It was cold and dark out here and he wanted to get in to the friendliness and the warmth and the peaceful, familiar security, but he didn’t dare go around to the door because he knew if he did the vision would vanish and he’d never find it again.
He scratched and beat at the window but his fingers made no sound, he tried to shout but his cries were only strangled whispers and the old lady sat and rocked and talked to the big gray cat and never turned her head.
The fire seemed to be flaring up suddenly, it was filling the whole room—a monstrous furnace; it shouldn’t do that he knew, but the old lady didn’t seem to mind sitting there rocking amid the flames—and it was so nice and warm. The fire kept growing and swelling though—soon it burst through the window and engulfed him. Too hot. Too hot.
Johnny swam hazily back to consciousness with an aching head and thick mouth. He saw that he had drifted clear of his protective screen somehow and the sun beat full on him. With clumsy, fumbling hands that seemed to belong to somebody else he managed the air valve; the increased oxygen reviving him enough to find the pedals and jet erratically about till he gained the shadow once more.
Now he was entering upon the worst phase of the living nightmare. Awake, the doubts and fears of his position tormented him; wearied, he feared to sleep, yet continually he found himself nodding only to jerk awake with that suddenness that is like a physical blow. Each one of these awakenings took away a little more of his self-control till he was reduced to near hysteria, muttering abstractly, sometimes whimpering like a lost child; now seized with a feverish concern for his air supply. He would at one instant cut it down to a dangerous minimum, then, remembering the near disaster of his first attempt at economy, frantically turn it up till he was in danger of an oxygen jag. In a moment he would forget and start all over again.
In addition, he was now realizing bitterly what he had subconsciously denied to himself for so long, that they had found Able Jake and drawn the obvious conclusion. That he had been obliterated or blown out through the hull by the collision without warning or preparation. That he was undoubtedly dead if not vaporized altogether and, as they must, considering the expense of a probably fruitless search, abandon him.
There came the moment when Johnny accepted this in full. This was directly after the time when, sliding down the long hill to the perigee of his orbit, he turned on his radio and cried for help. It was a bare hundred miles or less to that wonderful world below, but there was the Heaviside layer, and the weak signals beat but feebly against it. All that seeped through by some instant’s freak of transmission was a fragment of incoherent babble to reach the uncomprehending ear of an Arkansas ham and give that gentleman uneasy sleep for some time to come.
He kept calling mechanically even after perigee was long past, praying for an answer from the powerful transmitters below or from a searching ship. But when there was no slightest whisper in his phones or answering flare among the stars, Johnny came to the end of faith. Even of awareness, for his own ears did not register the transition of his calls to an insane howling of intermixed pleas, threats, condemnation—a sewer flood of foul vilification against those who had betrayed him.
Bright and beautiful, Earth rolled blandly beneath him, the sun was a remote impersonal thing and the stars mocked silently. After a while the radio carried only the agonized sounds of a man who had forgotten how to cry and must learn again. There were times after this when he observed incuriously a parade of mind pictures, part memory, part pure hallucination and containing nothing of reason; other times when he thought not at all. The sun appeared to dwindle, retreating and fading far away into a remote place where there were no stars at all. It became a feeble candle, guttered unsteadily a moment and suddenly winked out. Abruptly Johnny was asleep.