no difference, of course. He'd had no weight before, and he had none now. The appearance of Earth changed so gradually that he didn't really realize that he was approaching it. But he knew it in his mind, and he resented bitterly that he had passed the high point of this achievement and was now bound back toward the commonplace, the ordinary.

He made an effort to become his normal self. "Now I suspect I'm getting scared," he said wryly into his helmet mike. If he admitted it he'd be ashamed and so could fight it. But he found that he wasn't really scared. He was apprehensive, as one is when approaching a dentist's chair. He felt reluctant, because he knew that after he got down he'd be due for ghastly, tedious days during which the doctors would go over him almost with microscopes to hunt for sputters—the burned, exploded patches that would show up where cosmic-ray particles not slowed by air went through his body. There shouldn't be any, but there could be some. Robot instruments said no sputters. But a man had to come up here to make sure.

He felt something—a featherweight of pull toward the pointed tip of the nose-cone. The rocket had hit air which slowed it enough so he noticed it. He was astounded that he'd come back so far so fast. True, he was still almost unthinkably high by the standards of other men, but he'd been out in space!

Earth was deplorably near. At twenty miles up—a hundred-odd thousand feet—the processes for landing him should begin. He settled himself in his seat against what was coming.... He suddenly realized that he'd been talking, though he didn't remember what he'd said. Undoubtedly, though, he'd said everything that came into his head. He stopped. The headphone voice said encouragingly, "You're okay!"

"So far!" he answered.

There was the story about the optimist who fell off a skyscraper. Twenty stories earthward he saw someone looking out a window and called, "Everything's fine so far!" Yes....

There was an explosion and he started. Then others. They came from small, half-pound explosive charges set at carefully chosen places on the rocket. They were there to wreck its streamlined shape; to make it an irregular, dynamically inefficient object which would offer enormously increased resistance to its own fall through the air. Technically it was considered that the terminal speed-of-fall of the shattered rocket would be less than that of a man falling free without a parachute. What was that? A hundred and fifty miles an hour, or a hundred 

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