“It’ll be hard to adjust to, awake,” said Sally. “But getting adjusted to it asleep should be worse. You’ve waked up from a dream that you’re falling?”
“Sure,” said Joe. Then he whistled. “Oh-oh! I see! You’d drop off to sleep, and you’d be falling. So you’d wake up. Everybody in the Platform will be falling around the Earth in the Platform’s orbit! Every time they doze off they’ll be falling and they’ll wake up!”
He managed to think about it. It was true enough. A man awake could remind himself that he only thought and felt that he was falling, and that there was no danger. But what would happen when he tried to sleep? Falling is the first fear a human being ever knows. Everybody in the world has at one time waked up gasping from a dream of precipices down which he plunged. It is an inborn terror. And no matter how thoroughly a man might know in his conscious mind that weightlessness was normal in emptiness, his conscious mind would go off duty when he went to sleep. A completely primitive subconscious would take over then, and it would not be satisfied. It might wake him frantically at any sign of dozing until he cracked up from sheer insomnia ... or else let him sleep only when exhaustion produced unconsciousness rather than restful slumber.
“That’s a tough one!” he said disturbedly, and noticed that she still showed signs of her recent distress. “There’s not much to be done about it, either!”
“I suggested something,” said Sally, “and they built it in. I hope it works!” she explained uncomfortably. “It’s a sort of blanket with a top that straps down, and an inflatable underside. When a man wants to sleep, he’ll inflate this thing, and it will hold him in his bunk. It won’t touch his head, of course, and he can move, but it will press against him gently.”
Joe thought over what Sally had just explained. He noticed that they were quite close together, but he put his mind on her words.
“It’ll be like a man swimming?” he asked. “One can go to sleep floating. There’s no sensation of weight, but there’s the feeling of pressure all about. A man might be able to sleep if he felt he were floating. Yes, that’s a good idea, Sally! It’ll work! A man will think he’s floating, rather than falling!”
Sally flushed a little.
“I thought of it another way,” she said awkwardly. “When we go to sleep, we go way back. We’re like babies, with all a baby’s fears and needs. It might feel like floating. But—I tried one of those bunks. It feels like—it feels sort of dreamy, as if someone were—holding one quite safe. It feels as if one were a baby and—beautifully secure. But of course I haven’t tried it weightless. I just—hope it works.”
As if embarrassed, she turned abruptly and showed him the kitchen. Every pan was covered. The top of the stove was alnico-magnet strips, arranged rather like the top of a magnetic chuck. Pans would cling to it. And the covers had a curious flexible lining which Joe could not understand.