Men into space

COPYRIGHT © 1960 BY ZIV TELEVISION PRODUCTIONS, INC.
All rights reserved
BERKLEY EDITION, OCTOBER, 1960
BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by The Berkley Publishing Corporation 101 Fifth Avenue, New York 3, New York
Printed in the United States of America
IN OUTER SPACE
There was no sensation of weight. Nothing weighed anything. Nothing could be considered light or heavy. The difference in weight between a copper penny and the ship itself was imaginary. They had different masses, but both would weigh the same—zero. McCauley suddenly turned off the silent air-circulator of the cabin. He struck a match. The flame flared, but not as a rising leaf-shape. It was a perfect ball of incandescence. But it did not continue to burn. It went out, and a ball of white smokiness remained where the flame had been....
1
(When Ed McCauley was a very young officer—in fact, a new-made first lieutenant, space travel was restricted to robots. They did good work, for robots, but it wasn't enough. No man had ever gone up in a rocket. Nobody had ever gone up—let alone land safely. So the time came when somebody had to. And in those very early days McCauley volunteered for the job and managed to get it.)
First Lieutenant Ed McCauley opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling, wondering drowsily why this morning seemed so much more satisfying and important than any other. He'd had a good sleep, even though he remembered vaguely that he'd had a hard time dropping off. Now the sunlight came through the window blind in slatted streaks, the wall was a pale tan, and he was lying on an iron cot, his uniform neatly draped over a chair. Then he heard voices and the clattering of china, and suddenly he remembered where he was and what was important about today.
Today was the day of the shoot. The rocket shoot. It wasn't going to be big and spectacular, with a multiple-stage giant looming so high that a man couldn't see the payload capsule on top without his neck creaking. There'd be no giant gantry crane hovering over a slim but monstrous missile with its hundreds of plugged-in wires recording the performances of some tens of thousands of separate parts, all of which had to work perfectly if one part were to be any good. Even the electric wires had to pull clear perfectly when the gantry crane rolled back a matter of seconds before the end of the count down.