ualism, how much he'd depended on people. He had loved no one.
He had seemed to love them when he was with them, but could never form
any solid associations. Now all the people he had never really known
became as shadows thrown upon the wall of his brain. He felt the sweat
soaking his skin. Alone. Destined for it like a twin, whose double has
died at birth. Always--in league with those on the other side of the
looking-glass.

"_... three... two...._"

He screamed; _no, I can't do it, I can't face it--_

_Someone--listen--_

The dull muted explosion miles away, and the terrific compression and
the wash of numbing, deafening sound beating back around him.
Everything inside him seeming to whirl up and come down in a crash.
The seeming to slide around in the dihedrals of time and space,
slipping in and out of being like a ball-bearing in a maze....

First man to the moon. In a rocket meant for no man. Not a rocket. A
coffin--on a one-way trip--

_And I--maybe the one, the very one they should never have sent._

* * * * *

With each degree of returning consciousness, more and more capacity
for fighting the fear. He cursed the fear and wrestled with it like a
man with an invisible opponent down an endless flight of stairs.

He felt too alone, isolated; then he thought of the readings. They
could be flashed into a small screen in the face-plate by manipulating
the fingers of his right hand. He tried to concentrate on the readings
as an aid in fighting the fear.

... in the stratosphere, eighty kilometers, rocket's temperature minus
a hundred and fifty degrees. Hundred and twenty-five kilometers, lower
part of ionosphere, up plus one hundred and fifty--and then on up
where it was somewhere around a thousand degrees, and who cared? He
was beyond that--away way out--somewhere--

It went on a long time and then ... nothing but darkness ... the
lonely song of the gyroscopes. His own voice ... distant, alien ...
raving ... a kind of delirium ... then sometime, an awareness of the
cutting down of power, the brief warning of intuition, the concussion.
And as consciousness came back again, the knowing that he had hit too
hard in spite of the lighter moon gravity.

His head throbbing crazily and around him the absolute darkness and
silence and the warm ache in his head, the dizziness and the warm
stickiness flowing down his face.

He lay there, afraid of retching. He moved his finger to rel