He felt something—a featherweight of pull toward the pointed tip of the nose-cone. The rocket had hit air which slowed it enough so he noticed it. He was astounded that he'd come back so far so fast. True, he was still almost unthinkably high by the standards of other men, but he'd been out in space!
Earth was deplorably near. At twenty miles up—a hundred-odd thousand feet—the processes for landing him should begin. He settled himself in his seat against what was coming.... He suddenly realized that he'd been talking, though he didn't remember what he'd said. Undoubtedly, though, he'd said everything that came into his head. He stopped. The headphone voice said encouragingly, "You're okay!"
"So far!" he answered.
There was the story about the optimist who fell off a skyscraper. Twenty stories earthward he saw someone looking out a window and called, "Everything's fine so far!" Yes....
There was an explosion and he started. Then others. They came from small, half-pound explosive charges set at carefully chosen places on the rocket. They were there to wreck its streamlined shape; to make it an irregular, dynamically inefficient object which would offer enormously increased resistance to its own fall through the air. Technically it was considered that the terminal speed-of-fall of the shattered rocket would be less than that of a man falling free without a parachute. What was that? A hundred and fifty miles an hour, or a hundred and twenty? McCauley tensed himself.
It seemed that something broke loose. The rocket reeled. It plunged. It turned end over end and McCauley was flung intolerably this way and that against the straps that held him in his seat. A wallop nearly snapped his neck. But this was the way it was supposed to be. Streamlined, the rocket would have struck nose-first and buried itself in small fragments in the sandy soil below. This way....
It mushed. It wabbled. It tumbled as crazily as a maple leaf and as dizzily. McCauley steeled himself to endure it. "Sixteen more miles of this!" he thought.
But it was nearly over. There was another flash of explosive, this time nearby, and the nose-cone flew violently apart and a blast of wind hit him. Then there was a thump—a terrific thump—and a no less bone-shaking bump, and his acceleration seat was ejected and he was flying free through nothingness. Then the straps miraculously came loose and he was turning end for end; Earth and sky were playing merry-go-round in all directions simultaneously, while something ungainly and monstrous writhed crazily away from him and toward the agile Earth. And then there was a jolt and a jerk and another jerk....
He swung widely, but right-side up, beneath a perfectly commonplace government-issue parachute a mere three miles high. He was sore and bruised and shaken and dizzy, but everything was perfectly all right. He'd been ejected from the falling rocket just as instruments had been ejected hundreds of times before, and an ordinary parachute had opened to let him sink tranquilly and safely to the ground, just as it had done with the instruments.
He was remarkably close to solidity now. He got his breath and saw the mountains and the vast, ridged, sun-baked, mesquite-dotted ground of the rocket site. He could see the officers'-quarters building where he'd had breakfast this morning. He spotted the blockhouse, with the spindling launching tower from which he had departed so recently.