For the moon shot he'd been responsible for communications, recording and sensing systems inside the capsule, as Hatter had for the life-support systems and their two back-up men for propulsion and ground systems coordination respectively. He relived the maddening, risky business of the master switch to be secretly connected with the capsule's several brains and camouflaged. The strap to be weakened. Then the blind terror of launch when his pulse had topped 120; blurred vision, clenched teeth, the suit digging into him, the brief relief of weightlessness erased by the cramped, terrifying ride filled with new sensations and endless petty tasks. The camera eye pitilessly trained on his helmet. The way things had of staying there when you'd put them away. On Earth—already it was "On Earth," as if Earth was a port he'd sailed from—you put things out of your mind, but here they bobbed before you still, like the good luck charm in its little leather bag, for instance, the charm his wife had tied to one of his fastener tabs and that kept dancing in the air like a puppet, jerking every time he breathed.
Every time he breathed in the familiar sweat-plastic-chemicals smell, familiar because he'd been smelling it in training, in the transfer truck, in the capsule mock-up for months. All that should be new and adventurous had become stale and automatic through relentless training. His eyes rested on the color-coded meters and switches that were associated with nausea in the centrifuge tumbler-trainer. The couch made him think of long hours in the chlorinated pool—he always used to come out with his stomach rumbling and wrinkled white fingers, despite the tablets and the silicone creams. His skin itched beneath the adhesive pads that held the prying electrodes to his body, itched like the salt and sand itch he felt after swimming between training bouts. It was still Florida air he breathed, but filters had taken out its oil-fouled hot smell, its whiffs of canteen cooking, fish, seaweed and raw concrete in the sun. Hatter's and his own sing-song bit talk, so deliciously new to television audiences, rang trite in his own ears: a makeshift vocabulary, primer sentences chosen for maximum transmission efficiency to Control.
The Control center he remembered from having watched orbital flights himself. Machines that patiently followed pulse rate, breathing, temperature. Squiggly lines, awkward computer handwriting, screens where dots jumped, screens that showed instrument panels, screens where his own helmet showed, and inside it the squirming blob that was his own face, rendered as a kind of rubberized black-and-white tragic mask. He felt the metal ears turning, questing for signals, the little black boxes, miniaturized colossi tracking, listening, spewing tape. On the capsule itself—all folded in like Japanese water flowers—sensors, cameras, listeners, analyzers should have burgeoned on impact, shot up, reached out, grasped, retracted, analyzed, counted, transmitted.
But he'd cut the switch.
Al Marcusson blinked awake.
He set about freeing himself, a task comparable to getting a butterfly alive out of a spider web. Every creak of his suit and of the moulded couch sounded loud and flat in the newly silent capsule. His breathing soughed about him. But no signal went out from the electrodes taped to his chest to say that his heart beat had again topped a hundred, that he sweated, that his stomach contracted—even though he was under no gravity strain, the emergency cooling worked, and his latest no-crumbs, low-residue meal had been welcomed by the same stomach an hour earlier.
He sat up. The port gave off a pale creamy glow. He leaned forward and could see nothing except for a cream- or eggshell-colored mist, even and opaque.
He undid his glove-rings and took off his gloves. By the gleam of his wrist-light he checked whether Hatter was breathing correctly from his suit, visor down, and not the capsule's air, then put his gloves on again and bled the air slowly out. They were not supposed to leave the capsule, of course. Still the possibility of having to check or repair something had had to be considered and it was theoretically possible. He began the nerve-rasping egress procedure, through the narrow igloo-lock that seemed to extend painful claws and knobs to catch at every loop and fold of his suit. At last he gave a frantic wiggle and rolled free.
Because of the dead switch, turning antennae circled in vain, pens stopped reeling out ink, screens stayed blank. The men in the control room activated emergency signals but got no triggered responses. Meanwhile, television reporters sent frantic requests for background material fillers, their "and now back to's" falling thick and fast.