o weight at
all in the ship. Joe's laboring heart beat twice with the violence the
weight had called for, though weight had ended. It seemed to him that
his skull would crack open during those two heart-beats. Then he lay
limply, resting.

There was a completely incredible stillness, for a time. The four of
them panted. Haney was better off than Joe, but the Chief was harder
hit. Mike's small body had taken the strain best of all, and he would
use the fact later in shrill argument that midgets were designed by
nature to be the explorers of space for their bulkier and less
spaceworthy kindred.

The ending of the steady, punishing drag was infinitely good, but the
new sensation was hardly pleasant. They had no weight. It felt as if
they and the ship about them were falling together down an abyss which
must have a bottom. Actually, they were falling up. But they felt a
physical, crawling apprehension--a cringing from an imaginary imminent
impact.

They had expected the sensation, but it was not the better for being
understood. Joe flexed and unflexed his fingers slowly. He stirred and
swallowed hastily. But the feeling persisted. He unstrapped himself from
his seat. He stood up--and floated to the ceiling of the cabin. But
there was of course no ceiling. Every way was up and every way was down.
His stomach cramped itself in a hard knot, in the instinctive tensity of
somebody in free fall.

He fended himself from the ceiling and caught at a hand-line placed
there for just this necessity to grip something. In his absorption, he
did not notice which way his heels went. He suddenly noticed that his
companions, with regard to him, were upside down and staring at him with
wooden, dazed expressions on their faces.

He tried to laugh, and gulped instead. He pulled over to the
quartz-glass ports. He did not put his hand into the sunlight, but
shifted the glare shutters over those ports which admitted direct
sunshine. Some ports remained clear. Through one of them he saw the
Earth seemingly at arm's length somewhere off. Not up, not down. Simply
out from where he was. It filled all the space that the porthole
showed. It was a gigantic mass of white, fleecy specks and spots which
would be clouds, and between the whiteness there was a muddy dark
greenish color which would be the ocean. Yet it seemed to slide very,
very slowly past the window.

He saw a tanness between the clouds, and it moved inward from the edge
of his field