"All happiness," I managed and they left us alone in space with ringing bells and the red space ship that had the disconcerting habit of sighing once in a while or shifting its wall structure in a stretch that was so human you felt like apologizing for being inside it.
We were out in four light year space. In the big Empty between our solar system and the next. We had passed through two magnetic fields, and already I wasn't the same, but Radwick had laughed.
"Pleasure and pain," he said. "As common as an old shoe on a vacant lot. Why get corked over a little thing like that?"
It helped. It helped a lot to see him twisting and writhing on his bunk, the same as I was, only with the big red encyclopedia on his face as he pretended to read in indifference. We were in the painful magnetic field for about eight hours and I cried and cursed and prayed and laughed in horror and sweated a bucket. The reaction was worse. My frayed nerves temporarily gave out and I tried to walk through the wall of the space ship into the dining room of the Thousand Lights back in New York.
Shortly after that we hit the pleasure field. Those precious moments lasted for the same time as the painful sensations, but after that earth seemed like a cemetery of the dead. I mewed like a stroked kitten and Radwick kept putting down his encyclopedia and laughing in goofy happiness. It was silly; it was wonderful; it made me so glad to have a human body that I wanted to cry.
These magnetic fields were behind us now and I was staring at the outside emptiness apprehensively.
"Radwick, look—" I gasped.
I had been watching a point of light in the distance. It broke on us swiftly with dazzling power. The magnitudes of light were so powerful that I had to turn the screen down to its darkest level.
Out there was what looked like the true Choir of Heaven. Rank on rank of singing, human faces, spiraling upward. Tensions of mighty humanistic fire glowed from the banked, singing faces. The hymn was obscure but it was faintly religious and very stirring. Now we were winging down a long corridor in space banked on either side by a myriad shining, dedicated human faces, pouring out glory with solemn deep-soul singing. The celestial organ effect made the whole ship vibrate and made Radwick's blocks jump on the table like animated poker chips.