He was lifted and slammed against a bulkhead. Black fire belched behind his eyes. He had a flashing vision of the backyard of his folks' home in Pittsburg, and a dark curtain fell over it.
... Everywhere they had a vision of their home in Pittsburg. A black curtain fell over it ...
When he opened his eyes he saw he was alone among a crew of death. They hung in their spacesuits against the bulkheads like limp grey bats while the ship tore on through space. Two had failed to get their helmets on. Their faces were bruised plums, mottled. Inside their bloated chests, the lungs would be pink froth, literally having exploded with the instant drop in air pressure. A third man's suit had ruptured up the front, the raggedy edges flayed back like skin. The man was swollen like one long drowned.
There was no air. It had rushed through the barrel-sized hole in the hull. There was only one hole—the meteor had burst on impact and not passed clear through. Chunks of stone, ribbons of blood, scraps of metal hung quiet or floated above the deck.
Matt had never told anyone how he felt about space. It was a freezing, heart-killing loneliness that waited icily, and now it had come in through the hull and was with him. His jaw clenched. He had no idea whether he could carry on alone, but he was going to.
Then one of the grey bats stirred, drew up its legs, and launched itself off the bulkhead. The others began to move. A laugh rolled in Bailey's throat. Like him, they had only been stunned.
They froze the encapsulated dead and patched the hole as best they could and found a clock still running and re-set their instruments, and each man had a souvenir piece of meteor stone, and less than two weeks after this was done the boredom dropped over them again as though excitement had never been.
The tension about their mission to Krotzer, tighter from hour to hour only made it worse. They began to hate each other's mannerisms, the way a person scratched an ear or cleared a throat. It's getting you, Bailey, Matt told himself. This way men go nuts.
... Go nuts, echoed the minds that were him without knowing. Go nuts ... go nuts ... go nuts ...