My body. I knew that I would have to explore my new self before investigating the ship. With an effort of will I shut off my new sense impressions, and—looked inside. I sensed the rhythmic muscular action of my heart, the opening and closing of the valves. I felt the surge of blood in all my vessels. I moved my hand to touch the bulkhead, and found that I could count the number of microseconds it took for the nerve impulses to travel from my fingers to my brain. Time seemed to have slowed down, it took an hour for the second hand on the panel clock to make one circuit.
In retrospect I know that this condition of super-awareness must have lasted only for a few minutes. But it seemed then that I had all the time in the world.
I found that I no longer needed to think in words, or even symbols. I could pose myself a problem in, say, four-dimensional vector analysis and see the solution immediately, like a flash of intuition. I had attained total somatic consciousness; I was able to analyze the exact relationship of the drug to the molecular structure of my own protoplasm.
It was then I knew that, although I had recorded no information about Mars that the Russians didn't already have, I was going to bring back home a piece of candy much sweeter.
Wait, now, I told myself. Wait. You have a specific problem to solve. The problem being how to stop that leak in the hull long enough to get home alive. It was a problem of basic survival. I was confident. I knew that if any possible solution to my predicament existed I would find it. I was my own data computer now, but with eyes and ears and imagination. I opened my senses again and concentrated on the flood of information coming at me from the instrument panel. I found that I had total recall, I could remember—simultaneously—every wiring diagram and blueprint of the ship, every screw and transistor and welded seam, that I had ever glanced at. I saw the entire ship as a single entity, a smoothly functioning organism. In a flash I saw a hundred ways of improving its design. But that would have to wait. For a moment I gathered all my psychic energy and concentrated on the single crucial problem of stopping that leak.
And I saw that there was no way to stop the leak. No logical way.
Back at Lunar Base I tried to explain to Bronson what had happened. But I found that it was impossible to explain in words. In fact I no longer entirely understood, myself, what had happened. It was something that had occurred—not altogether on the conscious level. Something about my becoming aware, for a time, of the separate molecules of air within the cabin as extensions of my own body-mind. But I didn't know how to verbalize it.
Dr. Bronson gave me a thorough physical and a preliminary psychological exam. The effects of the drug had worn off, but I felt somehow—changed, I didn't know just how. In fact I wouldn't know until one day two years later, when I dropped a vial of nitroglycerine, and it miraculously did not go off. Still, Bronson pronounced me ready and fit for a long vacation, and in a few days I was headed back toward Pacific Grove.
The vacation lasted for a week. Then it was a Sunday evening, and I was sitting on the front porch of the white house nursing a highball while my wife was upstairs telling Wendy a bedtime story about a princess who kissed a toad, and it turned into a handsome prince.