headphones. McCauley reached out into the arrangement of objects before him. He took out a puzzle. It wasn't complicated, but he had to recognize it and then remember how to do it. He tossed it aside, finished, and his working time was undoubtedly recorded. The voice said: "Name two things in the same class among these: robin, shovel, tree, ibis, shark." McCauley answered. Again the time was noted. This was straight IQ stuff, to see how soon and how well his brain was functioning after the beating he'd taken in the booster-stage take-off and the second-stage acceleration of the rocket itself. He knew what it was all about, even when they told him to solve puzzle six, and then four, and then asked more silly questions. He responded as well as he could, with no idea how good that was. But he felt a great irrational anger and indignation. When he was asked to recite a paragraph of prose he'd memorized for the exact purpose of reciting it, on demand, he recited it. But he was unreasonably angry. It was his body's response to the suffering just past. Presently he snapped: "Doggone it, I want to see something!" "Go ahead," said the voice from the ground. "But keep on talking. It doesn't matter what you say. Talk." He pressed the button that slid the port shutters aside. The shutters were necessary. There'd been terrific heat outside when the nose-cone flung upward through the denser lower atmosphere near ground level. He looked eagerly out. For a moment he couldn't speak. He saw the horizon as an almost white line against a star-specked black sky. It was curved! There were innumerable flecks of whiteness—they'd be clouds—below him; they grew thicker farther away. He saw the ocean, which was hundreds of miles away. The world visibly tilted downwards, downhill away from him. He looked below and it was paradoxically a bowl. Quite close he saw a fleeting, rushing, tormented spurt of vapor which vanished instantly. It was a steam-jet correcting yaw or spin or tumbling, up here where the air was so thin that the fins themselves could take no grip on it. Years ago, when a WAC corporal made the first flight up to the then incredible height of two hundred and fifty miles, the machine turned end for end five times as it rose, and its tumbling made no difference. It was practically in a vacuum. McCauley was higher than that, already. But this Aerobee
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