ho have been in orbit
have chucked up or gotten dizzy or something. What if they go to all
this trouble and I get spacesick?"

"What if you drift away and can't get back?" she said. "It isn't like
swimming back to shore."

"There's always a way," I said, my stomach tightening as I thought of
what she said.

That was the night she kissed me good night. It wasn't much of a kiss,
because we were standing in the lobby of her apartment house, and she
wasn't going to invite me up, because she never did. But she said:
"Hurry back."

"Just you know it, Shouff," I said, bitter inside.

I'd have been a lot more bitter if I had known what was in store for
me at the Cape. COMCORP flew me down in one of our private prop-jets,
with only Paul Cleary for company. He introduced me to the brass, and
we sat through a couple conferences while the idea was spelled out to
a group of sure-enough spacemen. Then they turned that mob loose on
me.

I was emotionally unprepared. First off, Cleary and Fred had been
building me up all through the three months, and I had actually gotten
to the point where I thought I knew what I was doing. These
space-jockeys spent most of their time deflating my ego.

My tormentor-in-chief was a wise punk from Brooklyn named Sid Stein.
"How have you made out in your centrifuge tests?" he asked me at
breakfast the first morning after I had reached the Cape.

"I have never done any of that stuff, Mr. Stein," I said.

"Well, how many gees can you pull?"

I shrugged. "Same as you, I suppose. How many is that?"

"Brot_her_!"

The space medic wasn't any better. The mission chief insisted that it
wasn't safe to put anybody in a satellite who couldn't pass the
physical. I guess you know that about one man in a thousand can
qualify. This was supposed to wash me out.

"Remarkable shape." The space medic kept saying. "You must take
considerable exercise, doctor."

"Oh, no," I said. "Just jog a mile or so before breakfast. Nothing
spectacular."

"No other formal activity?"

"Well," I snarled, "just swimming, fencing and weight lifting. I've
given up the boxing and handball."

"Kept in excellent shape, nevertheless," he said. "You'll be a
disappointment to them."

"Look," Stein said to me after a week of tests and countertests.
"Don't be deceived by these tests. All they show is that your heart is
still beating. The big thing is emotional. Doc, I think you should
reconsider this idea of flopping around