pointed straight, balanced by little puffings of steam. It didn't even rotate.

He could see stars all around, and then he turned to the one filtered port and looked at the sun through it. It was a monstrous brilliance, with writhing fire-fringes around its edges. He saw Mercury off to its right. It was the first time in his life that he'd ever seen that planet, and he'd had to get out of the atmosphere to do it. Not one person in ten thousand has ever seen the sun's closest satellite, even as a tiny speck of light in the sky. But McCauley saw it, not hidden by the daytime sky. There was no air here to speak of. At this height a man not in a pressure-tight cabin, trying to breathe what few molecules of air were present, would die in thirteen seconds because of anoxia and explosive decompression. He'd die no more quickly out between the galaxies.

"Keep talking," said the voice in the headphones. "Keep talking, man!"

McCauley found himself stammering. What he said wasn't particularly coherent, and he knew his taped speech would be studied to find out exactly what mental state he was in. The headphones asked questions. Could he see this? Could he see that? He answered yes and no. The voice asked him to write something. He did, not looking at it. He stared out at the monstrousness of the universe, with Earth merely a dimpled gigantic ball below him.

He had no weight, but he did not notice. He gazed and gazed and exulted, and absent-mindedly obeyed the orders which came insistently to his ears. He wanted to saturate his mind and his memory with the sight that nobody had ever seen before, except in pictures taken at this height by robots.

Presently the sky wasn't totally black with innumerable tiny lights in it. It was a deep, dark purple. The stars seemed fainter. He said so.

"Right," said the voice in his helmet. "You reached peak altitude minutes ago. You're well on the way back down, now. We're going to turn the rocket over."

He realized the absolute silence about him by the fact that now he heard trivial, insignificant noises. Steam-jets came on—hydrogen peroxide sprayed into a catalysis chamber where it broke down instantly into steam and gas. The product rushed out the fin-tip jets. The universe visibly turned upside down; the sky was down beyond his feet, and the singular, unfamiliar object which was Earth could be seen only when he craned his neck to look upward.

He felt 

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