g
torturer it is. There is the loneliness, the sense of timelessness, the
sensation of falling, and above all there is the "weightless" feeling
from pressure-changes in man's blood-stream--changes sickening in effect
and soon resulting in delirium. Nothing definite; no gravity; no
"bottom," no "top"; merely a vacuum, comprehended by the human mind
through an all-enveloping nausea, and seen in confused spectral
labyrinths as the whole cold panorama of icy stars staggers and swirls
and the universe goes mad. Such a trip was enough to churn the
resistance of the hardiest traveler, but for Hawk Carse, Friday and
Eliot Leithgow there was more. On Ku Sui's asteroid they had gone
through hours of mental and physical tension without break or
relaxation, and they were sleep-starved and food-starved and their
brains fagged and dull. What would have been a strong reaction on land
hit them, in space, with tripled force.

So Friday--our ultimate authority--remembered little of the transit.
He had bad short periods of wakefulness, when the recurring agony of
his body woke and racked him afresh, and only during these did he see
the other two grotesque figures, sometimes widely separated, sometimes
close, dazzlingly half-lit by Jupiter's light. But he was conscious
that one of the three was keeping them more or less together, though
only later did he know that this one was Carse--Carse, who hardly
slept, who drove off unconsciousness and fought through nausea to keep
at his task of shepherding, failing which they would have drifted
miles apart and become hopelessly separated. He was able to maintain
them in a fairly compact group by his discovery of a short metal
direction rod on the breast of the suit, which gave horizontal
movement in the direction it was pointed when its button was pressed.

* * * * *

But though it seemed endless, the journey was not; Satellite III grew
and grew. Its pale circle spread outward; dark blurs took definition;
a spot of blue winked forth--the Great Briney Lake. The globe at last
became concave, then, after they entered its atmosphere, convex. This
last stretch was the most grueling.

Friday remembered it in vivid flashes. Time after time he dropped into
confused sleep, each time to be awakened by Carse jarring into him,
shouting at him through the suits' small radio sets, keeping him--and
Leithgow--attentive to the job of decelerating. The man's efforts must
have been