing and testing.
And in the same way, and almost to the same extent, there wasn't a square inch of the man, too, which didn't present problems, all of which must be solved before he could be sent into space.
And so, in test after test, one of the chosen astronauts had lain on the couch in the capsule, wired through his spacesuit to the dozens of dials and graph recorders on the consoles at which sat the watching specialists. It seemed there was nothing that could happen inside his body that they could not know about. They could read every flexing of his muscles, every heartbeat, every tiny shifting of temperature, every reaction of his blood and of his complicated nervous system. On the encephalograph, they could even detect reactions in the mass of gray matter which was his brain, any sign of tension there, and above all, any symptom of that strange phenomenon of which so little was yet known, and which was called the breakoff —the eerie sensation of complete isolation from Earth, the trancelike apathy and indifference to survival that can attack not only high-flying pilots, but deep-sea divers, the rapture of the depths, and sometimes it was accompanied by hallucinations in which strange forms and sounds were seen and heard.