Stevens guessed that the brain-boys up in some hidden bureau had an idea that sooner or later they would find somebody who could stand it, then they could make tests, find out why. Stevens had no idea how many had already been sacrificed. The boys upstairs knew but they weren't giving out statistics these days. Stevens would increase the unknown number by one more.
So it meant nothing, he thought. He wasn't one of the superboys, the jet-jyrenes, the hero lads who never came back and had statues and plaques stuck all over the place for being permanently en absentia. Not anymore, he wasn't.
He was one of the new volunteers from the West Coast branch of the Military Prison. Big-hearted Kanin had even promised him a pardon if he brought the ship back. It was a new high in irony, but that was about all.
He wouldn't come back, and he knew it. But he would be free, and Doris would be free to live her own life. He had been stupid, hot-headed, once—and this was a preferable way, he had decided, to pay up the debt.
Doris had resigned herself to waiting for him. It was a manslaughter charge, and he would have gotten out maybe in fifteen years. They didn't parole anybody from a Military Prison, at least not on anything as heavy as manslaughter. It wasn't fair to Doris, nor to himself.
All right. He was in a shiny "Coffin" and he would soon be on his way to wherever the others had gone—into nowhere. Where was nowhere? That was a question. It was way up, higher than anyone had returned from to answer—still within the bounds of gravity but—high. A lot of guys had found it, but they weren't sending back any ESP messages from the Beyond.
It was up there where the Earth lost its face behind thick vapor veils and began to look like a fancy balloon, that was where you found out the location of nowhere. Inside a beautifully stream-lined "Coffin" you found out—hurtling way beyond the speed of sound, shattering the supersonic barriers, and faster and faster still....
What happened to them? Nobody had figured it out. All the best brains in the world working on it might figure it out. But the brains were split up, divided into little camps here and there, getting a lot of atomic spitballs ready to throw at one another, when teacher's back was turned.
So it wasn't figured out, what happened to them. They had come a long way since they first broke the barrier. Faster and faster and faster—but they'd hit a limit somewhere up there. And until they wiped out that limitation, the Moon was as far away as it had ever been back when man thought the canoe was a great discovery.
They just went faster and faster and faster—and then they disappeared. A curtain parted. A curtain closed. And wherever man wanted to get to so fast—he got there.