m down and having
Wally and the captain sneeze him to death. But that was a kind of a
joke, naturally, when I was feeling good. Or pretty good. Usually I
thought about a knife for Sam. For Chowderhead it was a gun, right in
the belly, one shot. For Wally it was a tommy gun--just stitching him up
and down, you know, back and forth. The captain I would put in a cage
with hungry lions, and Gilvey I'd strangle with my bare hands. That was
probably because of the cough, I guess.

* * * * *

She was back. "Please tell me about it," she begged. "I'm _so_ curious."

I opened my eyes. "You want me to tell you about it?"

"Oh, please!"

"About what it's like to fly to Mars on a rocket?"

"Yes!"

"All right," I said.

It's wonderful what three little white pills will do. I wasn't even
shaking.

"There's six men, see? In a space the size of a Buick, and that's all
the room there is. Two of us in the bunks all the time, four of us on
watch. Maybe you want to stay in the sack an extra ten minutes--because
it's the only place on the ship where you can stretch out, you know, the
only place where you can rest without somebody's elbow in your side. But
you can't. Because by then it's the next man's turn.

"And maybe you don't have elbows in your side while it's your turn off
watch, but in the starboard bunk there's the air-regenerator master
valve--I bet I could still show you the bruises right around my
kidneys--and in the port bunk there's the emergency-escape-hatch handle.
That gets you right in the temple, if you turn your head too fast.

"And you can't really sleep, I mean not soundly, because of the noise.
That is, when the rockets are going. When they aren't going, then you're
in free-fall, and that's bad, too, because you dream about falling. But
when they're going, I don't know, I think it's worse. It's pretty loud.

"And even if it weren't for the noise, if you sleep too soundly you
might roll over on your oxygen line. Then you dream about drowning. Ever
do that? You're strangling and choking and you can't get any air? It
isn't dangerous, I guess. Anyway, it always woke me up in time. Though I
heard about a fellow in a flight six years ago--

"Well. So you've always got this oxygen mask on, all the time, except if
you take it off for a second to talk to somebody. You don't do that very
often, because what is there to say? Oh, maybe the first couple of
weeks, sure--everybody's frien