At the moment they are milling belligerently outside my force-field screen. As I look into their stupid, imaginationless faces I can only think that somewhere in the past they were invented by some unorthodox Terran scientist, probably of English descent. They—
Wait.
The force field. It's wavering. It must have been damaged when it got tramped underfoot. They are going to get in to me. It—
Barnhart watched them prepare the rocket that would blast him into an orbit circling the planet. He could see and even hear the sound that vibrated through the thin membrane in which he was encased, but he could not move a nerve-end. Fortunately his eyes were focused on infinity, so he could see everything at least blurrily.
The Leader, who seemed to have grown a few inches, wasted no time. He gave the orders and the quronos lifted him into the rocket. The hatch closed down on the indigo day and he was alone.
The blast of takeoff almost deafened him but he didn't feel the jar—only because, he realized, he could feel nothing.
A few weeks later the centrifugal force of the spinning rocket finally nudged the latch and the hatch swung open. Barnhart was exposed to naked fire-bright blackness itself.
After a day or two he stopped worrying about that, as he had stopped fretting about breathing.
He grew accustomed to the regular turn around the planet every fourteen hours. For two out of every three seconds he faced out into space and that was always changing. Yet, all poetry aside, the change was always the same.
He didn't have to worry about keeping on a schedule. He kept on one automatically.