The huge slab finally leaned out, wavered for a queasy moment, then fell with a splintering crash onto the boulders below. After the dust settled, we could see that much of the work of breaking up the mass was already accomplished. We descended and set to work with an enthusiasm that was new.
Long before sundown, of course, we were marched back to the latrine and then to the mess hall. Later I had expected that some further work would be thrust upon us, but it didn't happen. The grim Captain stopped me as I entered the mess hall. I froze. There was a queer smile on his face, and I had grown to fear novelty.
"You had a moment," he said, simply and declaratively. "You didn't miss it, did you?"
"No," I replied, not fully understanding. "No, I didn't miss it."
"You are more fortunate than most," he went on, still standing between me and the mess hall. "Some people come here year after year, or they go to other places like this, or permit themselves to be confined in the hulls of old submarines, and some even apprentice themselves to medical missionaries in Equatorial Africa; they expose themselves to every conceivable combination of external conditions, but nothing really happens to them. They feel nothing except a fleeting sensation of contrast—soon lost in a torrent of other sensations. No 'moment'; only a brief cessation of the continuing pleasure process. You have been one of the fortunate few, Mr. Devoe."
Then the film dissolved—finally and completely—from the surface of my brain, and my sense of time returned to me in a flood of ordered recollections. Hours and days began to arrange themselves into meaningful sequence. Was it possible that two whole glorious weeks could have passed so swiftly?
"You and Mrs. Devoe may leave tonight or in the morning, just as you prefer," said the Captain.
Bertha and I have had little to say to one another as we wait in the office for the car that will take us to the heliport. For the moment—this moment—it suffices that we stand here in our own clothes, that we have tasted coffee again, brought to us on a tray by a matron whose manner towards us bordered on the obsequious, and that the aroma of a cigarette is just as gratifying as ever.
We will go back to our ten-room apartment on the ninety-first floor of the New Empire State Hotel; back to our swimming pool, our three-dimensional color television, our anti-gravity sleeping chambers, our impeccably efficient, relentlessly cheerful robot servants, and our library of thrills, entertainment, solace, diversion and escape—all impressed on magnetic tape and awaiting our pleasure.