.

"It's going to feel queer," said Sally, oddly quiet, "when all this is
out in space, but it will look fairly normal. I think that's important.
This room will look like a big private library more than anything else.
One won't be reminded every second, by everything he sees, that he's
living in a strictly synthetic environment. He won't feel cramped. If
all the rooms were small, a man would feel as if he were in prison. At
least this way he can pretend that things are normal."

Her mind was not wholly on her words. She'd been frightened for Joe. And
he was acutely aware of it, because he felt a peculiar after-effect
himself.

"Normal," he said drily, "except that he doesn't weigh anything."

"I've worried about that," said Sally. "Sleeping's going to be a big
problem."

"It'll take getting used to," Joe agreed.

There was a momentary pause. They were simply looking about the great
room. Sally stirred uneasily.

"Tell me what you think," she said. "You've been in an elevator that
started to drop like a plummet. When the Platform is orbiting it'll be
like that all the time, only worse. No weight. Joe, if you were in an
elevator that seemed to be dropping and dropping and dropping for hours
on end--do you think you could go to sleep?"

Joe hadn't thought about it. And he was acutely conscious of Sally, just
then, but the idea startled him.

"It might be hard to adjust to," he admitted.

"It'll be hard to adjust to, awake," said Sally. "But getting adjusted
to it asleep should be worse. You've waked up from a dream that you're
falling?"

"Sure," said Joe. Then he whistled. "Oh-oh! I see! You'd drop off to
sleep, and you'd be falling. So you'd wake up. Everybody in the Platform
will be falling around the Earth in the Platform's orbit! Every time
they doze off they'll be falling and they'll wake up!"

He managed to think about it. It was true enough. A man awake could
remind himself that he only thought and felt that he was falling, and
that there was no danger. But what would happen when he tried to sleep?
Falling is the first fear a human being ever knows. Everybody in the
world has at one time waked up gasping from a dream of precipices down
which he plunged. It is an inborn terror. And no matter how thoroughly a
man might know in his conscious mind that weightlessness was normal in
emptiness, his conscious mind would go off duty when he went to sleep. A
completely primitive subconscious would take over the