He screamed; no, I can't do it, I can't face it—
Someone—listen—
The dull muted explosion miles away, and the terrific compression and the wash of numbing, deafening sound beating back around him. Everything inside him seeming to whirl up and come down in a crash. The seeming to slide around in the dihedrals of time and space, slipping in and out of being like a ball-bearing in a maze....
First man to the moon. In a rocket meant for no man. Not a rocket. A coffin—on a one-way trip—
And I—maybe the one, the very one they should never have sent.
With each degree of returning consciousness, more and more capacity for fighting the fear. He cursed the fear and wrestled with it like a man with an invisible opponent down an endless flight of stairs.
He felt too alone, isolated; then he thought of the readings. They could be flashed into a small screen in the face-plate by manipulating the fingers of his right hand. He tried to concentrate on the readings as an aid in fighting the fear.
... in the stratosphere, eighty kilometers, rocket's temperature minus a hundred and fifty degrees. Hundred and twenty-five kilometers, lower part of ionosphere, up plus one hundred and fifty—and then on up where it was somewhere around a thousand degrees, and who cared? He was beyond that—away way out—somewhere—
It went on a long time and then ... nothing but darkness ... the lonely song of the gyroscopes. His own voice ... distant, alien ... raving ... a kind of delirium ... then sometime, an awareness of the cutting down of power, the brief warning of intuition, the concussion. And as consciousness came back again, the knowing that he had hit too hard in spite of the lighter moon gravity.
His head throbbing crazily and around him the absolute darkness and silence and the warm ache in his head, the dizziness and the warm stickiness flowing down his face.