He flipped off the power control on the Tele-screen and watched the image fade away with a depleted whine of dying energy. That incandescent inferno out there— Grimly he tried to recall the name of the man who had said that, philosophically, energy is not actually a real thing at all.
He knew better than to waste time trying the pilot controls again. They were hopelessly jammed by the great magnetic attraction of the Sun. They had been jammed for hours now. He forced his way back to his bunk, and securely lashed himself to it again. Sleep was his only hope now, his only real escape from the growing, screaming hysteria within him.
He flung an arm across his tired face. His thin features trembled as he remembered the continuous alterations in his trajectory that had brought him within range of the Sun's mighty pull. He remembered also every detail of the last and gravest of the series of miscalculations that had swept him from the established route of the regular Venus-Mercury mail run, and threatened him with a violent, flaming end.
Greatly off course, he had been approaching Mercury, a routine thirty-six million miles from the Sun. On this, the final leg of his long journey, he had deviated just far enough from the extreme limits of safety to find himself and his ship gripped inexorably in the mighty magnetic fields of the Sun's passage....
He remembered a name— Josephine.
There would be no lover's meeting now on the green fields of Earth in the dusk of a summer evening. There would be no such meeting now. Not unless the prayers and dreams a boy and a girl had shared had followed him, plunging senselessly into the cold glacial heart of interstellar space.
His false bravado began to break and he began to weep quietly. He began to wish with all his heart that he had never left home.
The sudden crackling of the almost static-jammed ultra-wave radio snapped through to his mind. Quickly he began to free himself from the bunk.
"MR4, come in, MR4."
An eternity seemed to pass as he floated across the room, deliberately disregarding the strategically-placed hand-grips on the walls, floor, and ceiling. It seemed aeons before he reached the narrow little control compartment, and got the ultra-wave radio into action, nearly wrecking it in his clumsy-fingered haste.